many many years ago I paid 2K$ (well, actually me and a bunch of friends shared:) ) to get the first sony CD-R burner. at the time it was cool, medias were about 20-30$ each depending on quantities and brands... back then, technology wasn't as rushed as today, and it was way more tested.
Today, too many bad experiences...anyone remembers the leaking capacitors motherboards for example?, Degrading DVDs (even commercial ones, slashdot ran a story about this a while ago). 23GB is nice, but I have yet to TRUST the safety of the data written on my DVDs after seeing a few RWs going down the drain... it pissed me off to lose 4GB of data, I can't imagine 23GB, especially after paying 4K for such a device.
Usually people making negative waves grab more attention than people putting positive effort into something. Medias seem to love giving bad press.
If you're so confident about your platform outperforming another's platform, you should leave that other platform talk without even flaming back because you "know" that they won't be up to the match.
Reacting immaturely, flaming, crying out loud will not only look "kiddy", but will also get a press coverage like "Today, the conference was marked by a lot of people against [...]" and so on. Is that the kind of press that is needed?
I am not pro-MS or pro-Unix. If Flamer's argument is that microsoft keeps everything closed and are doing behind the door tactics, wouldn't it look more mature to simply accept the fact that they want to talk, and if you are confident about your platform, you could even make a debate. Usually people attending that kind of conference aren't idiots, if MS talks vague and conceptually like they love to do with their "marketting and PR" tactics, in the real world, with an intelligent and knowledgeable audience, I'm sure someone will bring them down to earth with insightful questions, and heck, you might even gain extra points beating their arguments live in the process.
Every new REALplayer release always brings up a privacy/spam/security issue on slashdot.
There was a time when Real was one of de facto thing for efficient streaming or simple encoding. Today it's not true. The player is bloated, the codec's CPU/quality factor isn't anything close spectacular (nor good I'd say), everything feels like molasse with their stuff, and on top of that, they are still pulling their dirty tricks. Why do people bother downloading it when there are TONS of alternatives?
Webmaster? heck you can encode DIVX, Quicktime, even Mpeg-1 codecs got good enough to make low bandwidth application (ok not at the same quality, but if you UNDERSTAND the basics of Mpeg you can manage to make a video that is efficient and still retains decent quality, and mpeg is cross-platform with no issues, I still use it, I do proper optimization with the vector settings vs skipping frames and chose the right encoder for the right application, each has it's strong and weak points), You can tweak the right encoding setting for the target bandwidth and voila, you're set. My last contract required me to encore a 4 minute clip, and I manage to make it small enough so dialup users could download it, it wasn't 320x240@30fps, then again same would apply with REAL, unless you like blurry/blocky transition and loads of frame skipping. That's another thing with most low bandwidth REAL content, clueless encoder put "maximum quality/crisp" with low bandwidth, that gives you 1fps or 2 but not on a second calculation but on let's say 10 seconds, you see 1 second with 2-3 frames, wait 2-3 seconds, then se another 2-3 frames, ARGH! it's totally annoying.
I'd rather have lower resolution and see something smooth than seeing skipping or blurryness. With mpeg I was doing 6-10FPS at the same low resolution, it was doing a very good job, wasn't annoying, and the video was actually useful where as the guy who made the "REAL" thing simply should have encoded audio without video for the viewer's sake. Anyways, I've managed to make good stuff with Realvideo but I stopped being impressed after their G2 system, they just bloated the damn thing where some others managed to make better codec, players, and so on.
Anyways, I've fixed the "REAL" problem here at work, all of the REAL networks ip addresses are banned, this takes care of all of the problems at the same time. If someone on a laptop goes download it at home, you can configure your firewall to send you an alert once it tries to do it's thing and go remove it from the offending laptop. This is how you deal with spyware/lameware/FS-EULAware. If everybody would do this, the net would be just a tad more enjoyable, too bad people don't care about this.
I actually bought an "encrypted" system that sits on top of an older garage door opening system that doesn't have any code rolling after my car got stolen in my garage. The way it works is you map the "button" wire to that receiver device, sync it's encrypted remote to it and then it's basically a relay that "presses the button" with an encrypted link.
I Was trying to find articles about how secure it was, if there was any backdoors (like, ANY flaws that any good car thief would know about and render the whole system completely useless).
Thanks to slashdot, I won't be able to sleep until I finish wiring the alarm system in the garage as well:).
DMCA or not, if a company claims their device is 100% secure, you should have the TOTAL FREEDOM to either post the flaw publicly or ask them for a compensation to keep your mouth shut (I like that idea). It's not extortion, since their claims are false and they are giving a false sense of security to the people who are buying such systems. Don't make claims if they aren't true. Period.
I remember when Compaq bought the Alpha technology. I was invited to a demo for their new workstation machine, that was back in the late 90s, I remember the workstation they were demoing in front of everyone, nice audience, people that worked on the movie Titanic were there to explain how they used the alpha technology to render those huge datasets, manipulate large 3d models, etc etc...
They were so EVASIVE when people would specifically ask them to compare the Alpha Workstation to intel workstation. I mean everything looked professionnal up to that precise moment. Why on earth are you getting yourself in so much trouble to advertise your alpha workstation, invite people to costly hotel floor, serve them good food, etc, if you don't want to address the PRIMARY concern of your target audience? What "non-alpha" people (new customers) want to know is why would they go alpha if it's not for the proprietary software?
(In this case, Lightwave was one of the tools and it was cross-platform, every Lightwave users KNEW that the alpha crushed the PC in rendering, so hiding this fact looked very suspicious for this small portion of the people that were there. Then you add the fact they they didn't want to give any comparing numbers, being evasive and all. The only positive thing they mentionned is the FX32 emulator and the fact that they could run non-native software like photoshop in their alpha workstation. Now who the hell would buy a workstation like this if it doesn't show any appeal outside from the people that already know about it? If you say "3x faster rendering, only 1.5x the price" now there's an apeal! They didn't! How on earth are they going to gain sufficient marketshare with mouth-to-ear strategy, where amiga, for example, failed. With a CPU R&D buisness, you need a LOT of sales to cover you expenses, they had a bomb on their hands, and while I understand that they had to play nice with Intel, they could have thrown the bomb at intel instead of blowing up with it.
This is another situation where Money and Monopoly is bad for evolutions and revolutions, try to find ONE SINGLE alpha user that bitched about the architecture (before it got left out dying, obviously), make a percentage (you'll probably get something close to 0%), then compare that percentage with Intel users. Not that Intel technology is bad, but it sure isn't revolutionnary, heck I'm still waiting to get that 7505 chipset board with 2 2.8Ghz Xeon on it, everything is back order or N/A yet. If compaq would have had a clue, I'd have a box probably 4x more powerful today with win2k support and good driver support for about the same price... shame.
Well I have an account here, I have about 500 posts, so I can call myself an "active user".
The way you are talking is like if EVERYONE here that has an account is a pirate, that EVERYONE here that is an active member fits the profile you are mentionning.
Do you know what's the % of browsers that are connecting here that are Internet Explorer? Last time I saw the numbers, it was more than 40%, so I wouldn't call this a "linux-only fanatic website", in fact, I don't really care about the open-source versus proprietary software debate, Both exists, both have shown great advantages and great flaws. I couldn't care less about the MP3/RIAA debate, but see? there are other subjects here that are of interests, and I am sure that the "40%" figure using IE couldn't care less about the few who yells louder about sticking it to the man, like you say.
