I was totally skeptic of how this adaptation would turn out when it was announced. But then the leaked photos and the official posters raised my eyebrows.
Being a die-hard fan of the graphic novel, I watched the trailer just to have something solid to complain about. Surprisingly, I was thoroughly impressed, I must admit that at least visually, this movie seems incredibly faithful to the art of the original. V looks incredible down to the last detail and Natalie Portman is Evey Hammond, no question about it.
It almost got me excited. The trailer, however, confirmed my worst fears. The storyline obviously has been dumbed down into that of a crappy action summer B movie with high production values and a lot of bullet-time, M for Matrix bullshit.
Problem is, this is not the first and certainly won't be the last bad adaptation of Alan Moore's work, Watchmen has been jumping around for a while.
<rant> My question is: All those guys making the adaptations always claim to be fans of the original sources, then why do they make them despite of the original author's opinion? Sheesh... </rant>
The Cell architecture was developed with powerful and complex math applications in mind. How will existing Linux applications perform on it? It seems to me that the Cell's strengths are not integer math and general purpose computing, so in theory only floating-point intensive and vector applications can get a real kick out of it. There are not many well known applications with these characteristics.
That said, advances in parallelizing or vectorizing tasks within the kernel or popular applications are possible, but that's not a trivial task, so at first glance Cell's Linux benchmarks could look unimpressive or misleading, even though the architecture itself is revolutionary, at least in theory.
Here I hope IBM has done their homework and show something really impressive, yet realistic. I want to see things like Apache and GD serving hundreds of thousands of requests for dynamic content, or some real-time encoding/compositing of MPEG4 video for scalable delivery. I want to see Maya or Lightwave rendering a very complex scene. Rubber ducks may be fun to look at and -in all fairness- fit for a videogame-oriented crowd, but I want to see some kick-ass performance based on what it can potentially do to application development.
Sorry, maybe I was angry and called him names, you're right, I take that back and apologize if I sounded too harsh. It's just that he missed a big opportunity to help the whole situation.
We are not sure if it was Sony who sent him the letter, but it certainly is not the first time they try to leverage their 800lb gorilla status to cripple an open standard. Case in point? Their Compact Disc protection. Did it work? NO! Have they discontinued every version of that crappy technology so far? YES!
We need to make that a strong point: CRIPPLED STANDARDS WON'T WORK!
If he didn't want to fight because of his values, that's ok, but sharing the source would allow other people to fight for the same or other similar principles. Keeping your mouth shut just because someone bigger told you to do so may sound like the smart thing if you don't want to get hurt, but that doesn't make the big guy right.
Just look at Jon Johansen's story, it would've been a completely different thing if he didn't share the source code of DeCSS. Whether he's just a frontman for a group or not, he was willing to go all the way to defend his rights and has since become even more powerful. Shame on this LIGHTNING UK! idiot for not giving true meaning to his application and using it only as an ego-boost, I just hope he had fun while it lasted.
Without Jon releasing the source code, there would be no T-shirts and haikus to show how stupid and simple it really was to crack the useless DVD protection. I'm pretty sure this new scheme is just as useless if it was cracked within 72 hours, but this very important message may now be lost forever.
When will corporations learn? Only when us consumers show them the way. I'm all for copyright and IP protection (I come from a family of artists), I'm all against piracy and fully understand its terrible consequences (I live in one of the top 3 pirate countries in the world), I'm a loyal consumer and don't own anything counterfeit or pirated but I'm pissed that people like me are starting to get crippled and outdated versions of everything, including our rights.
Last august I attended a presentation in Los Angeles of the new anti-ripping scheme Sony was developing for DVDs (don't know if it's the same but they DID mention DVD Decrypter). I was thinking "do these people really believe it will work?". I mean, the game consoles are meant to be closed standards and they still get cracked open in a matter of months, sometimes even days. How can they expect a protection scheme like that to work on an open standard like DVD? I wanted to scream "IT'S THE BUSINESS MODEL, STUPID!" during the presentation but I'm pretty sure I would've been kicked outside of the hall if I did.
That didn't stop me, though. During the Q&A session I told them it just takes ONE clever person to rip the DVD and get it through the illegal distribution channels, they simply responded the scheme was aimed at the casual ripper. Some people (especially the ones from Disney) listened to my concerns and seemed to be more receptive, since they had a wonderful presentation that day, showing a deep and surprisingly honest study on the issue of copyright infringement and its distribution mechanisms, kudos to them.
I'd say the moral of the story is to not keep your opinion to yourself, and that includes your code as a form of speech.
"It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals."
I personally don't care if it goes as far as to show nipples. It's already bad enough if it allows you to see through clothes that people specifically put on to cover body parts they're not willing to show in public.
By that definition, I don't even want them to see through my watch. If they really want to have a look, let them come and ask me to take it off. They already do that with shoes, belts, jackets, hats and whatnot, what's the problem with that?
I'm a frequent flyer and I'm already pissed with the current security measures. They should make those more efficient before thinking on implementing new equipment under the same, flawed policies.
I'm very happy with the results of this survey, it shows people are "getting it". All of you guys thinking this is wrong and cost savings is the key advantage of open source really need to think again. To say so is short-sighted, just like saying "free-as-in-beer is higher priority than free-as-in-speech".
Independence from vendors means you can make your own fork of whatever project you are working on and maintain it without someone else making the decisions for you, that's the closest thing to free speech you can get in software development.
Keep in mind that OSS is not necessarily cheaper: A closed source company can choose to squash bugs and integrate new features into an application without asking for more money (other than the licensing, of course), or charge you to fix/develop a specific feature if you happen to be the only customer with such a special request. With OSS, if there's no interest in the community to fix/implement that feature for free, then you have to pay someone to do it as well.
In both cases you end up paying for the custom code, and the only real difference is the cost of the license. But hey! With licenses like the GPL, not only you pay less, you can actually own the pieces you pay for! Maybe even repackage and sell the whole thing! Again, independence is far more important than anything else.
I'm not saying cost savings are not important, but let's face it, OSS doesn't necessarily guarantee free/cheaper support, maintenance or development. Hell, you don't have to charge less money per hour when working on projects related to OSS, you know? =)
What OSS guarantees, however, is a BETTER development model, which usually brings greater cost savings along with it.
