I do find it bizarre that a company which still hasn't announced the release date for the next piece of their episodic franchise twenty months after the last episode is planning to release an entire 'new version' of another product only one year from release.
Maybe it's because the 'new version' is really just a few new maps, weapons, gameplay modes, and bad guys, and is a lot less work for them than a new HL2 episode? Could it be that Valve are just starting to do extremely expensive expansion packs and calling them sequels to warrant charging the same as a full game?
The BBC doesn't have advertisements though so all a global distribution would achieve for them is a massive cost in hardware and bandwidth. The global idea could well work for a commercial broadcaster but for a pure public-service broadcaster like the BBC it's a non-starter.
If Adobe treat it the same as the did with the Linux Flash Player you'll get a first version based on the tech as it was when the Linux branch was forked and then it'll fairly quickly catch up with the Windows version as the extra features are integrated into the branch.
The iPhone content wasn't DRM protected for two reasons- the device wouldn't comfortably handle the DRM requirements, and the streams are much lower quality then those downloadable from iPlayer (ie. not really suitable for viewing on a decent home screen) so are viewed as less valuable.
The BBC did still make efforts to obfuscate the streams and make sure they only delivered to the iPhone, the fact that this got broken and the BBC have made repeated attempts to tighten the restrictions does show that they're still trying to protect the content rather than happily give away even this lower-quality version.
iPlayer does include a lot of externally provided content, it's just that people don't realise that this isn't internally producted. Just as a couple of popular examples take Have I Got News For You (Made by Hattrick), and Spooks (A Kudos production). This is ignoring things like The Apprentice which is BBC produced but as is it's based on a US property the distribution agreements are likely to be draconian. In order to keep the license agreement the BBC did end up agreeing to buy-in a certain percentage of programming every year- I did have a quick look to see if I could find the actual percentage but didn't come up with anything.
You're right that the geoIP restriction to UK is likely to be to protect the foreign distribution rights but it's also part of the BBC's general remit to provide value for the license fee payer. Giving the fee payers IP access to television is giving them value for money, giving non-fee payers access isn't as it results in money being spent on scaling the service in ways that aren't benefiting those funding the system. The fact that UK-based people who don't have licenses but can access iPlayer can be taken as an acceptable cost here for not requiring registration.
You're right though about not all of the BBCs funding coming from licenses, but according to the 2005-2006 annual report for last year it was £3.1bn from the license and about £650m from other sources. This does ignore the BBC World Service which is funded in a different agreement directly from taxes but as that doesn't affect iPlayer-like systems at all it's safe to ignore.
I paid my licence fee, I can tape stuff off the TV. Why the hell do they use DRM when they already allow you access??
Because without the DRM restrictions the BBC'd never have been able to convince the external content producers to allow them to distribute over the internet without exceptionally high payments which the BBC couldn't afford. They either added the DRM or it wasn't going to happen at all, basically.
What if the only chess club in town paired evenly-ranked players and you only got a few rating points per game and you knew that in order to have a game which'd actually present enough of a challenge to stop you falling asleep you'd need a rating of 2,000 rather than the measly 150 you're given when sign up? You're now looking at literally weeks sitting at the board before you can start to have fun.
Now you have the equivilent of grinding on mobs in order to get up to level 70 and be able to start raiding with your new character, not too bad the first time you do it but if your Guild is shouting for 'Moar Healerz!' then it's going to be tedious with your shiny new Healydude.
Personally I do play WoW but I'm not a raider, I like grouping with a few real-life friends on a Monday evening and hitting one of the 5-man dungeons that it contains whilst we chat over Skype. Whether the dungeon's a low-level one in a newbie zone or one of the 'Heroic' ones only doable at maximum level doesn't bother me- it's just whether we all have a good time doing it.
Ford should be knowledgeable and a man of the world, not an bumbling idiot, just odd
A man of the world? A man of the galaxy I'd have hoped, or at least the parts where respectable journalists can get respectably drunk on a utterly disrespectful salary.
Since this is the developer who wrote the Unreal 3d engine, which is one of the best in the world at the moment, you'll have to excuse me if I think he knows a little bit about graphics APIs.