What I find irritating is when someone comes in , post something generalizing a userbase and think he knows everything, and the others modding him up are as hypocrite as he is. If you don't like it, you have the right, just go away, don't read it and get frustrated because of what you see, heck, consult someone if it stops you for sleeping!.
Here's a cluebat to knock yourself with: There are 1000s of users here, if one day the "kill them all" side post more comments on a specific article, it doesn't mean that the "Who cares" side is smaller or approves what is written under that specific article. Without getting into extensive statistical/probability issues, if one day 1 or 10 people are saying how bad the MPAA is, maybe it's not those same 1 or 10 people that are posting that article about how good spiderman was and they should buy the dvd.
Oh yeah, Taco does... well this guy runs the damn site, if I had a website that would have a lot of hits like his and that I had a minimal powertrip, I'd love to speak out loud like he's doing, almost anyone would. And besides, who tell's you its always his sincere opinion? maybe being provocative makes people post even more and generates discussions, that's what this site is about no? getting a clue now? good. Hope I helped.:)
--- Original message ---
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. KaZaA is one example. WordPerfect is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is VA Research^W Linux^W Software who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
I am just wondering about the fact that someone gets into a lot of work of doing the recording and all, and It's a very cool idea, I thought about doing that myself with all of my amiga hardware, but I wanted something better than DVD since it's still crunches a tad, and I'd have to remaster the uncompressed footage to the newer standard...
but the main thing that stopped me, consideration of making money with other's work without being able to retrace everyone to get the proper permissions to do so...
any thoughts on that?
from website: 1 Mbps: 1870ft(570m) outdoor.
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802.11g Hardware Arrives
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Too bad there aren't any 10Mbs+ *low cost* hardware for let's say 5,000M radius, that would surely be cool for remote regions. Everything is so expensive when you want just a bit more range. It's okay if a community wants to build something behind a bigger pipe, but you need a lot of people to be able to pay off for both the pipe and the hardware at that point. I guess the PDA/cellular combo is still a better option for specific remote cases for now.
Put a catchy IP trial header. Put it as a Top 10 list of the year Mix in Playboy in the summary
Now that you've got everyone's attention, put one of the top playmates's personnal webpage address, and witness the explosive results:) Man I'd love to see the realtime specs on this one.
- Superb effects at the time (one of the first heavy-3d film actually and one of the few with a good storyline, especially with the crap coming out since a few years
- Superb storyline (for an action movie)
- Superb ending (something that Hollywood is usually good at screwing up (dragonheart comes to mind) on of the main hero "DIES", something you won't see often, because good guys always live and win with hollywood.
- Overall, one of the best rounded movies in the 90s, I have yet to see a movie that will sustain me that much all long and heck even make me cry at the end (another rare thing with action movies, or totally screwed up that makes you want to laugh (or cry because you lost 10$:) )
Heck if T3 would be just 1/2 as good as T2 was, I'd pay 50$ to see it!
Producers relying on 3D renderings should always look at T2 to learn how to balance that technology, I never seen anything that was as balanced as T2 in the 90s; the CGI effects were coexisting with the storyline (and not only being a CGI festival covering the rest that would be crap, like Hollywood is selling nowadays).
Can't wait.
Heck while at it, why not announce Neuromancer the movie, that would make my day!:)
> Imagine telling this to a geek just back from a 15-year coma:
This scenario is total science fiction.
In the real world, you'd ask him how much MSFT shares he has, offer him double that price and.... profit!:)
3ware 7850 8 channel drive
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IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I bought that about a while ago when the maxtor 160GB 5400RPM drives started to ship.
I had to build a datacenter and storage price was the main issue. I had to have something cheap, yet hold a LOAD of data. Problem is personally I hate maxtor drives, I always found the more or less reliable (but drive experiences varies from a person to another so..). Anyways at that time maxtor were the only one offering 160GB drives, at a decent price/meg, and although 5400RPM is quite slow for access time, the main issue was cost so I could take a hit on access speed as long as "streaming" speed was fast enough.
the Adaptec 2400A card was the best at the time, simple, cheap efficient, it had 3 bad sides for my application, no 48Bits LBA support (130GB+), no 64bits PCI version (I was using a K7 thunder, and that chipset will slow down the pci bus to the slowest card connected to to bus, and since I wanted all available bandwidth to be thrown to the 64bits gigabit card, I couldn't accept using 32bits), and finally, no more than 4 drives. I wanted to break the terrabyte limit, so let's say I would have used 2 of those cards, it wouldn't have been price-performance-wise since the 2 would have shared the bus and I would have lost 2 drives for raid-5 instead of one with a 8 drive setup. but the performance of the Adaptec 2400A was the best. Still looks like the best overall today, yet I dunno if they are supporting 48bits LBA?
Anyways the 3ware 7850 was an excellent choice. Although their tech support is more or less good (like most tech supports) especially for real bugs and not just standard drivers reinstallation issues, the response time and sales people were very nice and professionnal. I got surprising results from the array, where I thought it would run like molasse, I was getting over 50MB/sec sustained non-sequential reading if I recall correctly. And the tools are very good, rebuild time is about 3-4 hours with 8x160GB @ 400GB filled on the drives, there are email alert tools and web interface to the host machine to check diagnostics. Overall it's a nice system and I'm sure the 7500 series are even better.
Oh and on a "funny" note, windows shows 1.1TB available in the explorer window, not 1134GB:) Reminds me when I plugued my first gigabyte drive in my amiga and saw big numbers:)
As for the maxtor drives, I didn't take any chances, I ordered 10 to get 2 spares, 2 blew off in less than a month, but didn't have any problems since then, I guess if you can afford the time, doing a 1 month burn-in test with non critical data isn't overkill. usually they SHOULD blow up one by one so you could rebuild the array:).
>This really gets back into the short term success syndrome that trashed Wall Street, among other things.
My point exactly. By giving us 1 or 2 seasons of each new show, and killing them off the bat, you piss off an audience... do it 3-4 times, and that audience will either not bother, or wait a year and download/grab recorded tapes of all of the previous episodes to catch up, or do exactly EVERYTHING exept what they'd hope they'd succeed by doing that.
Let's see... B5 crusade, cancelled at S1, leaving all of the suspense and not even bothered to end it in a "plausible" way. Simply cutted off.
Birds of prey, S1 cutoff. not that I really enjoyed the show that much (that telepathetic girl, I just can't look at her face). But still, there's was potential there.
Firefly, just when I was grasping the roles and started to want to follow it every week, bang, I hear it gets cut off.
Family guy, who doesn't like family guy? Cut off it seems as well.
Meanwhile you had Xfiles running for over 10 seasons and sucked more and more, southpark beating the same dead horse and not being funny anymore, buffy that litterally sucked 10x worse than any of the cancelled show in it's 6th season where she shoud have remained dead and it would have been one of the best series ending they would have got for such a show (at least they catched up a bit this year), etc etc...
My point is if I'm to get into a show that will get cancelled, I might as well buy a book, or make it a freaking 2 hours TV special or mini series, don't call it a new staroff or spinoff if you're not going to keep it.
The analogy I'd give is that on a windows system, Format C:\ and reinstalling it doesn't cure all of the problem, especially if the user made a bad manipulation or installed crappy software and reinstalls it after reinstalling windows, you end up with the same problem. Same goes with shows on TV, they use the same concept to another plot/time/blabla, and they hope this time the mix will work.
Then again, when you see stuff like Dr. Phil picking up ratings through the roof, you wonder how bad the target audience is;).
