So Wal-Mart is destroying the western world by nearly forcing suppliers to outsource and import goods from the land of sweatshops. Solution ? Nuke the land of sweatshops. If you destroy whatever is judged 'inferior' then there is no more comparison to be made and thus the power battle ends.
I don't mean this in a racist or nazi way. We have to eliminate the difference so that there will no longer be an incentive to financially abuse the less-favored societies of the world. Killing is one way, striving towards global unity is another; but as long as there will be GW Bushes, Saddams and Bin Ladens on this planet there will be no world peace and equality, because for every gun you fire, someone else will get pissed and fire back. It's funny that we are taught cooperation and sharing as young children, but the leaders of our world are little more than tired old bullies with bigger gangs.
Better yet: don't pay parking tickets at all. We own this fucking land, it is our government. Time to show the world all its broken systems that need cleaning out.
The reason why open source games can't compete with big-budget titles is because corporate game houses have a small army of best-of-breed artists, designers and coders (and marketing sheep). The OSS collective has a handful of genius kernel hackers and network engineers, and a bazillion lazy perl/php monkeys. Let's face it, we're better than the unwashed masses but we suck as a whole when it comes to coordinated effort. Look at the biggest most successful OSS projects: most were made by a single person slaving for weeks/months, the rest of us just provide feedback, occasional patches etc. And then there's a hundred clones that never seem to get finished.
There's also the issue of survival: game developers get paid to work 80+ hours a week exclusively on their title. We have day jobs and do this stuff as a hobby. A true indie game programmer has to be either a 16 year old that doesn't go to school and lives with his parents (no job), or someone in-between jobs that has enough savings to live for a few months. Even then, just one person can't create Quake 4. It takes years of man-hours to get it done, and it happens to be quite difficult to get a bunch of unemployed talented game developers and artists together at any one time.
Considering how my PS2 is being thoroughly abused by the kids and I haven't even played it in over a year, I don't think I mind having paid 300$ for it a few years back. It's done its time and now my DVD burner is having a field day with Xbox software:) XBMP is a beautiful thing!
Seriously, a low-poly engine can make up for a lot of missing detail by using well designed textures and a few cheap tricks that mask the sharp edges, especially now that many 3d accelerators support pixel shaders where you can post-process the everything with a minimal performance hit. Another fine example of clever thinking beating out brute force.
Silly Nerdy, we already know the speed of light is 300 bazillion millimeters per second. Microwaves are being underused when measuring such trivialities with gross imprecision (a wooden ruler ?!). Nuke-o-matics are much better used to make things burst and/or arc in wonderful patterns of color.
Now this guy should find a way to measure the 'evilness' of a CD by frying it a few minutes on high. Perhaps a relation could be drawn between the bright blue arcs and the sheer nauseous content of an AOL 6.0 disc.
Attention-span camera logic is one of those things that are hard to get right, but great if/when you pull it off. Figure out what the player 'wants' to see, find the longest ground-parallel line between any two 'interesting' entities, and smoothly interpolate your camera alignment until the line is centered and full-width.
The problem with this algo is that you need to decide how far is 'far enough', and/or define a maximum number of enemies to track, perhaps skewing that analysis depending on the speed and/or threat assessment of each enemy. Basically we need to recreate our own mind's alertness processing. Hence the name 'attention-span camera'.
I've seen this done in some games, but usually they require fairly slow and predictable action because this is quite processing-intensive.
You do when they tout them as 3-view gaming uberbeasts. Bottom line is : Matrox now officially anally sucks goats. Yes they do have outstanding image integrity and crispness, but they've had that for nearly two decades now and there isn't much room for improvement. I'd like to see them team up with NV or ATI to use these industry kings' GPU's but with Matrox's premium-quality output stage circuitry.
What's the use in having 10'000$ speakers if you're using a 50$ sparkomatic amp ? That's Matrox. What's the use in having a 10'000$ amp if you have 50$ speakers ? That's NVidia. What's the use in having a 10'000$ amp and 10'000$ speakers if you only listen to rap 'music' ? That's ATI.
Envy sound chips ? You mean I just paid 300$ for VIA's half-baked technology and a handful of XLR connectors ? Oh the humanity!
