I purchased a mid range Marantz DVD player hooked up via S-Video to a high end TV. The colours from the Marantz just seem better than when watching DVD's on my PC, with a Sony 19" PC monitor. So, the $50 PC-DVD player cannot compare to a $350 stand alone DVD player, since they both have a D/A path.
Supporting a 3 year product means that there is no longer any need to evangelise the product, since there are over 40 million units sold. There keynotes are more specific and deal with the nitty gritty, hence the support remark.
All this opposed to Microsoft who are still in the launch stage of the XBox. Their keynotes were more marketing than support.
I attended the conference as a 3 day delegate, so here are some behind the scenes impressions:
- sessions based on Sony's PS2 were about getting the most out of the hardware - Performace Analysers, better occulsion and culling techniques, utilising the vector processors in parallel etc. Sony were honest enough to admit that the effeciency of their compilers weren't that good when it came to parallelisation, and offered suggestions for workarounds - thats what you get from a company supporting a 3 year old product.
- Microsoft on the other hand, had an excellent promotional team advocating the Xbox. Lets face it, they have newer and better hardware, so they kept on advocating its superiority compared to other consoles. Better development tools, a simpler architecture for developers, better graphics, familiar API's, documentation written in English first, hard drive, 5.1 sound, Unified memory etc. The speakers were very convincing, and made Microsoft seem like your best friend. - international speakers included Lars Gustavsson (sp), producer of Battlefield 1942 (he had excellent videos of the lifestyle of DICE developers), Doug Church (ex Ion Storm), Ray Muzyka (BioWare and NeverWinter Nights) and others. - exhibitors included nVidia and their new GeForce FX (Hi Brian!! - apparently, saying that you're from nVidia isn't as great a pick up line as geeks might expect), Metrowerks, Intel, Alias, Auran, Sony etc.
Ofcourse, everyone attends these conferences for the social events afterwards - cocktail, dinner and nerf gun parties. Conferences are a great place to share a beer or two with fellow collegues. Sony handed out condoms shaped like PS2 buttons, Microforte organised an excellent outdoor party on a historic sail ship (though it was very cold and windy for a Melbourne summer night). Everyone had fun, and noone fell over drunk from the ship into the cold water.
The most striking fact from the conference was examining the behaviour of different programming houses. Infogrammes (Melbourne House) were so big, that they didn't care about anyone else, so they always clustered together. It took a bit of effort to isolate a few of their developers to have a serious 1-1 talk. Ratbag developers seemed like the most compotent of the lot - they know their stuff, and are hungry for success. Watch out for these guys. MicroForte were the loudest at the party, they know how to have a good time. I felt sorry for one of the houses (who I will not name), they were like 'we will code games for food, give us a project, any project'.
All in all, a very exciting 3 days. Hope to see you all next year in Melbourne.
You haven't been watching CNN during the first half of the 90's. Apparently, the Bosnian Serbs played Tetris with the muslims, piling them up when dropping them into mass graves (akin to Tetris). Thats according to CNN, ofcourse, who's integrity we all trust.
Re:Security on Progressive games
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: 2
With mystery jackpots, wins are sent to slot machines by the central monitoring system. These systems use encryption when transmiting data. It is pretty secure, but like all things in the real world, an insider (network operator or engineer who designed system) can interfere with the system. Then again, how valuable are ones kneecaps and fingers?
I can imagine the atmosphere at iD headquarters near Dallas right now; John - "Damn bastards, the ATI folk. They leaked the alpha." Xian - "We've got to punish ATI somehow for this." John - "I know, I'll cripple performance on ATI cards. I'll just insert a sleep() function call here and half the framerate when I detect an ATI card. That will teach them." Xian - "Excellent."
Buddy, these days every line of code is audited by a Government agency, and if they find a backdoor or payout tweaking, you can kiss your licence goodbye (manufacturer), and they would not get a licence for the next 15 years in that jurastiction. Other jurastictions take note of these incidents, and audit the devision in their jurastiction. Since every manufacturer knows this, they have enourmous compliance departments whose sole job is to ensure the legality of the software.
The government agencies these days also supply the random number generator to all manufacturers, and if the source code was displayed on the slot machines to every patron, and you had a BeoWolf cluster of G4's, it would take you 10^8 years to figure out the next RNG outcome, assuming you can hit the spin button with an accuracy of 250 micro seconds, which is when the RNG is reseeded.
