Re:Not necessarily the war yet
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
But you can't expect people to *not* protest and try to stop an invasion, just because they might hurt the feelings of the people who are going to be ordered to execute the invasion...
I'm not talking about hurting someone's feelings. I'm talking about lowering the level of a soldier's motivation which can very easily cause lives.
I mean... If they succeed in stopping the invasion, the troops won't *have* to risk their lives. Right?
Its a little late to stop the invasion. Protesting a war after its already started is kinda like yelling at someone not to steal your car after they've already pulled out of your driveway and are well down the road with your vehicle. The war has begun and no amount of protesting will preempt itr. Best to support the troops are already there and fighting.
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
I'm against the war, but I don't see being against the war as being against our troops.
There are a lot of good reasons we shouldn't have done this. Now that we're committed, though, I want the war to end quickly, and I want us to win. I figure that's the best way to minimize the loss of lives (both American and Iraqi).
But being against an unjust war doesn't make one against our troops.
One does need to realize the effect of one's actions on the morale of our troops though. The troops are over there risking life and limb and when they tune into TV and they see all these protesters demonstrating against the war they're fighting it could potentially be very demoralizing.
If the US want European support, they'll have to offer some evidence that is not faked (admitted by the US prime minister) or bought (23 million $$$ to a Taliban defector!)
We *know* Saddam had tons of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction so what happened to them? The burden of proof isn't on the inspectors to *prove* Iraq has weapons. It is Iraq's job to show the inspectors documentation that proves that they destroyed their weapons of mass destruction. If we were to go by the South African model of disarmament (which most in the UN agree is an almost perfect model) the inspectors are basically auditors. Now I work for a fortune 500 company and let me explain how audits work. Auditors come in a request information. We provide the information and any backup to that info that they request. If we don't provide the requested documentation and backup we'd be in very hot water very quickly.
Auditing is not an easter egg hunt like these inspections appear to be. Blix has said that Iraq's documentation is insufficient. Iraq has had weapons of mass destruction in the past. What happened to them?! No one knows and Iraq won't/can't provide credible evidence/documentation that they've destroyed these weapons. So we're just to assume that Saddam has been a nice little boy and has gotten rid of them? Iraq is not actively complying with the inspectors and only letting inspectors look around. Guess what... they aren't going to find anything in a state the size of California. Its just too easy to hide things in a land of this size. There will *never* be anything close to the disarmament of Iraq without the active participation of Saddam as long as he is in power. You simply cannot expect him to give up these powerful weapons willingly. He has thumbed his nose at UN resolutions and inspections for 11 years. What makes you think he will suddenly see the light and disarm willingly? Assuming Saddam will do anything but delay and hinder disarmament attempts is pure fantasy.
Indie game developers face several problems with getting their game to market. The biggest problem is that the gaming industry and its distribution has matured but the indie gaming distribuion channels haven't yet. The music industry has a relatively good indie distribution network compared to the gaming industry. Music lovers can purchase all kinds of eclectic and not-so-mass-popular music if they know which shops carry that type of music.
So indie game developers aren't in any of the shops that most people frequent (EB Games etc.) and AFAIK there aren't any sites that publish a wide variety of indie games. What would really help is a site like garage games but on a grander scale and is open to all indie game producers. Sort of an EB Games for indie game developers to hawk their wares.
The other big problem is the cost involved in creating a title which even approaches AAA quality. With the relatively recent proliferation of capable open source 3D engines and libraries like OGRE, NeL (Nevrax) CrystalSpace, SDL and OpenAL the barrier for coding a high quality cross platform games has been dramatically lowered.
Of course there's also the issue of artwork being required. Hiring top quality artists can be restrictively expensive for indie gave devs. Someone had mentioned having a creative commons for game developers which I have always thought would be a wonderful idea. The problem is getting all of these far flung developers to work together in creating such a commons. WorldForge is slowing building a library of GPLed+FDLed media (which is now pretty substantial) but these things take time of course.
In 2001 Ford Europe was looking strongly at deploying Linux on the desktops there. Perhaps this went through or Linux got deployed somewhere else in Ford.
Now I wouldn't say that one sport is more difficult or intricate than the other but everythign you've mentioned here has a parallel in NASCAR.
Let me give some examples of how cyclng is more intricate than NASCAR: - The person in front of a group is putting in more effort than the rest of the group. Therefore everybody takes turns at the front of the group and the group is constantly rotating ("cycling").
This is also often done in NASCAR although its not planned. If you run at the front of the pack all day long unless you have an absolutely peerless car you're going to ruin your car for the end of the race. You won't have anything left for the end of the race and you'll likely end up further back in the pack. Often times drivers will wave other drivers by and let them pass so they'll have something for the mad scamble at the end of the race.
- Although the wind-effect is levelling the field, there are still people who are better (are fitter) than others. As said in the article, the differences between nascars are minimal. Also there are specialists in every team: Sprinters, Climbers, Loners, Rain-people, Coblle, etc.
To say that there aren't many differences between cars ignores the tens of thousands of man hours (not to mention the billions of dollars spent yearly on a single car) setting up, experimenting with and tuning these cars. There are also specialists who only drive road courses and other drivers who do well at superspeedways etc. Everyone has their strengths.
- In a burst effort, you can get clear of your group. But you can only do that a few times, therefore you have to play your cards right.
If you burst free from the pack at a superspeedway the other cars behind you begin drafting. The "train" of cars will gain momentum and blow by you. After that no one will let you back in the draft and you're left there wondering how you've suddenly gone from 1st to 20th place in the space of a few laps.
- Not to mention team tactics. Cyclist who are designated as a "helper" (in Dutch "knecht") is obliged to put effort into getting his teammate into a good position, an action which removes all chances of him winning. Sometimes that means thaking the front position in a group. This often escalates to an entire team (about 7 persons) at the front of the pack; racing like mad.
These types of things happen all the time in NASCAR with people on the same team. Also, many times drivers will make temporary alliances with each other to help one another advance their position. This makes for interesting pit road politics at times.