Funny, they should take those Envys and slap them onto budget motherboards, with dual athlons and a gig of ram, onboard 8meg video. Then sell them for a couple hundred bucks to all of us poor musicians who were intensely seriously assfucked by MP3.com and the 'new' payback system that earns less than the average click-based banner program.
In graphics, everything is redundant because you really can't see that lone pixel among the other 1920x1440. So the solution is to render one out of every four polygons... tada, 4x performance.
The reason there will not be a converging standard between desktops and notebooks is all about money.
You can buy a decent PC for 300$ these days. You can buy a decent notebook for about 1200$. Heck, just pick any pathetically simple accessory for your notebook and it costs as much as another desktop PC. Wireless network card ? only 149.99$. DVD-CDRW drive ? only 299.99$. Miniaturization my ass, they've been producing small gadgets forever, often sharing the same chipset as the larger desktop version.
It's all about lock-in. You paid 1200$ for that laptop, to the manufacturer that tells them you're either a rich (and/or stupid) student/geek, or your employed paid it for you. Either way, they reserve the right to suck your wallet dry when you want to upgrade the thing.
Just like an oil change for my Ford is 15$, while an oil change for a Volvo is 60$. Same oil, different suckers.
The xbox hackers know what's being validated, they just haven't figured out how to masquerade it as valid data. It's checking the bios, and what do we change on a modded xbox to run custom apps and copies ? the bios of course. So it is secure until we find a way to execute one bios, but present another to the Xbox Live test (or completely override the test itself - perhaps by intercepting accesses to the bios memory-mapped area). It's tricky but just like the PSX stealth mods that 'hide' after their job is done, something similar will probably be done on Xbox.
Xbox isn't hardware DRM, it's in the bios, which is just software. The modchips out there are just bios overrides, you can do the same with those "007 save game" exploits that simply reflash the bios with a cracked version. And even hardware DRM will be defeatable unless someone builds it right into the core, because if it's in a separate chip, someone somewhere will manufacture a pirate chip to replace it and defeat the protection.
Copy protection doesn't stop piracy, it just slows it down a few milliseconds. Anybody with the dedication will find a way around it. Heck, Safedisc and Securom were originally uncopyable, so people started buying burners that were specifically able to reproduce the bad sectors. The consumers' buying power eventually forced all manufacturers to make their burners 'strong enough' to make working copies of games. And there will always be no-cd patches for the rest. Heck, look at Alcohol 120% software - whatever it can't copy, it emulates. There is no end to this, because ultimately the crackers are smarter and more dedicated than the ones making the protection. You have to 'ship' a protection scheme, which means at some point it has to be declared 'done enough' and sold, whereas the cracker has all the time in the world to finish his task. The only person he needs to satisfy is himself.
"The problem in most cases, she said, is that your boss isn't going anywhere. Those who are in charge either had enough acumen to get themselves to the spot above you, they have the benefit of a protector, or they own the place."
How depressing! Here's a solution: plain kiddie pr0n, warez and Enron memos on his hard drive and narc him. Scratch one PHB!
If it's so secure, then why is it that right now, my entire team is in a panic because our (pr0n) webserver is being overrun by script kiddies sharing dvd rips and our #1 feature is going to be on national TV tomorrow for an hour-long biography and we don't even know what might happen to our box.
Well I guess that last line said it all. We're moving from Win2k to Linux because we're tired of the endless backdoors, trojans and whatnot. It doesn't matter how soon or often you patch, the bastards still find ways to break in. Game over Microsoft.
This may seem like bait, but if these three countries really do work on a joint effort, don't you think they're going to deliberately ruin the software out of hatred for one another ? They may be geographically close, but they're night and day when it comes to politics and century-old grudges that have lost their meaning. There's a reason why most of them are still stuck in the dark ages: it's because they're too busy infighting to realize the whole world has passed them by.
Nothing has changed. The Divx Pro encoder has always has two options: no $$ cost but adware supported, or 19.99$ no adware. The regular codec, used for regular playback, has always been free without adware.
For a free alternative to DivX, use XVID. Better quality, directly compatible, and perhaps mildly faster. Open source, of course.
Well DUH, especially barometric pressure will affect your body's functioning to some degree. If you go several hundred feet underwater, or up in the great mountains, the pressure differences make your lungs go k00ky (among other things).
Perhaps a slight variation in air pressure, may cause oxygen levels in your body to jitter just a little, enough to trigger a migraine in some people.
