I worked for a company that made 3D chips. We had a pretty good component. Not astoundingly fast, but a competitive mid-range component more than adequate for the current crop of games. Faster and cheaper than the GeForce 2 when that was still considered a competitive card.
So, the sales people went to various board manufacturers, and said "Do you want to buy our chip". The board manufacturers said Gosh. That's perfect for our mid-range market. We'd love to. Our sales people went home happy. nVidia's sales people said "Do you want us to keep selling you our chips?" The board manufacturers sid "Yes, of course we do". nVidia said "well, don't buy chips from that other upstart company".
Apart from the huge board manufacturers who would be able to seriously dent nVidia's sales, none of them were interested in us any more.
Interesting. But only to be expected with decreasing silicon cost. Low precision invsqrt operations such as those on vector units (e.g. 3dNow!) work in a similar way to this code. Doing it in hardware means you can make certain optimisations that aren't available to software.
Other people have answered this, so I'll ask another question.
Isn't it a little clearer, and potentially faster (at least if your optimiser doesn't understand) to use union { float f; int i; }value; value.f = x; i = value.i;
Okay - At times you want a normalised vector. A lot of the time you will have vectors of arbitrary length For example, the light is at the origin, the point is at (12, 4, 3). So the vector from the point to the light is (-13, -4, -3). The length of this vector can be calculated easily using pythagoras's theorem (sqrt (12^2+4^2+3^2). It's 13 units in length. We want a unit vector (i.e. a vector 1 unit in length) So we divide by the length to get (12/13, 4/13, 3/13).
This is great for a 3D rendering application, but in a game speed is critical. This pair of calculations involves a square root and a divide. Both of thse are at least an order of magnitude slower than multiplications and additions.
So what this function does is provide a value you can multiply each component by to get a unit vector.
Well, there's the what and why parts. As for the , I have no idea. I think it uses magic.
EA are clearly going to be making at least one Wii specific game. Which isn't going to surprise anyone.
A studio doesn't have to be particularly big. And most developers will keep development on specific platforms in the same place. It means they can swap programmers around between projects, and makes equipment purchasing simpler. Simple benefits like that.
Find out whether the company offers unofficial support for other platforms. A good company will help with generic problems but nothing that requires changes for the specific OS. What if there's a distro with a faulty version of a library? It's often easier to ask your customers to use a different version, and depending on the application, the customer will be quite hppy to do so.
Don't take it too seriously. It's a fairly amusing way to promote their views, and helps get their message out. Not that I agree with them but I applaud their methods.
Okay, so I'm no marketting gneius, but it seems to me, if there's any sort of competition for first place, then the consumer benefits rather than the companies. They'll be competing on the amount they spend and the prices they charge so they're both trying to provide more for less.
Niche products are different. If you have exactly what a small niche wants, then you have 100% of that niche. You don't need to compete with anyone so you can charge whatever they're willing to pay. Having 100% of 10% of the market is a lot better than 10% of 90% of the market.
Quite true. There is limited loyalty to consoles. How many people followed Sega after the Playstation came out? And the XBox didn't do too badly itself. The PS2 owners will be happy with their PS2 for a while. They'll buy a PS3 if it has better games but that will be the deciding factor.
It tends to be criticised most places except forums primarily populated by under 16's. You'll occasionally get sarcastic comments along the lines of "did you post that on a keyboard or a mobile phone?".
"Writing someone" as opposed to "writing to someone" is an Americanism and reads rather oddly to the British. It suggests getting a pen and scribbling "lego lego lego lego lego".
Ecash systems don't need a central server. You can devise a system where everything is stored on the card. This just requires confidence in the authenticity of the card.
So, use e-cash instead. Chargeup a card. Everyone who sells goods or servies has an inexpensive reader. Touch the card on the bar. Drinks are paid for. Touch card on the door of a taxi. Journey is paid for. Give charity collectors readers.
This product doesn't exist to make a profit for Microsoft. They're not expecting to beat Apple just yet.
What they're going to have, is a proof that Microsoft is a contender in the mp3 player market. This is just a very expensive piece of marketting for their next generation player.
But the thing is, with an AK47, you don't even need to think about that.
Cleaning a weapon is not too much to remember for trained army personel. It's another routine that can be drilled into a soldier. But the AK-47 is used by ad-hoc militia. You just stick the gun in someone's hand and tell him to shoot roughly at the approaching army.
