Yeah, I was wondering about that myself, but this is the way corporate heads think. "We need more money!" "Damn -- slash the production forces!" "Sir! We're using less money now, but we won't hit our sales targets!" "Slash one-third of the workforce!" "Sir! Our production is a lot less!" "The firings will continue until production improves!"
Well, it depends on the company, really. If they all thought this way, none of them would succeed.
The average time it took to render a single frame in the Final Fantasy Technology Demo was less than one-tenth of a second, compared to the 90 minutes it took in the movie,
Final Fantasy The Spirits Within!
``The only "good thing"(tm) that really happened was we were able to embarrass the RIAA a bit.''
Actually, according to www.eff.org, the Felten/EFF vs. RIAA case is still very much alive, because the EFF filed a countersuit against the RIAA. It seems that you cannot threaten lawsuits willy-nilly in this country after all!
Although if the EFF loses the case, you will be proven right; however, this is not over.
I certainly encountered more than my fair share of professors in undergrad and in grad school who had tenure and all kinds of honors, but didn't understand how a real computer works. Case in point: Algorithm analysis. We analyze the performance of algorithms based on a model where every memory access can take the same amount of time. But anyone who understands modern virtual memory knows that's not the case. And it turns out that although that won't take an algorithm in polynomial time and move it into exponential time, an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5) (according to one of the examples Larry Carter at the University of California-San Diego gave in a lecture).
In academia, people write papers on doing nifty things, while in the real world, people actually do them. It's kind of like the article below where a CS professor writes about DOOM and it becomes clear (at least to me) that he doesn't really know the first thing about what John C. actually does.
I'm not pissing on degrees; I certainly recognize the value of my degrees now that I have a job. But it took me a while to un-learn the habit I'd acquired in grad school of thinking ideas into the ground without actually doing anything with them. For a while I had to force myself to just DO things and worry about whether I was doing them "right" later. Only then did the education start to prove its worth.
I think it's common to think that people with Ph.D.'s are brilliant. They may be smarter than average, but getting a Ph.D. is more a matter of working VERY hard towards a goal than it is about being a genius.
``No it does not, in fact it specificly says "...it was done in an immersive first-persion perspective. Doom was not the first game to do this, but it was the first game to do it well."''
Well, then it's a subjective issue; I still think Wolf3D did it -well-.
"Wolfenstein 3D did not have textured celings or floors."
It didn't? Dang...I seem to remember differently. It has, after all, been ten years since I played it.:)
Okay, but even then he still ignored non-FPS games like Falcon 3.0, which IIRC (it was ten years ago after all) was released before DOOM and had multiplayer support. Moreover, he still got the academic credentials of John Carmack wrong.
1. The article states that DOOM was the first 3D first-person shooter.
No, Id's previous work, Wolfenstein 3D, was the first real 3D "you may get motion sickness playing this game" shooter. Also, he ignores games in non-FPS genres that really pushed the 3D envelope from that period, such as Falcon 3.0.
2. "[DOOM] was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in computer science."
John Carmack has a CS degree? News to me -- I thought he dropped out of college.
3. "It was the first 3D game to have textures on everything on the screen, and that made a huge difference for the atmosphere and the mood of the game."
See Wolfenstein 3D.
Well, there's probably more, but that's what I see in the first section. Anyone spot others?
This paper would have benefitted from some sort of peer review...
...was that the mainstream press is starting to see the anti-DMCA point of view, and to write about it. The fact that they're supporting the "little guy" is more than gravy, but we geeks have known all along that the "little guy" is who is hurt.
Seeing the Sklyarov tale picked up by the Times in this light can only bode ill for the DMCA. I hope this is a continuing trend, and not a blip on the radar...
...we didn't have no fancy-shmancy 32-bit computers with "true" color and multi-tasking multi-threaded GUI operating systems! We had EIGHT bits, and if you wanted any more than that you had to wait three days for a calculation! We had DOS and 640KB limits! We had four colors with our CGA graphics, including black and white!
And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!
We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!
We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!
We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!
And we liked it! We loved it!
I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!
"Better yet would be a trip back to the types of levels we saw in the original Quake -..."
