In D3D's defence, they had a number of optional features in D3D9, but developers really got to loathing the caps, so it was mostly abandoned for D3D10+.
As to D3D9's 'set functionality', it's true that Microsoft tried to lock down what you could add to the API. But you should check out Aras' D3D9 cheat sheet for hacked-in functionality. While there aren't any easy vectors for adding extra functionality to D3D9, that hasn't stopped ATI and NVIDIA from offering stuff through some of the weirdest and ugliest hacks imaginable. (Let's have a round of applause for the tesselation factor and point parameter render states, shall we?)
That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree that OpenGL has provided a much cleaner approach to extensibility of the API.
I'm really hoping that someone will write a post-mortem of the project for Game Developer magazine. It sounds like what happened here was a classic case of "the design document is in my head."
I once worked on a game project that lacked direction; I'm curious to hear just how much the experience here mirrored my own. (From the post linked in the story, it sounds suspiciously similar. If you don't have someone at your company whose mandate includes calling bull$#!% on projects that aren't going anywhere, and has the power to affect change, the end result is obvious.)
One more caveat on Apple mice worth mentioning explicitly; they only have one clicker for the multiple mouse buttons (as others have mentioned) which means it's impossible to a L+R simultaneous click. Since some apps do use this combination explicitly (i.e., Blender), this can be very frustrating.
(Blender does have offer an alternative way to trigger/emulate this mouse combo, but that requires holding down a key on the keyboard, and thus is considerably less elegant/easy to trigger.)
What part of "the Classic Controller Pro, a new input device for the Wii of a more typical design than the Wii Remote" was lost on you?
Actually, if you want to go splitting hairs, it's really a new input device for the Wiimote, so the OP does have a point about the description being a touch misleading/inaccurate.;)
To understand why this may be a poor choice for 3D glasses technology for consumers, as well as some thoughts on why NVIDIA might have gone with it anyways, here's an article that gets into the nitty gritty. Brief summary; headaches and batteries.
(Insert usual disclaimer about the Inquirer not exactly being an enthusiastic supporter of NVIDIA here..)
The main problem here is that OpenID was never a first-class citizen. If I go to a site that does support OpenID for login, which is a rarity, they only give the most basic of abilities to me. Whereas if I create a username in their system, suddenly I can create a profile for myself, set some preferences, etc. (Livejournal and Blogger being two notable ones.)
I really like OpenID, but my feeling is that companies never really wanted it in the first place. Sure the person running the site probably thought it was a great idea, but I'm sure the suits looked at it and thought "gee, I'm not going to be able to force my users to give me their full address and credit card before letting them do anything on my site, if they're logged in with this openid thing.." So instead, they use it as a teaser, and up-sell you on a real login. Of course, users aren't stupid, and if you're going to write comments on a blog and you think there's a hope in hell that you'll ever want to use the 'full' features of the site, you'll create a login instead.
What could save companies from this problem would be if they'd allow you to tie an OpenID to your login, and use that to login instead. (See stackoverflow.) But instead, a lot of sites prefer to use it as a way to avoid requiring a captcha for "anonymous" comments.
Also, it'd help if some of the big players weren't such dicks, and allowed you to login with an external OpenID rather than only exporting an OpenID.. It has to be a two-way street.
The key to the Mac and PC commercials has been their positioning.
Apple's Macs are all-in-one machines, that come with both hardware and software. So it's easy for them to position their avatar and straw man appropriately to showcase the advantages of their platform versus Microsoft's. "I'm a has-it-all-together Mac, you're a slightly confused yet assertive PC. Gee, why am I simpler to set up and use?"
Microsoft sells just the software, so they aimed to take the focus off of the 'whole package' aspect and instead focus on the users. Hence their "I'm a PC" campaign. (Incidentally, someone needs to tell Microsoft that PC stands for 'Personal Computer,' and not 'Person using a Computer'..)
The proper Linux positioning should be about Open Source, and how everyone contributes. So instead of an "I'm Linux" response, I'd suggest "We're Linux." Unlike how Microsoft's approach bends the meaning of words 'til they break, "We're Linux" would actually ring true on a lot of levels, from all of the different people whose pieces are put together to make one distribution, to the number of distributions available, to the sheer number of platforms that Linux has been ported to.