Everything in meat-space is interrelated. Push one thing, it affects another 500 feet away, though imperceptibly. These are things we are still too stupid to notice.
They're plagued by the "One vision" syndrome. Problem is that Miyamoto doesn't govern the buying habits of the entire planet.
Anyways, the reasoning behind bundled DVD support is a psychological cushion. Kids nag their parents for the latest and greatest console, parents say "Nay" until they notice it's also a DVD player. So they say "DVD's would be nice" and they buy the thing, thinking both kids and adults will benefit from the investment.
What allows these BSA thugs to just waltz in and raid the place ? I've never witnessed one (else I'd be in it with the other thugs to destroy BSA), but if someone is not invited, they have no legal right to cross the door, period. If I have someone at the reception desk claiming to be from BSA, I'm going to politely ask them to come back when they have a police escort, warrant, and notarized proof of intent.
Else I should change my career plans and become an independent BSA prick. I'd love to sue people on behalf of other people for things that don't exist.
All political issues aside, NVidia has been taking a hike down the low road lately. Geforce FX is a big big disappointment, more eye candy but less raw horsepower, the exact opposite of what the Nvidia brand used to be about. The thing with the Geforce line is that it used to be ahead of its time. I say that because three years ago I bought a GF2 GTS, I could run Quake at 120+ fps average, and up until late last year I was still running that same card, playing just about any game I could find with decent framerate. But today you can buy an FX5600 and be unimpressed from day one, even on current games.
Right now the Xbox is still performing admirably with its slowly aging Nvidia core, rivalling PC graphics to this day. This means that NV has been sitting on their asses shrugging their shoulders, the new products are actually slower than the old, and there isn't much innovation anymore. Therefore there's not enough of a significant improvement to warrant Xbox2 development with NVidia. On the other side, ATI is steadily releasing faster revisions of its cores, and taking advantage of.13 micron chips for higher clock speeds and lower power consumption. Don't forget that you don't want a huge 7000rpm fan cooling the graphics chip in that Xbox2.
Slashdot Mirror
So Wal-Mart is destroying the western world by nearly forcing suppliers to outsource and import goods from the land of sweatshops. Solution ? Nuke the land of sweatshops. If you destroy whatever is judged 'inferior' then there is no more comparison to be made and thus the power battle ends.
I don't mean this in a racist or nazi way. We have to eliminate the difference so that there will no longer be an incentive to financially abuse the less-favored societies of the world. Killing is one way, striving towards global unity is another; but as long as there will be GW Bushes, Saddams and Bin Ladens on this planet there will be no world peace and equality, because for every gun you fire, someone else will get pissed and fire back. It's funny that we are taught cooperation and sharing as young children, but the leaders of our world are little more than tired old bullies with bigger gangs.
Better yet: don't pay parking tickets at all. We own this fucking land, it is our government. Time to show the world all its broken systems that need cleaning out.
The reason why open source games can't compete with big-budget titles is because corporate game houses have a small army of best-of-breed artists, designers and coders (and marketing sheep). The OSS collective has a handful of genius kernel hackers and network engineers, and a bazillion lazy perl/php monkeys. Let's face it, we're better than the unwashed masses but we suck as a whole when it comes to coordinated effort. Look at the biggest most successful OSS projects: most were made by a single person slaving for weeks/months, the rest of us just provide feedback, occasional patches etc. And then there's a hundred clones that never seem to get finished.
There's also the issue of survival: game developers get paid to work 80+ hours a week exclusively on their title. We have day jobs and do this stuff as a hobby. A true indie game programmer has to be either a 16 year old that doesn't go to school and lives with his parents (no job), or someone in-between jobs that has enough savings to live for a few months. Even then, just one person can't create Quake 4. It takes years of man-hours to get it done, and it happens to be quite difficult to get a bunch of unemployed talented game developers and artists together at any one time.
Considering how my PS2 is being thoroughly abused by the kids and I haven't even played it in over a year, I don't think I mind having paid 300$ for it a few years back. It's done its time and now my DVD burner is having a field day with Xbox software :) XBMP is a beautiful thing!
It's all about the texturing!
Seriously, a low-poly engine can make up for a lot of missing detail by using well designed textures and a few cheap tricks that mask the sharp edges, especially now that many 3d accelerators support pixel shaders where you can post-process the everything with a minimal performance hit. Another fine example of clever thinking beating out brute force.