I agree it had great moods (enhanced considerably by Trent Reznor's soundtrack), but its contemporary, Duke Nukem 3D, was much more fun in single-player. If you're talking about level design I partially agree, but in general, I (and, I think, most people) didn't find Quake's single-player to be all that much fun.
I was definitely no fan of Al Gore, and I do believe the ISS and Hubble are more important for science, and I must also admit that I shared your reaction to this. At first.
But when I was an officer of SEDS (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) at college, we had our sponsor, Dr. Hans Mark, speak to us about some of the goings-on in the space program. And he mentioned that although current interest in the space program was down, "People always love to see the pictures."
Pictures from space are the best marketing NASA (or any space program) has. That's the other reason why Hubble is important. I have the Hubble slashbox, and I find myself changing my wallpaper to whatever's linked to it pretty frequently.:)
It still means it's a political device, but these things are important so that real scientific advancement can continue. So this would have benefitted science, and possibly in more ways than we can know.
My point is that the laws are the same. Fraud, murder, theft -- it doesn't matter if you're in Liverpool, Rome, Tijuana, Montreal, or Dallas; they have the same definition. Reparations are different, and the processes for making judgment are different, but we don't disagree on what it is the way we do on, say, patents.
Yes, but we're not talking about the finer points of patent law in this case; we're talking about fraud, which is a pretty much the same thing in both courts. Also, this case has international scope, because Infineon is a European company. These two court cases aren't happening in separate vacuum-sealed spaces, either.
So it is quite likely that, upon reading the EU judge's decision, that Robert E. Payne applied similar logic to the case over here.
Infineon and Rambus have been battling in European courts over the same issues, and the EU judge had cleared Rambus of any fraud charges, so it seemed like it was only a matter of time before the US courts fell in line with that decision.
No, their shareholders favor Rambus. The folks on the Rambus board at The Motley Fool's message boards (www.fool.com) are positively frightening in their zealotry...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this basically just the standard Open-Source development model, but restated with a lot more cool poetry?
Perhaps that's not "Mob Software's" point -- perhaps the whole point is just a romanticization of The Bazaar. I'm cool with that.
Yeah, I was wondering about that myself, but this is the way corporate heads think. "We need more money!" "Damn -- slash the production forces!" "Sir! We're using less money now, but we won't hit our sales targets!" "Slash one-third of the workforce!" "Sir! Our production is a lot less!" "The firings will continue until production improves!"
Well, it depends on the company, really. If they all thought this way, none of them would succeed.
We're geeks -- what do you expect???
``The only "good thing"(tm) that really happened was we were able to embarrass the RIAA a bit.''
Actually, according to www.eff.org, the Felten/EFF vs. RIAA case is still very much alive, because the EFF filed a countersuit against the RIAA. It seems that you cannot threaten lawsuits willy-nilly in this country after all!
Although if the EFF loses the case, you will be proven right; however, this is not over.
Yes; the EFF is doing so on his behalf.
I certainly encountered more than my fair share of professors in undergrad and in grad school who had tenure and all kinds of honors, but didn't understand how a real computer works. Case in point: Algorithm analysis. We analyze the performance of algorithms based on a model where every memory access can take the same amount of time. But anyone who understands modern virtual memory knows that's not the case. And it turns out that although that won't take an algorithm in polynomial time and move it into exponential time, an algorithm that on the surface is O(N^3) can actually be O(N^5) (according to one of the examples Larry Carter at the University of California-San Diego gave in a lecture).
In academia, people write papers on doing nifty things, while in the real world, people actually do them. It's kind of like the article below where a CS professor writes about DOOM and it becomes clear (at least to me) that he doesn't really know the first thing about what John C. actually does.
I'm not pissing on degrees; I certainly recognize the value of my degrees now that I have a job. But it took me a while to un-learn the habit I'd acquired in grad school of thinking ideas into the ground without actually doing anything with them. For a while I had to force myself to just DO things and worry about whether I was doing them "right" later. Only then did the education start to prove its worth.
I think it's common to think that people with Ph.D.'s are brilliant. They may be smarter than average, but getting a Ph.D. is more a matter of working VERY hard towards a goal than it is about being a genius.
``No it does not, in fact it specificly says "...it was done in an immersive first-persion perspective. Doom was not the first game to do this, but it was the first game to do it well."''