Again, neither sport is better or harder than the other but... That said there are lots of things a NASCAR driver has to endure that a cyclist will never see. Strapped to a 200mph rocket for two hours at Talladega (Florida) in the summer when the temperature outside can touch 100deg F and engine temperatures run about 300-350deg F and you begin to know the meaning of the word heat inside the car. Drivers have to wear fire suits, helmets and other saftey equiment in this heat. A driver's foot is seperated from the engine only by inches and at the end of the day he/she can have 2nd and 3rd degree burns on their feet when the heat of the engine eventually burns through their fire retardant boots. Thay my friend is hot.
Anyone who's played enough of the game NASCAR 200x will know that there is more to the sport than throwing back Buds and "hollerin'." A winning NASCAR team is a dance of technology, skill, hard work and just plain luck at times. I could go on and on about the many facets of NASCAR but all most/.ers will ever do or know is make redneck jokes. Isn't it a tad ironic that most/.ers are just as close minded in their own way as the rednecks they poke fun of?
The only way to get game developers to come to Linux is to develop a Direct-X like API that makes it easy to develop Linux-native games.
The existence of all the high quality Loki ports refutes this utterly. SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL are some noteable examples of cross platform and open APIs that are very useable.
The real reason you don't see alot of professional quality Free Software games is the lack of Free art and music assets. Coding is only about 10%-20% of the job of creating a professional level game. Why do you think one sees so many Free Software/Open Source board games, tetris, and old school arcade clone? Its because the art requirements on these types of ventures are very small. Coders grok the concepts behind Free Software but its a much more difficult job getting artists (and musicians to an extent) to understand and contribute.
The reason one doesn't see many commercial Linux ports is because the Linux desktop market isn't quite large enough for development houses to justify the effort (although this is beginning to change).
Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Don't forget the visual FX industry for movies and television. They really push their cards hard when modeling the amazing scenes we've come accustomed to seeing in movies and to a lesser extent on TV. This industry gobbles up the most powerful hardware they can get their hands on. Paying top dollar for a video card/CPU is much cheaper than paying an artist to wait on their maichine over time.
Also remember that they weren't against Open Source, they were specifically against it being used to allow pirated copies of their games to be played.
This is the line Blizzard/Vivendi hid behind but it flies in the face of the facts. Bdnet asked to use Blizzard's key authentication system and Blizzard said no. Of course Blizzard is under no obligation to do so but it is heavy handed the way the came down on bdnet. The only reason bdnet was so popular in the first place is bc battle.net was so hopelessly broken at the time. Really Blizzard has only themselves to blame for this whole mess anyway.
IANAL but as I understand it all CC licenses are considered non Free because of some stipulations (having to do with circumvention techonology) in all CC licenses.
The FDL is a very complex document which most lay people find very difficult to grasp. Are there any plans on cleaning up the language in this license to make it more readable like the GPL?
Are there any plans currently to draft a license for artistic assets like graphics, music and sound effects and if not why? In many programs there are often artistic assests which are distributed with programs. Games are an obvious example but even in every day programs there are icons, sound effects and other UI elements associated with a program. Using the GPL and/or FDL for artistic assets seems a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole as this isn't the purpose these licenses were created for.
If a person is unwilling to pay $100 for an operating system what makes you think they'll be willing to pay $40 for the OS and $500 for Office? This scenario is unlikely at best.
You don't list things on your 10-Q that are complete nonsense though. Investment analysts use a company's 10-Q as a standard research tool and putting unnecessarily negative information on your 10-Q risks a lot. I would dispute the notion that "This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat." Certainly when one reads MS' 10-Q with Ballmer's statement that Linux is MS' #1 threat I think one has no other choice but to conclude that MS is very worried about competing with a lower cost alternative.
I guess I just don't understand the big deal here. You can get free fonts from multiple places - why is this nothing more than a bit of free publicity for the company?
I'm no expert on fonts but I do know a little about the difficulties in creating them. I'm sure someone will correct me if I mispeak on a minor point.
Sure, you can download free cheeseball fonts from lots of different free font sites but there is a *huge* difference between those free fonts you just downloaded and professionally made fonts. Why do you think Linux has gone so long without a decent set of fonts? Its because high quality fonts take a *long* time to develop and are *very* expensive to make because of all the labor involved. It can take a professional typeographer a full year to develop just one font. Until now its been very difficult for the Free Software community to find either: 1) A professional typeographer willing to donate a large amount of time (typeographers and professional level font creation software doesn't grow on trees) 2) A company willing to fund the creation of the fonts. (expensive!)
With this in mind I think one can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the gift that Bitstream is giving the community.
While it appears that any effort to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Act will be an uphill battle there is one way to give ourselves a vibrant creative commons.
Artists, we can place our works under the public domain, FDL or a creative commons license that allows for redistribution and modification. If we can't count on our collective governments to stand up to the entertainment industry then we'll have to build our own open body of work much as the Open Source and Free Software movements have. There is already a very good head start available in the way of material available on the internet to download which is in the public domain.
Yes, you are. You see, the draw of open source was supposed to be a better model for software and for business. No one should want to do business with a closed source vendor like MS since you can't look under the hood yourself.
Unless the Open Source advocates have lost faith in their "superior" software model, this really shouldn't be a problem.
Perhaps his is the reason that businesses like and use open source but the people who create the software. The problem isn't whether or not one has faith in Open Source but rather a question of equity.
You seemingly want something for nothing when there is no such thing in this world. If this isn't what you meant then I apologize but your post did come off as being surly. People create, release and maintain Open Source because they want to share their program with others while at the same time scratching an itch they might have. There is also the hope in releasing the software that others will help further develop the software. I would hope that someone allowing you to use their code would plant the desire within you to help further develop and refine their software that you're using.
how is this different than the current state of things? You'll notice that the title screen of all major releases contain at least two different logos... the big-name publisher and the unknown independent developer.
The difference is that now anyone *CAN* get published without having to win over a major publisher who has their own agenda and tend to be risk averse. More about this later...
Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing.
This is basically what the indie studio needs. Someone to handle the physical production of the packaging.
They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services.
I'm not really sure about this one either.
Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers.