Blowing a weak mind to bits is always better than sex.
Silly Nerdy, we already know the speed of light is 300 bazillion millimeters per second. Microwaves are being underused when measuring such trivialities with gross imprecision (a wooden ruler ?!). Nuke-o-matics are much better used to make things burst and/or arc in wonderful patterns of color.
Now this guy should find a way to measure the 'evilness' of a CD by frying it a few minutes on high. Perhaps a relation could be drawn between the bright blue arcs and the sheer nauseous content of an AOL 6.0 disc.
Attention-span camera logic is one of those things that are hard to get right, but great if/when you pull it off. Figure out what the player 'wants' to see, find the longest ground-parallel line between any two 'interesting' entities, and smoothly interpolate your camera alignment until the line is centered and full-width.
The problem with this algo is that you need to decide how far is 'far enough', and/or define a maximum number of enemies to track, perhaps skewing that analysis depending on the speed and/or threat assessment of each enemy. Basically we need to recreate our own mind's alertness processing. Hence the name 'attention-span camera'.
I've seen this done in some games, but usually they require fairly slow and predictable action because this is quite processing-intensive.
You do when they tout them as 3-view gaming uberbeasts. Bottom line is : Matrox now officially anally sucks goats. Yes they do have outstanding image integrity and crispness, but they've had that for nearly two decades now and there isn't much room for improvement. I'd like to see them team up with NV or ATI to use these industry kings' GPU's but with Matrox's premium-quality output stage circuitry.
What's the use in having 10'000$ speakers if you're using a 50$ sparkomatic amp ? That's Matrox. What's the use in having a 10'000$ amp if you have 50$ speakers ? That's NVidia. What's the use in having a 10'000$ amp and 10'000$ speakers if you only listen to rap 'music' ? That's ATI.
Envy sound chips ? You mean I just paid 300$ for VIA's half-baked technology and a handful of XLR connectors ? Oh the humanity!
Funny, they should take those Envys and slap them onto budget motherboards, with dual athlons and a gig of ram, onboard 8meg video. Then sell them for a couple hundred bucks to all of us poor musicians who were intensely seriously assfucked by MP3.com and the 'new' payback system that earns less than the average click-based banner program.
In graphics, everything is redundant because you really can't see that lone pixel among the other 1920x1440. So the solution is to render one out of every four polygons... tada, 4x performance.
My proposition: randomize the program name (as reported to the OS/scheduler).
The reason there will not be a converging standard between desktops and notebooks is all about money.
You can buy a decent PC for 300$ these days. You can buy a decent notebook for about 1200$. Heck, just pick any pathetically simple accessory for your notebook and it costs as much as another desktop PC. Wireless network card ? only 149.99$. DVD-CDRW drive ? only 299.99$. Miniaturization my ass, they've been producing small gadgets forever, often sharing the same chipset as the larger desktop version.
It's all about lock-in. You paid 1200$ for that laptop, to the manufacturer that tells them you're either a rich (and/or stupid) student/geek, or your employed paid it for you. Either way, they reserve the right to suck your wallet dry when you want to upgrade the thing.
Just like an oil change for my Ford is 15$, while an oil change for a Volvo is 60$. Same oil, different suckers.
The xbox hackers know what's being validated, they just haven't figured out how to masquerade it as valid data. It's checking the bios, and what do we change on a modded xbox to run custom apps and copies ? the bios of course. So it is secure until we find a way to execute one bios, but present another to the Xbox Live test (or completely override the test itself - perhaps by intercepting accesses to the bios memory-mapped area). It's tricky but just like the PSX stealth mods that 'hide' after their job is done, something similar will probably be done on Xbox.
There is no 100% unbreakable copy protection.
Xbox isn't hardware DRM, it's in the bios, which is just software. The modchips out there are just bios overrides, you can do the same with those "007 save game" exploits that simply reflash the bios with a cracked version. And even hardware DRM will be defeatable unless someone builds it right into the core, because if it's in a separate chip, someone somewhere will manufacture a pirate chip to replace it and defeat the protection.
