Every company I worked for tried to make me sign one of these things and everyone one of them also insisted it was just a formality and was legally unenforceable. Yeah, right. Unless programmers somehow unionize, I don't see how we can prevent companies from taking away all of our employment rights. If you refuse to sign a non-compete, there are 20 more people in line eager to throw away their freedom.
I'm not 100% certain about the specific cards tested, but for several of the highest end NVIDIA and ATI cards a head-to-head comparison for performance doesn't tell the whole story.
This is because ATI cards have implemented a 24-bit floating point pipeline while NVIDIA cards implement a 32-bit pipeline. It is reasonable to expect the ATI card to outperform the NVIDIA card at the expense of some round-off errors. 32 vs. 24 bits on a color pixel is probably no big deal (although some color banding might arise), but when those results apply to vertex positions you could begin to see cracks in objects and shadows.
Note that the ATI card is still faster for Half-Life 2 in 16-bit mode, so it is probably a faster card overall for that game. There are so many ways to achieve similar looking effects on modern graphics cards that even as a graphics expert, I can't tell which card is actually faster.
I've been working with both the GeForceFX and Radeon9800 for some time and both are amazing cards. They have different capabilities under the hood, and can perform different operations at different speeds. Furthermore, under DirectX both cards are restricted to a common API but on OpenGL they have totally different capabilities. I don't think a consumer would go home unhappy with either card, except for the price.
Or Natural Selection. This free multiplayer mod pits a team of aliens against space marines counter-strike style. The game is really an RTS, however, with a tech tree and resources. The marines have a commander in charge who runs their strategy, makes buildings, and buys upgrades while the aliens work as a collective.
Nope... the government is allowed to curtail freedom of assembly, requiring a permit for large groups. The police could shut these down and arrest people if they decided they didn't want you flash mobbing in a specific location.
As of some point in the 90's, the law changed and a registered copyright no longer became necessary. I'm not surprised that registrations fell off after that.
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Re:Does it have Heinlein's extreme right-wing view
on
Altered Carbon
·
· Score: 1
I can't agree with you. He wrote the ultra left-wing Stranger in a Strange Land simultaneously with Starship Troopers. I don't think his politics fit on the left-right distinction: he's a pragmatist. Freedom comes first for Heinlein.
New features are great, but only when a product is already as good as it can be. I can now buy an NGAGE phone that is a lousy GameBoy rip-off, a phone that takes pictures, a phone that acts like a Palm Pilot, and now, a phone that acts like a significant other with my credit card number.
What I can't buy is a phone that is a really good telephone. I want a phone that gets great reception, has accurate voice recognition and a sane user interface, a good speaker and microphone, and talks to my computer via USB or IR instead of a $100 proprietary dongle. In other words, I want a phone that does all of the things modern cell-phones do, but does them well.
Copyright allows for fair use of small amounts of material-- a paragraph from a book, few notes from a song, even the entirety of a short poem.
80 lines of a million line program is a very small fraction, so this would have to stand on trade secrets, not copyright. Unless you sign a deal not to expose them, I don't think trade secrets are protected. Copyrights and patents are to encourage people to release work into the public domain after a short (150 year copyrights? WTF) period of time. So trade secrets, which keep work private, aren't protected in the same way. Presumably, the argument is that they gave IBM Unix source under a license agreement and IBM put that code into Linux.
Finally, the origin of the code has to be established. I can't show up with ten pages of text from William Gibson's newest novel embedded in my own book and claim that he stole it from me. SCO must demonstrate that Unix was the origin of the code to have any kind of suit. This requires finding the programmer who committed it (hey, for $1B at stake, maybe SCO added their own code to Linux) and when it was committed. Again, with $1B at stake, I'm not sure a 10 year old CVS log is sufficient evidence. I think testimony is necessary.