> Maybe this is begging the question, but WHY are you mad?
You're working on a project for over a year
You want gamers and other end-people to see and experience the FINAL result, maybe create some noise by having CONTROLLED (i.e. being very precise about what you want and don't want to show yet) demos.
You do some deals with some Hardware companies because hardware/drivers development is getting more and more complex and at some point in the development, it's easier to send an alpha build for the hardware company to do the QA on their drivers or reproduce specific bugs that you don't want to explain or make a little application to reproduce it (especially when it's getting to a point where it's a pile of little bugs left and right).
This is a good thing for the Game dev team and a good thing for the hardware team: they get to demo their technology in closed doors and the Game dev team gets better feedback and optimizations from the vendors where it can get optimized at the driver level. Also having more people on the QA testing of the engine doesn't hurt.
Naturally, all of this is confined with NDAs and closed environment, and I am sure the Vendors are in the obligation to make any investors or customers viewing anything more than what was shown publicly at E3 or any other demos to sign NDAs.
Now, every users can download UNFINISHED work, probably a RUSHED build so that they could make the demo on time, and have first hand EXPERIENCE with this build, while having first hand experience with a final build would be even better, now it will be only an "evolution" instead of a bigger bang that what people experienced with this leaked build.
While everyone here LOVES John's work, I don't want to speak for him, but personally I'd be seriously pissed at the person/company ruining the momentum I wanted to bring with a FINAL POLISHED product, in such a fashion. Of course the final will rock and people will love it, but until then, this shouldn't have happened and some head will fall for this. The people responsible for this leak will obviously have their head chopped off and better be looking for a job outside the graphics/game industry.
Anyways, we'll probably never know the whole truth on this but early reports seems to point at ATI... I'll wait for the official confirmation but if it would be them, as a (small) shareholder of ATI in my RSPs, I sure would be VERY disapointed at them.
I wouldn't be surprised for this to come from a hardware vendor, expecially after seeing some Drivers QA labs, When you hire "kids" to play games and do a bit of work, pay them a "kid" salary, and have more or less supervision, you can't ask them for being highly professionnal people and act like if they were CEOs with the same responsiblities and engagement, like one of my friend says (working at another company), you get what you pay for. Still, it's a shame if it would be ATI.
Re:This is very nice
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Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 5, Interesting
> Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk
Actually, you could say that about just EVERY product they've bought, EXEPT ghost.
The executable still fits on a 1.44MB diskette with MSDOS bootable files, and has a LOAD of features for the size.
I don't care about the TAR or tape driver portion of it, but I sure do care about the splitting, compression, encryption, being able to read the god damn compressed/encrypted/segmented file WITHOUT having to reghost it back to a hard drive in case I need a single file, I love being able to ghost directly to CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, to another machine or straight to a win2k server with ghost enterprise) exept that this portion is more or less good because of the fact that you need a dos packet driver and it causes a PITA with modern networking cards. I love the fact that it even worked with my 1.2TB raid (yeah, just for testing:)), it proves that the code base is solid and WORKS, all the features WORKS, they don't have crap like product activation, they aren't being lame about expiry or whatever other PITA software come with. This tool is one of the few that I'd put on EVERY sysadmin desk.
Okay it's not free, but it sure isn't overpriced compared to office suites or some other software out there that are doing far less and are in no way near as reliable as Ghost is. It pays for itself. Now if you want to compare this with a unix variant, be my guest, I have nothing against competition, but I sure do have something against +4 insightful comments based on something thrown in the air without substancial evidence. This isn't Norton Internet Security or Personnal Firewall that we are talking about (yes they really killed Atguard with this pile of... ).
The only thing I'd complain about ghost is that it's still dos based. I'd like to be able to have a hotswap IDE bay and keep my Win2k machine up and plug the drive, ghost it, move the file to my datacenter, and unplug without having to reboot or anything, that would be great, right now I use a testbench for this and it's still good enough for my needs, and saving me a LOT of time.
If you want to write something like 3DSMAX lightwave Maya or XSI, alone, you're either a genious or completely on crack. If you're a genious, and know how to make such an app, I don't understand where you could not have the intelligence or knowledge of coding it the right way with the right tools for the job.
I don't want to sound like a flame but comments like this always crack me up, if you want to see the biggest success of a "little people's job" look at lightwave3D, 2 guys made that software in the beginning, one guy on the modeler, one guy on the layout, today, they have a lot of people working with them because at some point, if you want to have features, one person or 2 people can't cut it anymore. Even if you know your 3d your maths and all. You'll always end up not knowing that little thing and require some research and steal valuable time...
Look at another example, project messiah, supposed to be the best thing out there, with the best renderer, the best animation software and all, all in one package... guess what? they are Late, they have a pissed off userbase, and while I have a lot of respect for that company and they did a lot in the 3d scene, they've hit a reality in the programming world that doesn't always apply in the 3D production world: you don't always meet your deadlines or objectives in time. So 1 year later than the "release announcement" they are still late, not because they suck or they have no talent, god, they got LOADS of talent there, and they've proven that they can do the work with the previous character animation plugin they've made for lightwave, but doing everything from scratch is more work than you can think of. Plus reinventing the wheel is kinda useless.
If I were you, I'd use my skills to write a new breed of plugin, there's always things that people would like implemented, new paradigms, new concepts, this year, stuff like sub-surface scattering and 3d hair were the big hit, be in advance, read some theorical siggraph paper, do some plugins, get known, and probably a 3d software company will notice you and buy your stuff to integrate it to their package and there you will be able to make a difference. I can name you people that got millionnaire that way.
Again, I'm wondering if this story isn't just a way to generate traffic and make people talk, Maya got an ARMY of developpers, Discreet (3dsmax) got a lot of people, Lightwave, less but still, it's NOT a one man's job. By the time you'll finish the basics, you'll have 10000s of features to catch up, and lots of debug too probably... anyways...
Well a movie that is worth going out to the theatre to watch is a big event in itself. The MPAA keep blaming piracy and P2P for their lower revenues, but they fail to take into account that every good movie made generated a buttload of cash (spiderman, monsters inc, LOTR I, etc).
Theatres wouldn't be dying off slowly if they would have more QUALITY content making the trip worth to see and making good use of "the big screen". I used to go to the movies every week before, now it's about once per 3 months. The quality dropped, so had my support for the movie industry.
LOTR II will be a movie that not only I'll go see, but I'll do like I did for monsters inc, shreck and LOTR I, I'll organise an office group to go watch it altogether and have a beer before or after. At least I'm sure I won't have people bitching that I made them lose a night with that movie;)
They should stomps the annoying Bugs in their software before stomping the competition with FUD... A better product always sells by itself, especially in a monopoly situation. They could have an happy userbase and a more pro-microsoft community by doing so.
RIght now they are focussing their energy in stomping both consumer (DRM) and market rights, stomping competition, and stomping whatever or whoever dares to say something bad against them. This is such a waste of energy only a PR departement with too much staff can afford.
Stupid yet annoying bug to give ONE example out of probably 1000+ that people could bring up:
Since windows 95, when I'm dragging a huge folder, explorer STILL doesn't display the remanining time correctly, saying example 2 minutes remaning, and then 388432 minutes (and going down by 600 minutes every 2 seconds), I mean, for god's sake, 5 years later, 3 service pack later, windows 2000 *STILL* has that bug. This is one dumb example, but imagine all the bugs that you don't directly see.
