in fact [the original xbox controller] caused serious cramping after short use
Oh come on, maybe after you had just finished a furious round of masterbating. We all know it wasn't great, but this is just bullshit. I played Halo for days straight as did most of my friends and never had an issue. If you are this frail, perhaps you should forget about gaming altogether.
This is a great way to minimize scan data, but it isn't as useful as the article makes it out to be. Most modeled 3d objects are as low resolution as possible. Shrek has as many polygons as he needs to have, to take away some, or swap their location would destroy the model. For instance, I am a Modeler/TD and most animable character models have 5 divisions, or 'loops' around a deformable joint. Any less would not allow for the deformation control we need. As with most background scenery, it is modeled by hand and as low resolution as possible.
This could come into more handy later if it is built into a renderer.
A subpixel displacement renderer that can nullify coplanar polys in this way (though there arent that many usually in detailed oranic objects) it could speed things up quite a bit.
MS has said it WILL NOT equip its next Xbox with a hard drive. They have hired on M-Systems an Israeli flash mem maker to replace the HD. Supposedly with something like this, but this flies in the face of most of the things this system is supposed to be capable of. Can they afford to give it a large enough solid state HD to work as a DVR/Tivo? Or to install and run PC games? I think not. So I guess we shall wait and see.
I find this funny. I always love hearing about catastrpophic asteroids and things. But the US has 10,000 nuculear warheads, enough to 'overkill' the worlds pupulation 12x. For those of you not in the military, this means that if the bodies of the dead were to get up again, we could kill them all 12 more times. We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.
I had no experience, I am sorry I can understand that it looks complicated. The complicated part of the page is where I am making an Xbox JAMMA converter box. The actual connecting the buttons/controls to a PSX of DC or Xbox controller was so simple I only talk about it (where I explain how buttons work and how to connect them etc) and it is not pictured in the tutorial, I will add more pictures to clear that up. Sorry.
There are also more FAQs just about building a control panel at www.ArcadeControls.com
I am actually an animator by trade, I have no electrical background.
A word of warning to people. These type of control panels do not have analog sticks _or_ buttons. And most games for modern consoles _require_ them. These sticks are only for a few fighting games on next gen consoles, and not to be used instead of a controller. You cannot play halo on these.. however, at Software Etc we get these back all the time with that same complaint.
I wrote a tutorial a while back on building one of these control panels, and also building a cabinet to go with it. It's really very easy to wire up, you can see the buttons on the page linked in the story.
Please check it out, because it's a great project to do, and it's very simple, these X-Arcade and Hotrod guys are just raping people; you can build one of these dual sticks for about 20 dollars, and it's a lot of fun.
Why do all the OCer's and Gamers always drool over Dual proc boards? There are *very few* SMP capable games at all. This is one huge old myth I would like to dispell for these people. To my old gamer knowledge, only ID and maybe a few other people have made SMP capable game engines, and then, they weren't fully SMP capable, and it only mattered if you used software rendering. There have been one or two SMP game servers.. Adding another processor is virtually useless for a 'gaming machine' unless you want to be running Seti@Home one the other processor while you're 'fragging' or whatever you kids are calling it these days.
I can only think of a few uses for a dual processor machine for '1337' gamers and OCers and it's things like restricting apps to individual processors, if you *must* encode the latest DVD you rented from blockbuster while teaming up in a death match -and most people don't know this is possible. There are though more than a few SMP capable DVD ripping/encoding apps, but it hardly justifies two opterons.
(CE/AP) Honda claims that mileage numbers not indicative of actual mileage. In response to a growing trend among CPU processor manufacturers, Honda will be releasing their cars with 'numbers indicative of overall performance, not purely miles per gallon'.
One of the great things about firewire is that it can power devices.. I guess this is no longer the case. Time to break out the ol ac adapter with your new 'firewireless' adapter. Not to mention, any device I can think of would need a PS, or are they going to release external HDs with giant batteries now?
