It was the need for additional spectrum for public safety communications that initially got the ball rolling on DTV, many years ago.
And the fact that Congress' balanced budget bill, which has the budget balanced by 2006, is based heavily on the $$ they will get from the auctioning of VHF/UHF had nothing to do with it?
2006 was the mandated date for DTV because without that the balanced budget spreadsheets *don't work out*. It has nothing to do with better use of the frequency. Most small stations can't afford to upgrade to DTV broadcast equipment and will probably be squeezed out our purchased because of this mandate.
DTV is viewed by Congress as a money maker. Nothing more, nothing less. Too bad dor us that they already spent money that they don't have. Now they have to legislate anyway possible to insure they get the money they feel they're deserved.
"My current work on Doom is designed around what was made possible on the original GeForce, and reaches an optimal implementation on the NV30. My next generation of work will be designed around what is made possible on the NV30."
The GF cards came out 1999ish (give or take). No matter how fast and furiously the hardware manufacturers pump out new silicon there is always a long adoption cycle for any new concepts. Game developers would be pretty thick headed to close out an installed base of X just to support a feature on Y (where Y is an extremely small value compared to X) cards.
It doesn't matter how earth-shattering the NV30 will be. It's complete feature set won't be utilized anytime soon. The GF3/4 cards still has long lives ahead of them.
So basically if you wanted to add that "gwhiz AA x4" feature to your card, you could write it in software, and load it into your card at boot.
Total BS. The registers to do HW T&L don't exist on anything below a GeForce 1 card. The registers to do pixel and vertex shaders don't exist on anything below a GF3 card.
There is no way you could write a new driver for a TNT2 card that would allow it to do those advanced features. Give up the pipe dream. A programable pipleline graphics card != a simple video convertor box. It doesn't matter how much you believe that the hardware/software design behind a Snappy can be transfered to a video card, it just isn't going to work.
I'll try to sum it up for you in simple terms, since you can't seem to grasp the concept.
TNT2 doesn't have the transistors to do hardware transform and lighting. It can't do pixel and vertex shaders. Those can only be done in dedicated hardware or on the CPU. No amount of driver source code will change that.
Via proper software drivers (OpenGL and/or DirectX) TNT2 cards can *already* run games that use pixel and vertex shaders. It's just that since the card is offloading all of those calcuations to the CPU the programs are intolerably slow.
Please take your random thoughts to logical conclusions before posting insipid open letters to corporations.
If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only alot slower.
Well, duh. If that wasn't the case we'd not have had any computer graphics for the last few decades or so. If the hardware isn't doing it the CPU is. That's the whole *point* behind the GeForce line of cards.
Yes, you can do pixel and vertex shaders on the CPU, but it will make the application so slow as to be unusable.
Don't think that your 6 year old TNT2 card will become some magic speed demon if nVidia gives you driver source. It won't. Your argument is akin to saying, "Intel, give us the internals to the P4. I know I can make my 80286 run all new code if you do!"
If they had wanted their money so badly, they should have started enforcing it when they first patented it, not almost 2 decades later. What Forgent is pulling here is bullsh**, and even _they_ probably know it. Ignore it, and it will go away.
As I understand it, Forgent was not the original patent holder. They purchased the patent just a few years ago. If that is true then your ire is misplaced. The anger should be directed at the original patent holder who was nice enough to let people use it royalty free but didn't include any "must be used royalty free in perpetuity" clause in the patent-sale documentation.
That's already there. The law on patents is that if you don't act to enforce the patent for a sufficient period of time, the patent becomes unenforceable.
No, that's trademark law. Patents are viable until the prescribed date they become invalid. The lifespan of a patent differes depending on the type of patent it is.
If what you are saying is true then there could be no such thing as "submarine" or "submerged" patents, which is what is going on here. The patent is 17 years old and just now Forgent (new owners of said patent) are wanting royalties from everyone using it. This tactic is being used more frequently by businesses (see any article on the RAMBUS debacle).
Patents do not become invalid due to lack of enforcement. Patent holders don't have to do anything to protect their patents. By law it is 100% the responsibility of inventors to make sure their inventions are not infringing on other's patents. All the patent holder has to do is look for infringements and either work out a licensing agreement with the offender or sue them.
I'm not advocating the system, as I personally feel the trademark law of owner-enforcement requirements to be much better. I'm just pointing out that your statement isn't correct.
The BYU Unix Users Group gives its own response. This year, we're going to have a booth in the student center too. We're inviting students to bring their machines, and a group of volunteers will install Linux on their machines on the spot, for free.
So, I could either lug a boxen, keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc... all the way across campus to get an OS installed and then lug all of that PLUS my coursebooks for the semester back to my room. Or, I could walk out of there with a few simple to install MS CDs and my books.
Which option doesn't make me look like a geek?