Both DirectX and OpenGL are entirely dedicated to the "Here is a triangle-based polygon mesh, some textures, and a few shaders- go draw me a pretty picture won't you?". This is a good approach to a lot of general 3d work but it is not the alpha and omega of 3d rendering.
As a couple of examples it doesn't have good support for voxel-based volumatic rendering which is perfect for cloudy scenes and also could give better support for fractally-defined terrains, it also doesn't support any rendering method which actually uses the equations of curves to render them properly as opposed to turning them into a series of small triangles. Many of these can be shoe-horned into the existing APIs, but when you do so you find you're actually going round the API much of the time and so losing any advantage they give you. There are a number of other examples of rendering methods which won't fit into the existing APIs in the article.
If the article is right and this did come about then there probably would be a series of APIs coming out for the different methods of 3d rendering. Those such as the article's author who're writing the graphic engines for the AAA games almost certainly won't be using them though- they'll be still be hand-crafting their own APIs specific and optimised for the current engine's features and now they'll be building them on top of very low-level graphics APIs with limited features like setting screen resolution and drawing a single pixel as opposed to the polygon-mesh with shaders level of complex APIs today.
A modern GPU, such as the current flagship GeForce GTX 280, is a relatively specialised piece of hardware. It has optimised support for things such as matrix operations which are used a lot in graphics and yet has no real support for integers which aren't. It has a very fast and entirely dedicated memory bus capable of pushing 140GB/s at maximum for processing geometry and textures. It's highly parallel having two hundred and forty stream processors to process the millions of seperate shader runs which make up a single frame of a high-resolution 3d scene as quickly as possible. It is also a very complex piece of technology having 1400 million transistors compared to a Core 2 Extreme QX9650's 820 million processors.
There's no way that a current CPU could replace that in anything other than a very slow emulation mode even if fully dedicated to the task. If you do want to see the difference download either nVidia's FX Composer or ATI's RenderMonkey which are both shader authoring tools. These will allow you to load a shader and preview it using your 3d card and then drop down to software rendering. Watch as a smoothly-animated complex shader suddenly grinds to a halt, often taking literally seconds to render a single frame. It's not a pretty sight.
In the future with CPUs getting more and more cores and graphics programming getting more generic to support different algorithms without needing to work against the silicon's basic design it's likely we'll see them being more suitable to the rendering task as the article covers but for now trying to substitute the CPU for the GPU would be like entering a bulldozer into a Formula 1 race on the basis that it has a large engine.
OpenGL and DirectX both have shaders, but that isn't the same as shaders needing one of these. It's equally possible to do the shading code in more conventional language such as C++ and then just draw the pixels on screen with a much lower-level graphics API, possibly as low as simply accessing the framebuffer as a large array.
The line about adding new fixed-function features did confuse me a little too though, I ended up guessing it was about the Geometry Shaders which were introduced in DX10. Whilst these are shaders, and so programmable, they do fit into a very specific point of the fixed DirectX pipeline and so can only be used to do things which boil down to 'Add more geometric detail' which when you think about it is quite a small category of task. I could be entirely wrong about what he meant though.
..or if you want to go to where you can buy your own look as KleinBottle.com. Those of you who've read the Cookoo's Egg may just recognise the name of the owner too.
If a player dies they're not likely to come back, but I think it it's just their character dying there may be more of a chance the player'll stay with it.
This doesn't hold true any more, the latest generation of hardware are all using the Unified Shader Model. This removes the distinction between a pixel pipeline and a vertex pipeline as a unified pipeline is used which can be switched between pixel and vertex processing as the scene demands.
The BBC is required, by it's charter, to have a significant proportion of its content produced by external providers.
These providers would charge vastly more for a lot of their product if the BBC was going to say "Hey, we're putting all your content on the web in non-protected forms.. okay?", especially those who want to sell their content to other broadcasters too. For content already in the BBC's vast archives the rules are even more difficult as we're talking contractual obligations sometimes going back pre-WW2.
At some point soon the BBC Trust (External to the BBC management structure, acting as overseers who-must-be-obeyed) would step in and point out this isn't getting value-for-money for the license fee payer, and it was cannibalising the sales of BBC DVDs and sales of BBC-owned content to foreign broadcaster which are then funnelled back into production. They would then slap the BBC silly and pull the service.