:)
Well, then it's a subjective issue; I still think Wolf3D did it -well-.
"Wolfenstein 3D did not have textured celings or floors."
It didn't? Dang...I seem to remember differently. It has, after all, been ten years since I played it.
Okay, but even then he still ignored non-FPS games like Falcon 3.0, which IIRC (it was ten years ago after all) was released before DOOM and had multiplayer support. Moreover, he still got the academic credentials of John Carmack wrong.
1. The article states that DOOM was the first 3D first-person shooter.
No, Id's previous work, Wolfenstein 3D, was the first real 3D "you may get motion sickness playing this game" shooter. Also, he ignores games in non-FPS genres that really pushed the 3D envelope from that period, such as Falcon 3.0.
2. "[DOOM] was designed by talented people with good skills and academic degrees in computer science."
John Carmack has a CS degree? News to me -- I thought he dropped out of college.
3. "It was the first 3D game to have textures on everything on the screen, and that made a huge difference for the atmosphere and the mood of the game."
See Wolfenstein 3D.
Well, there's probably more, but that's what I see in the first section. Anyone spot others?
This paper would have benefitted from some sort of peer review...
Furbeowulf
Funny. :)
...was that the mainstream press is starting to see the anti-DMCA point of view, and to write about it. The fact that they're supporting the "little guy" is more than gravy, but we geeks have known all along that the "little guy" is who is hurt.
Seeing the Sklyarov tale picked up by the Times in this light can only bode ill for the DMCA. I hope this is a continuing trend, and not a blip on the radar...
...we didn't have no fancy-shmancy 32-bit computers with "true" color and multi-tasking multi-threaded GUI operating systems! We had EIGHT bits, and if you wanted any more than that you had to wait three days for a calculation! We had DOS and 640KB limits! We had four colors with our CGA graphics, including black and white!
And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!
We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!
We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!
We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!
And we liked it! We loved it!
I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!
"Better yet would be a trip back to the types of levels we saw in the original Quake - ..."
I agree it had great moods (enhanced considerably by Trent Reznor's soundtrack), but its contemporary, Duke Nukem 3D, was much more fun in single-player. If you're talking about level design I partially agree, but in general, I (and, I think, most people) didn't find Quake's single-player to be all that much fun.
Good funny, but actually, since it uses the new DOOM engine, I don't think so.
I know it says "Sid Meier's Civ 3," but is Sid Meier actually involved with the project?
Right; but that's a -patent- issue, not a -fraud- issue.
I was definitely no fan of Al Gore, and I do believe the ISS and Hubble are more important for science, and I must also admit that I shared your reaction to this. At first.
:)
But when I was an officer of SEDS (Students for Exploration and Development of Space) at college, we had our sponsor, Dr. Hans Mark, speak to us about some of the goings-on in the space program. And he mentioned that although current interest in the space program was down, "People always love to see the pictures."
Pictures from space are the best marketing NASA (or any space program) has. That's the other reason why Hubble is important. I have the Hubble slashbox, and I find myself changing my wallpaper to whatever's linked to it pretty frequently.
It still means it's a political device, but these things are important so that real scientific advancement can continue. So this would have benefitted science, and possibly in more ways than we can know.
My point is that the laws are the same. Fraud, murder, theft -- it doesn't matter if you're in Liverpool, Rome, Tijuana, Montreal, or Dallas; they have the same definition. Reparations are different, and the processes for making judgment are different, but we don't disagree on what it is the way we do on, say, patents.
Yes, but we're not talking about the finer points of patent law in this case; we're talking about fraud, which is a pretty much the same thing in both courts. Also, this case has international scope, because Infineon is a European company. These two court cases aren't happening in separate vacuum-sealed spaces, either.
So it is quite likely that, upon reading the EU judge's decision, that Robert E. Payne applied similar logic to the case over here.
I wish there were just three of them. There are actually a couple of dozen at least, and that's just at The Fool...
Infineon and Rambus have been battling in European courts over the same issues, and the EU judge had cleared Rambus of any fraud charges, so it seemed like it was only a matter of time before the US courts fell in line with that decision.
No, their shareholders favor Rambus. The folks on the Rambus board at The Motley Fool's message boards (www.fool.com) are positively frightening in their zealotry...