Umm.. please stop this crap. Your OS is used by about 2% of the global computer using populace. I am a 3D animator. No one ports the software I use to that 2%, and when they do, like Alias Wavefront, it's so horrible. For instance, OSX Maya couldn't even recognize dual processors, it was not SMP capable, and it crashed left and right.
You are right about spyware. Not enough people in the world use Macintosh for writing mac adware/trojans pallatable. But at the same time you need to understand that companies feel the same way. Not to mention when problems arise they are patched for PC first, then maybe mac. It's all about profit, I was a Mac user for ten years, I lived Mac Paint and Hypercard, and for a while there was a gray area, but there isn't anymore. I mean look at the PC Preffered campaign Adobe launched. Sure, their apps were originally written for the Mac, but now the windows ports run better, I am not going to start this kind of thing here, just go google some mac/pc benchmarks for yourself, and stop assuming mac is the best option for everyone. Very few of the programs I use on a day to day basis have *ANY* mac support, and no Mac alternatives.
This post was completely unbiased, and I hope that a torrent of Mac enthusiasts don't mod my karma down, because what I said was true.
Malware is here to stay. I clean it of the computers of friends and family constantly. You can't hide behind Mozilla -or anything for the matter. You can use Ad-Aware or the like, and that's about it. I gave up on trying to make others understand what 'safe browsing' habits are. Malware no longer requires you to click 'ok' to something. It just hijacks your system on page load. I myself had a Java based trojan install an ftp daemon in my system folder with an INI file that had accounts named 'xdcc-warez' etc.. I am very secure, but I wouldn't have known about this intruder unless my firewall would have reported the ftp daemon opening the port.
I have tried many types of virus protection and I refuse to run them. Symantec 2004 'Pro' or 'Corporate' is EXTREMELY intrusive. With *ALL* the auto search and protection off, it still runs many services that take over 15mb of ram! McAffee and everything else is about the same. I am all about performance, I will not have adware and virus protection software scanning every file written to my HD, every word doc I open, email I send, or page i visit; that's ridiculous; not to mention with all those things of, the services are still there for some reason. Also, I don't need a HUGE GUI interface with animated gifs and crap.
Spyware is here to stay, get some somewhat non-intrusive software to protect your family and friends, and as for yourself, I guess just check your firewall, and/or have it alert you when a weird program or service wants access.
Things usually start like this, but after a while they will use them or functions that they originally weren't meant for when they were installed. Like making sure that hikers aren't on closed paths, or that they have left the park by sundown. I can easily see this crap happening. Whenever you have a good system in use someone always finds another use for it. I for one hike snowed out trails and things all the time, I even hike off trail, something they ask you not to do so jackasses don't get hurt, but I could see this device used for places where people usually hike off trail.
In St. Petersburg Florida there is an underground civil war fort on Shell Island. The land is public land and you are free to camp and explore there. If you find one of the old tunnel entrances, and try to enter the fort a motion detector loudly announces that people are not allowed to enter and that your intrusion has been recorded.
It's kinda lame, but in the darkness it scares the PISS out of you. I think they should reconsider this; as it could give someone a heart attack.
It's a tight line, they dont want people getting hurt hiking/rock climbing on public land because they could be sued, etc.. I think we need to fix the legal system instead of putting disclaimers on everything and monitoring everyone.
If this device can save lives; great, but let's only use it for that intended use.
Now they might have enough content for one channel
on
G4TechTV Announced
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, from the times I watched Tech TV and G4, I wasn't at all impressed, maybe now they will have enough programs to fill ONE channel with content, instead of rerunning old programs as endlessly as they plug themselves with HUGE commercial breaks full of their own spots and commercials for their own network. There were a few great shows on ZDTV/TechTV, and a videogame network was a cool idea, but I could have told you they were going to fold eventually, G4 was especially terrible, it only had one or two shows a day and then recycled all it's content for the rest of the 12 hours before it sold it's soul to infomercials at night.
I don't understand, does this mean that if I develop a really great and cheap duffelbag that I can be arrested if it's used by a bank robber?