Um, they've since dropped all backwards compatibility for PS2 from the new machines. The PS3 machines being manufactured today don't have support for any PS2 games anymore..
People were educated about the new system, which is why it failed. In particular, rural voters looked at it and realized that:
- there will be fewer seats in parliament to accommodate the proportional/list MPs, which means rural ridings will be larger and rural voters will have less representation
- those list MPs will likely come from urban areas, and aren't likely to have rural interests at the forefront of their minds
As a result, they all voted it down in droves.
If we really want to revise our electoral system, we need to do it one step at a time. I really wish we'd made the baby step of going for run-off ballot, rather than picking something ambitious like this.
Printer drivers are bloated in part because of the OCR code and reference images that they're forced to include. Seriously; try scanning and printing an American dollar bill, and see what happens.
It's obvious that the graphics angle is really just a Trojan horse; they're using graphics as the reason to get it into the largest number of hands possible, but what they really want to do is to keep people writing for the X86 instruction set, rather than OpenCL, DirectX 11, or CUDA. Lock-in with the X86 instruction set has served them too well in the past.
In other words, general compute was an area where things were slipping out of their grasp; this is a means to shore things up.
It's a sound business strategy. But I have to agree with blogger-dude; I don't see them being overly competitive with NVIDIA and AMD's latest parts for rasterized graphics anytime soon.
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
The GPU is a NVIDIA chip. Linux drivers from NVIDIA are closed-source, and I haven't heard of any low-level hardware documentation being handed out to people looking to write open source alternatives. How would people program the GPU under PS3 Linux without that documentation?
FFXII was set in a world created for the earlier game Final Fantasy Tactics, and the team was lead by the folks behind that game. As far as I know, all previous games have had a completely new world, with the possible exception of FFIX.
I am a touch concerned, though, as you are, about the upcoming Final Fantasy games. This recent approach by Square-Enix to make the Final Fantasy series into multiple-game affairs spread across everything from portables and cellphones up to the latest cutting-edge home console is causing them to over-think and over-engineer the worlds in which their characters reside. The games, or to be more specific the stories, are losing their focus and suffering for it.
On the upside, at least they're re-releasing Final Fantasy IV on the DS with updated visuals. (That's FFII from the SNES) It'll be nice to take that trip back in time to when the worlds were self-contained and focused on the premise rather than providing fodder for all the requisite/inevitable spin-offs.
In listening to his argument and reflecting on it a bit, I don't disagree with what he's saying. It's important for students to understand what the numbers mean and how they work, and cast in that particular light, this new math does have the potential to address those concerns. What I object to is that the scope of the subject has been greatly expanded to include teaching communication skills, without recognition of the additional time that'll be required. As a result, the classic algorithms, the fundamentals you need to rely upon, are being pushed out to save time.
The other thing that confuses me is that I seem to recall all of this 'what numbers mean' stuff having been covered back when I was in elementary school. I understood it then, but some of my classmates did not. Will making fundamental changes like this to the curriculum really bring more kids on board, or will it make it so that people who are, for example, more verbally oriented do better, but people who have a more logical learning style do not?
Or is the goal to reach those students which are considered 'unteachable,' who just refuse to do the math because they haven't been able to build that mental basis to work from? And if so, are we holding back the other students who've already latched onto the concepts and are now bored out of their skulls? One of the main ways that teachers maintain control of their class is by making sure their students are all following along with the subject, regardless of their aptitude. For brighter students, it can make a student come to dread a subject they excel at.
Just as important is communicating to the parents what's going on, and I don't see that happening. My dad diligently worked through the book trying to understand what some of the problems were asking of my younger sister. The terminology was completely different, and there was no place where it was adequately explained in the text. Even worse, the grading scheme was non-obvious, so there was no guidance on what was required for an answer. In other words, these texts were setting him up for failure. I'd consider this to probably the worst thing you can do when teaching a subject to young children; you need to set the parents up to succeed, because they're the fall-back person the kids are going to go to for help and guidance. If they can't get into the subject, then the kids aren't going to, and then you may as well kiss your country's technical fields goodbye.