There's no way the BBC's going to be able to provide the same amount of content in the same quality and on demand without the DRM, what this now means to them continuing to develop this service isn't clear. The streaming version's one possibility, but that's unlikely to have the same video quality and won't have the on demand bit so may even be treated as 'broadcast'.
For a lot of DRM you're stopped by the fact that it'll not support HDCP (High-Definition Content Protection), and so won't be trused and will either get a downsampled version or nothing. True, HDCP may be broken ultimately (Details here, but it's going to take a lot more than a simple AGP card to do it.
I've been doing all of those things, with the exception of the P2P voice development, on my HTC Universal (Orange M5000) for nearly two years now- and that was by no means the first device which offered this kind of functionality.
Please, if you're going to credit anyone with opening up the true power of Smartphones don't make it Apple.. any openness of their device is purely accidental, not unlike the Sony PSP, and is likely to be reduced more and more as they patch. With regards to actually promoting external developers to get things done on their phones they're leagues behind their competition, which includes the Windows Mobile based phones, Symbian, Linux phones, and the Palm offerings. At least we can get specs, APIs, and documentation from these, even if the phones aren't viewed in the same 'manna from heaven' light as Apple's product.
People seem to be thinking this is entire episodes- so far all that's been announced are clips. I'd be very surprised if the BBC moved to allowing regular episodic content to go to YouTube, especially given they're going to be putting a lot of their efforts behind their own iPlayer project now.
Hard disks are faster than Flash RAM for raw transfer speed, but the idea here is to use the Flash to cache small frequently-read files where the hard disk's latency and seek time would be the limiting factor.
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I do find it bizarre that a company which still hasn't announced the release date for the next piece of their episodic franchise twenty months after the last episode is planning to release an entire 'new version' of another product only one year from release. Maybe it's because the 'new version' is really just a few new maps, weapons, gameplay modes, and bad guys, and is a lot less work for them than a new HL2 episode? Could it be that Valve are just starting to do extremely expensive expansion packs and calling them sequels to warrant charging the same as a full game?
The BBC doesn't have advertisements though so all a global distribution would achieve for them is a massive cost in hardware and bandwidth. The global idea could well work for a commercial broadcaster but for a pure public-service broadcaster like the BBC it's a non-starter.
If Adobe treat it the same as the did with the Linux Flash Player you'll get a first version based on the tech as it was when the Linux branch was forked and then it'll fairly quickly catch up with the Windows version as the extra features are integrated into the branch.
The iPhone content wasn't DRM protected for two reasons- the device wouldn't comfortably handle the DRM requirements, and the streams are much lower quality then those downloadable from iPlayer (ie. not really suitable for viewing on a decent home screen) so are viewed as less valuable.
The BBC did still make efforts to obfuscate the streams and make sure they only delivered to the iPhone, the fact that this got broken and the BBC have made repeated attempts to tighten the restrictions does show that they're still trying to protect the content rather than happily give away even this lower-quality version.
iPlayer does include a lot of externally provided content, it's just that people don't realise that this isn't internally producted. Just as a couple of popular examples take Have I Got News For You (Made by Hattrick), and Spooks (A Kudos production). This is ignoring things like The Apprentice which is BBC produced but as is it's based on a US property the distribution agreements are likely to be draconian. In order to keep the license agreement the BBC did end up agreeing to buy-in a certain percentage of programming every year- I did have a quick look to see if I could find the actual percentage but didn't come up with anything. You're right that the geoIP restriction to UK is likely to be to protect the foreign distribution rights but it's also part of the BBC's general remit to provide value for the license fee payer. Giving the fee payers IP access to television is giving them value for money, giving non-fee payers access isn't as it results in money being spent on scaling the service in ways that aren't benefiting those funding the system. The fact that UK-based people who don't have licenses but can access iPlayer can be taken as an acceptable cost here for not requiring registration. You're right though about not all of the BBCs funding coming from licenses, but according to the 2005-2006 annual report for last year it was £3.1bn from the license and about £650m from other sources. This does ignore the BBC World Service which is funded in a different agreement directly from taxes but as that doesn't affect iPlayer-like systems at all it's safe to ignore.