With dedicated video cards and dedicated sound cards, it looks as if we already have a dedicated AI card - its called the motherboard. Asus and Abit make excellent AI cards:-)
DVD burners only burn one layer, which gives you 4.7Gb (4.38). The movies you rent are usually on a dual layered, single sided disk (up to 9Gb). You need to reduce the movie to fit onto a single disk, by either reducing the bit rate, or by eliminating the extra stuff. Dual layered burners wont be around for a long long time.
The other prospect is to encode the movies with DivX;-) , or MPEG4. You no longer need to sacrifice image quality, but you end up with a disk which cant be played from the DVD player in the living room. You can only play it on your PC, or a next gen DVD player (which supports MPEG-4).
Its suprising to see that some people fail to see the larger picture which DVD-R brings. Walk into any Blockbuster/VideoEzy/Video library, rent a movie overnight, stick it into your PC and start ripping and recompressing, and burn the movie onto your DVD-R. Total cost for movie ownership - $5 for rental and $5 for blank DVD-R. This will get cheaper, since blank media prices will fall. Most video libraries also offer a rent 5 movies for $10 deal, so you can get 5 movies for $35, or $7 each at current prices. Of course, you have to factor in burner and PC ammortisation and electricity, but you get the general idea. When blank disks cost $2 each, you're looking at $4 for pirated movie disks. Great value in any book, when you take into consideration that most movies cost $20 or so. You miss out on the menus and extra features, but you can always burn them onto another disk. The best thing is that you dont get to see the FBI style warnings before every disk (telling you how wrong it is to do what you've just done).
The best part about this situation is that free software already exists which can rip a DVD and compress it to fit on a 4.38Gb (4.7G) disk at the push of a button. Just hit start, flip disks 2 hours later, and hit burn. If you have a second DVD-ROM, you dont even have to hit burn - insert the two disks (original and blank), and just hit Start.
Of course, the MPAA will catch onto this soon, but its too late to introduce new counter measures. The cat is out of the bag.
I'd stay away from candidates who used 'hot shot' tricks. As Martin Fowler (the Refactoring dude) would say "It's easy to make code which a machine can understand - the real skill comes in writing code which another HUMAN can understand." This XOR trick is neat, but has no place in any code which is to be maintained. These days, code is written once, and maintained forever after. God help the poor maintainers who have to sift through this XOR hack.
Its ironic when secretaries (these days Personal Assistants) have PC's twice as fast as the engineers writting the core product. Different departments, different budgets. I've had this box for over 3 years, while accountants down the hall have already gone through 2 upgrades during this time. And the primary business of this company is to sell software. Go figure...
Well, if you live in Europe (specifically the Balkans), that imaginary administrative line is a cause of civil war. No way I'm going to allow that to govern me. These borders are stupid.
For those people who are moaning about 5 disks, all you really need is the net install disk image, which conveniently fits on a 1.44 floppy. Then you can spend 4 hours downloading the beast, 3 hours configuring, 2 hours cursing, then reboot and continue playing MoH:AA on the other system which we wont mention;-)
You're obviously one of the group of people who just dont get it. After 'seeing the light', I organised a quick presentation at work to introduce my collegues with Fowler's wisdom, even prepared a few pages as a presentation. I even asked my boss to get a copy of the book for every developer. I must be a bad presenter, because only 2 other people (out of 13) saw the benefits Refactoring brings, and decided to study the book. The other 11 thought (just like you) that Refactoring was bollocks. Out of curiosity, what do you think of the 'Gang of Four' book?
The primary audience of code is not the compiler. Anyone SW engineer can write code which a machine can understand. A great SW engineer writes code which another human can understand. A HUMAN is your target audience.
To quote our good friend Martin Fowler (in reference to Smelly Code): "Comments are a sweet smell in code. But sometimes they are used as a deoderant, intented to mask a foul smell. If you need comments to explain a section of code, its time to Refactor".
Comments will not solve your software maintainance problems. Refactoring will. If you havn't read Martins book, then drop everything and read it. Refactoring, as well as the Gang of Four book, are the most influential books on Software Engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
I purchased a mid range Marantz DVD player hooked up via S-Video to a high end TV. The colours from the Marantz just seem better than when watching DVD's on my PC, with a Sony 19" PC monitor. So, the $50 PC-DVD player cannot compare to a $350 stand alone DVD player, since they both have a D/A path.
Pon is actually a decent looking chick. Thumbs up, fan-groovy-tastic, bone worthy etc.