While it is true that the tools students use are becoming more and more powerful, it's important that they're still able to do and understand the tasks they're asking these blessed pieces of electronics to do for them. I worry that we're giving all of this power to kids too early, giving them this crutch that they're always going to be relying on because they've never figured it out on their own.
As an example, when you're learning computer science you're often asked to implement a linked list class of some sort. So you do the exercise, and you get a fundamental understanding of the structure's strengths and weaknesses from that exercise. (Performance characteristics, how it can fail, etc.) But you typically toss the whole thing out and use an already established linked list implementation someone else has put together for your professional work. The thing is, you're constantly using what you learned in implementing your own while working with the professional bug-tested version.. it's an important step in the learning process.
When you're learning math, you learn addition, you learn times tables, etc., but then whenever the numbers get big, you use a calculator. But you can still check your numbers, your assumptions, to make sure you haven't screwed up along the way with some simple mental math. I would argue that's very important.
Anyways, I should get to my personal regional beef with math, and that's this constant need for 'New Math.' Every few years, someone thinks they can update the subject for elementary school students. They're wrong. The fundamentals of math have not changed, and you're only muddying the waters by trying to put in this 'think like this' crap. My younger sister has been given math problems where she's had to come up with three different ways to figure out the answer to a multiplication question. This is when she's just started to learn multiplication. One of the expected answers went something like this:
"Well 3x9 is almost like 3x10, so it's 30.. but then we subtract 3 and get 27."
Which is perfectly valid as a mneumonic, but it's not strictly necessary. Teach the best way to always get a correct answer. Optimize later. Simple computer science rule. The current New Math invasion is supposedly all about making things easier to understand by expressing it in words. Instead, they're teaching a lot of premature optimization.
Most of the parents in the area can't help their kids with their math homework anymore because it's just so obfuscated. New terminology, imprecise gobbledy-goop questions that don't look like any math they've ever done before. It quickly becomes really frustrating for all involved.
My personal experiences with math in university have frankly been depressing. I once took a number theory course where the math professor came in every day and wrote a blackboard's worth of errata. The book he was teaching out of was that buggy. Given the quality of math textbooks in general, I would not at all be surprised by a decline in math standards at the university level.
The other observation I have about university-level math is just the sheer amount of it that gets crammed into a first-year math course. Calculus used to be something that was taught in high school. Then they pared it down and taught just derivatives. Now, that entire year of high school has been eliminated, and they only learn limits. That burden is now fully on the university. It's pathetic.
In case anyone's wondering what region I'm from, it's Ontario, Canada. But from what I understand, these math books and this style of teaching are being imported from the US, so I suspect this applies to a slightly larger geographical region.
I'm actually more interested in the psychological ramifications of constantly villainizing your consumers. If you have consumers, who out of the goodness of their heart, are trying to do the right thing in actually plunking down money for your content, you want them to feel good about it. Instead, every DVD, broadcast, etc., these days starts with a pumped-up anti-fair use lecture.
The worst part about these lectures is that the end user might think whatever it is they're doing is acceptable. And in a lot of cases, as the point has been made, they are. (Fair use.) But now you've just taken a consumer who thought they were doing right by you and told them they're doing wrong.
So now the consumer's asking themselves.. I'm apparently already doing something illegal. If they're going to throw the book at me anyways, why should I bother paying for it in the first place?
I thoroughly agree on that point. I sincerely doubt that Square has approved this in any shape or manner, especially after what they did to Chrono Resurrection.
Slashdot Mirror
In D3D's defence, they had a number of optional features in D3D9, but developers really got to loathing the caps, so it was mostly abandoned for D3D10+.
As to D3D9's 'set functionality', it's true that Microsoft tried to lock down what you could add to the API. But you should check out Aras' D3D9 cheat sheet for hacked-in functionality. While there aren't any easy vectors for adding extra functionality to D3D9, that hasn't stopped ATI and NVIDIA from offering stuff through some of the weirdest and ugliest hacks imaginable. (Let's have a round of applause for the tesselation factor and point parameter render states, shall we?)