So to an extent, advertising is a bit of a non factor when creating a game. Chalk another one up for indie studios.:-)
And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia [ambrosiasw.com] if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.
I think you're missing the point a bit in that no one is suggesting that people quit their day jobs, hire 1/2 a dozen people and form an indie studio. I always felt that Torque was reaching out more to the hobby game developer. Torque and GarageGames could prove to be a training ground for people to hone and develop their skills. Of course most game coder/artist hobbyist's dream is to become the next Ambrosia and strike it big, but most realize that's unlikely to happen. Still though for the few who do move on to develop games professionally they'll be much better off having gone through creating a game and possibly having it published in a low scale fashion such as GarageGames offers.
The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses.
Of course there will always be a large place for publishers. The world needs huge budget AAA titles like Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Seige, etc. I also have a strong feeling that a signifigant segment of the gaming community would also be drawn low budget games with original concepts and innovative game play. This is the niche that GarageGames is attempting to fill. IMO there is a reason that the games of yesteryear were so fresh and inventive. Game creation had not yet become the big business it is today and hence game developers had a lot more discretion about what wen t into their games. Today we mainly see a market where 90% of the games are merely variations on a theme covered in ever more beautiful wrappings. This is because big name titles cost tremendous amounts of money to produce which makes the publisher very risk averse. I'd like to see a little more variety in games and I think GarageGames is a step in the right direction. The tools to create great looking and playing games have never been more accessible to hobbyists than they are today. This makes for fertile ground in which to plant an indie gaming scene. Everyone, always draws parallel's from the Gaming to the Music/Movie biz yet the the later two have vibrant indie scenes. Shouldn't the gaming biz have an equally or even more vibrant indie scene as well? I think so.
What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?
Publishers very rare indeed until GarageGames stepped in. Now anyone who can create a game that people enjoy playing and generate sales can get published. Granted, those are no two mean tasks but its a heck of a lot easier than the following traditional steps:
* Create your tech demo * Shop your game to publishers after creating a tech demo * Find a publish that is willing to strike a deal * Hire lawyers and haggle terms * Negotiate/Accept publishers game requirements, deadlines etc. * Create your game * Develop hype and a community around your game * Release game and hope it sells!
Garage Games eliminates almost 1/2 the steps involved. I hope I don't come off sounding too much like a GG cheerleader (I don't even own a copy of Tribes2 or Torque) but I can certainly see how they're really giving indie developers a big helping hand.
-Jason
Re:8.0 was great, but...
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New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 1, Informative
*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters
Last I heard NTFS support is very unreliable. You could very well end up trashing your file system if you attempt to write to an NTFS file system. It seems prudent to leave this turned off. It would be nice if FAT partitions were stuck in fstab automatically during the install though.
*That silly "Extras" menu: you never quite know where software is going to turn up *Lack of a good package management front-end: That Windows-like one they include is good for managing the software on the RH8 CDs, but for removing, installing, and upgrading third-party RPMs, one must resort either to the command line, or better yet, apt4rpm. Apt4rpm should be in by default.
Amen! Red Hat's menu's are attrocious. Apt4Rpm is a beautiful thing. Make a prettly little GUI for the newbies as well, please.:-)
*DMA is off by default on CD-ROM drives. This is easily fixed through config files, but for the average user, this is a hurdle to DVD playing and CD burning.
I think this was a performance/compatibility comprimise that RH made because many of their customers use devices like optical drives which wouldn't work if DMA were turned on by default.
*No MP3 support in XMMS *No nVidia drivers
I'm actually glad Red Hat did these two. It helps raise awareness of licensing problems with these two pieces of software. It is a stand on principles. Of course whether or not you agree with this stance is another matter but RH has been consistent on points of licensing at least.
I'd also add to the gripe list that Red Hat 8 (as far as I can tell) didn't come with a menu editor prinstalled.
Other than that it was absolutely perfect! Bluecurve is a work of art...
I was disappointed with the depth of this article. I expected lots of little hints and tricks that I didn't know about but instead found most of the material was common sense stuff for anyone who had been around computers for any amount of time.
If you *really* want to get deep inside the guts of optimizing a Windows box I can think of no better guide than O'reilly's.
This book is currently out of print and is getting a little long in the tooth (published in 1999) but the internals for Windows doesn't really change that radically from a tuner's perspective. This book isn't a mere collection of little tricks but gives you a more fundamental understanding of Windows and how to trim the fat. The Amazon user rating system gives it 5 stars and rightfully so. To top it off you can pick up a used copy for about $8 or so at half.com among other places.
This is really a great book for anyone looking to get the most out of their Windows machine or just trying to understand the black box that is Windows. I used some of the tricks mentioned in this book on my wife's old p233 laptop w/96MBs RAM. Her Win98SE box has been going for almost two years now w/o any serious stability or performance problems. Granted, she's not a niddler and only does a certain set number of tasks on this laptop but I think that's pretty darn good for a Windows 98 box.
Actually, its not as bleak as that. The push to get hardware accelerated drivers for Linux is gathering momentum thanks at least in part to the companies who create CGI for entertainment industry. This industry is an early adopter of Linux and is moving fairly aggressively to incorporate Linux into their organizations. This is why you see most of the professional 3D packages now with Linux versions of their products. Now, the same companies who buy these expensive modeling packages (like Maya which is $10,000) buy those *really* expensive professional level graphics cards. There are usually very large profit margins on these professional level cards so the video card manufacturers tend to bend over backwards to try and appease these customers, as the profit margin on the consumer side is wafer thin. This is one large reason why you're seeing more accelerated video card drivers for Linux pop up nowadays from the larger video card manufacturers. ATI just released their unified accelerated drivers for Linux and Nvidia has had drivers for Linux for quite a while. Heck, even my trusty little Kyro II card has had Linux drivers for quite some time. Things are looking up for Linux video drivers and its only going to get better as time goes on.
I've been around the fringes of the music industry and I like challenge many of the points you've made.
Well artists still need to record thier music professionally, so maybe we would have smaller companies that just record for the artists.