Supporting a 3 year product means that there is no longer any need to evangelise the product, since there are over 40 million units sold. There keynotes are more specific and deal with the nitty gritty, hence the support remark.
All this opposed to Microsoft who are still in the launch stage of the XBox. Their keynotes were more marketing than support.
I attended the conference as a 3 day delegate, so here are some behind the scenes impressions:
- sessions based on Sony's PS2 were about getting the most out of the hardware - Performace Analysers, better occulsion and culling techniques, utilising the vector processors in parallel etc. Sony were honest enough to admit that the effeciency of their compilers weren't that good when it came to parallelisation, and offered suggestions for workarounds - thats what you get from a company supporting a 3 year old product.
- Microsoft on the other hand, had an excellent promotional team advocating the Xbox. Lets face it, they have newer and better hardware, so they kept on advocating its superiority compared to other consoles. Better development tools, a simpler architecture for developers, better graphics, familiar API's, documentation written in English first, hard drive, 5.1 sound, Unified memory etc. The speakers were very convincing, and made Microsoft seem like your best friend.
- international speakers included Lars Gustavsson (sp), producer of Battlefield 1942 (he had excellent videos of the lifestyle of DICE developers), Doug Church (ex Ion Storm), Ray Muzyka (BioWare and NeverWinter Nights) and others.
- exhibitors included nVidia and their new GeForce FX (Hi Brian!! - apparently, saying that you're from nVidia isn't as great a pick up line as geeks might expect), Metrowerks, Intel, Alias, Auran, Sony etc.
Ofcourse, everyone attends these conferences for the social events afterwards - cocktail, dinner and nerf gun parties. Conferences are a great place to share a beer or two with fellow collegues. Sony handed out condoms shaped like PS2 buttons, Microforte organised an excellent outdoor party on a historic sail ship (though it was very cold and windy for a Melbourne summer night). Everyone had fun, and noone fell over drunk from the ship into the cold water.
The most striking fact from the conference was examining the behaviour of different programming houses. Infogrammes (Melbourne House) were so big, that they didn't care about anyone else, so they always clustered together. It took a bit of effort to isolate a few of their developers to have a serious 1-1 talk. Ratbag developers seemed like the most compotent of the lot - they know their stuff, and are hungry for success. Watch out for these guys. MicroForte were the loudest at the party, they know how to have a good time. I felt sorry for one of the houses (who I will not name), they were like 'we will code games for food, give us a project, any project'.
All in all, a very exciting 3 days. Hope to see you all next year in Melbourne.
You haven't been watching CNN during the first half of the 90's. Apparently, the Bosnian Serbs played Tetris with the muslims, piling them up when dropping them into mass graves (akin to Tetris). Thats according to CNN, ofcourse, who's integrity we all trust.
With mystery jackpots, wins are sent to slot machines by the central monitoring system. These systems use encryption when transmiting data. It is pretty secure, but like all things in the real world, an insider (network operator or engineer who designed system) can interfere with the system. Then again, how valuable are ones kneecaps and fingers?
I can imagine the atmosphere at iD headquarters near Dallas right now;
John - "Damn bastards, the ATI folk. They leaked the alpha."
Xian - "We've got to punish ATI somehow for this."
John - "I know, I'll cripple performance on ATI cards. I'll just insert a sleep() function call here and half the framerate when I detect an ATI card. That will teach them."
Xian - "Excellent."
Buddy, these days every line of code is audited by a Government agency, and if they find a backdoor or payout tweaking, you can kiss your licence goodbye (manufacturer), and they would not get a licence for the next 15 years in that jurastiction. Other jurastictions take note of these incidents, and audit the devision in their jurastiction. Since every manufacturer knows this, they have enourmous compliance departments whose sole job is to ensure the legality of the software.
The government agencies these days also supply the random number generator to all manufacturers, and if the source code was displayed on the slot machines to every patron, and you had a BeoWolf cluster of G4's, it would take you 10^8 years to figure out the next RNG outcome, assuming you can hit the spin button with an accuracy of 250 micro seconds, which is when the RNG is reseeded.
With dedicated video cards and dedicated sound cards, it looks as if we already have a dedicated AI card - its called the motherboard. Asus and Abit make excellent AI cards :-)
Hey, we must be collegues. OK, stand up and wave so that I may see you.
Buddy, dont quit your day job. Your code will kill someone. Geez, 2 tight loops, 4 syntax errors . . .