So please microsoft, don't focus on the few users you don't have, focus on making your current userbase HAPPY so that they aren't bleeding off to your potential competitor as soon as they get a chance or get too fed up, because THIS will cost you.
Amiga was just good at games, PC were serious tools while amiga was "just a console replacement with a keyboard" to quote the infidels;)
Funny how things changed in a matter of 10 years, and how games pushed the broad need for better technology more than CAD or 3D rendering software combined.
Anyways, saying that the PC is losing the game war is only a sensationnal catchy title to get people to react, in that respect I think it worked. In the real world, it's true that game companies face a barrier: you need a TEAM to design a big title game, it's no longuer the work of one programmer in his basement making a card game (at least for the MMORPG and FPS).
Consoles games originally were "simpler" and more arcade-oriented. While being complex in some perspective, the majority were still under the complexity level of the major PC titles (emphasis on MOST, and not ALL).
While in the PC world game companies are often facing a "pass or break" financial situation at every released title, consoles are catching up very fast with the same complexity and requirements in dev teams. You hear a lot of PC software companies being bought out or closing, I think this is one of the cause, either the project was too big for the dev team, either there was bad planning, or either the complexity was underestimated and the programmers got overloaded with work and cash ran out (i.e. bad planning).
Of course a console platform gaining more complexity will eventually face the same issues, I don't see the PC fading away anytime soon as a gaming market. The people claiming that also clamed that the PC would be dead many years ago and be replaced with "intelligent" consoles.
We're not even there yet, those webtv thing died a miserable death, and while companies like microsoft can afford losing million to make the concept real, if they really want this to pass, they will have to offer something that the PC doesn't offer, or offer it in a way that the PC looks obsolete by 10 years. DRM (i.e. restriction and proprietary solutions) is one of the "solution" and will not make this paradign shift happen, this is a very bad idea, we don't need to extend on this. So I don't see what else could.
Unless microsoft releases a console with a geforce 5, or buys out both ATI and NVIDIA and boycott PCs, it will simply not happen for the next few years.
To conclude, I'd say that the Console market and hardware looks more and more like a PC, with upgradable options (DVD, remotes, steering wheels, etc), PC video graphic chips, PC-like media instead of cardriges, etc. Console to PC way more than the PC trying to look like a console. So if they need to do that shifting in order to get more sales and keep up with technology, what does that tell you?
Yes of course some companies are delaying on PC, who cares, some others are releasing on PC way faster than console, no need to be alarmist about it, it's a buisness decision, and there's no number out yet saying if it was a good one or not.
They will put a gazillion conditions, give themselves the rights to sue you, your dog and all of your decendants till year 3000, and so on.
This I am affraid, you will have a hard time to change it, but what you can add before going into confrontation is clauses that protect you as well. I.e. they can't blackmail you, they can't accuse you of stuff that you didn't do, they can't stop you from working at a competitor's because they FIRED you (you didn't leave to go elsewhere) and here in Canada you can't stop someone from living his life, if you are a talented enginneer in rocket sciences, chances are you won't go to pump out gas or sell shoes. So if they can't afford you, it's not your problem, if a better company can afford you and it happens to be a competitor, well too bad, and this would hold off in court. The only thing that could go against you is if you are giving them the blueprints of what you were working on at the last company, or discuss their strategies.. this would be bad and breach your contract and besides... it's non-ethical.
The other way out if they do not want to protect you and make it only 1-way is to either go to the small claim court if what they owe you is under 3000$ (but be sure you have written evidance that they didn't want to include any of your self-protecting options in the contract, especially if they are general and legitimate, it will make them look terribly bad), another way out is simply sign it and if they ever sue you if it's that bad, here in canada it won't hold up in court, the judge will simply invalidate the contract because it's probably going to go against human right charts and work charts.
One last thing to consider: if they lay you off, they are out of cash, chances are they wouldn't be able to sue you in the first place, and chances are within the next year they will be out of buisness... but I can understand that you wouldn't want to sign such documents. I've managed to get my side protection saying that they really enjoyed my work and I was a very good employee and blablabla as a recomandation letter, so if they would blackmail me afterwards, they'd have to explain this to the judge, and they were so disorganized that I would have crushed them in no time, it's common and the last thing you need is to pay for a lawyer to comfort you and goign to court to get your money back, (small claim is okay but more than 3000$ is standard court with lawyer and long procedures, you don't want that, especially if what they owe you is under 5K.
>What a terrible idea! When you have no money $4000 is a lot. When you're looking at making $200,000 a year from your patent, $4000 is nothing, but 10% of your profits sure is. Terrible idea!
Well if you don't have the 4000$ you're not going anywhere in the first place.. and the lawyer has nothing to gain by agreeing to get "6000$ when I generate money". The risk vs. potential is not worth enough. It's like investors, they won't invest if they don't get at least a potnetial 10x+ their initial investment, so you give up (lets use fictionnal numbers) 66% of your shares in order to get 200,000$ financing plus your idea that is valued at 100,000$. You grow big, the company is now worth 3,000,000. Well you don't have the 3M$ but you have a nice 1M$ that you would never have hot they wouldn't have been there.
So basically, I'd gladly give a small % of my shares for a 1 man project if it could mean that I could SAVE PERSONNAL MONEY uphand.. you're giving paper, not your personnal savings, if it grows big, it's normal that everyone who took the risk with you at different level get rewarded accordingly. Of course if the lawyer asks 50% it's because he doesn't beleive in your project or that it will generate enough revenues to be worth his risk factor, or he's simply trying to screw you.
>I am not going to buy a DVD burner until the technology matures a little.
You can also do like me and wait over 2 years after they've announced DVD+R that would be cheaper faster and more compatible than DVD-R and come out within the "next 6 months"...
Now that DVD-R and DVD+R are out, guess what I bought? Pioneer A04, DVD-R, simply because I hate people that promise stuff (cough cough HP cough cough) and deliver over 2 years later. Plus, the cheaper is not the case, +R medium costs more, and faster.. well.. 2x or 2.4x, I'll still have to wait too much so it's not even an argument until they reach 4-8x.
+R is a better technology, maybe, but DVD-R been out for a while, been tested, been proven to do the job just great, and there are huge charts about what's compatible and not when you are buying medias.
Firmware issues can always happen, you patch your bios, you upgrade your drivers, you overclock your CD-RW:), I mean, it's something common and people that can't do it are already used to bring their computers for checkups or upgrades.
Of course I won't go up to the point of defending Pioneer for making a firmware that does this type of error, I was just commenting on your comment:)
Basically you can always wait... I can wait till maxtor releases a TB disk to store my video... or I can simply buy many 160/320GB drives and raid them. You can always wait for newer better and improved technology, but I saw so much FUD to cut off sales of the competitors, that now I am buying the stuff that is available NOW when I need it NOW. If I can wait, good thing, it's because I don't NEED it.
How is your family and friends reacting to all this? Do they understand why you did all this? were they aware of your activities (okay this might be a bit too much to ask since they could re-use that against you or them but still, I'd like to know at least their reaction and how they feel about the system and your actions).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go one step further...
:) ) to get the first sony CD-R burner. at the time it was cool, medias were about 20-30$ each depending on quantities and brands... back then, technology wasn't as rushed as today, and it was way more tested.
many many years ago I paid 2K$ (well, actually me and a bunch of friends shared
Today, too many bad experiences...anyone remembers the leaking capacitors motherboards for example?, Degrading DVDs (even commercial ones, slashdot ran a story about this a while ago). 23GB is nice, but I have yet to TRUST the safety of the data written on my DVDs after seeing a few RWs going down the drain... it pissed me off to lose 4GB of data, I can't imagine 23GB, especially after paying 4K for such a device.