This infrastructure is already in place. It exists today. Go find a reputable local studio and rent some studio time. Chances are that studio will have equipment that can produce a high quality end product. Studio time isn't cheap but artists shell out the bucks all the time to cut their own records. This isn't an issue.
Now artists need to make some money (both to pay that recording company and for themselves) so somehow they have to sell thier music. Well, if they're a new artist that nobody's heard of then nobody will buy thier music. So they need to promote themselves. They only way thier promoting efforts will get them national exposure is if they contract a promoting agency to do it. If you think the web is good enough by itself then your living in a dream world. Maybe in 20 years. So now we need a promoting agency.
To an extent you need a promoting agency but to be honest with you the best way to promote one's self is the old fashioned way. TOUR YOUR HINDER OFF! True, the web isn't good enough yet but it is an excellent secondary means promote oneself. The web is esp. good if you're just a popular regional band. Tour your butt off, get your web site up, get your songs out there on the P2P sites and encourage bootlegs and you're on your way.
Independent labels could fill any void that the large labels leave to a great extent as many of them (esp the mid-larger ones) have good distribution channels, some promotional outreach abilities and contacts with various radio stations. If every large distributor (like WEA, Sony etc) fell off the Earth tomorrow tons of smaller companies would spring in to action to fill the void these elephants left and in the end we'd end up with a richer and more diverse music scene.
The large distribution (payola) scheme of promoting music as we know it is in jeopardy and the Mega Media Corps know it. The internet is attacking the current distribution chain's reason for dominance. Up until the widespread use of the internet it was impossible for a person or group to promote, distribute and sell their own music on a wide scale economically. This is all changing and unless the record companies adapt to reality very quickly they will rapidly become forgotten relics (taking the RIAA with them).
I *can* list several methods of implementation with respect to Blender's UI that cannot rationally be considered 'efficient', by any means.
True, all 3D modelers have warts and rough places where their interface sucks. Hence, we see most production houses using more than one tool or *heavily* modify the one they are using (lots of shops severly hack up Maya for example). I'd even be willing to say that Blender probably has more of these rough places than 1/2 of the commercial modelers available.
After using Blender for as long as I have, I've come to believe that Blender has a split personality - while some aspects do provide for some level of efficiency, there are others that do quite the opposite, thus making any overall advantage a wash. I consider Blender to be "usable but difficult." You can produce some fairly decent material with it, if you're willing to deal with the headaches.
I wouldn't argue with any of this except to say that if you spend time with it, you can come up with not only 'fairly decent material' you can do some *amazing* work with Blender. Just look at ex-Nihilo's Millenium Falcon for example:
http://exnihilo.users5.50megs.com/falcon.htm
Amazing work! It even turned the heads of some folks over at ILM and prompted them to ask him for a demo reel. You can't get much higher praise than than. I'd also like to note that while Blender's efficiencies and inefficiencies may be a wash it does have another thing working in its favor. Blender is a very flexible and cleverly conceived modeler. This allows you use Blender in unconventional ways and helps make up for features that may not be directly built into Blender (or any other modeler for that matter). This in part accounts for the love and loyal following that Blender enjoys from it's userbase.
Now that Blender has been GPLed I have little doubt that these rough edges will be smoothed out and we'll see Blender develop into a more polished app that can compete feature for feature with the big boys (like Maya and LW).
It will be interesting to see how many production houses will start using Blender once it matures a bit more. Most professional production houses really hack up Max, Maya (or whatever they use) and I would think that having the source code to a modeler would be a real boon for them. I guess we'll see!:-)
If it's so good, why haven't real professional tools like Maya and Lightwave copied the interface?
For the same reasons the two applications you mentioned (Maya & LW) have such radically different interfaces. No one really knows what the perfect 3D interface is. There are multiple ways to skin a cat and the craft of 3d modeler UI design is a very young one. Blender presents one way to do your work, Maya another and LW yet another. I don't think 3D modelers as a whole are mature enough to say that any of these UI design approaches are right or wrong way to construct an interface.
Yeah, I don't understand. In the end they both produce pretty pictures of modelled objects, right?
Well, not necessarily (game modelers for instance don't make pretty pictures) but I'll see if I can explain myself a bit better about why these two approaches are so very different (and somewhat developmentally incompatible).
In the end that is the idea but there are many ways to skin a cat (or even a mesh).;-) Scanline and Ray tracers are two approaches. Each of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. A scan line renderer for example is a fast renderer which generally produces nice looking results (by using shortcuts and certain assumptions). As a result of these shortcuts it is difficult or even impossible to implement some features well such as caustics or radiosity. A raytracer uses a highly accurate (but expensive CPUwise and render time) algorithm that calculates the paths of millions of beams of light and uses these paths to piece together a pretty picture. Using ray tracing you can implement the fancy stuff I mentioned earlier (caustics, radiosity, etc.) more accurately and generally more easily than you can in a scan line renderer. So basically raytracers are very slow but highly accurate but scanline renderers are fast and (at times) don't output highly accurate renders.
Also some other differences between Blender and Moonlight.
Moonlight 3D is more geared towards ease of use and to help newbies ease themselves into 3D w/a nice UI and basic modeling funtions.
Blender is currently geared towards the more experienced 3D artist with an ultra efficient UI (with a steeper learning curve) and a professional workflow that enables you to output tons of work easily (sometimes at the price of user friendliness).
These are two very different crowds that Moonlight and Blender are catering to. I think there's room enough in Free Software for them both.:-)
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But you can't expect people to *not* protest and try to stop an invasion, just because they might hurt the feelings of the people who are going to be ordered to execute the invasion...
I'm not talking about hurting someone's feelings. I'm talking about lowering the level of a soldier's motivation which can very easily cause lives.
I mean... If they succeed in stopping the invasion, the troops won't *have* to risk their lives. Right?
Its a little late to stop the invasion. Protesting a war after its already started is kinda like yelling at someone not to steal your car after they've already pulled out of your driveway and are well down the road with your vehicle. The war has begun and no amount of protesting will preempt itr. Best to support the troops are already there and fighting.
I'm against the war, but I don't see being against the war as being against our troops.