Why not sue the computer manufacturers for abatement as well? There are any great uses for P2P, it is a great way to distribute music and video you have created, and I have distributed many animated shorts I have worked on via bit torrent etc...
How long will it be before someone sues the makers of a web browser, FTP, or IRC app for 'copyright abatement'?
Anyone who uses software powersaving/CPU cooling in windows or linux has heard this noise. Programs like CPUIdle et all put the processor into an HLT state and cool it significantly (12+ degrees here). I run the thing to cool my massive laptop which would get quite hot during renders and things, what with it's 10K RAID etc.. I hear this hum in a lot of electronics that have no moving parts (routers, computers, etc..), and have always wondered about it. In a chat on IRC we chalked it up to electric frequency vibration.
I have also worked on some PCs that make the hum during *any* processor use, like scrolling a webpage, etc..
Robosaurus > Comanche?
on
Robosaurus
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Glad to see that they cancelled the Comanche project after 8 years of work and BILLIONS of dollars, but still kept around the important projects like the 'RoboSaurus'. I wasn't able to make it to the show, and it's hard to see from those pictures, but I heard that Donald Rumsfeld was driving it.
I am a 3D modeler/TD by trade, heh I guess that lingo isn't common geek speak, here is an article on 'greebling', or 'adding nurnies and greebles' to an object. It's basically the art of making up hi-tech looking crap. The original star destroyers were greebled with plastic navy ship parts and other crap. Interestingly enough, i think they were somewhere around the size of this guys toy; i may be wrong...
The thing just looks like a big balsa wood model, and it isn't very detailed. I am a model maker, and I feel the creator could have chunked a lot of plastic ship models for nurnies and greebles.. He also, could have chunked old star wars toys for control panels etc. It really just looks like a large DIY project, and not a playable toy. I was a kid not too long ago, and I wouldn't really wanna play with some big balsa wood, grey-pained thing. It also looks like it would also break too easily.
I mean I wouldn't crit, but when you put it out here, it's open season; not to mention this shouldn't have been on here anyway; it's like an advertisement.
So this software would make backing up your data illegal?
I have all my CDs ripped, and I ftp them to another drive at another location frequently. This would stop any student from sending any of his MP3's to a computer at home for back up. That sounds fair.
'Astronomers were surprised by what they did not see, a moon. The hubble telescope helped solve the problem when honed onto Sedna itself. The planet's oddly erratic, eliptical orbit is due to a giant mass on it's far side. Colon Powell presented the Hubble photographs today in a speech before the United Nations. The photographs detail the until now, 'unknown mass' that was altering Sedna's orbit. "It is clear from these photos" he said "that we have found the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction".
It is unclear how Saddam Hussein delivered and stockpiled the weapons on Sedna, but the blury photographic proof shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the administration was in the Right from the beginning. NASA was unavailable for comment.
The thing I use most with Google is the image search. As an artist I need reference photos and things, and it appears A9 doesn't have an image search (how is this possible?). I cannot believe they went live without an image search. IMHO this isn't that great at all.
Re:Real time films? Sooner than you realize!
on
The State of OpenGL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The key here is: 'something that can be used real time.', it's not a PRman implimentation, it is merely a front end to give the artist some visual feedback as to the prman shader on the object. It renders and changes a UV baked raster image of the shader.
As for the Final Fantasy thing. I saw that at siggraph running on SMP PS2's. It's 'alright', but it didn't look a whole lot like the film, it looked like an OGL render of the film.
What you aren't understanding are the fundamental differences between scan line renderers, ray trace renderers, and real-time technology. Real-time can only 'fake' ray tracing, and it's not very accurate or good. Like I said, we are a long way off.
And don't jump up and down, some people have real-time SSS, radiosity, and raytrace demos, but they are very crude, and a long way off.
And sure, you can tweak a movie scene down to get it to look good and run on a next gen card when presented on a vid online or TV, but we're talking about film.