A vector engine is not always a size-to-performance tradeoff.
1) Smaller sizes also give a performance boost on all types of data transfer, including expensive memory bandwidth 2) The rasterized vectors can still be cached, this reduces overhead during redrawing operations (something already being done with bitmaps) 3) Vectors give you resolution-independent displays that have better visual quality at negligible performance differences between resolutions (this is debatable, but I'm talking about full hardware-acceleration) 4) Cairo, Quartz and Avalon are ultimately designed for GPU acceleration, so ideally there won't be a performance hit on the CPU
Yes, you may still need a somewhat powerful PC to have full-access to all the benefits of these vector-based engines, but on less powerful equipment you can do something you can't do with bitmaps, and that's having a smoother and more graceful visual degradation using the same source material.
And, by the way, we'll still be using bitmaps for a long time, so you don't need to worry about GTK/X developers deprecating bitmap rendering and everything becoming vectors overnight, chances are that most users will need to have some form of programmable GPU before that happens. I guess that's why Avalon is getting delay after delay, and Apple can get away with it so much earlier because it has better control on its out-of-the-box hardware capabilities.
The problem I see with this movie is that the original storyline may not seem particularly amusing for the current political and moral environment.
Right now the preview says: "a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts", but this description doesn't fit the darker spirit of the original.
While the description does mention terrorism, V is much more complex than that, as described in several reviews and analysis, like this one. Thus I'm expecting that along the road, V will be transformed into some kind of "masked avenger" or Batman-like superhero, better suited for the post-9/11 era.
I don't expect the movie to portrait V blowing up government buildings, killing policemen and a priest, questioning Justice and promoting Anarchy, like in the original. So, what's the point of adapting it? If these Wachowski guys want some story about oppression, they'd be better off adapting Cinderella for that matter.
If it's changed in such a way, it will be ironic that a story that shows a world of totalitarianism and lack of freedom won't be translated verbatim into another medium because of issues with "political correctness".
I never said having it all tied together, I'm talking about an easy-to-use solution that would immediately enable the user to install a shrinkwrapped product and a developer to create or use an engine that doesn't have to follow a thousand different runtime libraries from different distros and having to QA the hell out of it just to have a usable product. Try to make a Linux game that uses something else than a mouse and a keyboard, try to enable 5.1 sound for it, it's madness.
I'm also talking about an end-user wanting to tweak or fiddle with his own computer and settings and not having to resort to learn vi shortcuts. Have you ever tried to tweak your OpenGL settings? How about the __GL_FSAA environment variable on nVidia cards? Painful as it is to hear, Windows is way better in that sense.
I'm not saying DirectX is better/worse from a technical standpoint and sure, some key APIs in Linux are mature and some of them are very robust and nice, industrial strength and all that, but it's the WHOLE thing that has to be streamlined in order to be marketable and that means distro and API developers working together to get that.
We all know Linux is good and has a lot of strengths as the ones you mentioned, I'm aware of all of that, but it requires much more than just technical prowess to have a competitive OS in the consumer arena.
From where I sit Linux networking is faster, more complete, more flexible, more *everything* than Windows. In what way is it inadequate?
Yes and no, Linux networking might be superior in many ways from a technical standpoint. But from a regular end-user, it's a mess.
Just as an example, try to install MadWifi in a regular Fedora installation, the module creates an ath0 device by default! fixing that requires changing several config files by hand. Besides, a regular user will have a big problem knowing he needs MadWifi for his brand-new laptop with an Atheros chipset in the first place, and even harder knowing that the Fedora stock kernel doesn't include it, where to download it from, and how to manually install it using RPM/YUM/APT/whatnot.
Also, if you're on an unstable wLAN your card will not react properly and retry to obtain an IP address automatically. This also applies if you forgot to turn the wLAN switch on your laptop, you need to fix that manually.
Before anyone jumps out with the typical "But my Debian/Suse/Gentoo yadda yadda", I know this behavior changes from distro to distro and it's better on some of them, but that's a bug, not a feature! This support needs to be standardized and streamlined for the end-users to be able to buy a shrinkwrapped Linux version of Doom3 and happily frag their friends.
I think this article, while right in its own context, is too graphics-centric and doesn't provide a full perspective on the problem, it's far worse that one can expect from just RTFA.
Sure, graphics are important, but sound, network and input APIs are actually in a much worse situation.
We can argue all we want about how OpenGL is better in many ways and I'd agree wholeheartedly, but Linux's sound, input and network support is just too behind the times in terms "out of the box" functionality or ease of use.
I have been a developer for many years and worked on many platforms, and a common pattern on any serious platform (even going back to the 8-bit days) is that there's complete (granted it's almost never perfect) support for all areas, and DirectX here is no exception, it has by far the best integrated gaming support of any API in existence. Whether it's buggy or low-performance or not cross-platform portable doesn't matter that much. Time-to-market is the name of the game, you want a sellable product and DirectX is the fastest way.
Too often for this kind of argument I receive answers that are ignorant, or uninformed at best, some of them sound like: "But there's OpenAL and it's cross-platform", "udev and hotplug are TEH R0x0RZ", "Linux networking is robust and good enough for servers, therefore desktop performance is guaranteed", "ALSA is better than the Windows crap", "Linux is more stable". Some of them may be right, and Hey! I want Linux to be successful too! But they're completely missing the point and that doesn't help the situation.
We need better API integration, better driver support from chipset vendors (not just graphics, you pixel whores!), BETTER END-USER UTILITIES and some company like Transgaming that can provide a sensible porting/cross-platform middleware solution for developers, not just wrappers for end-users. Criterion's Renderware is a very successful solution for home consoles, one would think there's a market for something like this on the PC.
I can't even begin to think how on earth did that happen, but a long time ago (10 years or something) there used to be a Taco Bell in Mexico City indeed. Maybe they wanted to show us what a taco is supposed to be?
Very soon, as expected in this land of taco-ignorants, the place went bankrupt, never to be mentioned again. It seems we'll never know what a real taco is and it's a pity, our soft tortillas would never stand a chance against their V-shaped tostadas.
Seriously, though, I can't imagine anyone here remotely considering the idea to eat in Taco Bell, maybe some stray tourists from the US would find amusing to eat in such a place but I doubt that would guarantee its existence.