I taught a similar class and wrote the GameKit environment to teach kids how to program, with games as a motivating example. It is a simple programming language where I tried to convey the idea of programming while removing many of the staples-- there are no variable bindings, callable procedures, complex data structures, etc. It uses event driven, object oriented programming to accomplish most game logic.
The environment provides a map editor, code editor, and single stepping debugger. You can use MS paintbrush to create new backgrounds and sprites. My goal was an environment where students could write classic arcade games in about 100 lines of code-- space invaders is provided as an example.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/morgan/gamekit/in de x.html
I wouldn't consider the project feature complete. It is written in Visual Basic and anyone seriously interested is welcome to the source.
A piece of software that failed to trap an I/O error and instead exited abruptly is clearly at fault. One try..catch or error code check could have saved this user's document.
It is really expensive to produce a rich adventure game in 3D (and you can't sell a 2D game anymore). Creating environments and characters like those of King's Quest for real-time 3D is just hard. In contrast, driving a game by combat lets you deemphasize the environment and squeeze a lot more game time out of a few hallways filled with the same crate model. I think Deus Ex was a pretty good adventure game/RPG, but it was heavily combat driven. Making a non-combat interaction game with 100 hours of play would require a lot of cash to create-- and there isn't any market data showing that lots of people (by modern standards) will buy it. I think the ideas don't get off the drawing board because of this.
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Re:Other books/sources
on
The Cg Tutorial
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· Score: 5, Informative
Why not a good GL wrapper for CG, does one exist? How about some good GL samples, period? Can anyone help here?
I released 75,000 lines of C++ code for supporting OpenGL game development on Windows and Linux as the G3D library. It is under the BSD license. The next release includes support for the shaders that are compiled by Cg-- you can grab it from the SourceForge CVS site.
G3D includes some small OpenGL demos (~200 lines), wrappers for the nasty parts of OpenGL, and wrappers for objects like textures and vertex shaders.
His arguments appear to be based on an assumption: humans are going to hand-code XML and want wierd syntax because of that (e.g. attributes, explicit close tags, the ridiculous XPath grammar). I doubt that 1% of the world's XML (by character count) is hand written today, and think this assumption is a poor one to make.
I could care less whether "<", "(", "{" or any other character begins a tag. The structure of
'(a (href "http://www.cnn.com") (text "CNN"))
beats
<HREF="http://www.cnn.com">CNN</A>
by a mile.
Data should be stored in a way that is easy to parse and unambiguous to design. XML would have been better designed with a way to represent pointers (e.g. LET/LETREC) than the silly attributes and other syntactic nonsense.
Templates reduce code bloat. They allow you to write code once and use it across multiple types. That is, vector and vector are the same piece of code compiled twice. You only write it once. Granted, this makes a larger binary, but would you rather have 2x as much source or binary?
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Re:Who cares about Salon? Will anyone save The WEL
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 1
I recommend reason.com, Reason Online. It is reminiscent of Salon but the authors tend to write much better. The libertarian slant is heavy, but frequently expressed in a much less cloying manner than Salon's Democratic bias. I wish I knew an online editorial site that catered equally but intelligently across the political arena.
Slashdot Mirror
There actually are SI units "kibi", "mebi" and "gibi" that mean 2^10, 2^20, and 2^30. But nobody uses them.
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I'm not 100% certain about the specific cards tested, but for several of the highest end NVIDIA and ATI cards a head-to-head comparison for performance doesn't tell the whole story.
This is because ATI cards have implemented a 24-bit floating point pipeline while NVIDIA cards implement a 32-bit pipeline. It is reasonable to expect the ATI card to outperform the NVIDIA card at the expense of some round-off errors. 32 vs. 24 bits on a color pixel is probably no big deal (although some color banding might arise), but when those results apply to vertex positions you could begin to see cracks in objects and shadows.
Note that the ATI card is still faster for Half-Life 2 in 16-bit mode, so it is probably a faster card overall for that game. There are so many ways to achieve similar looking effects on modern graphics cards that even as a graphics expert, I can't tell which card is actually faster.