There are a lot of good reasons we shouldn't have done this. Now that we're committed, though, I want the war to end quickly, and I want us to win. I figure that's the best way to minimize the loss of lives (both American and Iraqi).
But being against an unjust war doesn't make one against our troops.
One does need to realize the effect of one's actions on the morale of our troops though. The troops are over there risking life and limb and when they tune into TV and they see all these protesters demonstrating against the war they're fighting it could potentially be very demoralizing.
If the US want European support, they'll have to offer some evidence that is not faked (admitted by the US prime minister) or bought (23 million $$$ to a Taliban defector!)
We *know* Saddam had tons of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction so what happened to them? The burden of proof isn't on the inspectors to *prove* Iraq has weapons. It is Iraq's job to show the inspectors documentation that proves that they destroyed their weapons of mass destruction. If we were to go by the South African model of disarmament (which most in the UN agree is an almost perfect model) the inspectors are basically auditors. Now I work for a fortune 500 company and let me explain how audits work. Auditors come in a request information. We provide the information and any backup to that info that they request. If we don't provide the requested documentation and backup we'd be in very hot water very quickly.
Auditing is not an easter egg hunt like these inspections appear to be. Blix has said that Iraq's documentation is insufficient. Iraq has had weapons of mass destruction in the past. What happened to them?! No one knows and Iraq won't/can't provide credible evidence/documentation that they've destroyed these weapons. So we're just to assume that Saddam has been a nice little boy and has gotten rid of them? Iraq is not actively complying with the inspectors and only letting inspectors look around. Guess what... they aren't going to find anything in a state the size of California. Its just too easy to hide things in a land of this size. There will *never* be anything close to the disarmament of Iraq without the active participation of Saddam as long as he is in power. You simply cannot expect him to give up these powerful weapons willingly. He has thumbed his nose at UN resolutions and inspections for 11 years. What makes you think he will suddenly see the light and disarm willingly? Assuming Saddam will do anything but delay and hinder disarmament attempts is pure fantasy.
Indie game developers face several problems with getting their game to market. The biggest problem is that the gaming industry and its distribution has matured but the indie gaming distribuion channels haven't yet. The music industry has a relatively good indie distribution network compared to the gaming industry. Music lovers can purchase all kinds of eclectic and not-so-mass-popular music if they know which shops carry that type of music.
So indie game developers aren't in any of the shops that most people frequent (EB Games etc.) and AFAIK there aren't any sites that publish a wide variety of indie games. What would really help is a site like garage games but on a grander scale and is open to all indie game producers. Sort of an EB Games for indie game developers to hawk their wares.
The other big problem is the cost involved in creating a title which even approaches AAA quality. With the relatively recent proliferation of capable open source 3D engines and libraries like OGRE, NeL (Nevrax) CrystalSpace, SDL and OpenAL the barrier for coding a high quality cross platform games has been dramatically lowered.
Of course there's also the issue of artwork being required. Hiring top quality artists can be restrictively expensive for indie gave devs. Someone had mentioned having a creative commons for game developers which I have always thought would be a wonderful idea. The problem is getting all of these far flung developers to work together in creating such a commons. WorldForge is slowing building a library of GPLed+FDLed media (which is now pretty substantial) but these things take time of course.
In 2001 Ford Europe was looking strongly at deploying Linux on the desktops there. Perhaps this went through or Linux got deployed somewhere else in Ford.
Now I wouldn't say that one sport is more difficult or intricate than the other but everythign you've mentioned here has a parallel in NASCAR.
/.ers will ever do or know is make redneck jokes. Isn't it a tad ironic that most /.ers are just as close minded in their own way as the rednecks they poke fun of?
Let me give some examples of how cyclng is more intricate than NASCAR:
- The person in front of a group is putting in more effort than the rest of the group. Therefore everybody takes turns at the front of the group and the group is constantly rotating ("cycling").
This is also often done in NASCAR although its not planned. If you run at the front of the pack all day long unless you have an absolutely peerless car you're going to ruin your car for the end of the race. You won't have anything left for the end of the race and you'll likely end up further back in the pack. Often times drivers will wave other drivers by and let them pass so they'll have something for the mad scamble at the end of the race.
- Although the wind-effect is levelling the field, there are still people who are better (are fitter) than others. As said in the article, the differences between nascars are minimal. Also there are specialists in every team: Sprinters, Climbers, Loners, Rain-people, Coblle, etc.
To say that there aren't many differences between cars ignores the tens of thousands of man hours (not to mention the billions of dollars spent yearly on a single car) setting up, experimenting with and tuning these cars. There are also specialists who only drive road courses and other drivers who do well at superspeedways etc. Everyone has their strengths.
- In a burst effort, you can get clear of your group. But you can only do that a few times, therefore you have to play your cards right.
If you burst free from the pack at a superspeedway the other cars behind you begin drafting. The "train" of cars will gain momentum and blow by you. After that no one will let you back in the draft and you're left there wondering how you've suddenly gone from 1st to 20th place in the space of a few laps.
- Not to mention team tactics. Cyclist who are designated as a "helper" (in Dutch "knecht") is obliged to put effort into getting his teammate into a good position, an action which removes all chances of him winning. Sometimes that means thaking the front position in a group. This often escalates to an entire team (about 7 persons) at the front of the pack; racing like mad.
These types of things happen all the time in NASCAR with people on the same team. Also, many times drivers will make temporary alliances with each other to help one another advance their position. This makes for interesting pit road politics at times.
Again, neither sport is better or harder than the other but... That said there are lots of things a NASCAR driver has to endure that a cyclist will never see. Strapped to a 200mph rocket for two hours at Talladega (Florida) in the summer when the temperature outside can touch 100deg F and engine temperatures run about 300-350deg F and you begin to know the meaning of the word heat inside the car. Drivers have to wear fire suits, helmets and other saftey equiment in this heat. A driver's foot is seperated from the engine only by inches and at the end of the day he/she can have 2nd and 3rd degree burns on their feet when the heat of the engine eventually burns through their fire retardant boots. Thay my friend is hot.