"Microsoft Brand Penis enlargers anyone?"
:)
Why do I have that sadistic image of the device crashing and little Johnny turning blue?
Anyways, Microsoft doesn't need to sell any penis enlargers; they've got everyone by the balls already...
Usually people making negative waves grab more attention than people putting positive effort into something. Medias seem to love giving bad press.
If you're so confident about your platform outperforming another's platform, you should leave that other platform talk without even flaming back because you "know" that they won't be up to the match.
Reacting immaturely, flaming, crying out loud will not only look "kiddy", but will also get a press coverage like "Today, the conference was marked by a lot of people against [...]" and so on. Is that the kind of press that is needed?
I am not pro-MS or pro-Unix. If Flamer's argument is that microsoft keeps everything closed and are doing behind the door tactics, wouldn't it look more mature to simply accept the fact that they want to talk, and if you are confident about your platform, you could even make a debate. Usually people attending that kind of conference aren't idiots, if MS talks vague and conceptually like they love to do with their "marketting and PR" tactics, in the real world, with an intelligent and knowledgeable audience, I'm sure someone will bring them down to earth with insightful questions, and heck, you might even gain extra points beating their arguments live in the process.
Am I the only one who was expecting the trunk to actually close super fast (possibly causing injuries) while he sticked himself a bit inside?
:)
Damn you catchy story title!
Every new REALplayer release always brings up a privacy/spam/security issue on slashdot.
There was a time when Real was one of de facto thing for efficient streaming or simple encoding. Today it's not true. The player is bloated, the codec's CPU/quality factor isn't anything close spectacular (nor good I'd say), everything feels like molasse with their stuff, and on top of that, they are still pulling their dirty tricks. Why do people bother downloading it when there are TONS of alternatives?
Webmaster? heck you can encode DIVX, Quicktime, even Mpeg-1 codecs got good enough to make low bandwidth application (ok not at the same quality, but if you UNDERSTAND the basics of Mpeg you can manage to make a video that is efficient and still retains decent quality, and mpeg is cross-platform with no issues, I still use it, I do proper optimization with the vector settings vs skipping frames and chose the right encoder for the right application, each has it's strong and weak points), You can tweak the right encoding setting for the target bandwidth and voila, you're set. My last contract required me to encore a 4 minute clip, and I manage to make it small enough so dialup users could download it, it wasn't 320x240@30fps, then again same would apply with REAL, unless you like blurry/blocky transition and loads of frame skipping. That's another thing with most low bandwidth REAL content, clueless encoder put "maximum quality/crisp" with low bandwidth, that gives you 1fps or 2 but not on a second calculation but on let's say 10 seconds, you see 1 second with 2-3 frames, wait 2-3 seconds, then se another 2-3 frames, ARGH! it's totally annoying.
I'd rather have lower resolution and see something smooth than seeing skipping or blurryness. With mpeg I was doing 6-10FPS at the same low resolution, it was doing a very good job, wasn't annoying, and the video was actually useful where as the guy who made the "REAL" thing simply should have encoded audio without video for the viewer's sake. Anyways, I've managed to make good stuff with Realvideo but I stopped being impressed after their G2 system, they just bloated the damn thing where some others managed to make better codec, players, and so on.
Anyways, I've fixed the "REAL" problem here at work, all of the REAL networks ip addresses are banned, this takes care of all of the problems at the same time. If someone on a laptop goes download it at home, you can configure your firewall to send you an alert once it tries to do it's thing and go remove it from the offending laptop. This is how you deal with spyware/lameware/FS-EULAware. If everybody would do this, the net would be just a tad more enjoyable, too bad people don't care about this.
I actually bought an "encrypted" system that sits on top of an older garage door opening system that doesn't have any code rolling after my car got stolen in my garage. The way it works is you map the "button" wire to that receiver device, sync it's encrypted remote to it and then it's basically a relay that "presses the button" with an encrypted link.
:).
I Was trying to find articles about how secure it was, if there was any backdoors (like, ANY flaws that any good car thief would know about and render the whole system completely useless).
Thanks to slashdot, I won't be able to sleep until I finish wiring the alarm system in the garage as well
DMCA or not, if a company claims their device is 100% secure, you should have the TOTAL FREEDOM to either post the flaw publicly or ask them for a compensation to keep your mouth shut (I like that idea). It's not extortion, since their claims are false and they are giving a false sense of security to the people who are buying such systems. Don't make claims if they aren't true. Period.
Yey, 500th post, on a subject I like :)
I remember when Compaq bought the Alpha technology. I was invited to a demo for their new workstation machine, that was back in the late 90s, I remember the workstation they were demoing in front of everyone, nice audience, people that worked on the movie Titanic were there to explain how they used the alpha technology to render those huge datasets, manipulate large 3d models, etc etc...
They were so EVASIVE when people would specifically ask them to compare the Alpha Workstation to intel workstation. I mean everything looked professionnal up to that precise moment. Why on earth are you getting yourself in so much trouble to advertise your alpha workstation, invite people to costly hotel floor, serve them good food, etc, if you don't want to address the PRIMARY concern of your target audience? What "non-alpha" people (new customers) want to know is why would they go alpha if it's not for the proprietary software?
(In this case, Lightwave was one of the tools and it was cross-platform, every Lightwave users KNEW that the alpha crushed the PC in rendering, so hiding this fact looked very suspicious for this small portion of the people that were there. Then you add the fact they they didn't want to give any comparing numbers, being evasive and all. The only positive thing they mentionned is the FX32 emulator and the fact that they could run non-native software like photoshop in their alpha workstation. Now who the hell would buy a workstation like this if it doesn't show any appeal outside from the people that already know about it? If you say "3x faster rendering, only 1.5x the price" now there's an apeal! They didn't! How on earth are they going to gain sufficient marketshare with mouth-to-ear strategy, where amiga, for example, failed. With a CPU R&D buisness, you need a LOT of sales to cover you expenses, they had a bomb on their hands, and while I understand that they had to play nice with Intel, they could have thrown the bomb at intel instead of blowing up with it.
This is another situation where Money and Monopoly is bad for evolutions and revolutions, try to find ONE SINGLE alpha user that bitched about the architecture (before it got left out dying, obviously), make a percentage (you'll probably get something close to 0%), then compare that percentage with Intel users. Not that Intel technology is bad, but it sure isn't revolutionnary, heck I'm still waiting to get that 7505 chipset board with 2 2.8Ghz Xeon on it, everything is back order or N/A yet. If compaq would have had a clue, I'd have a box probably 4x more powerful today with win2k support and good driver support for about the same price... shame.
Well I have an account here, I have about 500 posts, so I can call myself an "active user".
:)
The way you are talking is like if EVERYONE here that has an account is a pirate, that EVERYONE here that is an active member fits the profile you are mentionning.
Do you know what's the % of browsers that are connecting here that are Internet Explorer? Last time I saw the numbers, it was more than 40%, so I wouldn't call this a "linux-only fanatic website", in fact, I don't really care about the open-source versus proprietary software debate, Both exists, both have shown great advantages and great flaws. I couldn't care less about the MP3/RIAA debate, but see? there are other subjects here that are of interests, and I am sure that the "40%" figure using IE couldn't care less about the few who yells louder about sticking it to the man, like you say.