There have been other attempts by food chains to emulate some of the "taco culture". One of them is McDonald's with the "Mc Pastor", there were these TV ads showing the owner of a taco restaurant crying, while his former customers were running to get their fix at the McDonald's in the background. I bet nobody remembers that by now, it was so damn funny.
Now, to be on-topic, I'd be willing to pay some serious money just to get a realtime traffic map of Mexico City, now that's a challenge! And I know I'm not alone, there's a potential market of millions of desperate users here.
There are several techniques that could be used to achieve such pixel count with current technology, so it doesn't really sound that interesting. It might be good to create a large, hi-res poster with a beautiful landscape. It's also nice that they want the massive datasets to be processed and stored in about 1/15th of a second, making it a lot more useable for artistic purposes.
But film still surpasses those qualities and not only because of resolution and speed, but color. What I'd be interested in is to have digital photography that goes beyond the current 24-bit depth (if only for internal computations and not actual output) and implements better CCD technology to compensate for its inherent problems with lighting.
I know there are advances in those areas, but unfortunately they've been very slow since the market is going for pixel count (MHz, anyone?). Until that trend changes, film will continue to be the better choice, regardless of what any dream team says.
I'd actually find the command "cat/dev/null > foo" a lot more spiritual, it's like Death coming for your soul. And hey, it doesn't even need to be god (root).
I have seen many cases of people holding funerals or paying their respects to renowned pieces of code or equipment. IIRC, even Bill Gates and co. paid theirs to MS-DOS in the Windows 2000 presentation, when the command 'exit' was typed on a DOS virtual machine.
But the funniest I've ever seen is when I visited a good friend of mine in a software development company during the dot-com era (lots of young geeks around), he was showing me the office and all that, then he took me to the backyard/graveyard, where they had several things buried, but the most recent one was a modem (they were also an ISP), complete with a tombstone and an epitaph that read "NO CARRIER".
Marionette has meaning and Wi-Fi's not alone.
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· Score: 2, Informative
Marionette in japanese would be correctly pronounced or written "Marionetto". "Netto" is also the way to write/pronounce "Net". So it could be a very clear hint to something called "Mario Net".
A Nintendo network for the DS would be fairly easy to do. You only need to maintain a matchmaking service. Basically it's the same Xbox Live does (matchmaking and then letting one console be the host to others), but the footprint and requirements for DS games are quite smaller and there's no HDD to download patches to, therefore the service could be very cheap, paid by simple marketing schemes or even free.
By the way, Wi-Fi is not the only wireless protocol the DS has built-in. It also includes a proprietary wireless chipset, probably devoted to game requirements, like using lower frequencies and throughput than 802.11b to maximize range and battery power, and optimized to not include IP to avoid overhead/latency and simplify connectivity between users.
It's also desirable to avoid hotspot authentication when connecting locally since it can really be a nightmare because some hotspots are not configured to allow connectivity between machines on the same network, they only route to the outside and that could mean a lot of headaches for local users.
As much as I like Wi-Fi, it has limitations and can't really be considered "Plug and Play" (imagine typing your credit card number or WEP key on the DS screen in order to access a Boingo hotspot in an airport), so I definitely support the simplicity of another wireless protocol specifically made to run games locally and nothing else.
The problem with compiling your own binaries is that you are effectively forking code from the original distribution at the low level. To do this you really must know what you're doing, and that can be a very difficult thing when working with applications you didn't write yourself.
Just look at the Linux Kernel Mailing List and how many errors can be traced to a GCC specific version. That's why Linus enforces a standardized compiler environment, developers can't be wasting their time fixing compiler-induced errors.
I know it's attractive to just recompile your whole distribution to your specific hardware combination because there are real world performance gains, but sometimes there are weird bugs caused by it and you'll probably be out of luck trying to find some documentation on them. What are the chances of somebody having the same hardware configuration? And remember we're not talking about branded components and specific models, we must throw in firmware, drivers, BIOS settings and whatnot into the mix.
As long as the PC components are not standardized, this problem is never going to be away. I seriously considered Mandrake and Gentoo a couple of times in the past and they had very different bugs on each version every time I tried them. Even though they have gotten better on each release, I'd still refuse to put them on a production machine, there's a reason why every distro ships with a precompiled i386 kernel.
I, for one, just recompile the most important parts of a system that do require most of the CPU time, like the kernel, Apache, and other runtime libraries whenever I do need that extra punch, not a second before. distcc is a geek tool and has that coolness-factor and all, but I'm not on a frenzy to use it to recompile all my servers' software, I care about stability first.
Even before the Xbox arrived to market, it was obvious that the existence of the platform itself is artificial. I said it many times and I'll say it again: It would've been the greatest generation ever if Nintendo and Sony gave us (the gamers) $100+ just for buying a piece of hardware. By now the Gamecube would be free of charge, the PS2 around $50 and the Xbox still $150 a piece.
Microsoft's business model for this console is possible only because of their deep pockets. It's not that releasing the next-generation hardware early will backfire, it's the fact that _this_ generation's business model has already backfired.
I live in Mexico and you'd be truly amazed on the uses people give to their Xboxes; emulators, media players, ripped games, here the machine is regarded as a pirate's paradise. Obviously, it hurts Microsoft's revenue and it's only natural they need to replace the platform as soon as possible. By the way, this is not really news, it was all the buzz at the last E3, as even Nintendo mentioned it in the pre-show conference.
The problem is, Sony and Nintendo are always thinking on extending the life-cycle of their products, like this and this, while Microsoft is now desperately planning to kill it. Clearly, the future of the console is not written in stone, because Microsoft could continue losing more than $1B per year and still be around by the year 2100. But it's now clear the Xbox is already dead come 2005, and developers are already starting to focus on the next console. This is also hurting the business this very year.
Look at what happened to True Fantasy Live Online, a great MMORPG I was really excited about, and it got cancelled because I'm pretty sure they'll move it to Xbox2/Next. In fact, I'm also willing to bet this is another indication that the next generation console will not be backwards compatible. They need to stop hackers, they need to bring prices down and they need good games for launch.
All that said, I was never happy to see the Xbox's artificial presence in the industry. However, I applaud Microsoft's clean room approach. If it's not heavily subsidized, heck, if it's a product that could live without someone pouring wads of cash on it, then I'll be in line to get mine and regard it as the real console the Xbox never was.