Slashdot Mirror
in fact [the original xbox controller] caused serious cramping after short use
Oh come on, maybe after you had just finished a furious round of masterbating. We all know it wasn't great, but this is just bullshit. I played Halo for days straight as did most of my friends and never had an issue. If you are this frail, perhaps you should forget about gaming altogether.
This is a great way to minimize scan data, but it isn't as useful as the article makes it out to be. Most modeled 3d objects are as low resolution as possible. Shrek has as many polygons as he needs to have, to take away some, or swap their location would destroy the model. For instance, I am a Modeler/TD and most animable character models have 5 divisions, or 'loops' around a deformable joint. Any less would not allow for the deformation control we need. As with most background scenery, it is modeled by hand and as low resolution as possible.
This could come into more handy later if it is built into a renderer.
A subpixel displacement renderer that can nullify coplanar polys in this way (though there arent that many usually in detailed oranic objects) it could speed things up quite a bit.
MS has said it WILL NOT equip its next Xbox with a hard drive. They have hired on M-Systems an Israeli flash mem maker to replace the HD. Supposedly with something like this, but this flies in the face of most of the things this system is supposed to be capable of. Can they afford to give it a large enough solid state HD to work as a DVR/Tivo? Or to install and run PC games? I think not. So I guess we shall wait and see.
I find this funny. I always love hearing about catastrpophic asteroids and things. But the US has 10,000 nuculear warheads, enough to 'overkill' the worlds pupulation 12x. For those of you not in the military, this means that if the bodies of the dead were to get up again, we could kill them all 12 more times. We humans are capable of creating a much larger catastrophe than our often theoretical cousins in space; and it's saddening.
I had no experience, I am sorry I can understand that it looks complicated. The complicated part of the page is where I am making an Xbox JAMMA converter box. The actual connecting the buttons/controls to a PSX of DC or Xbox controller was so simple I only talk about it (where I explain how buttons work and how to connect them etc) and it is not pictured in the tutorial, I will add more pictures to clear that up. Sorry.
There are also more FAQs just about building a control panel at www.ArcadeControls.com
I am actually an animator by trade, I have no electrical background.
A word of warning to people. These type of control panels do not have analog sticks _or_ buttons. And most games for modern consoles _require_ them. These sticks are only for a few fighting games on next gen consoles, and not to be used instead of a controller. You cannot play halo on these.. however, at Software Etc we get these back all the time with that same complaint.
I wrote a tutorial a while back on building one of these control panels, and also building a cabinet to go with it. It's really very easy to wire up, you can see the buttons on the page linked in the story.
Please check it out, because it's a great project to do, and it's very simple, these X-Arcade and Hotrod guys are just raping people; you can build one of these dual sticks for about 20 dollars, and it's a lot of fun.
Why do all the OCer's and Gamers always drool over Dual proc boards? There are *very few* SMP capable games at all. This is one huge old myth I would like to dispell for these people. To my old gamer knowledge, only ID and maybe a few other people have made SMP capable game engines, and then, they weren't fully SMP capable, and it only mattered if you used software rendering. There have been one or two SMP game servers.. Adding another processor is virtually useless for a 'gaming machine' unless you want to be running Seti@Home one the other processor while you're 'fragging' or whatever you kids are calling it these days.
I can only think of a few uses for a dual processor machine for '1337' gamers and OCers and it's things like restricting apps to individual processors, if you *must* encode the latest DVD you rented from blockbuster while teaming up in a death match -and most people don't know this is possible. There are though more than a few SMP capable DVD ripping/encoding apps, but it hardly justifies two opterons.
These things do look great for rendering though.
Now if we could only get computers to help teach our children!
(CE/AP) Honda claims that mileage numbers not indicative of actual mileage. In response to a growing trend among CPU processor manufacturers, Honda will be releasing their cars with 'numbers indicative of overall performance, not purely miles per gallon'.
One of the great things about firewire is that it can power devices.. I guess this is no longer the case. Time to break out the ol ac adapter with your new 'firewireless' adapter. Not to mention, any device I can think of would need a PS, or are they going to release external HDs with giant batteries now?