Until Linux doesn't have to be installed by a bunch of "DeCSS Code On A T-Shirt" wearing nerds it will never be able to supplant MS on the desktop.
No, it's so you can expand the tool to fit your needs. Both Max and Maya ship with C++ SDKs and scripting languages.
We're using the Max SDK and MaxScript to create a suite of tools that run within Max that are specifically tuned for our game development path.
Why re-invent the wheel (polygonal modeling, vertex animation, texture UV application, etc...) when an off the shelf product can provide that functionality? Then, you use the provided APIs to extend that tool to fit your needs. Both Discreet and Alias/Wavefront market their products to game developers as a sort of graphic-design middleware. It's a good solution.
Yeah, if you want to make a game that is about 5 years behind in terms of graphics.
Multigen Creator can do multitexturing, but it doesn't give the user any way to set the blend level between the layers. Use two textures and get a 50% blend. Use 3 and get 33%, etc... blech.
Detail texture application didn't work right in 2.05 (when I got away from it).
It doesn't do keyframe animation. That's a show stopper right there.
It doesn't support hardware shaders. It's only OpenGL based, so vertex and pixel shader playback would be done completely via vendor specific extensions to OpenGL.
The list goes on and on.
Creator tried to bust into games. Unfortunately for Multigen two things happened: 1) The ability to do amazing graphics on PCs exploded very quickly in the timeframe between the orignal GeForce card and the GF3 card. 2) The market for PC based military flight simulators dissapeared. Since Creator was (and still is) marketed as a military and civil engineering vis-sim tool it is best suited for those types of products. You'll never make a Quake III, Tribes II, NWN, or GTA3 with it.
I think Phil Katz (if he were still living) and the employees of PKWare would have something to say about you attributing the creation of the.zip compressed data file format to MS.
No Voodoo card can do them regardless of how many of those chips you stick on a board. Fixed function pipelines suck once you get used to being able to change all of the lighting and shading code that the graphics board runs.
The game oriented graphics card industry will not slow down until there are cards that can do polygon/pixel resolution at at least 1600x1200 with enough fill rate to draw ten passes and still maintain at least 60-75fps.
Once you can get multi-pass polygon/pixel resolution at acceptable performance levels the need textures becomes moot and very interesting things will start to be produced.
One of the main tennants of his argument is the fact that the government mandated a tax on blank music recording media because the music industry was (supposedly) losing so much money to illegal copies. Now they are still collecting the blank media tax and selling copy protected CDs. Boucher feels (correctly, imho) that if the user pays the blank media tax then they should be able to make legal copies of the CDs they have purchased.
Basically, the music industry wants it both ways and he is willing to stand up and say, "Wait a second here!"
Right. You're trying to organize a boycott on Slashdot.
Slashdot, where everyone was up in arms about Johansen, the DMCA, MPAA, and DeCSS.
Slashdot, where they still allow Katz to post reviews of movies produced by member companies to the MPAA.
Slashdot, where everyone talks the talk about how the Senator from Disney (Hollings) and the SSSCA are evil.
Slashdot, where in the most recent movie review (MIB2) a large number of the comments were about how MIB was boring and that Lilo and Stich (a Disney movie) was better.
So, the MPAA and the DMCA is bad, lets all say they're bad. But, lets all run down to the local mega-plex and freely give our money to the bad companies and organizations because they made a move full of bright colors and funny sounds!
The hypocracy on this site is amazing sometimes. Most notably when dealing with pop-culture entertainment.
Re:My favorite browser "feature"
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
We bashed our heads against the wall to figure this out until we realized that the numbers added up to almost, but not quite, 100
Hmm, my calculator shows 31+42+29 = 102. If you're calculator told you it was "not quite" 100 then it was wrong. It must've been written in VB.
AMD and Intel are onboard because corporations are amoral. The decision to make these chips isn't one of "We like MS, MS is good, let's help MS." The reason they are onboard is because they have a legal obligation to fiduciary responsibility towards their shareholders. In a nutshell that means that if there is a way for the corporation to further its profits in a manner that jives with their business plan they must do it. To not do so could open them up to a shareholder lawsuit for not protecting their interests.
I used to back my Amiga HD up using identical technology. It's slow and error prone. The data gets written to the VHS tape multiple times because of the inherent potential error of converting a string of 1s and 0s to a visible format and then writing it to a low-grade analog recording device. There is no computer accessible search/find function so you either restore the entire backup or you do without the one file you just hosed.
If you didn't use the highest quality VHS tapes you could find your chances of having a good backup when you needed it were pretty slim.
As far as I can tell this new promotion is like the OS-less PC promotion. It is being offered online only. You can not go into a Wal*Mart store and buy and OS-less PC. I doubt you will be able to go into a Wal*Mart store and buy a Lindows PC.
