With X-Box supporting DirectX only (and a special version at that) and PS2 not supporting OpenGL in general, some of the utility of SDL is lost. For example, I can write a SDL & OpenGL game that compiles and runs on OSX, Linux, and Win32. But window, input, thread and audio management are the least of my problems when moving to X-Box or PS2... I have to rewrite my whole graphics pipeline!
There are, of course, some very good commercial 3D API's that will abstract over this problem. One of the strengths of SDL has been that you have abstracted over the low level and have avoided getting into the sticky business of fighting OpenGL and Direct3D for the 3D API. This also limits the utility of SDL, however, because of the lack of a solid, free API for abstracting the 3D API.
Do you see SDL moving higher up the graphics pipeline in the future, or is it your intent to continue to avoid higher level 3D calls?
This is really disturbing. Coupled with "ignorance of the law is no exception," it means you are responsible for knowing all of the laws of all states, towns, cities, etc. This is completely insane. Utah could ban websites refering to sex and alcohol and drag half the internet into court. Texas could decide that it is illegal to discuss homosexuality on the internet.
One of the useful things the federal government could (and is supposed to) do is keep states from arresting other state's citizens over inter-state matters.
Thank you-- you hit the nail on the head. Serious geeks spend a lot of time trying to be geeks (wearing black, having the best techno-toys, seeing the right movies, glowering over their monitors at happy co-workers). But this just substitutes one social ladder for another.
It is lame to bash or even look down on other geeks because you think their tastes aren't hardcore enough-- isn't it enough that half the world already looks down on us? Do we need to add to the persecution?
The messenger bag has become the geek version of the purse. I'm not knocking this... I just switched to this solution over loading down my pants pockets. I wish it was socially acceptable for me (male) to wear a purse. That's exactly what I want.
Another problem I encountered was that the aluminum strap I used to secure the tailpipe of the engine to the kart frame just melted away. I'll have to make a new one from steel.
This guy is nicely insane. You get the Darwin prize for things like strapping a jet engine to a go-cart. I'm jealous.
And, by the way, Boston roads aren't any better than New Zealand ones:)
-m
FYI: 3D modellers have traditionally used unix (actually, Irix on SGI's). NT and Mac are relatively recent developments. Tron, Last Starfighter, etc. through Final Fantasy (movie) were all done on SGI's AFAIK. Games were modelled on unix (Doom was NeXT, I think) until PC's got powerful enough to run 3D modelling software. 3DS MAX on NT is now the platform of choice.
I agree that PC games tend to be as good or better than PS2 games. The PS2 is a very cool box, but an Athlon with a GeForce3 has more power, ram, and hard drive than a PS2. By the end of the year, PCs will leave PS2 in the dust, performance wise. As you said, the attraction of consoles is that you don't have to write for 6 different flavors of Windows, worry about a Linux/Mac port, and try to support hundreds of hardware configurations.
PC's are pretty cheap... the monitor is the only expensive part these days. In the US, $200 will get you a monitor-less system good enough to surf the net and play Quake III on. $800 will get you a top of the line machine (1.4 GHz Athlon with all the trimmings), which has more power than a PS2.
Play stations are still about $150 here, so it isn't quite that level, but it is awfully close. You can even buy used PII PC's on EBay for $50.
I greatly support a US Linux playstation, but as a graphics developer, I'm not sure it is interesting to me personally. With small modifications, it could be *really* interesting, however.
The playstation is currently really hard for small developers to support because the development stations are so expensive and it is difficult to port to from a Windows platform. Providing Linux for PS2 almost fixes this. Providing Linux with OpenGL drivers (and hopefully, a SDL port) completely rectifies the situation.
The X-Box is really attractive to small developers because it is a console where we can develop titles on regular PC workstations, then have a publisher (like Microsoft themselves) foot the minimal cost of the port if the game looks good. On PS2, the port is really expensive since the hardware is so different from a PC. With Linux and OpenGL support, I could develop on a Linux PC and Linux Playstation. I could also easily port PC Linux, Windows OpenGL, and Mac OpenGL/OSX apps to Playstation.
"Major US computer conference" my ass. Dmitry was arrested at DefCon, which is a bunch of hackery types wearing black and trying to be sneaky about it.
The whole situation sucks and I can only hope it goes to the US supreme court, but exaggerating like New Scientist did won't help things any. I got to quite a few scientific conferences, and most of the conference organizers I know couldn't reschedule an event unless it was at least 3 years out, for practical reasons.
OSX ships with the latest Java runtime... and it is better than the other versions because it has hardware accelerated graphics and provides separate, external JARs for accessing all OSX functionality.
1. reads CNN and Slashdot to fluff his/her/its own ego
2. silently thanks all of the kind people for pointing out the two "bugs" of hardcoding the IP instead of using DNS and not flooding if a connection can't be made
3. fixes and redeploys the worm.
It isn't open source, but decompilation makes everything open source. Isn't it great how the community can improve open source? And who's likely to be more responsive, a sys admin for a MS system or a virus author/copycat?