Umm.. please stop this crap. Your OS is used by about 2% of the global computer using populace. I am a 3D animator. No one ports the software I use to that 2%, and when they do, like Alias Wavefront, it's so horrible. For instance, OSX Maya couldn't even recognize dual processors, it was not SMP capable, and it crashed left and right.
You are right about spyware. Not enough people in the world use Macintosh for writing mac adware/trojans pallatable. But at the same time you need to understand that companies feel the same way. Not to mention when problems arise they are patched for PC first, then maybe mac. It's all about profit, I was a Mac user for ten years, I lived Mac Paint and Hypercard, and for a while there was a gray area, but there isn't anymore. I mean look at the PC Preffered campaign Adobe launched. Sure, their apps were originally written for the Mac, but now the windows ports run better, I am not going to start this kind of thing here, just go google some mac/pc benchmarks for yourself, and stop assuming mac is the best option for everyone. Very few of the programs I use on a day to day basis have *ANY* mac support, and no Mac alternatives.
This post was completely unbiased, and I hope that a torrent of Mac enthusiasts don't mod my karma down, because what I said was true.
Malware is here to stay. I clean it of the computers of friends and family constantly. You can't hide behind Mozilla -or anything for the matter. You can use Ad-Aware or the like, and that's about it. I gave up on trying to make others understand what 'safe browsing' habits are. Malware no longer requires you to click 'ok' to something. It just hijacks your system on page load. I myself had a Java based trojan install an ftp daemon in my system folder with an INI file that had accounts named 'xdcc-warez' etc.. I am very secure, but I wouldn't have known about this intruder unless my firewall would have reported the ftp daemon opening the port.
I have tried many types of virus protection and I refuse to run them. Symantec 2004 'Pro' or 'Corporate' is EXTREMELY intrusive. With *ALL* the auto search and protection off, it still runs many services that take over 15mb of ram! McAffee and everything else is about the same. I am all about performance, I will not have adware and virus protection software scanning every file written to my HD, every word doc I open, email I send, or page i visit; that's ridiculous; not to mention with all those things of, the services are still there for some reason. Also, I don't need a HUGE GUI interface with animated gifs and crap.
Spyware is here to stay, get some somewhat non-intrusive software to protect your family and friends, and as for yourself, I guess just check your firewall, and/or have it alert you when a weird program or service wants access.
Things usually start like this, but after a while they will use them or functions that they originally weren't meant for when they were installed. Like making sure that hikers aren't on closed paths, or that they have left the park by sundown. I can easily see this crap happening. Whenever you have a good system in use someone always finds another use for it. I for one hike snowed out trails and things all the time, I even hike off trail, something they ask you not to do so jackasses don't get hurt, but I could see this device used for places where people usually hike off trail.
In St. Petersburg Florida there is an underground civil war fort on Shell Island. The land is public land and you are free to camp and explore there. If you find one of the old tunnel entrances, and try to enter the fort a motion detector loudly announces that people are not allowed to enter and that your intrusion has been recorded.
It's kinda lame, but in the darkness it scares the PISS out of you. I think they should reconsider this; as it could give someone a heart attack.
It's a tight line, they dont want people getting hurt hiking/rock climbing on public land because they could be sued, etc.. I think we need to fix the legal system instead of putting disclaimers on everything and monitoring everyone.
If this device can save lives; great, but let's only use it for that intended use.
Well, from the times I watched Tech TV and G4, I wasn't at all impressed, maybe now they will have enough programs to fill ONE channel with content, instead of rerunning old programs as endlessly as they plug themselves with HUGE commercial breaks full of their own spots and commercials for their own network. There were a few great shows on ZDTV/TechTV, and a videogame network was a cool idea, but I could have told you they were going to fold eventually, G4 was especially terrible, it only had one or two shows a day and then recycled all it's content for the rest of the 12 hours before it sold it's soul to infomercials at night.