I paid my licence fee, I can tape stuff off the TV. Why the hell do they use DRM when they already allow you access?? Because without the DRM restrictions the BBC'd never have been able to convince the external content producers to allow them to distribute over the internet without exceptionally high payments which the BBC couldn't afford. They either added the DRM or it wasn't going to happen at all, basically.
If that's true then there're a lot of computer he beat earlier which're more human than him. This makes my brain hurt.
What if the only chess club in town paired evenly-ranked players and you only got a few rating points per game and you knew that in order to have a game which'd actually present enough of a challenge to stop you falling asleep you'd need a rating of 2,000 rather than the measly 150 you're given when sign up? You're now looking at literally weeks sitting at the board before you can start to have fun.
Now you have the equivilent of grinding on mobs in order to get up to level 70 and be able to start raiding with your new character, not too bad the first time you do it but if your Guild is shouting for 'Moar Healerz!' then it's going to be tedious with your shiny new Healydude.
Personally I do play WoW but I'm not a raider, I like grouping with a few real-life friends on a Monday evening and hitting one of the 5-man dungeons that it contains whilst we chat over Skype. Whether the dungeon's a low-level one in a newbie zone or one of the 'Heroic' ones only doable at maximum level doesn't bother me- it's just whether we all have a good time doing it.
Ford should be knowledgeable and a man of the world, not an bumbling idiot, just odd
A man of the world? A man of the galaxy I'd have hoped, or at least the parts where respectable journalists can get respectably drunk on a utterly disrespectful salary.
Since this is the developer who wrote the Unreal 3d engine, which is one of the best in the world at the moment, you'll have to excuse me if I think he knows a little bit about graphics APIs.
Both DirectX and OpenGL are entirely dedicated to the "Here is a triangle-based polygon mesh, some textures, and a few shaders- go draw me a pretty picture won't you?". This is a good approach to a lot of general 3d work but it is not the alpha and omega of 3d rendering.
As a couple of examples it doesn't have good support for voxel-based volumatic rendering which is perfect for cloudy scenes and also could give better support for fractally-defined terrains, it also doesn't support any rendering method which actually uses the equations of curves to render them properly as opposed to turning them into a series of small triangles. Many of these can be shoe-horned into the existing APIs, but when you do so you find you're actually going round the API much of the time and so losing any advantage they give you. There are a number of other examples of rendering methods which won't fit into the existing APIs in the article.
If the article is right and this did come about then there probably would be a series of APIs coming out for the different methods of 3d rendering. Those such as the article's author who're writing the graphic engines for the AAA games almost certainly won't be using them though- they'll be still be hand-crafting their own APIs specific and optimised for the current engine's features and now they'll be building them on top of very low-level graphics APIs with limited features like setting screen resolution and drawing a single pixel as opposed to the polygon-mesh with shaders level of complex APIs today.
A modern GPU, such as the current flagship GeForce GTX 280, is a relatively specialised piece of hardware. It has optimised support for things such as matrix operations which are used a lot in graphics and yet has no real support for integers which aren't. It has a very fast and entirely dedicated memory bus capable of pushing 140GB/s at maximum for processing geometry and textures. It's highly parallel having two hundred and forty stream processors to process the millions of seperate shader runs which make up a single frame of a high-resolution 3d scene as quickly as possible. It is also a very complex piece of technology having 1400 million transistors compared to a Core 2 Extreme QX9650's 820 million processors.
There's no way that a current CPU could replace that in anything other than a very slow emulation mode even if fully dedicated to the task. If you do want to see the difference download either nVidia's FX Composer or ATI's RenderMonkey which are both shader authoring tools. These will allow you to load a shader and preview it using your 3d card and then drop down to software rendering. Watch as a smoothly-animated complex shader suddenly grinds to a halt, often taking literally seconds to render a single frame. It's not a pretty sight.
In the future with CPUs getting more and more cores and graphics programming getting more generic to support different algorithms without needing to work against the silicon's basic design it's likely we'll see them being more suitable to the rendering task as the article covers but for now trying to substitute the CPU for the GPU would be like entering a bulldozer into a Formula 1 race on the basis that it has a large engine.