C'mon, you know you'd love to see a Microsoft bug take out the whitehouse site, anyhow.
IE has been shipping with an ancient JVM anyway. To use a compliant 1.3 (soon to be 1.4!) JVM in a browser, developers use Sun's Java plugin as an ActiveX control or Netscape Plugin.
The story and the slashdot post are really misleading... these are natural formations, not man-made structures. The lost city of Atlantis has not been found, that is just the result of playful naming by the scientists involved. You can now return to your regularly scheduled life.
In fact, if you want a CGI vehicle, watch a real one.
For all of the critic's complaints about butt-jokes in Shrek, I thought the movie was great. The script wasn't up to Toy Story standards, but the rendering was the best I'd ever seen, the sound track is fantasitic, and the parody jokes were hysterical.
So, for an anal-fetish CGI move, skip Evoloution and hit the kid's movie instead.
-m
I value my stock options at $0, which is what they are worth until the company is publicly traded and your restriction period is lifted.
That said, you should be aware that there are a lot of "catches" with ISO (incentive stock options).
1. You have to have cash on hand to exercise them. 500,000 options at $1 for a $100 stock do you no good if you don't have half a million on hand.
2. You have to pay short term capital gains, even if you don't sell. You must pay taxes on the difference between your strike price and the current market price. If the stock went up a lot ($99 in the previous example), you have to pay $36 in taxes per share immediately-- even though you haven't sold your stock yet! People have lost a lot of money on ISO's this way.
3. ISO's are not necessarily honored if a company is sold. If the company is not publicly traded and is forced to sell or liquidate, preferred shares are paid off first. ISO's get whatever is left, which may be nothing.
The Kinesis Ergo Contour Classic is the best keyboard I've ever found. For $175, you get full hardware level remap and macro, an intelligently arranged keyboard (that looks science fiction; it has 12 thumb keys), with an overall contour shaped for the range of motion of your hands. I got mine on a doctor's recomendation and have loved it ever since.
Python's biggest shortcomming (and I'm a Python programmer) is the whitespace issue. I like the idea of using indentation alone for control flow, but man, 90% of all bugs are because of tabs vs. spaces, one too many spaces, etc. And you always get a bizarre error message.
We need an Emacs Python mode that doesn't allow tabs and does something clever like only allowing indents to be a multiple of 2 (or 4-- when whitespace is significant, you want to indent further).
Asian countries (China/Taiwan in particular) are under intense pressure from the US to respect US copyrights and patents. This leads to swat-team level enforcement, usually targetted at large scale pirates.
They probably aren't doing this because they are very upset about MP3's, but because it is a demonstration that they are working to stamp out piracy.
Microsoft said its decision not to include built-in support for recording better-sounding MP3 music also avoids it having to pay license fees required by Thomson Multimedia SA and the Fraunhofer Institut, which collect at least US$2.50 from software vendors for each copy of recording software based on their MP3 technology.
It seems like Microsoft, not the customer is the one trying to slip out of a license:).
I've never used MS products to record or play MP3's, so I could care less about MS's lack of support.
Compare all of this to Apple, who just released the best MP3 encoder/ripper/song manager/cd burner program I've ever used, iTunes. Oh yeah, Apple makes their product free to everyone, too. With OSX running both MS Office, apple apps and all of my favorite unix tools, why would I upgrade to Win XP instead of throwing out my PC and getting a G4? Maybe even a Titanium G4 with a GeForce3...:)
I agree... having owned a DC for a while and just played several games on PS2, the DC costs way less and looks better.
The PS2 games beat original PSX games up, but they don't compare very well against DC or PC games. N64 generally goes for a totally different look to its games, but it is behind DC as well.
I was shopping for a new computer and wanted to get an AMD chip because of the lower cost. I couldn't tell what the relative power of the AMD and Intel chips are, however.
The MHz is only a useful comparison between two of the same processor model (e.g. PIII 500Mhz vs PIII 800MHz). A fast PIII outperforms a slow P4-- and I have no idea where AMD fits in at all.
Does anyone know what the relative ranking of chips is?
Not to knock--Paul Nolan's got a nice application there. If you're interested in how to achieve these kinds of effects, I've open sourced a platform-independent Java library that can produce similar effects.
Slashdot Mirror
There are, of course, some very good commercial 3D API's that will abstract over this problem. One of the strengths of SDL has been that you have abstracted over the low level and have avoided getting into the sticky business of fighting OpenGL and Direct3D for the 3D API. This also limits the utility of SDL, however, because of the lack of a solid, free API for abstracting the 3D API.
Do you see SDL moving higher up the graphics pipeline in the future, or is it your intent to continue to avoid higher level 3D calls?
-magic
One of the useful things the federal government could (and is supposed to) do is keep states from arresting other state's citizens over inter-state matters.
-m
It is lame to bash or even look down on other geeks because you think their tastes aren't hardcore enough-- isn't it enough that half the world already looks down on us? Do we need to add to the persecution?