Well, if you're limiting yourself to the genres where these input devices really shine (FPS, RTS, RPGs) then you can say they're great.
But a control pad is definitely not "old school" it has seen more innovations in the last decade in terms of responsiveness, force feedback, analog control, durability and ergonomics than any other input device in history. Just look at the PS2 controller in its third generation, look at the N64's, Gamecube and even the SNES pads, they ooze polishness and innovation at the beginning of each console's life-cycle.
Compare that to keyboards, which are not really designed for games and that haven't changed at all for how long? Twenty-something years? And what about the mouse? The middle button is not even standard! The scroll wheel seems to be achieving that status faster (but ooooh, we have optic mice now *drools*:p). Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see the point of playing an action or fighting game with a device not designed to let you press more than one key at once. And don't get me started on offline multiplayer or when trying to play while in any other place but an office desk.
Really, the "old school" devices here are the keyboard and mouse. They may work great with some games that are _designed_ around the limitations and advantages of those input devices, but if you want to see the future, look at the advances in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) on game consoles, especially the upcoming portable ones.
Things like X-Arcade controllers will always have a market because they are input devices designed for games, not the other way around.
It may not be popular (yet) on PC/Mac/Linux/whatever environments, but portable toolkits do exist in the video game industry. Renderware is an example of a modular toolkit that is used to make a game that can be ported to several consoles. Just recently, Sega's Sonic Team used it for a high-profile cross-platform project you might have heard about, it's called Sonic Heroes:p . This is getting increasingly popular because of market issues. EA, Konami, Namco, Capcom and many others use this kind of cross-platform toolkits because it can cut development time by an order of magnitude when they want their products to be launched to a wider, multi-platform market.
This is also a problem for the console manufacturers, as they want to push their own, proprietary toolkits and get exclusivity for as many important titles as possible. This is why Microsoft is going to push this XNA thing very hard, it wants developers to stay inside the DirectX world.
Cross-platform, feature-complete, strongly supported APIs and toolkits are a big necessity in today's marketplace to comply with the very high standards the video game industry demands.
By the way, I'll start my little rant about OpenGL. I love the thing very much and it used to be great, but I'm really sad to see it's very outdated now and it doesn't reflect current game developers' needs, for example, fragment shaders support is something not well defined yet and it's a market requirement, you can't just port games from Windows and not support fragment shaders. Then there's the thing about OpenGL supporting SO MUCH F'ng more than just games-related functions (the API is still very strong in the professional apps space), remember the API subset some games had during the Voodoo era? This is also a requirement for today's games, a lightweight, full-featured API without unnecessary bloat.
To make matters worse, OpenGL doesn't include equivalent cross-platform audio and input APIs/toolkits, so you need to rewrite these parts for each new platform, or create your own API (and you still need to write support for it in every platform), or maybe look for some of the half-baked efforts out there.
Here's the reason DirectX smokes everybody else: We don't have a good cross-platform alternative to game development.
id Software, however industry-leading it may be, can't sustain our only true cross-platform open API in existence alone forever.
As many have said on the previous discussion, games-oriented distros already exist, based on Knoppix, Gentoo and many others. I can't help but feel the focus on these distro developers is not going to the right direction.
Being a developer myself, having used UNIX clones for more than one decade, and worked in the videogames industry, I know it's tempting to see the whole Free/Open Source software available as reusable code for just about any kind of project and think about software as some sort of Swiss Army knife.
But, the truth of the matter is, the usage patterns of a gamer are completely different from any other type of user, either from a technological and/or psychological perspective. We even tend to think of games as content in the same way as audio or video, when in fact, games are very demanding applications. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the usability of games, their GUIs, the APIs and hardware support are not a priority and you'll see just about any of the so-called "games distro" using mostly the same software as a regular one, complete with KDE, GNOME and whatnot.
There should be only a handful of games-oriented distros, made with forks of every relevant component, but tailored exclusively for the needs of games and include no non-games related software inside. X, OpenGL, SDL and other libraries and APIs, Hardware Detection & Driver Support may seem obvious to have, but why do we need whole collections of shells, fonts, window managers or even locales? Why even the same init and authentication processes as desktop-oriented distros? Most games need to have their own, custom support for these things anyway, so the unnecessary, duplicate stuff should be removed.
Small, specialized software is better in many ways, so that the focus can be on the hardware support and the robustness of needed engines, APIs and libraries. Only then a games developer can maximize resources and focus on solving games' bugs during beta testing, and spend less time on issues with other unrelated, bloated components.
A tiny, modular LiveCD distribution is ideal for games because software diversity and versioning is better controlled, but should not be mandatory, and because the OS components can be under a free license, software houses can launch their products with the same codebase without any problem and make them either bootable or installable. Hell, some can even make professional SDKs out of it and license it to other developers.
Simply put, making a desktop-oriented distro, then just adding some drivers and some games and claiming it's a "games distro", doesn't take advantage of the technical superiority the free software community and, as a gamer, doesn't make it attractive to me, as in every distro there's some learning curve and fine tuning involved. "Damn! I just want to play a friggin' game!"
<RANT>It's a shame we're not showing of any real world usability advantages over videogame consoles or Windows-based games.</RANT>
By the way, Tecmo recently released Ninja Gaiden exclusively for the Xbox console, but as an added value decided to include the original NES trilogy.
Tecmo must have got a license from Nintendo to emulate the games on the Xbox, using a modified PC emulator or a "clean room" one. The only way Tecmo could get away without a license was to port the original games to the new console, because Nintendo is the holder of many patents related to the technology used back then for the cartridges, including a "lockout chip" (really a hardware dongle), and modifying the games to prevent or trick the code to avoid the lockout chip checking would result in a copyright, patent and/or license violation. I think Tecmo saved lots of time and money and went with the license, otherwise the NES games would've been remade better.
Patenting things related to emulation is simply a way for Nintendo to avoid GBA's and GCN's newly discovered market advantage through legacy games to be dilluted with competitors being able to do the same. Expect the PSP to follow on this strategy with old PSone games.
To think about what all these years at this industry can teach you...
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I was totally skeptic of how this adaptation would turn out when it was announced. But then the leaked photos and the official posters raised my eyebrows.