Copy protection doesn't stop piracy, it just slows it down a few milliseconds. Anybody with the dedication will find a way around it. Heck, Safedisc and Securom were originally uncopyable, so people started buying burners that were specifically able to reproduce the bad sectors. The consumers' buying power eventually forced all manufacturers to make their burners 'strong enough' to make working copies of games. And there will always be no-cd patches for the rest. Heck, look at Alcohol 120% software - whatever it can't copy, it emulates. There is no end to this, because ultimately the crackers are smarter and more dedicated than the ones making the protection. You have to 'ship' a protection scheme, which means at some point it has to be declared 'done enough' and sold, whereas the cracker has all the time in the world to finish his task. The only person he needs to satisfy is himself.
How depressing! Here's a solution: plain kiddie pr0n, warez and Enron memos on his hard drive and narc him. Scratch one PHB!
If it's so secure, then why is it that right now, my entire team is in a panic because our (pr0n) webserver is being overrun by script kiddies sharing dvd rips and our #1 feature is going to be on national TV tomorrow for an hour-long biography and we don't even know what might happen to our box.
Well I guess that last line said it all. We're moving from Win2k to Linux because we're tired of the endless backdoors, trojans and whatnot. It doesn't matter how soon or often you patch, the bastards still find ways to break in. Game over Microsoft.
This may seem like bait, but if these three countries really do work on a joint effort, don't you think they're going to deliberately ruin the software out of hatred for one another ? They may be geographically close, but they're night and day when it comes to politics and century-old grudges that have lost their meaning. There's a reason why most of them are still stuck in the dark ages: it's because they're too busy infighting to realize the whole world has passed them by.
Nothing has changed. The Divx Pro encoder has always has two options: no $$ cost but adware supported, or 19.99$ no adware. The regular codec, used for regular playback, has always been free without adware.
For a free alternative to DivX, use XVID. Better quality, directly compatible, and perhaps mildly faster. Open source, of course.
Well DUH, especially barometric pressure will affect your body's functioning to some degree. If you go several hundred feet underwater, or up in the great mountains, the pressure differences make your lungs go k00ky (among other things).
Perhaps a slight variation in air pressure, may cause oxygen levels in your body to jitter just a little, enough to trigger a migraine in some people.
Everything in meat-space is interrelated. Push one thing, it affects another 500 feet away, though imperceptibly. These are things we are still too stupid to notice.
Alright, come on and proselytize to me in the PK arena!
(/me is an aggressive antitheist - quit believing or quit breathing!)
They're plagued by the "One vision" syndrome. Problem is that Miyamoto doesn't govern the buying habits of the entire planet.
Anyways, the reasoning behind bundled DVD support is a psychological cushion. Kids nag their parents for the latest and greatest console, parents say "Nay" until they notice it's also a DVD player. So they say "DVD's would be nice" and they buy the thing, thinking both kids and adults will benefit from the investment.
Sure beats those 40$ Apex AD-1200's any day!
So, absolute freedom and no scripted missions, eh ?
You've obviously never worked for the mob.
*snicker*
What allows these BSA thugs to just waltz in and raid the place ? I've never witnessed one (else I'd be in it with the other thugs to destroy BSA), but if someone is not invited, they have no legal right to cross the door, period. If I have someone at the reception desk claiming to be from BSA, I'm going to politely ask them to come back when they have a police escort, warrant, and notarized proof of intent.
Else I should change my career plans and become an independent BSA prick. I'd love to sue people on behalf of other people for things that don't exist.
All political issues aside, NVidia has been taking a hike down the low road lately. Geforce FX is a big big disappointment, more eye candy but less raw horsepower, the exact opposite of what the Nvidia brand used to be about. The thing with the Geforce line is that it used to be ahead of its time. I say that because three years ago I bought a GF2 GTS, I could run Quake at 120+ fps average, and up until late last year I was still running that same card, playing just about any game I could find with decent framerate. But today you can buy an FX5600 and be unimpressed from day one, even on current games.
.13 micron chips for higher clock speeds and lower power consumption. Don't forget that you don't want a huge 7000rpm fan cooling the graphics chip in that Xbox2.
Right now the Xbox is still performing admirably with its slowly aging Nvidia core, rivalling PC graphics to this day. This means that NV has been sitting on their asses shrugging their shoulders, the new products are actually slower than the old, and there isn't much innovation anymore. Therefore there's not enough of a significant improvement to warrant Xbox2 development with NVidia. On the other side, ATI is steadily releasing faster revisions of its cores, and taking advantage of