Anyone who's played enough of the game NASCAR 200x will know that there is more to the sport than throwing back Buds and "hollerin'." A winning NASCAR team is a dance of technology, skill, hard work and just plain luck at times. I could go on and on about the many facets of NASCAR but all most
The only way to get game developers to come to Linux is to develop a Direct-X like API that makes it easy to develop Linux-native games.
The existence of all the high quality Loki ports refutes this utterly. SDL, OpenGL and OpenAL are some noteable examples of cross platform and open APIs that are very useable.
The real reason you don't see alot of professional quality Free Software games is the lack of Free art and music assets. Coding is only about 10%-20% of the job of creating a professional level game. Why do you think one sees so many Free Software/Open Source board games, tetris, and old school arcade clone? Its because the art requirements on these types of ventures are very small. Coders grok the concepts behind Free Software but its a much more difficult job getting artists (and musicians to an extent) to understand and contribute.
The reason one doesn't see many commercial Linux ports is because the Linux desktop market isn't quite large enough for development houses to justify the effort (although this is beginning to change).
Now, I like a good game as much as the next guy, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that is using all of this triangle processing power for purposes other than games?
Don't forget the visual FX industry for movies and television. They really push their cards hard when modeling the amazing scenes we've come accustomed to seeing in movies and to a lesser extent on TV. This industry gobbles up the most powerful hardware they can get their hands on. Paying top dollar for a video card/CPU is much cheaper than paying an artist to wait on their maichine over time.
Also remember that they weren't against Open Source, they were specifically against it being used to allow pirated copies of their games to be played.
This is the line Blizzard/Vivendi hid behind but it flies in the face of the facts. Bdnet asked to use Blizzard's key authentication system and Blizzard said no. Of course Blizzard is under no obligation to do so but it is heavy handed the way the came down on bdnet. The only reason bdnet was so popular in the first place is bc battle.net was so hopelessly broken at the time. Really Blizzard has only themselves to blame for this whole mess anyway.
IANAL but as I understand it all CC licenses are considered non Free because of some stipulations (having to do with circumvention techonology) in all CC licenses.
The FDL is a very complex document which most lay people find very difficult to grasp. Are there any plans on cleaning up the language in this license to make it more readable like the GPL?
Are there any plans currently to draft a license for artistic assets like graphics, music and sound effects and if not why? In many programs there are often artistic assests which are distributed with programs. Games are an obvious example but even in every day programs there are icons, sound effects and other UI elements associated with a program. Using the GPL and/or FDL for artistic assets seems a bit like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole as this isn't the purpose these licenses were created for.
If a person is unwilling to pay $100 for an operating system what makes you think they'll be willing to pay $40 for the OS and $500 for Office? This scenario is unlikely at best.
You don't list things on your 10-Q that are complete nonsense though. Investment analysts use a company's 10-Q as a standard research tool and putting unnecessarily negative information on your 10-Q risks a lot. I would dispute the notion that "This comment doesn't mean MS thinks there is a threat." Certainly when one reads MS' 10-Q with Ballmer's statement that Linux is MS' #1 threat I think one has no other choice but to conclude that MS is very worried about competing with a lower cost alternative.
I guess I just don't understand the big deal here. You can get free fonts from multiple places - why is this nothing more than a bit of free publicity for the company?
I'm no expert on fonts but I do know a little about the difficulties in creating them. I'm sure someone will correct me if I mispeak on a minor point.
Sure, you can download free cheeseball fonts from lots of different free font sites but there is a *huge* difference between those free fonts you just downloaded and professionally made fonts. Why do you think Linux has gone so long without a decent set of fonts? Its because high quality fonts take a *long* time to develop and are *very* expensive to make because of all the labor involved. It can take a professional typeographer a full year to develop just one font. Until now its been very difficult for the Free Software community to find either:
1) A professional typeographer willing to donate a large amount of time (typeographers and professional level font creation software doesn't grow on trees)
2) A company willing to fund the creation of the fonts. (expensive!)
With this in mind I think one can begin to appreciate the magnitude of the gift that Bitstream is giving the community.
Thank you Bitstream!
While it appears that any effort to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Act will be an uphill battle there is one way to give ourselves a vibrant creative commons.
Artists, we can place our works under the public domain, FDL or a creative commons license that allows for redistribution and modification. If we can't count on our collective governments to stand up to the entertainment industry then we'll have to build our own open body of work much as the Open Source and Free Software movements have. There is already a very good head start available in the way of material available on the internet to download which is in the public domain.
Yes, you are. You see, the draw of open source was supposed to be a better model for software and for business. No one should want to do business with a closed source vendor like MS since you can't look under the hood yourself.
Unless the Open Source advocates have lost faith in their "superior" software model, this really shouldn't be a problem.
Perhaps his is the reason that businesses like and use open source but the people who create the software. The problem isn't whether or not one has faith in Open Source but rather a question of equity.
You seemingly want something for nothing when there is no such thing in this world. If this isn't what you meant then I apologize but your post did come off as being surly. People create, release and maintain Open Source because they want to share their program with others while at the same time scratching an itch they might have. There is also the hope in releasing the software that others will help further develop the software. I would hope that someone allowing you to use their code would plant the desire within you to help further develop and refine their software that you're using.
how is this different than the current state of things? You'll notice that the title screen of all major releases contain at least two different logos... the big-name publisher and the unknown independent developer.
:-)
The difference is that now anyone *CAN* get published without having to win over a major publisher who has their own agenda and tend to be risk averse. More about this later...
Publishers currently handle the printing of the manuals, the stuffing of retail boxes, distribution, advertising, and money. According to the article on Garage Games, the Independents would still be outsourcing printing and stuffing.
This is basically what the indie studio needs. Someone to handle the physical production of the packaging.
They gloss over the problem of distribution, but imply that the independent would be well served by their services.
I'm not really sure about this one either.
Advertising they claim is a pittiance, though that could be simply because it is executed so badly by the major distributers.
So to an extent, advertising is a bit of a non factor when creating a game. Chalk another one up for indie studios.