Being a die-hard fan of the graphic novel, I watched the trailer just to have something solid to complain about. Surprisingly, I was thoroughly impressed, I must admit that at least visually, this movie seems incredibly faithful to the art of the original. V looks incredible down to the last detail and Natalie Portman is Evey Hammond, no question about it.
It almost got me excited. The trailer, however, confirmed my worst fears. The storyline obviously has been dumbed down into that of a crappy action summer B movie with high production values and a lot of bullet-time, M for Matrix bullshit.
Problem is, this is not the first and certainly won't be the last bad adaptation of Alan Moore's work, Watchmen has been jumping around for a while.
<rant>
My question is: All those guys making the adaptations always claim to be fans of the original sources, then why do they make them despite of the original author's opinion? Sheesh...
</rant>
The Cell architecture was developed with powerful and complex math applications in mind. How will existing Linux applications perform on it? It seems to me that the Cell's strengths are not integer math and general purpose computing, so in theory only floating-point intensive and vector applications can get a real kick out of it. There are not many well known applications with these characteristics.
That said, advances in parallelizing or vectorizing tasks within the kernel or popular applications are possible, but that's not a trivial task, so at first glance Cell's Linux benchmarks could look unimpressive or misleading, even though the architecture itself is revolutionary, at least in theory.
Here I hope IBM has done their homework and show something really impressive, yet realistic. I want to see things like Apache and GD serving hundreds of thousands of requests for dynamic content, or some real-time encoding/compositing of MPEG4 video for scalable delivery. I want to see Maya or Lightwave rendering a very complex scene. Rubber ducks may be fun to look at and -in all fairness- fit for a videogame-oriented crowd, but I want to see some kick-ass performance based on what it can potentially do to application development.
Sorry, maybe I was angry and called him names, you're right, I take that back and apologize if I sounded too harsh. It's just that he missed a big opportunity to help the whole situation.
We are not sure if it was Sony who sent him the letter, but it certainly is not the first time they try to leverage their 800lb gorilla status to cripple an open standard. Case in point? Their Compact Disc protection. Did it work? NO! Have they discontinued every version of that crappy technology so far? YES!
We need to make that a strong point: CRIPPLED STANDARDS WON'T WORK!
If he didn't want to fight because of his values, that's ok, but sharing the source would allow other people to fight for the same or other similar principles. Keeping your mouth shut just because someone bigger told you to do so may sound like the smart thing if you don't want to get hurt, but that doesn't make the big guy right.
Just look at Jon Johansen's story, it would've been a completely different thing if he didn't share the source code of DeCSS. Whether he's just a frontman for a group or not, he was willing to go all the way to defend his rights and has since become even more powerful. Shame on this LIGHTNING UK! idiot for not giving true meaning to his application and using it only as an ego-boost, I just hope he had fun while it lasted.
Without Jon releasing the source code, there would be no T-shirts and haikus to show how stupid and simple it really was to crack the useless DVD protection. I'm pretty sure this new scheme is just as useless if it was cracked within 72 hours, but this very important message may now be lost forever.
When will corporations learn? Only when us consumers show them the way. I'm all for copyright and IP protection (I come from a family of artists), I'm all against piracy and fully understand its terrible consequences (I live in one of the top 3 pirate countries in the world), I'm a loyal consumer and don't own anything counterfeit or pirated but I'm pissed that people like me are starting to get crippled and outdated versions of everything, including our rights.
Last august I attended a presentation in Los Angeles of the new anti-ripping scheme Sony was developing for DVDs (don't know if it's the same but they DID mention DVD Decrypter). I was thinking "do these people really believe it will work?". I mean, the game consoles are meant to be closed standards and they still get cracked open in a matter of months, sometimes even days. How can they expect a protection scheme like that to work on an open standard like DVD? I wanted to scream "IT'S THE BUSINESS MODEL, STUPID!" during the presentation but I'm pretty sure I would've been kicked outside of the hall if I did.
That didn't stop me, though. During the Q&A session I told them it just takes ONE clever person to rip the DVD and get it through the illegal distribution channels, they simply responded the scheme was aimed at the casual ripper. Some people (especially the ones from Disney) listened to my concerns and seemed to be more receptive, since they had a wonderful presentation that day, showing a deep and surprisingly honest study on the issue of copyright infringement and its distribution mechanisms, kudos to them.
I'd say the moral of the story is to not keep your opinion to yourself, and that includes your code as a form of speech.
"It shows nipples. It shows the clear outline of genitals."
I personally don't care if it goes as far as to show nipples. It's already bad enough if it allows you to see through clothes that people specifically put on to cover body parts they're not willing to show in public.
By that definition, I don't even want them to see through my watch. If they really want to have a look, let them come and ask me to take it off. They already do that with shoes, belts, jackets, hats and whatnot, what's the problem with that?
I'm a frequent flyer and I'm already pissed with the current security measures. They should make those more efficient before thinking on implementing new equipment under the same, flawed policies.
I'm very happy with the results of this survey, it shows people are "getting it". All of you guys thinking this is wrong and cost savings is the key advantage of open source really need to think again. To say so is short-sighted, just like saying "free-as-in-beer is higher priority than free-as-in-speech".
Independence from vendors means you can make your own fork of whatever project you are working on and maintain it without someone else making the decisions for you, that's the closest thing to free speech you can get in software development.
Keep in mind that OSS is not necessarily cheaper: A closed source company can choose to squash bugs and integrate new features into an application without asking for more money (other than the licensing, of course), or charge you to fix/develop a specific feature if you happen to be the only customer with such a special request. With OSS, if there's no interest in the community to fix/implement that feature for free, then you have to pay someone to do it as well.
In both cases you end up paying for the custom code, and the only real difference is the cost of the license. But hey! With licenses like the GPL, not only you pay less, you can actually own the pieces you pay for! Maybe even repackage and sell the whole thing! Again, independence is far more important than anything else.
I'm not saying cost savings are not important, but let's face it, OSS doesn't necessarily guarantee free/cheaper support, maintenance or development. Hell, you don't have to charge less money per hour when working on projects related to OSS, you know? =)
What OSS guarantees, however, is a BETTER development model, which usually brings greater cost savings along with it.
I was going to use the Windows port of GIMP to make this joke, but then the MS Antispyware tool detected it.