What I find irritating is when someone comes in , post something generalizing a userbase and think he knows everything, and the others modding him up are as hypocrite as he is. If you don't like it, you have the right, just go away, don't read it and get frustrated because of what you see, heck, consult someone if it stops you for sleeping!.
Here's a cluebat to knock yourself with: There are 1000s of users here, if one day the "kill them all" side post more comments on a specific article, it doesn't mean that the "Who cares" side is smaller or approves what is written under that specific article. Without getting into extensive statistical/probability issues, if one day 1 or 10 people are saying how bad the MPAA is, maybe it's not those same 1 or 10 people that are posting that article about how good spiderman was and they should buy the dvd.
Oh yeah, Taco does... well this guy runs the damn site, if I had a website that would have a lot of hits like his and that I had a minimal powertrip, I'd love to speak out loud like he's doing, almost anyone would. And besides, who tell's you its always his sincere opinion? maybe being provocative makes people post even more and generates discussions, that's what this site is about no? getting a clue now? good. Hope I helped.
--- Original message ---
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. KaZaA is one example. WordPerfect is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is VA Research^W Linux^W Software who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
I am just wondering about the fact that someone gets into a lot of work of doing the recording and all, and It's a very cool idea, I thought about doing that myself with all of my amiga hardware, but I wanted something better than DVD since it's still crunches a tad, and I'd have to remaster the uncompressed footage to the newer standard...
but the main thing that stopped me, consideration of making money with other's work without being able to retrace everyone to get the proper permissions to do so...
any thoughts on that?
Speed outdoor indoor.
54 Mbps. 165ft(50m) 65ft(20m)
18 Mbps: 490ft(150m) 245ft(75m)
11 Mbps. 590ft(180m) 410ft(125m)
1 Mbps: 1870ft(570m) 410ft(125m)
Too bad there aren't any 10Mbs+ *low cost* hardware for let's say 5,000M radius, that would surely be cool for remote regions. Everything is so expensive when you want just a bit more range. It's okay if a community wants to build something behind a bigger pipe, but you need a lot of people to be able to pay off for both the pipe and the hardware at that point. I guess the PDA/cellular combo is still a better option for specific remote cases for now.
Put a catchy IP trial header.
Put it as a Top 10 list of the year
Mix in Playboy in the summary
Now that you've got everyone's attention, put one of the top playmates's personnal webpage address, and witness the explosive results
Who's been waiting for T3??
:) )
:)
I know that T2 is *MY* cult movie.
- Superb effects at the time (one of the first heavy-3d film actually and one of the few with a good storyline, especially with the crap coming out since a few years
- Superb storyline (for an action movie)
- Superb ending (something that Hollywood is usually good at screwing up (dragonheart comes to mind) on of the main hero "DIES", something you won't see often, because good guys always live and win with hollywood.
- Overall, one of the best rounded movies in the 90s, I have yet to see a movie that will sustain me that much all long and heck even make me cry at the end (another rare thing with action movies, or totally screwed up that makes you want to laugh (or cry because you lost 10$
Heck if T3 would be just 1/2 as good as T2 was, I'd pay 50$ to see it!
Producers relying on 3D renderings should always look at T2 to learn how to balance that technology, I never seen anything that was as balanced as T2 in the 90s; the CGI effects were coexisting with the storyline (and not only being a CGI festival covering the rest that would be crap, like Hollywood is selling nowadays).
Can't wait.
Heck while at it, why not announce Neuromancer the movie, that would make my day!
> Imagine telling this to a geek just back from a 15-year coma:
.... profit! :)
This scenario is total science fiction.
In the real world, you'd ask him how much MSFT shares he has, offer him double that price and
I bought that about a while ago when the maxtor 160GB 5400RPM drives started to ship.
:) Reminds me when I plugued my first gigabyte drive in my amiga and saw big numbers :)
:).
I had to build a datacenter and storage price was the main issue. I had to have something cheap, yet hold a LOAD of data. Problem is personally I hate maxtor drives, I always found the more or less reliable (but drive experiences varies from a person to another so..). Anyways at that time maxtor were the only one offering 160GB drives, at a decent price/meg, and although 5400RPM is quite slow for access time, the main issue was cost so I could take a hit on access speed as long as "streaming" speed was fast enough.
the Adaptec 2400A card was the best at the time, simple, cheap efficient, it had 3 bad sides for my application, no 48Bits LBA support (130GB+), no 64bits PCI version (I was using a K7 thunder, and that chipset will slow down the pci bus to the slowest card connected to to bus, and since I wanted all available bandwidth to be thrown to the 64bits gigabit card, I couldn't accept using 32bits), and finally, no more than 4 drives. I wanted to break the terrabyte limit, so let's say I would have used 2 of those cards, it wouldn't have been price-performance-wise since the 2 would have shared the bus and I would have lost 2 drives for raid-5 instead of one with a 8 drive setup. but the performance of the Adaptec 2400A was the best. Still looks like the best overall today, yet I dunno if they are supporting 48bits LBA?
Anyways the 3ware 7850 was an excellent choice. Although their tech support is more or less good (like most tech supports) especially for real bugs and not just standard drivers reinstallation issues, the response time and sales people were very nice and professionnal. I got surprising results from the array, where I thought it would run like molasse, I was getting over 50MB/sec sustained non-sequential reading if I recall correctly. And the tools are very good, rebuild time is about 3-4 hours with 8x160GB @ 400GB filled on the drives, there are email alert tools and web interface to the host machine to check diagnostics. Overall it's a nice system and I'm sure the 7500 series are even better.
Oh and on a "funny" note, windows shows 1.1TB available in the explorer window, not 1134GB
As for the maxtor drives, I didn't take any chances, I ordered 10 to get 2 spares, 2 blew off in less than a month, but didn't have any problems since then, I guess if you can afford the time, doing a 1 month burn-in test with non critical data isn't overkill. usually they SHOULD blow up one by one so you could rebuild the array
>This really gets back into the short term success syndrome that trashed Wall Street, among other things.
;).
My point exactly. By giving us 1 or 2 seasons of each new show, and killing them off the bat, you piss off an audience... do it 3-4 times, and that audience will either not bother, or wait a year and download/grab recorded tapes of all of the previous episodes to catch up, or do exactly EVERYTHING exept what they'd hope they'd succeed by doing that.
Let's see... B5 crusade, cancelled at S1, leaving all of the suspense and not even bothered to end it in a "plausible" way. Simply cutted off.
Birds of prey, S1 cutoff. not that I really enjoyed the show that much (that telepathetic girl, I just can't look at her face). But still, there's was potential there.
Firefly, just when I was grasping the roles and started to want to follow it every week, bang, I hear it gets cut off.
Family guy, who doesn't like family guy? Cut off it seems as well.
Meanwhile you had Xfiles running for over 10 seasons and sucked more and more, southpark beating the same dead horse and not being funny anymore, buffy that litterally sucked 10x worse than any of the cancelled show in it's 6th season where she shoud have remained dead and it would have been one of the best series ending they would have got for such a show (at least they catched up a bit this year), etc etc...
My point is if I'm to get into a show that will get cancelled, I might as well buy a book, or make it a freaking 2 hours TV special or mini series, don't call it a new staroff or spinoff if you're not going to keep it.