I love reading posts from former BeOS engineers on Slashdot. It puts things into perspective, especially considering BeInc's foray into Tablet PC's.
In Opera you hit F12, de-select Enable Flash. To reenable it, hit F12, select Enable Flash.
Nice User #
DVD burners only burn one layer, which gives you 4.7Gb (4.38). The movies you rent are usually on a dual layered, single sided disk (up to 9Gb). You need to reduce the movie to fit onto a single disk, by either reducing the bit rate, or by eliminating the extra stuff. Dual layered burners wont be around for a long long time.
;-) , or MPEG4. You no longer need to sacrifice image quality, but you end up with a disk which cant be played from the DVD player in the living room. You can only play it on your PC, or a next gen DVD player (which supports MPEG-4).
The other prospect is to encode the movies with DivX
Its suprising to see that some people fail to see the larger picture which DVD-R brings. Walk into any Blockbuster/VideoEzy/Video library, rent a movie overnight, stick it into your PC and start ripping and recompressing, and burn the movie onto your DVD-R. Total cost for movie ownership - $5 for rental and $5 for blank DVD-R. This will get cheaper, since blank media prices will fall. Most video libraries also offer a rent 5 movies for $10 deal, so you can get 5 movies for $35, or $7 each at current prices. Of course, you have to factor in burner and PC ammortisation and electricity, but you get the general idea. When blank disks cost $2 each, you're looking at $4 for pirated movie disks. Great value in any book, when you take into consideration that most movies cost $20 or so. You miss out on the menus and extra features, but you can always burn them onto another disk. The best thing is that you dont get to see the FBI style warnings before every disk (telling you how wrong it is to do what you've just done).
The best part about this situation is that free software already exists which can rip a DVD and compress it to fit on a 4.38Gb (4.7G) disk at the push of a button. Just hit start, flip disks 2 hours later, and hit burn. If you have a second DVD-ROM, you dont even have to hit burn - insert the two disks (original and blank), and just hit Start.
Of course, the MPAA will catch onto this soon, but its too late to introduce new counter measures. The cat is out of the bag.
I'd stay away from candidates who used 'hot shot' tricks. As Martin Fowler (the Refactoring dude) would say "It's easy to make code which a machine can understand - the real skill comes in writing code which another HUMAN can understand." This XOR trick is neat, but has no place in any code which is to be maintained. These days, code is written once, and maintained forever after. God help the poor maintainers who have to sift through this XOR hack.
Its ironic when secretaries (these days Personal Assistants) have PC's twice as fast as the engineers writting the core product. Different departments, different budgets. I've had this box for over 3 years, while accountants down the hall have already gone through 2 upgrades during this time. And the primary business of this company is to sell software. Go figure...
Well, if you live in Europe (specifically the Balkans), that imaginary administrative line is a cause of civil war. No way I'm going to allow that to govern me. These borders are stupid.
Are moderators on crack? This is rated +5 informative? Holy smoke!!
Maybe I should have a go.
To open can, simply lift the ring and pull towards you. Drink.
Speilberg didn't direct JP3. Check imdb.
For those people who are moaning about 5 disks, all you really need is the net install disk image, which conveniently fits on a 1.44 floppy. Then you can spend 4 hours downloading the beast, 3 hours configuring, 2 hours cursing, then reboot and continue playing MoH:AA on the other system which we wont mention ;-)
You're obviously one of the group of people who just dont get it. After 'seeing the light', I organised a quick presentation at work to introduce my collegues with Fowler's wisdom, even prepared a few pages as a presentation. I even asked my boss to get a copy of the book for every developer. I must be a bad presenter, because only 2 other people (out of 13) saw the benefits Refactoring brings, and decided to study the book. The other 11 thought (just like you) that Refactoring was bollocks. Out of curiosity, what do you think of the 'Gang of Four' book?
As I said, I must be a bad presenter.
The primary audience of code is not the compiler. Anyone SW engineer can write code which a machine can understand. A great SW engineer writes code which another human can understand. A HUMAN is your target audience.
Quote from Martin Fowler, Refactoring.
To quote our good friend Martin Fowler (in reference to Smelly Code):
"Comments are a sweet smell in code. But sometimes they are used as a deoderant, intented to mask a foul smell. If you need comments to explain a section of code, its time to Refactor".
Comments will not solve your software maintainance problems. Refactoring will. If you havn't read Martins book, then drop everything and read it. Refactoring, as well as the Gang of Four book, are the most influential books on Software Engineering.