I've been working with both the GeForceFX and Radeon9800 for some time and both are amazing cards. They have different capabilities under the hood, and can perform different operations at different speeds. Furthermore, under DirectX both cards are restricted to a common API but on OpenGL they have totally different capabilities. I don't think a consumer would go home unhappy with either card, except for the price.
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Agreed-- LGPL is ideal for Java, where *everything* is dynamically linked.
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What I can't buy is a phone that is a really good telephone. I want a phone that gets great reception, has accurate voice recognition and a sane user interface, a good speaker and microphone, and talks to my computer via USB or IR instead of a $100 proprietary dongle. In other words, I want a phone that does all of the things modern cell-phones do, but does them well.
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80 lines of a million line program is a very small fraction, so this would have to stand on trade secrets, not copyright. Unless you sign a deal not to expose them, I don't think trade secrets are protected. Copyrights and patents are to encourage people to release work into the public domain after a short (150 year copyrights? WTF) period of time. So trade secrets, which keep work private, aren't protected in the same way. Presumably, the argument is that they gave IBM Unix source under a license agreement and IBM put that code into Linux.
Finally, the origin of the code has to be established. I can't show up with ten pages of text from William Gibson's newest novel embedded in my own book and claim that he stole it from me. SCO must demonstrate that Unix was the origin of the code to have any kind of suit. This requires finding the programmer who committed it (hey, for $1B at stake, maybe SCO added their own code to Linux) and when it was committed. Again, with $1B at stake, I'm not sure a 10 year old CVS log is sufficient evidence. I think testimony is necessary.
Then again, OJ wasn't guilty.
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The environment provides a map editor, code editor, and single stepping debugger. You can use MS paintbrush to create new backgrounds and sprites. My goal was an environment where students could write classic arcade games in about 100 lines of code-- space invaders is provided as an example.
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/morgan/gamekit/i
I wouldn't consider the project feature complete. It is written in Visual Basic and anyone seriously interested is welcome to the source.
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A piece of software that failed to trap an I/O error and instead exited abruptly is clearly at fault. One try..catch or error code check could have saved this user's document.
-m
It is really expensive to produce a rich adventure game in 3D (and you can't sell a 2D game anymore). Creating environments and characters like those of King's Quest for real-time 3D is just hard. In contrast, driving a game by combat lets you deemphasize the environment and squeeze a lot more game time out of a few hallways filled with the same crate model. I think Deus Ex was a pretty good adventure game/RPG, but it was heavily combat driven. Making a non-combat interaction game with 100 hours of play would require a lot of cash to create-- and there isn't any market data showing that lots of people (by modern standards) will buy it. I think the ideas don't get off the drawing board because of this.
-m
I released 75,000 lines of C++ code for supporting OpenGL game development on Windows and Linux as the G3D library. It is under the BSD license. The next release includes support for the shaders that are compiled by Cg-- you can grab it from the SourceForge CVS site.
G3D includes some small OpenGL demos (~200 lines), wrappers for the nasty parts of OpenGL, and wrappers for objects like textures and vertex shaders.
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There is also an OpenGL back-end for Cg, so you can compile Cg programs to run on the OpenGL ARB program extensions or the NVIDIA extensions.
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In the press release they said they fixed this problem and can now show 150 minute movies.
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Who used a work that was out of copyright (Alice in Wonderland) to base his game on...
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http://autos.msn.com/vip/specifications.aspx?model id=10511&src=vip
Nissan's cars appear to weigh about 2,752 lbs when they start out.
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I could care less whether "<", "(", "{" or any other character begins a tag. The structure of
beats by a mile.Data should be stored in a way that is easy to parse and unambiguous to design. XML would have been better designed with a way to represent pointers (e.g. LET/LETREC) than the silly attributes and other syntactic nonsense.
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