The analogy I'd give is that on a windows system, Format C:\ and reinstalling it doesn't cure all of the problem, especially if the user made a bad manipulation or installed crappy software and reinstalls it after reinstalling windows, you end up with the same problem. Same goes with shows on TV, they use the same concept to another plot/time/blabla, and they hope this time the mix will work.
Then again, when you see stuff like Dr. Phil picking up ratings through the roof, you wonder how bad the target audience is
> Maybe this is begging the question, but WHY are you mad?
You're working on a project for over a year
You want gamers and other end-people to see and experience the FINAL result, maybe create some noise by having CONTROLLED (i.e. being very precise about what you want and don't want to show yet) demos.
You do some deals with some Hardware companies because hardware/drivers development is getting more and more complex and at some point in the development, it's easier to send an alpha build for the hardware company to do the QA on their drivers or reproduce specific bugs that you don't want to explain or make a little application to reproduce it (especially when it's getting to a point where it's a pile of little bugs left and right).
This is a good thing for the Game dev team and a good thing for the hardware team: they get to demo their technology in closed doors and the Game dev team gets better feedback and optimizations from the vendors where it can get optimized at the driver level. Also having more people on the QA testing of the engine doesn't hurt.
Naturally, all of this is confined with NDAs and closed environment, and I am sure the Vendors are in the obligation to make any investors or customers viewing anything more than what was shown publicly at E3 or any other demos to sign NDAs.
Now, every users can download UNFINISHED work, probably a RUSHED build so that they could make the demo on time, and have first hand EXPERIENCE with this build, while having first hand experience with a final build would be even better, now it will be only an "evolution" instead of a bigger bang that what people experienced with this leaked build.
While everyone here LOVES John's work, I don't want to speak for him, but personally I'd be seriously pissed at the person/company ruining the momentum I wanted to bring with a FINAL POLISHED product, in such a fashion. Of course the final will rock and people will love it, but until then, this shouldn't have happened and some head will fall for this. The people responsible for this leak will obviously have their head chopped off and better be looking for a job outside the graphics/game industry.
Anyways, we'll probably never know the whole truth on this but early reports seems to point at ATI... I'll wait for the official confirmation but if it would be them, as a (small) shareholder of ATI in my RSPs, I sure would be VERY disapointed at them.
I wouldn't be surprised for this to come from a hardware vendor, expecially after seeing some Drivers QA labs, When you hire "kids" to play games and do a bit of work, pay them a "kid" salary, and have more or less supervision, you can't ask them for being highly professionnal people and act like if they were CEOs with the same responsiblities and engagement, like one of my friend says (working at another company), you get what you pay for. Still, it's a shame if it would be ATI.
> Ever since Symantec bought Ghost, they've been changing it from a simple, easy to use, small, beautiful and most of all SMALL utility to a typical bloated pile of junk
:)), it proves that the code base is solid and WORKS, all the features WORKS, they don't have crap like product activation, they aren't being lame about expiry or whatever other PITA software come with. This tool is one of the few that I'd put on EVERY sysadmin desk.
... ).
Actually, you could say that about just EVERY product they've bought, EXEPT ghost.
The executable still fits on a 1.44MB diskette with MSDOS bootable files, and has a LOAD of features for the size.
I don't care about the TAR or tape driver portion of it, but I sure do care about the splitting, compression, encryption, being able to read the god damn compressed/encrypted/segmented file WITHOUT having to reghost it back to a hard drive in case I need a single file, I love being able to ghost directly to CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, to another machine or straight to a win2k server with ghost enterprise) exept that this portion is more or less good because of the fact that you need a dos packet driver and it causes a PITA with modern networking cards. I love the fact that it even worked with my 1.2TB raid (yeah, just for testing
Okay it's not free, but it sure isn't overpriced compared to office suites or some other software out there that are doing far less and are in no way near as reliable as Ghost is. It pays for itself. Now if you want to compare this with a unix variant, be my guest, I have nothing against competition, but I sure do have something against +4 insightful comments based on something thrown in the air without substancial evidence. This isn't Norton Internet Security or Personnal Firewall that we are talking about (yes they really killed Atguard with this pile of
The only thing I'd complain about ghost is that it's still dos based. I'd like to be able to have a hotswap IDE bay and keep my Win2k machine up and plug the drive, ghost it, move the file to my datacenter, and unplug without having to reboot or anything, that would be great, right now I use a testbench for this and it's still good enough for my needs, and saving me a LOT of time.
If you want to write something like 3DSMAX lightwave Maya or XSI, alone, you're either a genious or completely on crack. If you're a genious, and know how to make such an app, I don't understand where you could not have the intelligence or knowledge of coding it the right way with the right tools for the job.
I don't want to sound like a flame but comments like this always crack me up, if you want to see the biggest success of a "little people's job" look at lightwave3D, 2 guys made that software in the beginning, one guy on the modeler, one guy on the layout, today, they have a lot of people working with them because at some point, if you want to have features, one person or 2 people can't cut it anymore. Even if you know your 3d your maths and all. You'll always end up not knowing that little thing and require some research and steal valuable time...
Look at another example, project messiah, supposed to be the best thing out there, with the best renderer, the best animation software and all, all in one package... guess what? they are Late, they have a pissed off userbase, and while I have a lot of respect for that company and they did a lot in the 3d scene, they've hit a reality in the programming world that doesn't always apply in the 3D production world: you don't always meet your deadlines or objectives in time. So 1 year later than the "release announcement" they are still late, not because they suck or they have no talent, god, they got LOADS of talent there, and they've proven that they can do the work with the previous character animation plugin they've made for lightwave, but doing everything from scratch is more work than you can think of. Plus reinventing the wheel is kinda useless.
If I were you, I'd use my skills to write a new breed of plugin, there's always things that people would like implemented, new paradigms, new concepts, this year, stuff like sub-surface scattering and 3d hair were the big hit, be in advance, read some theorical siggraph paper, do some plugins, get known, and probably a 3d software company will notice you and buy your stuff to integrate it to their package and there you will be able to make a difference. I can name you people that got millionnaire that way.
Again, I'm wondering if this story isn't just a way to generate traffic and make people talk, Maya got an ARMY of developpers, Discreet (3dsmax) got a lot of people, Lightwave, less but still, it's NOT a one man's job. By the time you'll finish the basics, you'll have 10000s of features to catch up, and lots of debug too probably... anyways...
Well a movie that is worth going out to the theatre to watch is a big event in itself. The MPAA keep blaming piracy and P2P for their lower revenues, but they fail to take into account that every good movie made generated a buttload of cash (spiderman, monsters inc, LOTR I, etc).
Theatres wouldn't be dying off slowly if they would have more QUALITY content making the trip worth to see and making good use of "the big screen". I used to go to the movies every week before, now it's about once per 3 months. The quality dropped, so had my support for the movie industry.
LOTR II will be a movie that not only I'll go see, but I'll do like I did for monsters inc, shreck and LOTR I, I'll organise an office group to go watch it altogether and have a beer before or after. At least I'm sure I won't have people bitching that I made them lose a night with that movie
They should stomps the annoying Bugs in their software before stomping the competition with FUD... A better product always sells by itself, especially in a monopoly situation. They could have an happy userbase and a more pro-microsoft community by doing so.
RIght now they are focussing their energy in stomping both consumer (DRM) and market rights, stomping competition, and stomping whatever or whoever dares to say something bad against them. This is such a waste of energy only a PR departement with too much staff can afford.