OpenGL and DirectX both have shaders, but that isn't the same as shaders needing one of these. It's equally possible to do the shading code in more conventional language such as C++ and then just draw the pixels on screen with a much lower-level graphics API, possibly as low as simply accessing the framebuffer as a large array. The line about adding new fixed-function features did confuse me a little too though, I ended up guessing it was about the Geometry Shaders which were introduced in DX10. Whilst these are shaders, and so programmable, they do fit into a very specific point of the fixed DirectX pipeline and so can only be used to do things which boil down to 'Add more geometric detail' which when you think about it is quite a small category of task. I could be entirely wrong about what he meant though.
You can post an empty unsealed envelope to yourself and have it tracked too and then put a letter in whenever you choose and seal it.
..or if you want to go to where you can buy your own look as KleinBottle.com. Those of you who've read the Cookoo's Egg may just recognise the name of the owner too.
If a player dies they're not likely to come back, but I think it it's just their character dying there may be more of a chance the player'll stay with it.
This doesn't hold true any more, the latest generation of hardware are all using the Unified Shader Model. This removes the distinction between a pixel pipeline and a vertex pipeline as a unified pipeline is used which can be switched between pixel and vertex processing as the scene demands.
As the Free Software Foundation put it, the BBC now stands for "Bill's Corrupted Corporation".
Shouldn't that be the BCC.. ?The BBC is required, by it's charter, to have a significant proportion of its content produced by external providers.
These providers would charge vastly more for a lot of their product if the BBC was going to say "Hey, we're putting all your content on the web in non-protected forms.. okay?", especially those who want to sell their content to other broadcasters too. For content already in the BBC's vast archives the rules are even more difficult as we're talking contractual obligations sometimes going back pre-WW2.
At some point soon the BBC Trust (External to the BBC management structure, acting as overseers who-must-be-obeyed) would step in and point out this isn't getting value-for-money for the license fee payer, and it was cannibalising the sales of BBC DVDs and sales of BBC-owned content to foreign broadcaster which are then funnelled back into production. They would then slap the BBC silly and pull the service.
There's no way the BBC's going to be able to provide the same amount of content in the same quality and on demand without the DRM, what this now means to them continuing to develop this service isn't clear. The streaming version's one possibility, but that's unlikely to have the same video quality and won't have the on demand bit so may even be treated as 'broadcast'.
Look at Flex Builder. Built on the same technologies as Flash, but with the focus on application-style GUIs rather than animations.
Used the Windows-based freely available Flex 2 SDK (Not the Builder) to write an in-house media viewer here and was rather pleased by it, all told.
Not that I'd expect this to run on Gnash though as Gnash is based on a version of Flash (SWF 7) which wouldn't support all these cool toys.
For a lot of DRM you're stopped by the fact that it'll not support HDCP (High-Definition Content Protection), and so won't be trused and will either get a downsampled version or nothing. True, HDCP may be broken ultimately (Details here, but it's going to take a lot more than a simple AGP card to do it.
On that basis though wouldn't it make more sense to use the video RAM as disk cache?
Awesome as it may be... Sword-chucks, Yo!
I've been doing all of those things, with the exception of the P2P voice development, on my HTC Universal (Orange M5000) for nearly two years now- and that was by no means the first device which offered this kind of functionality.
Please, if you're going to credit anyone with opening up the true power of Smartphones don't make it Apple.. any openness of their device is purely accidental, not unlike the Sony PSP, and is likely to be reduced more and more as they patch. With regards to actually promoting external developers to get things done on their phones they're leagues behind their competition, which includes the Windows Mobile based phones, Symbian, Linux phones, and the Palm offerings. At least we can get specs, APIs, and documentation from these, even if the phones aren't viewed in the same 'manna from heaven' light as Apple's product.
People seem to be thinking this is entire episodes- so far all that's been announced are clips. I'd be very surprised if the BBC moved to allowing regular episodic content to go to YouTube, especially given they're going to be putting a lot of their efforts behind their own iPlayer project now.
Hard disks are faster than Flash RAM for raw transfer speed, but the idea here is to use the Flash to cache small frequently-read files where the hard disk's latency and seek time would be the limiting factor.