That's why I used Photoshop, sorry...
Yeah! What about him?
A vector engine is not always a size-to-performance tradeoff.
1) Smaller sizes also give a performance boost on all types of data transfer, including expensive memory bandwidth
2) The rasterized vectors can still be cached, this reduces overhead during redrawing operations (something already being done with bitmaps)
3) Vectors give you resolution-independent displays that have better visual quality at negligible performance differences between resolutions (this is debatable, but I'm talking about full hardware-acceleration)
4) Cairo, Quartz and Avalon are ultimately designed for GPU acceleration, so ideally there won't be a performance hit on the CPU
Yes, you may still need a somewhat powerful PC to have full-access to all the benefits of these vector-based engines, but on less powerful equipment you can do something you can't do with bitmaps, and that's having a smoother and more graceful visual degradation using the same source material.
And, by the way, we'll still be using bitmaps for a long time, so you don't need to worry about GTK/X developers deprecating bitmap rendering and everything becoming vectors overnight, chances are that most users will need to have some form of programmable GPU before that happens. I guess that's why Avalon is getting delay after delay, and Apple can get away with it so much earlier because it has better control on its out-of-the-box hardware capabilities.
The problem I see with this movie is that the original storyline may not seem particularly amusing for the current political and moral environment.
Right now the preview says: "a mysterious man in a white porcelain mask who fights political oppressors through terrorism and seemingly absurd acts", but this description doesn't fit the darker spirit of the original.
While the description does mention terrorism, V is much more complex than that, as described in several reviews and analysis, like this one. Thus I'm expecting that along the road, V will be transformed into some kind of "masked avenger" or Batman-like superhero, better suited for the post-9/11 era.
I don't expect the movie to portrait V blowing up government buildings, killing policemen and a priest, questioning Justice and promoting Anarchy, like in the original. So, what's the point of adapting it? If these Wachowski guys want some story about oppression, they'd be better off adapting Cinderella for that matter.
If it's changed in such a way, it will be ironic that a story that shows a world of totalitarianism and lack of freedom won't be translated verbatim into another medium because of issues with "political correctness".
I never said having it all tied together, I'm talking about an easy-to-use solution that would immediately enable the user to install a shrinkwrapped product and a developer to create or use an engine that doesn't have to follow a thousand different runtime libraries from different distros and having to QA the hell out of it just to have a usable product. Try to make a Linux game that uses something else than a mouse and a keyboard, try to enable 5.1 sound for it, it's madness.
I'm also talking about an end-user wanting to tweak or fiddle with his own computer and settings and not having to resort to learn vi shortcuts. Have you ever tried to tweak your OpenGL settings? How about the __GL_FSAA environment variable on nVidia cards? Painful as it is to hear, Windows is way better in that sense.
I'm not saying DirectX is better/worse from a technical standpoint and sure, some key APIs in Linux are mature and some of them are very robust and nice, industrial strength and all that, but it's the WHOLE thing that has to be streamlined in order to be marketable and that means distro and API developers working together to get that.
We all know Linux is good and has a lot of strengths as the ones you mentioned, I'm aware of all of that, but it requires much more than just technical prowess to have a competitive OS in the consumer arena.
From where I sit Linux networking is faster, more complete, more flexible, more *everything* than Windows. In what way is it inadequate?
Yes and no, Linux networking might be superior in many ways from a technical standpoint. But from a regular end-user, it's a mess.
Just as an example, try to install MadWifi in a regular Fedora installation, the module creates an ath0 device by default! fixing that requires changing several config files by hand. Besides, a regular user will have a big problem knowing he needs MadWifi for his brand-new laptop with an Atheros chipset in the first place, and even harder knowing that the Fedora stock kernel doesn't include it, where to download it from, and how to manually install it using RPM/YUM/APT/whatnot.
Also, if you're on an unstable wLAN your card will not react properly and retry to obtain an IP address automatically. This also applies if you forgot to turn the wLAN switch on your laptop, you need to fix that manually.
Before anyone jumps out with the typical "But my Debian/Suse/Gentoo yadda yadda", I know this behavior changes from distro to distro and it's better on some of them, but that's a bug, not a feature! This support needs to be standardized and streamlined for the end-users to be able to buy a shrinkwrapped Linux version of Doom3 and happily frag their friends.
I think this article, while right in its own context, is too graphics-centric and doesn't provide a full perspective on the problem, it's far worse that one can expect from just RTFA.
Sure, graphics are important, but sound, network and input APIs are actually in a much worse situation.
We can argue all we want about how OpenGL is better in many ways and I'd agree wholeheartedly, but Linux's sound, input and network support is just too behind the times in terms "out of the box" functionality or ease of use.
I have been a developer for many years and worked on many platforms, and a common pattern on any serious platform (even going back to the 8-bit days) is that there's complete (granted it's almost never perfect) support for all areas, and DirectX here is no exception, it has by far the best integrated gaming support of any API in existence. Whether it's buggy or low-performance or not cross-platform portable doesn't matter that much. Time-to-market is the name of the game, you want a sellable product and DirectX is the fastest way.
Too often for this kind of argument I receive answers that are ignorant, or uninformed at best, some of them sound like: "But there's OpenAL and it's cross-platform", "udev and hotplug are TEH R0x0RZ", "Linux networking is robust and good enough for servers, therefore desktop performance is guaranteed", "ALSA is better than the Windows crap", "Linux is more stable". Some of them may be right, and Hey! I want Linux to be successful too! But they're completely missing the point and that doesn't help the situation.
We need better API integration, better driver support from chipset vendors (not just graphics, you pixel whores!), BETTER END-USER UTILITIES and some company like Transgaming that can provide a sensible porting/cross-platform middleware solution for developers, not just wrappers for end-users. Criterion's Renderware is a very successful solution for home consoles, one would think there's a market for something like this on the PC.
I can't even begin to think how on earth did that happen, but a long time ago (10 years or something) there used to be a Taco Bell in Mexico City indeed. Maybe they wanted to show us what a taco is supposed to be?
Very soon, as expected in this land of taco-ignorants, the place went bankrupt, never to be mentioned again. It seems we'll never know what a real taco is and it's a pity, our soft tortillas would never stand a chance against their V-shaped tostadas.