That having been said, I wholeheartedly agree that OpenGL has provided a much cleaner approach to extensibility of the API.
This jostling for OpenGL to jump over Direct3D in terms of features is ridiculous.
You can't have stable without the beta.
I'm really hoping that someone will write a post-mortem of the project for Game Developer magazine. It sounds like what happened here was a classic case of "the design document is in my head."
I once worked on a game project that lacked direction; I'm curious to hear just how much the experience here mirrored my own. (From the post linked in the story, it sounds suspiciously similar. If you don't have someone at your company whose mandate includes calling bull$#!% on projects that aren't going anywhere, and has the power to affect change, the end result is obvious.)
One more caveat on Apple mice worth mentioning explicitly; they only have one clicker for the multiple mouse buttons (as others have mentioned) which means it's impossible to a L+R simultaneous click. Since some apps do use this combination explicitly (i.e., Blender), this can be very frustrating.
(Blender does have offer an alternative way to trigger/emulate this mouse combo, but that requires holding down a key on the keyboard, and thus is considerably less elegant/easy to trigger.)
It would be extremely intriguing to watch what would happen if say..the US pulled completely out of South Korea, for example.
Well, I can predict what would happen on the stock market; there'd be an awful lot of folks shorting ATVI. (That's Activision-Blizzard..)
What part of "the Classic Controller Pro, a new input device for the Wii of a more typical design than the Wii Remote" was lost on you?
Actually, if you want to go splitting hairs, it's really a new input device for the Wiimote, so the OP does have a point about the description being a touch misleading/inaccurate. ;)
To understand why this may be a poor choice for 3D glasses technology for consumers, as well as some thoughts on why NVIDIA might have gone with it anyways, here's an article that gets into the nitty gritty. Brief summary; headaches and batteries.
(Insert usual disclaimer about the Inquirer not exactly being an enthusiastic supporter of NVIDIA here..)
The main problem here is that OpenID was never a first-class citizen. If I go to a site that does support OpenID for login, which is a rarity, they only give the most basic of abilities to me. Whereas if I create a username in their system, suddenly I can create a profile for myself, set some preferences, etc. (Livejournal and Blogger being two notable ones.)
I really like OpenID, but my feeling is that companies never really wanted it in the first place. Sure the person running the site probably thought it was a great idea, but I'm sure the suits looked at it and thought "gee, I'm not going to be able to force my users to give me their full address and credit card before letting them do anything on my site, if they're logged in with this openid thing.." So instead, they use it as a teaser, and up-sell you on a real login. Of course, users aren't stupid, and if you're going to write comments on a blog and you think there's a hope in hell that you'll ever want to use the 'full' features of the site, you'll create a login instead.
What could save companies from this problem would be if they'd allow you to tie an OpenID to your login, and use that to login instead. (See stackoverflow.) But instead, a lot of sites prefer to use it as a way to avoid requiring a captcha for "anonymous" comments.
Also, it'd help if some of the big players weren't such dicks, and allowed you to login with an external OpenID rather than only exporting an OpenID.. It has to be a two-way street.
The key to the Mac and PC commercials has been their positioning.
Apple's Macs are all-in-one machines, that come with both hardware and software. So it's easy for them to position their avatar and straw man appropriately to showcase the advantages of their platform versus Microsoft's. "I'm a has-it-all-together Mac, you're a slightly confused yet assertive PC. Gee, why am I simpler to set up and use?"
Microsoft sells just the software, so they aimed to take the focus off of the 'whole package' aspect and instead focus on the users. Hence their "I'm a PC" campaign. (Incidentally, someone needs to tell Microsoft that PC stands for 'Personal Computer,' and not 'Person using a Computer'..)
The proper Linux positioning should be about Open Source, and how everyone contributes. So instead of an "I'm Linux" response, I'd suggest "We're Linux." Unlike how Microsoft's approach bends the meaning of words 'til they break, "We're Linux" would actually ring true on a lot of levels, from all of the different people whose pieces are put together to make one distribution, to the number of distributions available, to the sheer number of platforms that Linux has been ported to.
Um, they've since dropped all backwards compatibility for PS2 from the new machines. The PS3 machines being manufactured today don't have support for any PS2 games anymore..