-m
-m
And, by the way, Boston roads aren't any better than New Zealand ones :)
-m
I agree that PC games tend to be as good or better than PS2 games. The PS2 is a very cool box, but an Athlon with a GeForce3 has more power, ram, and hard drive than a PS2. By the end of the year, PCs will leave PS2 in the dust, performance wise. As you said, the attraction of consoles is that you don't have to write for 6 different flavors of Windows, worry about a Linux/Mac port, and try to support hundreds of hardware configurations.
-m
Play stations are still about $150 here, so it isn't quite that level, but it is awfully close. You can even buy used PII PC's on EBay for $50.
-m
The playstation is currently really hard for small developers to support because the development stations are so expensive and it is difficult to port to from a Windows platform. Providing Linux for PS2 almost fixes this. Providing Linux with OpenGL drivers (and hopefully, a SDL port) completely rectifies the situation.
The X-Box is really attractive to small developers because it is a console where we can develop titles on regular PC workstations, then have a publisher (like Microsoft themselves) foot the minimal cost of the port if the game looks good. On PS2, the port is really expensive since the hardware is so different from a PC. With Linux and OpenGL support, I could develop on a Linux PC and Linux Playstation. I could also easily port PC Linux, Windows OpenGL, and Mac OpenGL/OSX apps to Playstation.
-magic
Blue Axion Studios
The whole situation sucks and I can only hope it goes to the US supreme court, but exaggerating like New Scientist did won't help things any. I got to quite a few scientific conferences, and most of the conference organizers I know couldn't reschedule an event unless it was at least 3 years out, for practical reasons.
-m
-m
-m
1. reads CNN and Slashdot to fluff his/her/its own ego 2. silently thanks all of the kind people for pointing out the two "bugs" of hardcoding the IP instead of using DNS and not flooding if a connection can't be made 3. fixes and redeploys the worm.
It isn't open source, but decompilation makes everything open source. Isn't it great how the community can improve open source? And who's likely to be more responsive, a sys admin for a MS system or a virus author/copycat?
C'mon, you know you'd love to see a Microsoft bug take out the whitehouse site, anyhow.
-m
Giant worm eats whitehouse Chinese hackers retaliate for plane They've got the Olympics... and hackers Gee, only the title one is funny. -m
See http://www.javasoft.com/products/plugin/index.html for more information on the Java plugin.
-m
-m
In fact, if you want a CGI vehicle, watch a real one. For all of the critic's complaints about butt-jokes in Shrek, I thought the movie was great. The script wasn't up to Toy Story standards, but the rendering was the best I'd ever seen, the sound track is fantasitic, and the parody jokes were hysterical. So, for an anal-fetish CGI move, skip Evoloution and hit the kid's movie instead. -m
That said, you should be aware that there are a lot of "catches" with ISO (incentive stock options).
1. You have to have cash on hand to exercise them. 500,000 options at $1 for a $100 stock do you no good if you don't have half a million on hand.
2. You have to pay short term capital gains, even if you don't sell. You must pay taxes on the difference between your strike price and the current market price. If the stock went up a lot ($99 in the previous example), you have to pay $36 in taxes per share immediately-- even though you haven't sold your stock yet! People have lost a lot of money on ISO's this way.
3. ISO's are not necessarily honored if a company is sold. If the company is not publicly traded and is forced to sell or liquidate, preferred shares are paid off first. ISO's get whatever is left, which may be nothing.
-m
The Kinesis Ergo Contour Classic is the best keyboard I've ever found. For $175, you get full hardware level remap and macro, an intelligently arranged keyboard (that looks science fiction; it has 12 thumb keys), with an overall contour shaped for the range of motion of your hands. I got mine on a doctor's recomendation and have loved it ever since.
We need an Emacs Python mode that doesn't allow tabs and does something clever like only allowing indents to be a multiple of 2 (or 4-- when whitespace is significant, you want to indent further).
-m
They probably aren't doing this because they are very upset about MP3's, but because it is a demonstration that they are working to stamp out piracy.
-m
It seems like Microsoft, not the customer is the one trying to slip out of a license :).
I've never used MS products to record or play MP3's, so I could care less about MS's lack of support.
Compare all of this to Apple, who just released the best MP3 encoder/ripper/song manager/cd burner program I've ever used, iTunes. Oh yeah, Apple makes their product free to everyone, too. With OSX running both MS Office, apple apps and all of my favorite unix tools, why would I upgrade to Win XP instead of throwing out my PC and getting a G4? Maybe even a Titanium G4 with a GeForce3... :)
-m
The PS2 games beat original PSX games up, but they don't compare very well against DC or PC games. N64 generally goes for a totally different look to its games, but it is behind DC as well.
-m
The MHz is only a useful comparison between two of the same processor model (e.g. PIII 500Mhz vs PIII 800MHz). A fast PIII outperforms a slow P4-- and I have no idea where AMD fits in at all.
Does anyone know what the relative ranking of chips is?
-m
My project attempts to evolve these effects using genetic algorithms, but you could use the code without the genetic algorithm. Project page at http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/morgan/evolver/inde x.html.
-m
-m