So, who has access to the Wal*Mart website? Those people who already have a computer. Who goes to Wal*Mart.com to buy a PC? Outside of those people that want an OS-less PC to install Linux on, probably not a large number of people.
This isn't going to convert unsuspecting people to Linux users (a dangerous thing to wish for at any rate). It isn't going to spread Linux to the mass market. It isn't going to steal any appreciable market share away from Microsoft.
It's noteworthy for the fact that a major retailer has thumbed their nose at Microsoft. But, that same major retailer is only thumbing their nose while behind a box in a locked room with the shades drawn so that the world can not really see that they are doing it.
If other major computer resellers follow suit (which I doubt they will), then this will become interesting. Now, though, it's nothing more than YALPOS (Yet Another Linux Post On Slashdot)
Slashdot Mirror
And the fact that Congress' balanced budget bill, which has the budget balanced by 2006, is based heavily on the $$ they will get from the auctioning of VHF/UHF had nothing to do with it?
2006 was the mandated date for DTV because without that the balanced budget spreadsheets *don't work out*. It has nothing to do with better use of the frequency. Most small stations can't afford to upgrade to DTV broadcast equipment and will probably be squeezed out our purchased because of this mandate.
DTV is viewed by Congress as a money maker. Nothing more, nothing less. Too bad dor us that they already spent money that they don't have. Now they have to legislate anyway possible to insure they get the money they feel they're deserved.
It doesn't matter how earth-shattering the NV30 will be. It's complete feature set won't be utilized anytime soon. The GF3/4 cards still has long lives ahead of them.
There is no way you could write a new driver for a TNT2 card that would allow it to do those advanced features. Give up the pipe dream. A programable pipleline graphics card != a simple video convertor box. It doesn't matter how much you believe that the hardware/software design behind a Snappy can be transfered to a video card, it just isn't going to work.
I'll try to sum it up for you in simple terms, since you can't seem to grasp the concept.
TNT2 doesn't have the transistors to do hardware transform and lighting. It can't do pixel and vertex shaders. Those can only be done in dedicated hardware or on the CPU. No amount of driver source code will change that.
Via proper software drivers (OpenGL and/or DirectX) TNT2 cards can *already* run games that use pixel and vertex shaders. It's just that since the card is offloading all of those calcuations to the CPU the programs are intolerably slow.
Please take your random thoughts to logical conclusions before posting insipid open letters to corporations.
Yes, you can do pixel and vertex shaders on the CPU, but it will make the application so slow as to be unusable.
Don't think that your 6 year old TNT2 card will become some magic speed demon if nVidia gives you driver source. It won't. Your argument is akin to saying, "Intel, give us the internals to the P4. I know I can make my 80286 run all new code if you do!"
If what you are saying is true then there could be no such thing as "submarine" or "submerged" patents, which is what is going on here. The patent is 17 years old and just now Forgent (new owners of said patent) are wanting royalties from everyone using it. This tactic is being used more frequently by businesses (see any article on the RAMBUS debacle).
Patents do not become invalid due to lack of enforcement. Patent holders don't have to do anything to protect their patents. By law it is 100% the responsibility of inventors to make sure their inventions are not infringing on other's patents. All the patent holder has to do is look for infringements and either work out a licensing agreement with the offender or sue them.
I'm not advocating the system, as I personally feel the trademark law of owner-enforcement requirements to be much better. I'm just pointing out that your statement isn't correct.
Search/Replace "Walmart" w/ "Walmart.com" and your post would be more accurate.
Walmart is *NOT* selling OSless and/or Linux based machines in their retail stores. Joe-Six-Pack will never see these machines.
Which option doesn't make me look like a geek?
Until Linux doesn't have to be installed by a bunch of "DeCSS Code On A T-Shirt" wearing nerds it will never be able to supplant MS on the desktop.
It's called DirecTV with a DirecTivo unit.
I can even fast foward through the commercials.
What's the big announcement here again?
No, it's so you can expand the tool to fit your needs. Both Max and Maya ship with C++ SDKs and scripting languages.
We're using the Max SDK and MaxScript to create a suite of tools that run within Max that are specifically tuned for our game development path.
Why re-invent the wheel (polygonal modeling, vertex animation, texture UV application, etc...) when an off the shelf product can provide that functionality? Then, you use the provided APIs to extend that tool to fit your needs. Both Discreet and Alias/Wavefront market their products to game developers as a sort of graphic-design middleware. It's a good solution.
Yeah, if you want to make a game that is about 5 years behind in terms of graphics.
Multigen Creator can do multitexturing, but it doesn't give the user any way to set the blend level between the layers. Use two textures and get a 50% blend. Use 3 and get 33%, etc... blech.
Detail texture application didn't work right in 2.05 (when I got away from it).
It doesn't do keyframe animation. That's a show stopper right there.
It doesn't support hardware shaders. It's only OpenGL based, so vertex and pixel shader playback would be done completely via vendor specific extensions to OpenGL.