People were educated about the new system, which is why it failed. In particular, rural voters looked at it and realized that:
- there will be fewer seats in parliament to accommodate the proportional/list MPs, which means rural ridings will be larger and rural voters will have less representation
- those list MPs will likely come from urban areas, and aren't likely to have rural interests at the forefront of their minds
As a result, they all voted it down in droves.
If we really want to revise our electoral system, we need to do it one step at a time. I really wish we'd made the baby step of going for run-off ballot, rather than picking something ambitious like this.
Printer drivers are bloated in part because of the OCR code and reference images that they're forced to include. Seriously; try scanning and printing an American dollar bill, and see what happens.
It's obvious that the graphics angle is really just a Trojan horse; they're using graphics as the reason to get it into the largest number of hands possible, but what they really want to do is to keep people writing for the X86 instruction set, rather than OpenCL, DirectX 11, or CUDA. Lock-in with the X86 instruction set has served them too well in the past.
In other words, general compute was an area where things were slipping out of their grasp; this is a means to shore things up.
It's a sound business strategy. But I have to agree with blogger-dude; I don't see them being overly competitive with NVIDIA and AMD's latest parts for rasterized graphics anytime soon.
I wish we could access the GPU but I understand why Sony doesn't want that.
Well, I wish somebody would explain it to me. I presume the answer has something to do with piracy, but I don't see how that has a damn thing to do with access to the graphics chip under Linux. I mean, if they want to prevent you booting disks that haven't been officially signed, then that's fair enough (just about), but what does limiting the access to the GPU achieve?
The GPU is a NVIDIA chip. Linux drivers from NVIDIA are closed-source, and I haven't heard of any low-level hardware documentation being handed out to people looking to write open source alternatives. How would people program the GPU under PS3 Linux without that documentation?
FFXII was set in a world created for the earlier game Final Fantasy Tactics, and the team was lead by the folks behind that game. As far as I know, all previous games have had a completely new world, with the possible exception of FFIX.
I am a touch concerned, though, as you are, about the upcoming Final Fantasy games. This recent approach by Square-Enix to make the Final Fantasy series into multiple-game affairs spread across everything from portables and cellphones up to the latest cutting-edge home console is causing them to over-think and over-engineer the worlds in which their characters reside. The games, or to be more specific the stories, are losing their focus and suffering for it.
On the upside, at least they're re-releasing Final Fantasy IV on the DS with updated visuals. (That's FFII from the SNES) It'll be nice to take that trip back in time to when the worlds were self-contained and focused on the premise rather than providing fodder for all the requisite/inevitable spin-offs.
In listening to his argument and reflecting on it a bit, I don't disagree with what he's saying. It's important for students to understand what the numbers mean and how they work, and cast in that particular light, this new math does have the potential to address those concerns. What I object to is that the scope of the subject has been greatly expanded to include teaching communication skills, without recognition of the additional time that'll be required. As a result, the classic algorithms, the fundamentals you need to rely upon, are being pushed out to save time.
The other thing that confuses me is that I seem to recall all of this 'what numbers mean' stuff having been covered back when I was in elementary school. I understood it then, but some of my classmates did not. Will making fundamental changes like this to the curriculum really bring more kids on board, or will it make it so that people who are, for example, more verbally oriented do better, but people who have a more logical learning style do not?
Or is the goal to reach those students which are considered 'unteachable,' who just refuse to do the math because they haven't been able to build that mental basis to work from? And if so, are we holding back the other students who've already latched onto the concepts and are now bored out of their skulls? One of the main ways that teachers maintain control of their class is by making sure their students are all following along with the subject, regardless of their aptitude. For brighter students, it can make a student come to dread a subject they excel at.
Just as important is communicating to the parents what's going on, and I don't see that happening. My dad diligently worked through the book trying to understand what some of the problems were asking of my younger sister. The terminology was completely different, and there was no place where it was adequately explained in the text. Even worse, the grading scheme was non-obvious, so there was no guidance on what was required for an answer. In other words, these texts were setting him up for failure. I'd consider this to probably the worst thing you can do when teaching a subject to young children; you need to set the parents up to succeed, because they're the fall-back person the kids are going to go to for help and guidance. If they can't get into the subject, then the kids aren't going to, and then you may as well kiss your country's technical fields goodbye.