Seriously, though, I can't imagine anyone here remotely considering the idea to eat in Taco Bell, maybe some stray tourists from the US would find amusing to eat in such a place but I doubt that would guarantee its existence.
There have been other attempts by food chains to emulate some of the "taco culture". One of them is McDonald's with the "Mc Pastor", there were these TV ads showing the owner of a taco restaurant crying, while his former customers were running to get their fix at the McDonald's in the background. I bet nobody remembers that by now, it was so damn funny.
Now, to be on-topic, I'd be willing to pay some serious money just to get a realtime traffic map of Mexico City, now that's a challenge! And I know I'm not alone, there's a potential market of millions of desperate users here.
There are several techniques that could be used to achieve such pixel count with current technology, so it doesn't really sound that interesting. It might be good to create a large, hi-res poster with a beautiful landscape. It's also nice that they want the massive datasets to be processed and stored in about 1/15th of a second, making it a lot more useable for artistic purposes.
But film still surpasses those qualities and not only because of resolution and speed, but color. What I'd be interested in is to have digital photography that goes beyond the current 24-bit depth (if only for internal computations and not actual output) and implements better CCD technology to compensate for its inherent problems with lighting.
I know there are advances in those areas, but unfortunately they've been very slow since the market is going for pixel count (MHz, anyone?). Until that trend changes, film will continue to be the better choice, regardless of what any dream team says.
Well, if they're sites about people and cats that look like this, then I'm all for evolution.
I'd actually find the command "cat /dev/null > foo" a lot more spiritual, it's like Death coming for your soul. And hey, it doesn't even need to be god (root).
I have seen many cases of people holding funerals or paying their respects to renowned pieces of code or equipment. IIRC, even Bill Gates and co. paid theirs to MS-DOS in the Windows 2000 presentation, when the command 'exit' was typed on a DOS virtual machine.
But the funniest I've ever seen is when I visited a good friend of mine in a software development company during the dot-com era (lots of young geeks around), he was showing me the office and all that, then he took me to the backyard/graveyard, where they had several things buried, but the most recent one was a modem (they were also an ISP), complete with a tombstone and an epitaph that read "NO CARRIER".
Marionette in japanese would be correctly pronounced or written "Marionetto". "Netto" is also the way to write/pronounce "Net". So it could be a very clear hint to something called "Mario Net".
A Nintendo network for the DS would be fairly easy to do. You only need to maintain a matchmaking service. Basically it's the same Xbox Live does (matchmaking and then letting one console be the host to others), but the footprint and requirements for DS games are quite smaller and there's no HDD to download patches to, therefore the service could be very cheap, paid by simple marketing schemes or even free.
By the way, Wi-Fi is not the only wireless protocol the DS has built-in. It also includes a proprietary wireless chipset, probably devoted to game requirements, like using lower frequencies and throughput than 802.11b to maximize range and battery power, and optimized to not include IP to avoid overhead/latency and simplify connectivity between users.
It's also desirable to avoid hotspot authentication when connecting locally since it can really be a nightmare because some hotspots are not configured to allow connectivity between machines on the same network, they only route to the outside and that could mean a lot of headaches for local users.
As much as I like Wi-Fi, it has limitations and can't really be considered "Plug and Play" (imagine typing your credit card number or WEP key on the DS screen in order to access a Boingo hotspot in an airport), so I definitely support the simplicity of another wireless protocol specifically made to run games locally and nothing else.
The problem with compiling your own binaries is that you are effectively forking code from the original distribution at the low level. To do this you really must know what you're doing, and that can be a very difficult thing when working with applications you didn't write yourself.
Just look at the Linux Kernel Mailing List and how many errors can be traced to a GCC specific version. That's why Linus enforces a standardized compiler environment, developers can't be wasting their time fixing compiler-induced errors.
I know it's attractive to just recompile your whole distribution to your specific hardware combination because there are real world performance gains, but sometimes there are weird bugs caused by it and you'll probably be out of luck trying to find some documentation on them. What are the chances of somebody having the same hardware configuration? And remember we're not talking about branded components and specific models, we must throw in firmware, drivers, BIOS settings and whatnot into the mix.
As long as the PC components are not standardized, this problem is never going to be away. I seriously considered Mandrake and Gentoo a couple of times in the past and they had very different bugs on each version every time I tried them. Even though they have gotten better on each release, I'd still refuse to put them on a production machine, there's a reason why every distro ships with a precompiled i386 kernel.
I, for one, just recompile the most important parts of a system that do require most of the CPU time, like the kernel, Apache, and other runtime libraries whenever I do need that extra punch, not a second before. distcc is a geek tool and has that coolness-factor and all, but I'm not on a frenzy to use it to recompile all my servers' software, I care about stability first.
Even before the Xbox arrived to market, it was obvious that the existence of the platform itself is artificial. I said it many times and I'll say it again: It would've been the greatest generation ever if Nintendo and Sony gave us (the gamers) $100+ just for buying a piece of hardware. By now the Gamecube would be free of charge, the PS2 around $50 and the Xbox still $150 a piece.
Microsoft's business model for this console is possible only because of their deep pockets. It's not that releasing the next-generation hardware early will backfire, it's the fact that _this_ generation's business model has already backfired.
I live in Mexico and you'd be truly amazed on the uses people give to their Xboxes; emulators, media players, ripped games, here the machine is regarded as a pirate's paradise. Obviously, it hurts Microsoft's revenue and it's only natural they need to replace the platform as soon as possible. By the way, this is not really news, it was all the buzz at the last E3, as even Nintendo mentioned it in the pre-show conference.
The problem is, Sony and Nintendo are always thinking on extending the life-cycle of their products, like this and this, while Microsoft is now desperately planning to kill it. Clearly, the future of the console is not written in stone, because Microsoft could continue losing more than $1B per year and still be around by the year 2100. But it's now clear the Xbox is already dead come 2005, and developers are already starting to focus on the next console. This is also hurting the business this very year.
Look at what happened to True Fantasy Live Online, a great MMORPG I was really excited about, and it got cancelled because I'm pretty sure they'll move it to Xbox2/Next. In fact, I'm also willing to bet this is another indication that the next generation console will not be backwards compatible. They need to stop hackers, they need to bring prices down and they need good games for launch.