I don't understand, does this mean that if I develop a really great and cheap duffelbag that I can be arrested if it's used by a bank robber?
Why not sue the computer manufacturers for abatement as well? There are any great uses for P2P, it is a great way to distribute music and video you have created, and I have distributed many animated shorts I have worked on via bit torrent etc...
How long will it be before someone sues the makers of a web browser, FTP, or IRC app for 'copyright abatement'?
Anyone who uses software powersaving/CPU cooling in windows or linux has heard this noise. Programs like CPUIdle et all put the processor into an HLT state and cool it significantly (12+ degrees here). I run the thing to cool my massive laptop which would get quite hot during renders and things, what with it's 10K RAID etc.. I hear this hum in a lot of electronics that have no moving parts (routers, computers, etc..), and have always wondered about it. In a chat on IRC we chalked it up to electric frequency vibration.
I have also worked on some PCs that make the hum during *any* processor use, like scrolling a webpage, etc..
Glad to see that they cancelled the Comanche project after 8 years of work and BILLIONS of dollars, but still kept around the important projects like the 'RoboSaurus'. I wasn't able to make it to the show, and it's hard to see from those pictures, but I heard that Donald Rumsfeld was driving it.
I am a 3D modeler/TD by trade, heh I guess that lingo isn't common geek speak, here is an article on 'greebling', or 'adding nurnies and greebles' to an object. It's basically the art of making up hi-tech looking crap. The original star destroyers were greebled with plastic navy ship parts and other crap. Interestingly enough, i think they were somewhere around the size of this guys toy; i may be wrong...
The thing just looks like a big balsa wood model, and it isn't very detailed. I am a model maker, and I feel the creator could have chunked a lot of plastic ship models for nurnies and greebles.. He also, could have chunked old star wars toys for control panels etc. It really just looks like a large DIY project, and not a playable toy. I was a kid not too long ago, and I wouldn't really wanna play with some big balsa wood, grey-pained thing. It also looks like it would also break too easily.
I mean I wouldn't crit, but when you put it out here, it's open season; not to mention this shouldn't have been on here anyway; it's like an advertisement.
So this software would make backing up your data illegal? I have all my CDs ripped, and I ftp them to another drive at another location frequently. This would stop any student from sending any of his MP3's to a computer at home for back up. That sounds fair.
In capitalist America
65 million buy website.
In Soviet Russia,
65 million buy country.
'Astronomers were surprised by what they did not see, a moon. The hubble telescope helped solve the problem when honed onto Sedna itself. The planet's oddly erratic, eliptical orbit is due to a giant mass on it's far side. Colon Powell presented the Hubble photographs today in a speech before the United Nations. The photographs detail the until now, 'unknown mass' that was altering Sedna's orbit. "It is clear from these photos" he said "that we have found the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction".
It is unclear how Saddam Hussein delivered and stockpiled the weapons on Sedna, but the blury photographic proof shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that the administration was in the Right from the beginning. NASA was unavailable for comment.
The thing I use most with Google is the image search. As an artist I need reference photos and things, and it appears A9 doesn't have an image search (how is this possible?). I cannot believe they went live without an image search. IMHO this isn't that great at all.
The key here is: 'something that can be used real time.', it's not a PRman implimentation, it is merely a front end to give the artist some visual feedback as to the prman shader on the object. It renders and changes a UV baked raster image of the shader.
As for the Final Fantasy thing. I saw that at siggraph running on SMP PS2's. It's 'alright', but it didn't look a whole lot like the film, it looked like an OGL render of the film.
What you aren't understanding are the fundamental differences between scan line renderers, ray trace renderers, and real-time technology. Real-time can only 'fake' ray tracing, and it's not very accurate or good. Like I said, we are a long way off.
And don't jump up and down, some people have real-time SSS, radiosity, and raytrace demos, but they are very crude, and a long way off.
And sure, you can tweak a movie scene down to get it to look good and run on a next gen card when presented on a vid online or TV, but we're talking about film.