And finally MONEY... The article implies that every independent can become an Ambrosia [ambrosiasw.com] if they just aim at an underrepresented market, but this, quite frankly, is unrealistic. Despite what the article says, you cannot hire real artists, sound personnel, video editors, coders, and testers for six months for 5,000 dollars. That budget should be more like 200,000... and that would be a lean and mean 4 person crew. If you can convince everyone to work pro-bono and can find a spare pair of rooms in someone's house, that will offset most of the costs but will put the talent into an even worse position than they started out in.
I think you're missing the point a bit in that no one is suggesting that people quit their day jobs, hire 1/2 a dozen people and form an indie studio. I always felt that Torque was reaching out more to the hobby game developer. Torque and GarageGames could prove to be a training ground for people to hone and develop their skills. Of course most game coder/artist hobbyist's dream is to become the next Ambrosia and strike it big, but most realize that's unlikely to happen. Still though for the few who do move on to develop games professionally they'll be much better off having gone through creating a game and possibly having it published in a low scale fashion such as GarageGames offers.
The dream of relaiming IP from the publisher, as well as creative control, is an alluring one. But the fact is the publisher serves several vital roles in this industry, most of which are underappreciated by veterans who have had several great ideas and a lot of bad projects canned by the major houses.
Of course there will always be a large place for publishers. The world needs huge budget AAA titles like Neverwinter Nights, Dungeon Seige, etc. I also have a strong feeling that a signifigant segment of the gaming community would also be drawn low budget games with original concepts and innovative game play. This is the niche that GarageGames is attempting to fill. IMO there is a reason that the games of yesteryear were so fresh and inventive. Game creation had not yet become the big business it is today and hence game developers had a lot more discretion about what wen t into their games. Today we mainly see a market where 90% of the games are merely variations on a theme covered in ever more beautiful wrappings. This is because big name titles cost tremendous amounts of money to produce which makes the publisher very risk averse. I'd like to see a little more variety in games and I think GarageGames is a step in the right direction. The tools to create great looking and playing games have never been more accessible to hobbyists than they are today. This makes for fertile ground in which to plant an indie gaming scene. Everyone, always draws parallel's from the Gaming to the Music/Movie biz yet the the later two have vibrant indie scenes. Shouldn't the gaming biz have an equally or even more vibrant indie scene as well? I think so.
What climate has changed? What power shifted to the independents? Doesn't the lowered entry barriers into game development, as mentioned in the article, make publishers a relatively rarer and therefore more powerful entity?
Publishers very rare indeed until GarageGames stepped in. Now anyone who can create a game that people enjoy playing and generate sales can get published. Granted, those are no two mean tasks but its a heck of a lot easier than the following traditional steps:
* Create your tech demo
* Shop your game to publishers after creating a tech demo
* Find a publish that is willing to strike a deal
* Hire lawyers and haggle terms
* Negotiate/Accept publishers game requirements, deadlines etc.
* Create your game
* Develop hype and a community around your game
* Release game and hope it sells!
Garage Games eliminates almost 1/2 the steps involved. I hope I don't come off sounding too much like a GG cheerleader (I don't even own a copy of Tribes2 or Torque) but I can certainly see how they're really giving indie developers a big helping hand.
-Jason
*Lack of NTFS support by default: Near-neccessary for 2000/XP dual-booters
:-)
Last I heard NTFS support is very unreliable. You could very well end up trashing your file system if you attempt to write to an NTFS file system. It seems prudent to leave this turned off. It would be nice if FAT partitions were stuck in fstab automatically during the install though.
*That silly "Extras" menu: you never quite know where software is going to turn up
*Lack of a good package management front-end: That Windows-like one they include is good for managing the software on the RH8 CDs, but for removing, installing, and upgrading third-party RPMs, one must resort either to the command line, or better yet, apt4rpm. Apt4rpm should be in by default.
Amen! Red Hat's menu's are attrocious. Apt4Rpm is a beautiful thing. Make a prettly little GUI for the newbies as well, please.
*DMA is off by default on CD-ROM drives. This is easily fixed through config files, but for the average user, this is a hurdle to DVD playing and CD burning.
I think this was a performance/compatibility comprimise that RH made because many of their customers use devices like optical drives which wouldn't work if DMA were turned on by default.
*No MP3 support in XMMS
*No nVidia drivers
I'm actually glad Red Hat did these two. It helps raise awareness of licensing problems with these two pieces of software. It is a stand on principles. Of course whether or not you agree with this stance is another matter but RH has been consistent on points of licensing at least.
I'd also add to the gripe list that Red Hat 8 (as far as I can tell) didn't come with a menu editor prinstalled.
Other than that it was absolutely perfect! Bluecurve is a work of art...
I was disappointed with the depth of this article. I expected lots of little hints and tricks that I didn't know about but instead found most of the material was common sense stuff for anyone who had been around computers for any amount of time.
If you *really* want to get deep inside the guts of optimizing a Windows box I can think of no better guide than O'reilly's.
Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia by David L. Farquhar
This book is currently out of print and is getting a little long in the tooth (published in 1999) but the internals for Windows doesn't really change that radically from a tuner's perspective. This book isn't a mere collection of little tricks but gives you a more fundamental understanding of Windows and how to trim the fat. The Amazon user rating system gives it 5 stars and rightfully so. To top it off you can pick up a used copy for about $8 or so at half.com among other places.
This is really a great book for anyone looking to get the most out of their Windows machine or just trying to understand the black box that is Windows. I used some of the tricks mentioned in this book on my wife's old p233 laptop w/96MBs RAM. Her Win98SE box has been going for almost two years now w/o any serious stability or performance problems. Granted, she's not a niddler and only does a certain set number of tasks on this laptop but I think that's pretty darn good for a Windows 98 box.
Actually, its not as bleak as that. The push to get hardware accelerated drivers for Linux is gathering momentum thanks at least in part to the companies who create CGI for entertainment industry. This industry is an early adopter of Linux and is moving fairly aggressively to incorporate Linux into their organizations. This is why you see most of the professional 3D packages now with Linux versions of their products. Now, the same companies who buy these expensive modeling packages (like Maya which is $10,000) buy those *really* expensive professional level graphics cards. There are usually very large profit margins on these professional level cards so the video card manufacturers tend to bend over backwards to try and appease these customers, as the profit margin on the consumer side is wafer thin. This is one large reason why you're seeing more accelerated video card drivers for Linux pop up nowadays from the larger video card manufacturers. ATI just released their unified accelerated drivers for Linux and Nvidia has had drivers for Linux for quite a while. Heck, even my trusty little Kyro II card has had Linux drivers for quite some time. Things are looking up for Linux video drivers and its only going to get better as time goes on.
