One of the rules in this really strikes me -- the one that says that no 3d accelleration should be used. Think back to the days of VGA 320x200x256. For at least five years, all the games that were released for PC used that mode. It meant that there had to be innovation, because there were no technical doodads and wow-devices to make everyone go "ooh, ah." That is what "don't rely on technical advances" does for us. We may have all been gnawing at the bit to enter the SVGA age, but the games we got were FUN!
A similar situation happened with the C64 and the Atari 2600. The hardware is set, unchanging, and the games that come out for them get better and better as time goes by, as developers come up with ideas that, using the same hardware, are designed to be better than previous games.
The problem with this sort of thinking is this: how long did it take NASA to build and program that computer? Back then they were programming in assembly language because they had no choice (for efficiency both of clock cycles and memory). Now, throw a couple gigs of memory and a few thousand MHz at the problem and it becomes a lot easier to handle, and you can use a nice friendly high-level language and accomplish way more than you ever could have before.
The fact is that the average software engineer produces five lines of code per day of an efficient development cycle. In a project where lives will depend on the result (such as in space travel), the number is more like one or two lines of source code per day. That's regardless of what language they're using. So programming in assembly language you would produce way fewer features for the same time spent.
This is just a fact of software development, there's no way around it. So don't tell me that computers that are more powerful are not a good way to solve problems. If that were true, we wouldn't have bloated software like Linux, Windows, and Microsoft Office. But bloated though they may be, they're pretty bloody useful!
(BTW: I wasn't able to get through to the source code listing so I'm just assuming they were programming in assembly. My argument still stands, though, regardless.)
Gnutella is a dead end. The brute-force method it employs of connecting people up is simply too expensive. It takes too long to connect and too long to do a search. The only viable future for peer-ro-peer file sharing is a more intelligent approach such as freenet, Publius, or something like that. Perhaps the death of Scour and the probable near-future death of Napster (at least in the form we know it) will spur on the development of these or other good solutions to the file-sharing problem.
Is it really necessary to post every release of KDE and GNOME and debian and Redhat and every other distro/user-environment on the net? Slashdot should be about Stuff That Matters! At the very least it should be just the major releases that are announced here, not endless betas or bugfixes.
I have a lot of friends in the 3d animation world, and every once of them hates Max. They're always talking about how bad the interface is, and about how difficult it is to do certain things. They all talk about how much better Maya is, but Max is pretty much entrenched, and it takes forever for real companies to make the change, since the training would cost so much for Maya.
Honestly I don't know how Autodesk could expect real studios to use a stripped down version of Max. The cost for a copy of Max is insignificant in the grand scheme of things for a real business. The only people I see this mattering to is regular joes who think they are animators. For them, I say "hooray." For people who want to do real animation, save up and buy Maya, and in the mean time practice your traditional animation skills. There are too many crappy animators out there who don't know how to do anything but linear motion with no timing. With this free version of Max coming out, I expect to see even more.
Ever since I first discovered the Toon RPG and Another Day, Another Dungeon, I've been a huge fan of Greg Costikyan. He's a wonderful advocate and friend to gamers. I highly recommend his web site as well. It's got some great articles, game links, and RPG spoofs. One of my favorites is Nuclear Winter, a realistic post-holocaust game:)
It's nice to see someone bringing up the important issue of abandonware. The game companies are way too anal about keeping a hold on their old games. Bravo to Id and Parallax for releasing old source code (Doom, Quake, Descent, etc).
PNG is one of the most under-implemented formats out there. The format itself is very powerful, but good luck finding programs that support its full feature set. And it's not even a problem like that of TIFF, where the full spec is so huge that it's effectively impossible to implement the whole thing. The problem is that the software producers just haven't put a priority on it. I've been waiting so long for full alpha support that I'm actually somewhat surprised to see it finally showing up. I guess that's the kind of thing that you'll get from a nerd-oriented development model.
Unfortunately, since I much prefer IE in general, I'll still have to wait a while to get alpha in my browser. Maybe Microsoft will figure out that Alpha is a Good Thing soon?
Current GPS hardware will work as usual, but instead of the ~50-foot precision, it'll be much more precise. The press release suggests that the improved system will be ~10x more accurate, which would seem to indicate ~5-foot (1-2 meter) precision. Anyone have any more specific numbers?
Does anyone know if Serial ATA will support more than 4 devices? With my two hard drive, zip drive, and DVD drive, I don't have any room for tape backup! And no, I can't afford the inflated price of SCSI. And with Apple making computers now with ATA interfaces, SCSI is set to get even more expensive.
Of course, I may be an exception here, with all four PCI slots, all four ATA slots, my AGP slot, and one ISA slot filled. At least I still have one memory slot left.... Anyone know where to find a motherboard with more expansion capabilities?
Actually, Quicktime seems to be the de-facto standard in online video, at least among people who are in the industry, making videos and animation. I'm an animation student at the University of Oregon, and most of the people here are downright snobs about it. When I tried posting some AVIs once, I got a thorough reaming from people saying that AVIs aren't universally readable.
Probably the biggest reason for people using QT is that the A/V industry is so permeated by Macs. PCs still haven't made a significant bite out of the desktop video editing market. Every Mac has QT. I think the reason QT is the most universally readable is that Apple has such tight control over it.
So the problem that arises, of course, is that "universally viewable" pretty much only counts for the big two OSs. It's okay for the most part in video editing circles, since there's no decent editing software for Linux, so everyone who does any video editing will have MacOS or Windows. When it comes to consumer-oriented stuff, I'm sorry to tell you this, but most big software companies aren't concerned about making software for Linux. The market is way too small. I'll be surprised if I see Apple make a QT viewer for Linux any time in the next few years.