While it is true that the tools students use are becoming more and more powerful, it's important that they're still able to do and understand the tasks they're asking these blessed pieces of electronics to do for them. I worry that we're giving all of this power to kids too early, giving them this crutch that they're always going to be relying on because they've never figured it out on their own.
As an example, when you're learning computer science you're often asked to implement a linked list class of some sort. So you do the exercise, and you get a fundamental understanding of the structure's strengths and weaknesses from that exercise. (Performance characteristics, how it can fail, etc.) But you typically toss the whole thing out and use an already established linked list implementation someone else has put together for your professional work. The thing is, you're constantly using what you learned in implementing your own while working with the professional bug-tested version.. it's an important step in the learning process.
When you're learning math, you learn addition, you learn times tables, etc., but then whenever the numbers get big, you use a calculator. But you can still check your numbers, your assumptions, to make sure you haven't screwed up along the way with some simple mental math. I would argue that's very important.
Anyways, I should get to my personal regional beef with math, and that's this constant need for 'New Math.' Every few years, someone thinks they can update the subject for elementary school students. They're wrong. The fundamentals of math have not changed, and you're only muddying the waters by trying to put in this 'think like this' crap. My younger sister has been given math problems where she's had to come up with three different ways to figure out the answer to a multiplication question. This is when she's just started to learn multiplication. One of the expected answers went something like this:
"Well 3x9 is almost like 3x10, so it's 30.. but then we subtract 3 and get 27."
Which is perfectly valid as a mneumonic, but it's not strictly necessary. Teach the best way to always get a correct answer. Optimize later. Simple computer science rule. The current New Math invasion is supposedly all about making things easier to understand by expressing it in words. Instead, they're teaching a lot of premature optimization.
Most of the parents in the area can't help their kids with their math homework anymore because it's just so obfuscated. New terminology, imprecise gobbledy-goop questions that don't look like any math they've ever done before. It quickly becomes really frustrating for all involved.
My personal experiences with math in university have frankly been depressing. I once took a number theory course where the math professor came in every day and wrote a blackboard's worth of errata. The book he was teaching out of was that buggy. Given the quality of math textbooks in general, I would not at all be surprised by a decline in math standards at the university level.
The other observation I have about university-level math is just the sheer amount of it that gets crammed into a first-year math course. Calculus used to be something that was taught in high school. Then they pared it down and taught just derivatives. Now, that entire year of high school has been eliminated, and they only learn limits. That burden is now fully on the university. It's pathetic.
In case anyone's wondering what region I'm from, it's Ontario, Canada. But from what I understand, these math books and this style of teaching are being imported from the US, so I suspect this applies to a slightly larger geographical region.
I wonder what Apple thinks of this.
Does a giant exclamation mark appear over your head too?
I'll start considering Thunderbird an Outlook replacement whenever there's a conduit that allows me to sync with my Palm under Windows.
I'm actually more interested in the psychological ramifications of constantly villainizing your consumers. If you have consumers, who out of the goodness of their heart, are trying to do the right thing in actually plunking down money for your content, you want them to feel good about it. Instead, every DVD, broadcast, etc., these days starts with a pumped-up anti-fair use lecture.
The worst part about these lectures is that the end user might think whatever it is they're doing is acceptable. And in a lot of cases, as the point has been made, they are. (Fair use.) But now you've just taken a consumer who thought they were doing right by you and told them they're doing wrong.
So now the consumer's asking themselves.. I'm apparently already doing something illegal. If they're going to throw the book at me anyways, why should I bother paying for it in the first place?
The system may stop responding to keyboard or mouse input.
Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like the behavior I've been having with an Athlon X2 and a 64-bit Suse 10.1 install.
I'm surprised they aren't saying the same thing to each other about us.
I thoroughly agree on that point. I sincerely doubt that Square has approved this in any shape or manner, especially after what they did to Chrono Resurrection.
That printer better have a blow-dryer attached to the business end, 'cause otherwise those pages are going to end up with pictures on both sides..