Stupid yet annoying bug to give ONE example out of probably 1000+ that people could bring up:
Since windows 95, when I'm dragging a huge folder, explorer STILL doesn't display the remanining time correctly, saying example 2 minutes remaning, and then 388432 minutes (and going down by 600 minutes every 2 seconds), I mean, for god's sake, 5 years later, 3 service pack later, windows 2000 *STILL* has that bug. This is one dumb example, but imagine all the bugs that you don't directly see.
So please microsoft, don't focus on the few users you don't have, focus on making your current userbase HAPPY so that they aren't bleeding off to your potential competitor as soon as they get a chance or get too fed up, because THIS will cost you.
Amiga was just good at games, PC were serious tools while amiga was "just a console replacement with a keyboard" to quote the infidels ;)
Funny how things changed in a matter of 10 years, and how games pushed the broad need for better technology more than CAD or 3D rendering software combined.
Anyways, saying that the PC is losing the game war is only a sensationnal catchy title to get people to react, in that respect I think it worked. In the real world, it's true that game companies face a barrier: you need a TEAM to design a big title game, it's no longuer the work of one programmer in his basement making a card game (at least for the MMORPG and FPS).
Consoles games originally were "simpler" and more arcade-oriented. While being complex in some perspective, the majority were still under the complexity level of the major PC titles (emphasis on MOST, and not ALL).
While in the PC world game companies are often facing a "pass or break" financial situation at every released title, consoles are catching up very fast with the same complexity and requirements in dev teams. You hear a lot of PC software companies being bought out or closing, I think this is one of the cause, either the project was too big for the dev team, either there was bad planning, or either the complexity was underestimated and the programmers got overloaded with work and cash ran out (i.e. bad planning).
Of course a console platform gaining more complexity will eventually face the same issues, I don't see the PC fading away anytime soon as a gaming market. The people claiming that also clamed that the PC would be dead many years ago and be replaced with "intelligent" consoles.
We're not even there yet, those webtv thing died a miserable death, and while companies like microsoft can afford losing million to make the concept real, if they really want this to pass, they will have to offer something that the PC doesn't offer, or offer it in a way that the PC looks obsolete by 10 years. DRM (i.e. restriction and proprietary solutions) is one of the "solution" and will not make this paradign shift happen, this is a very bad idea, we don't need to extend on this. So I don't see what else could.
Unless microsoft releases a console with a geforce 5, or buys out both ATI and NVIDIA and boycott PCs, it will simply not happen for the next few years.
To conclude, I'd say that the Console market and hardware looks more and more like a PC, with upgradable options (DVD, remotes, steering wheels, etc), PC video graphic chips, PC-like media instead of cardriges, etc. Console to PC way more than the PC trying to look like a console. So if they need to do that shifting in order to get more sales and keep up with technology, what does that tell you?
Yes of course some companies are delaying on PC, who cares, some others are releasing on PC way faster than console, no need to be alarmist about it, it's a buisness decision, and there's no number out yet saying if it was a good one or not.
They will put a gazillion conditions, give themselves the rights to sue you, your dog and all of your decendants till year 3000, and so on.
This I am affraid, you will have a hard time to change it, but what you can add before going into confrontation is clauses that protect you as well. I.e. they can't blackmail you, they can't accuse you of stuff that you didn't do, they can't stop you from working at a competitor's because they FIRED you (you didn't leave to go elsewhere) and here in Canada you can't stop someone from living his life, if you are a talented enginneer in rocket sciences, chances are you won't go to pump out gas or sell shoes. So if they can't afford you, it's not your problem, if a better company can afford you and it happens to be a competitor, well too bad, and this would hold off in court. The only thing that could go against you is if you are giving them the blueprints of what you were working on at the last company, or discuss their strategies.. this would be bad and breach your contract and besides... it's non-ethical.
The other way out if they do not want to protect you and make it only 1-way is to either go to the small claim court if what they owe you is under 3000$ (but be sure you have written evidance that they didn't want to include any of your self-protecting options in the contract, especially if they are general and legitimate, it will make them look terribly bad), another way out is simply sign it and if they ever sue you if it's that bad, here in canada it won't hold up in court, the judge will simply invalidate the contract because it's probably going to go against human right charts and work charts.
One last thing to consider: if they lay you off, they are out of cash, chances are they wouldn't be able to sue you in the first place, and chances are within the next year they will be out of buisness... but I can understand that you wouldn't want to sign such documents. I've managed to get my side protection saying that they really enjoyed my work and I was a very good employee and blablabla as a recomandation letter, so if they would blackmail me afterwards, they'd have to explain this to the judge, and they were so disorganized that I would have crushed them in no time, it's common and the last thing you need is to pay for a lawyer to comfort you and goign to court to get your money back, (small claim is okay but more than 3000$ is standard court with lawyer and long procedures, you don't want that, especially if what they owe you is under 5K.
Hope this helps... and good luck.
>What a terrible idea! When you have no money $4000 is a lot. When you're looking at making $200,000 a year from your patent, $4000 is nothing, but 10% of your profits sure is. Terrible idea!
Well if you don't have the 4000$ you're not going anywhere in the first place.. and the lawyer has nothing to gain by agreeing to get "6000$ when I generate money". The risk vs. potential is not worth enough. It's like investors, they won't invest if they don't get at least a potnetial 10x+ their initial investment, so you give up (lets use fictionnal numbers) 66% of your shares in order to get 200,000$ financing plus your idea that is valued at 100,000$. You grow big, the company is now worth 3,000,000. Well you don't have the 3M$ but you have a nice 1M$ that you would never have hot they wouldn't have been there.
So basically, I'd gladly give a small % of my shares for a 1 man project if it could mean that I could SAVE PERSONNAL MONEY uphand.. you're giving paper, not your personnal savings, if it grows big, it's normal that everyone who took the risk with you at different level get rewarded accordingly. Of course if the lawyer asks 50% it's because he doesn't beleive in your project or that it will generate enough revenues to be worth his risk factor, or he's simply trying to screw you.
>I am not going to buy a DVD burner until the technology matures a little.
:), I mean, it's something common and people that can't do it are already used to bring their computers for checkups or upgrades.
:)
You can also do like me and wait over 2 years after they've announced DVD+R that would be cheaper faster and more compatible than DVD-R and come out within the "next 6 months"...
Now that DVD-R and DVD+R are out, guess what I bought? Pioneer A04, DVD-R, simply because I hate people that promise stuff (cough cough HP cough cough) and deliver over 2 years later. Plus, the cheaper is not the case, +R medium costs more, and faster.. well.. 2x or 2.4x, I'll still have to wait too much so it's not even an argument until they reach 4-8x.
+R is a better technology, maybe, but DVD-R been out for a while, been tested, been proven to do the job just great, and there are huge charts about what's compatible and not when you are buying medias.
Firmware issues can always happen, you patch your bios, you upgrade your drivers, you overclock your CD-RW
Of course I won't go up to the point of defending Pioneer for making a firmware that does this type of error, I was just commenting on your comment
Basically you can always wait... I can wait till maxtor releases a TB disk to store my video... or I can simply buy many 160/320GB drives and raid them. You can always wait for newer better and improved technology, but I saw so much FUD to cut off sales of the competitors, that now I am buying the stuff that is available NOW when I need it NOW. If I can wait, good thing, it's because I don't NEED it.
How is your family and friends reacting to all this? Do they understand why you did all this? were they aware of your activities (okay this might be a bit too much to ask since they could re-use that against you or them but still, I'd like to know at least their reaction and how they feel about the system and your actions).
Thanks.