[BTW, personally, I can't stand Apple and the software they produce. I would love to see a third-party mov-viewer, since the one from Apple is such a pest ("Upgrade [now] or [later]?" Leave me alone!).]
Do you really think that Sun would behave any differently than MS has, if they had MS's power? No, they wouldn't. Corperations are there so that no one person has to take the blame for the corp's dastardly deeds. And Rare is the corperation that doesn't perform nasty acts. They do whatever they can to survive and prosper. If that includes breaking the law (assuming they can get away with it), so be it.
My point here is that when you get right down to it, Sun is no more or less evil than MS. We just like to focus on MS because they have the power. If Apple had won the desktop war, it would be them on trial for anti-trust violations right now, not Microsoft.
What about Sun withdrawing Java from the standardization process? Well, it enforces my point: Sun is not our friend just because they are the underdog in the war. They will do anything they can to gain ground, even if it ends up screwing us, the loyal folks who have faith in the ultimate virtue of the underdog.
Slashdot Mirror
A similar situation happened with the C64 and the Atari 2600. The hardware is set, unchanging, and the games that come out for them get better and better as time goes by, as developers come up with ideas that, using the same hardware, are designed to be better than previous games.
The fact is that the average software engineer produces five lines of code per day of an efficient development cycle. In a project where lives will depend on the result (such as in space travel), the number is more like one or two lines of source code per day. That's regardless of what language they're using. So programming in assembly language you would produce way fewer features for the same time spent.
This is just a fact of software development, there's no way around it. So don't tell me that computers that are more powerful are not a good way to solve problems. If that were true, we wouldn't have bloated software like Linux, Windows, and Microsoft Office. But bloated though they may be, they're pretty bloody useful!
(BTW: I wasn't able to get through to the source code listing so I'm just assuming they were programming in assembly. My argument still stands, though, regardless.)
Gnutella is a dead end. The brute-force method it employs of connecting people up is simply too expensive. It takes too long to connect and too long to do a search. The only viable future for peer-ro-peer file sharing is a more intelligent approach such as freenet, Publius, or something like that. Perhaps the death of Scour and the probable near-future death of Napster (at least in the form we know it) will spur on the development of these or other good solutions to the file-sharing problem.
Is it really necessary to post every release of KDE and GNOME and debian and Redhat and every other distro/user-environment on the net? Slashdot should be about Stuff That Matters! At the very least it should be just the major releases that are announced here, not endless betas or bugfixes.
Honestly I don't know how Autodesk could expect real studios to use a stripped down version of Max. The cost for a copy of Max is insignificant in the grand scheme of things for a real business. The only people I see this mattering to is regular joes who think they are animators. For them, I say "hooray." For people who want to do real animation, save up and buy Maya, and in the mean time practice your traditional animation skills. There are too many crappy animators out there who don't know how to do anything but linear motion with no timing. With this free version of Max coming out, I expect to see even more.
It's nice to see someone bringing up the important issue of abandonware. The game companies are way too anal about keeping a hold on their old games. Bravo to Id and Parallax for releasing old source code (Doom, Quake, Descent, etc).
Unfortunately, since I much prefer IE in general, I'll still have to wait a while to get alpha in my browser. Maybe Microsoft will figure out that Alpha is a Good Thing soon?
Current GPS hardware will work as usual, but instead of the ~50-foot precision, it'll be much more precise. The press release suggests that the improved system will be ~10x more accurate, which would seem to indicate ~5-foot (1-2 meter) precision. Anyone have any more specific numbers?
-David
Does anyone know if Serial ATA will support more than 4 devices? With my two hard drive, zip drive, and DVD drive, I don't have any room for tape backup! And no, I can't afford the inflated price of SCSI. And with Apple making computers now with ATA interfaces, SCSI is set to get even more expensive.
Of course, I may be an exception here, with all four PCI slots, all four ATA slots, my AGP slot, and one ISA slot filled. At least I still have one memory slot left.... Anyone know where to find a motherboard with more expansion capabilities?
Probably the biggest reason for people using QT is that the A/V industry is so permeated by Macs. PCs still haven't made a significant bite out of the desktop video editing market. Every Mac has QT. I think the reason QT is the most universally readable is that Apple has such tight control over it.
So the problem that arises, of course, is that "universally viewable" pretty much only counts for the big two OSs. It's okay for the most part in video editing circles, since there's no decent editing software for Linux, so everyone who does any video editing will have MacOS or Windows. When it comes to consumer-oriented stuff, I'm sorry to tell you this, but most big software companies aren't concerned about making software for Linux. The market is way too small. I'll be surprised if I see Apple make a QT viewer for Linux any time in the next few years.
[BTW, personally, I can't stand Apple and the software they produce. I would love to see a third-party mov-viewer, since the one from Apple is such a pest ("Upgrade [now] or [later]?" Leave me alone!).]
Do you really think that Sun would behave any differently than MS has, if they had MS's power? No, they wouldn't. Corperations are there so that no one person has to take the blame for the corp's dastardly deeds. And Rare is the corperation that doesn't perform nasty acts. They do whatever they can to survive and prosper. If that includes breaking the law (assuming they can get away with it), so be it.
My point here is that when you get right down to it, Sun is no more or less evil than MS. We just like to focus on MS because they have the power. If Apple had won the desktop war, it would be them on trial for anti-trust violations right now, not Microsoft.
What about Sun withdrawing Java from the standardization process? Well, it enforces my point: Sun is not our friend just because they are the underdog in the war. They will do anything they can to gain ground, even if it ends up screwing us, the loyal folks who have faith in the ultimate virtue of the underdog.
Perhaps that faith is their greatest asset?