All that said, I was never happy to see the Xbox's artificial presence in the industry. However, I applaud Microsoft's clean room approach. If it's not heavily subsidized, heck, if it's a product that could live without someone pouring wads of cash on it, then I'll be in line to get mine and regard it as the real console the Xbox never was.
Well, if you're limiting yourself to the genres where these input devices really shine (FPS, RTS, RPGs) then you can say they're great.
:p). Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see the point of playing an action or fighting game with a device not designed to let you press more than one key at once. And don't get me started on offline multiplayer or when trying to play while in any other place but an office desk.
But a control pad is definitely not "old school" it has seen more innovations in the last decade in terms of responsiveness, force feedback, analog control, durability and ergonomics than any other input device in history. Just look at the PS2 controller in its third generation, look at the N64's, Gamecube and even the SNES pads, they ooze polishness and innovation at the beginning of each console's life-cycle.
Compare that to keyboards, which are not really designed for games and that haven't changed at all for how long? Twenty-something years? And what about the mouse? The middle button is not even standard! The scroll wheel seems to be achieving that status faster (but ooooh, we have optic mice now *drools*
Really, the "old school" devices here are the keyboard and mouse. They may work great with some games that are _designed_ around the limitations and advantages of those input devices, but if you want to see the future, look at the advances in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) on game consoles, especially the upcoming portable ones.
Things like X-Arcade controllers will always have a market because they are input devices designed for games, not the other way around.
It may not be popular (yet) on PC/Mac/Linux/whatever environments, but portable toolkits do exist in the video game industry. Renderware is an example of a modular toolkit that is used to make a game that can be ported to several consoles. Just recently, Sega's Sonic Team used it for a high-profile cross-platform project you might have heard about, it's called Sonic Heroes :p . This is getting increasingly popular because of market issues. EA, Konami, Namco, Capcom and many others use this kind of cross-platform toolkits because it can cut development time by an order of magnitude when they want their products to be launched to a wider, multi-platform market.
This is also a problem for the console manufacturers, as they want to push their own, proprietary toolkits and get exclusivity for as many important titles as possible. This is why Microsoft is going to push this XNA thing very hard, it wants developers to stay inside the DirectX world.
Cross-platform, feature-complete, strongly supported APIs and toolkits are a big necessity in today's marketplace to comply with the very high standards the video game industry demands.
By the way, I'll start my little rant about OpenGL. I love the thing very much and it used to be great, but I'm really sad to see it's very outdated now and it doesn't reflect current game developers' needs, for example, fragment shaders support is something not well defined yet and it's a market requirement, you can't just port games from Windows and not support fragment shaders. Then there's the thing about OpenGL supporting SO MUCH F'ng more than just games-related functions (the API is still very strong in the professional apps space), remember the API subset some games had during the Voodoo era? This is also a requirement for today's games, a lightweight, full-featured API without unnecessary bloat.
To make matters worse, OpenGL doesn't include equivalent cross-platform audio and input APIs/toolkits, so you need to rewrite these parts for each new platform, or create your own API (and you still need to write support for it in every platform), or maybe look for some of the half-baked efforts out there.
Here's the reason DirectX smokes everybody else: We don't have a good cross-platform alternative to game development.
id Software, however industry-leading it may be, can't sustain our only true cross-platform open API in existence alone forever.
As many have said on the previous discussion, games-oriented distros already exist, based on Knoppix, Gentoo and many others. I can't help but feel the focus on these distro developers is not going to the right direction.
Being a developer myself, having used UNIX clones for more than one decade, and worked in the videogames industry, I know it's tempting to see the whole Free/Open Source software available as reusable code for just about any kind of project and think about software as some sort of Swiss Army knife.
But, the truth of the matter is, the usage patterns of a gamer are completely different from any other type of user, either from a technological and/or psychological perspective. We even tend to think of games as content in the same way as audio or video, when in fact, games are very demanding applications. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the usability of games, their GUIs, the APIs and hardware support are not a priority and you'll see just about any of the so-called "games distro" using mostly the same software as a regular one, complete with KDE, GNOME and whatnot.
There should be only a handful of games-oriented distros, made with forks of every relevant component, but tailored exclusively for the needs of games and include no non-games related software inside. X, OpenGL, SDL and other libraries and APIs, Hardware Detection & Driver Support may seem obvious to have, but why do we need whole collections of shells, fonts, window managers or even locales? Why even the same init and authentication processes as desktop-oriented distros? Most games need to have their own, custom support for these things anyway, so the unnecessary, duplicate stuff should be removed.
Small, specialized software is better in many ways, so that the focus can be on the hardware support and the robustness of needed engines, APIs and libraries. Only then a games developer can maximize resources and focus on solving games' bugs during beta testing, and spend less time on issues with other unrelated, bloated components.
A tiny, modular LiveCD distribution is ideal for games because software diversity and versioning is better controlled, but should not be mandatory, and because the OS components can be under a free license, software houses can launch their products with the same codebase without any problem and make them either bootable or installable. Hell, some can even make professional SDKs out of it and license it to other developers.
Simply put, making a desktop-oriented distro, then just adding some drivers and some games and claiming it's a "games distro", doesn't take advantage of the technical superiority the free software community and, as a gamer, doesn't make it attractive to me, as in every distro there's some learning curve and fine tuning involved. "Damn! I just want to play a friggin' game!"
<RANT>It's a shame we're not showing of any real world usability advantages over videogame consoles or Windows-based games.</RANT>
By the way, Tecmo recently released Ninja Gaiden exclusively for the Xbox console, but as an added value decided to include the original NES trilogy.
Tecmo must have got a license from Nintendo to emulate the games on the Xbox, using a modified PC emulator or a "clean room" one. The only way Tecmo could get away without a license was to port the original games to the new console, because Nintendo is the holder of many patents related to the technology used back then for the cartridges, including a "lockout chip" (really a hardware dongle), and modifying the games to prevent or trick the code to avoid the lockout chip checking would result in a copyright, patent and/or license violation. I think Tecmo saved lots of time and money and went with the license, otherwise the NES games would've been remade better.
Patenting things related to emulation is simply a way for Nintendo to avoid GBA's and GCN's newly discovered market advantage through legacy games to be dilluted with competitors being able to do the same. Expect the PSP to follow on this strategy with old PSone games.
To think about what all these years at this industry can teach you...