The list goes on and on.
Creator tried to bust into games. Unfortunately for Multigen two things happened:
1) The ability to do amazing graphics on PCs exploded very quickly in the timeframe between the orignal GeForce card and the GF3 card.
2) The market for PC based military flight simulators dissapeared. Since Creator was (and still is) marketed as a military and civil engineering vis-sim tool it is best suited for those types of products. You'll never make a Quake III, Tribes II, NWN, or GTA3 with it.
I think Phil Katz (if he were still living) and the employees of PKWare would have something to say about you attributing the creation of the .zip compressed data file format to MS.
5 words for you:
Pixel and vertex shaders.
No Voodoo card can do them regardless of how many of those chips you stick on a board. Fixed function pipelines suck once you get used to being able to change all of the lighting and shading code that the graphics board runs.
The game oriented graphics card industry will not slow down until there are cards that can do polygon/pixel resolution at at least 1600x1200 with enough fill rate to draw ten passes and still maintain at least 60-75fps.
Once you can get multi-pass polygon/pixel resolution at acceptable performance levels the need textures becomes moot and very interesting things will start to be produced.
One of the main tennants of his argument is the fact that the government mandated a tax on blank music recording media because the music industry was (supposedly) losing so much money to illegal copies. Now they are still collecting the blank media tax and selling copy protected CDs. Boucher feels (correctly, imho) that if the user pays the blank media tax then they should be able to make legal copies of the CDs they have purchased.
Basically, the music industry wants it both ways and he is willing to stand up and say, "Wait a second here!"
Right. You're trying to organize a boycott on Slashdot.
Slashdot, where everyone was up in arms about Johansen, the DMCA, MPAA, and DeCSS.
Slashdot, where they still allow Katz to post reviews of movies produced by member companies to the MPAA.
Slashdot, where everyone talks the talk about how the Senator from Disney (Hollings) and the SSSCA are evil.
Slashdot, where in the most recent movie review (MIB2) a large number of the comments were about how MIB was boring and that Lilo and Stich (a Disney movie) was better.
So, the MPAA and the DMCA is bad, lets all say they're bad. But, lets all run down to the local mega-plex and freely give our money to the bad companies and organizations because they made a move full of bright colors and funny sounds!
The hypocracy on this site is amazing sometimes. Most notably when dealing with pop-culture entertainment.
We bashed our heads against the wall to figure this out until we realized that the numbers added up to almost, but not quite, 100
Hmm, my calculator shows 31+42+29 = 102. If you're calculator told you it was "not quite" 100 then it was wrong. It must've been written in VB.
AMD and Intel are onboard because corporations are amoral. The decision to make these chips isn't one of "We like MS, MS is good, let's help MS." The reason they are onboard is because they have a legal obligation to fiduciary responsibility towards their shareholders. In a nutshell that means that if there is a way for the corporation to further its profits in a manner that jives with their business plan they must do it. To not do so could open them up to a shareholder lawsuit for not protecting their interests.
I used to back my Amiga HD up using identical technology. It's slow and error prone. The data gets written to the VHS tape multiple times because of the inherent potential error of converting a string of 1s and 0s to a visible format and then writing it to a low-grade analog recording device. There is no computer accessible search/find function so you either restore the entire backup or you do without the one file you just hosed.
If you didn't use the highest quality VHS tapes you could find your chances of having a good backup when you needed it were pretty slim.
It's a nice idea, but it's a hack solution.
Our story noting the EULA concerns makes interesting, if somewhat confusing, reading.
Which makes it just like all of the other Slashdot stories.
Games will be tested against something if it comprises a significant portion of the market for the game.
Selling these machines online only, and at Wal*Mart.com to boot, will not make them a significant portion of any game's market.
As far as I can tell this new promotion is like the OS-less PC promotion. It is being offered online only. You can not go into a Wal*Mart store and buy and OS-less PC. I doubt you will be able to go into a Wal*Mart store and buy a Lindows PC.
So, who has access to the Wal*Mart website? Those people who already have a computer. Who goes to Wal*Mart.com to buy a PC? Outside of those people that want an OS-less PC to install Linux on, probably not a large number of people.
This isn't going to convert unsuspecting people to Linux users (a dangerous thing to wish for at any rate). It isn't going to spread Linux to the mass market. It isn't going to steal any appreciable market share away from Microsoft.
It's noteworthy for the fact that a major retailer has thumbed their nose at Microsoft. But, that same major retailer is only thumbing their nose while behind a box in a locked room with the shades drawn so that the world can not really see that they are doing it.
If other major computer resellers follow suit (which I doubt they will), then this will become interesting. Now, though, it's nothing more than YALPOS (Yet Another Linux Post On Slashdot)
True, but I would consider Smoke and Combustion to be high-end compared to After Effects.