You might if your right hand had become "cancerous." Better to lose the one hand than the whole body.
I've been around the fringes of the music industry and I like challenge many of the points you've made.
Well artists still need to record thier music professionally, so maybe we would have smaller companies that just record for the artists.
This infrastructure is already in place. It exists today. Go find a reputable local studio and rent some studio time. Chances are that studio will have equipment that can produce a high quality end product. Studio time isn't cheap but artists shell out the bucks all the time to cut their own records. This isn't an issue.
Now artists need to make some money (both to pay that recording company and for themselves) so somehow they have to sell thier music. Well, if they're a new artist that nobody's heard of then nobody will buy thier music. So they need to promote themselves. They only way thier promoting efforts will get them national exposure is if they contract a promoting agency to do it. If you think the web is good enough by itself then your living in a dream world. Maybe in 20 years. So now we need a promoting agency.
To an extent you need a promoting agency but to be honest with you the best way to promote one's self is the old fashioned way. TOUR YOUR HINDER OFF! True, the web isn't good enough yet but it is an excellent secondary means promote oneself. The web is esp. good if you're just a popular regional band. Tour your butt off, get your web site up, get your songs out there on the P2P sites and encourage bootlegs and you're on your way.
Independent labels could fill any void that the large labels leave to a great extent as many of them (esp the mid-larger ones) have good distribution channels, some promotional outreach abilities and contacts with various radio stations. If every large distributor (like WEA, Sony etc) fell off the Earth tomorrow tons of smaller companies would spring in to action to fill the void these elephants left and in the end we'd end up with a richer and more diverse music scene.
The large distribution (payola) scheme of promoting music as we know it is in jeopardy and the Mega Media Corps know it. The internet is attacking the current distribution chain's reason for dominance. Up until the widespread use of the internet it was impossible for a person or group to promote, distribute and sell their own music on a wide scale economically. This is all changing and unless the record companies adapt to reality very quickly they will rapidly become forgotten relics (taking the RIAA with them).
I *can* list several methods of implementation with respect to Blender's UI that cannot rationally be considered 'efficient', by any means.
:-)
True, all 3D modelers have warts and rough places where their interface sucks. Hence, we see most production houses using more than one tool or *heavily* modify the one they are using (lots of shops severly hack up Maya for example). I'd even be willing to say that Blender probably has more of these rough places than 1/2 of the commercial modelers available.
After using Blender for as long as I have, I've come to believe that Blender has a split personality - while some aspects do provide for some level of efficiency, there are others that do quite the opposite, thus making any overall advantage a wash. I consider Blender to be "usable but difficult." You can produce some fairly decent material with it, if you're willing to deal with the headaches.
I wouldn't argue with any of this except to say that if you spend time with it, you can come up with not only 'fairly decent material' you can do some *amazing* work with Blender. Just look at ex-Nihilo's Millenium Falcon for example:
http://exnihilo.users5.50megs.com/falcon.htm
Amazing work! It even turned the heads of some folks over at ILM and prompted them to ask him for a demo reel. You can't get much higher praise than than. I'd also like to note that while Blender's efficiencies and inefficiencies may be a wash it does have another thing working in its favor. Blender is a very flexible and cleverly conceived modeler. This allows you use Blender in unconventional ways and helps make up for features that may not be directly built into Blender (or any other modeler for that matter). This in part accounts for the love and loyal following that Blender enjoys from it's userbase.
Now that Blender has been GPLed I have little doubt that these rough edges will be smoothed out and we'll see Blender develop into a more polished app that can compete feature for feature with the big boys (like Maya and LW).
It will be interesting to see how many production houses will start using Blender once it matures a bit more. Most professional production houses really hack up Max, Maya (or whatever they use) and I would think that having the source code to a modeler would be a real boon for them. I guess we'll see!
If it's so good, why haven't real professional tools like Maya and Lightwave copied the interface?
For the same reasons the two applications you mentioned (Maya & LW) have such radically different interfaces. No one really knows what the perfect 3D interface is. There are multiple ways to skin a cat and the craft of 3d modeler UI design is a very young one. Blender presents one way to do your work, Maya another and LW yet another. I don't think 3D modelers as a whole are mature enough to say that any of these UI design approaches are right or wrong way to construct an interface.
Yeah, I don't understand. In the end they both produce pretty
;-) Scanline and Ray tracers are two approaches. Each of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. A scan line renderer for example is a fast renderer which generally produces nice looking results (by using shortcuts and certain assumptions). As a result of these shortcuts it is difficult or even impossible to implement some features well such as caustics or radiosity. A raytracer uses a highly accurate (but expensive CPUwise and render time) algorithm that calculates the paths of millions of beams of light and uses these paths to piece together a pretty picture. Using ray tracing you can implement the fancy stuff I mentioned earlier (caustics, radiosity, etc.) more accurately and generally more easily than you can in a scan line renderer. So basically raytracers are very slow but highly accurate but scanline renderers are fast and (at times) don't output highly accurate renders.
:-)
pictures of modelled objects, right?
Well, not necessarily (game modelers for instance don't make pretty pictures) but I'll see if I can explain myself a bit better about why these two approaches are so very different (and somewhat developmentally incompatible).
In the end that is the idea but there are many ways to skin a cat (or even a mesh).
Also some other differences between Blender and Moonlight.
Moonlight 3D is more geared towards ease of use and to help newbies ease themselves into 3D w/a nice UI and basic modeling funtions.
Blender is currently geared towards the more experienced 3D artist with an ultra efficient UI (with a steeper learning curve) and a professional workflow that enables you to output tons of work easily (sometimes at the price of user friendliness).
These are two very different crowds that Moonlight and Blender are catering to. I think there's room enough in Free Software for them both.