I thoguht it was to ensure that a well regulated militia had adequate armaments. Any extrapolation on that is just an assumption.
But quite honestly, who gives a flying fuck what they thought 200 years ago? Just because they thought it back then doesn't mean it's a good idea now. If you think it is, then great, but the reasons it's a good idea now are not neccesarily the same reasons it was in 1786.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for a company that made 3D chips. We had a pretty good component. Not astoundingly fast, but a competitive mid-range component more than adequate for the current crop of games. Faster and cheaper than the GeForce 2 when that was still considered a competitive card.
So, the sales people went to various board manufacturers, and said "Do you want to buy our chip". The board manufacturers said Gosh. That's perfect for our mid-range market. We'd love to. Our sales people went home happy. nVidia's sales people said "Do you want us to keep selling you our chips?" The board manufacturers sid "Yes, of course we do". nVidia said "well, don't buy chips from that other upstart company".
Apart from the huge board manufacturers who would be able to seriously dent nVidia's sales, none of them were interested in us any more.
Interesting. But only to be expected with decreasing silicon cost. Low precision invsqrt operations such as those on vector units (e.g. 3dNow!) work in a similar way to this code. Doing it in hardware means you can make certain optimisations that aren't available to software.
Other people have answered this, so I'll ask another question.
Isn't it a little clearer, and potentially faster (at least if your optimiser doesn't understand) to use
union
{
float f;
int i;
}value;
value.f = x;
i = value.i;
Okay - At times you want a normalised vector. A lot of the time you will have vectors of arbitrary length For example, the light is at the origin, the point is at (12, 4, 3). So the vector from the point to the light is (-13, -4, -3). The length of this vector can be calculated easily using pythagoras's theorem (sqrt (12^2+4^2+3^2). It's 13 units in length. We want a unit vector (i.e. a vector 1 unit in length) So we divide by the length to get (12/13, 4/13, 3/13).
This is great for a 3D rendering application, but in a game speed is critical. This pair of calculations involves a square root and a divide. Both of thse are at least an order of magnitude slower than multiplications and additions.
So what this function does is provide a value you can multiply each component by to get a unit vector.
Well, there's the what and why parts. As for the , I have no idea. I think it uses magic.
EA are clearly going to be making at least one Wii specific game. Which isn't going to surprise anyone.
A studio doesn't have to be particularly big. And most developers will keep development on specific platforms in the same place. It means they can swap programmers around between projects, and makes equipment purchasing simpler. Simple benefits like that.
Find out whether the company offers unofficial support for other platforms. A good company will help with generic problems but nothing that requires changes for the specific OS. What if there's a distro with a faulty version of a library? It's often easier to ask your customers to use a different version, and depending on the application, the customer will be quite hppy to do so.
Don't take it too seriously. It's a fairly amusing way to promote their views, and helps get their message out. Not that I agree with them but I applaud their methods.
Green peg.
Okay, so I'm no marketting gneius, but it seems to me, if there's any sort of competition for first place, then the consumer benefits rather than the companies. They'll be competing on the amount they spend and the prices they charge so they're both trying to provide more for less.
Niche products are different. If you have exactly what a small niche wants, then you have 100% of that niche. You don't need to compete with anyone so you can charge whatever they're willing to pay. Having 100% of 10% of the market is a lot better than 10% of 90% of the market.
Quite true. There is limited loyalty to consoles. How many people followed Sega after the Playstation came out? And the XBox didn't do too badly itself. The PS2 owners will be happy with their PS2 for a while. They'll buy a PS3 if it has better games but that will be the deciding factor.
Do people still care about that? That's like sooooooooo 1990's.
Sorry. Was just intrigued. Wondering if he'd say or do anything interesting if prodded.
The only one that bothers me, and I'm not sure who is more guilty of it...is spelling 'lose' as 'loose'.
Me too. I once did a search of our entire codebase to sort this one out.
It tends to be criticised most places except forums primarily populated by under 16's. You'll occasionally get sarcastic comments along the lines of "did you post that on a keyboard or a mobile phone?".
It did rather.
"Writing someone" as opposed to "writing to someone" is an Americanism and reads rather oddly to the British. It suggests getting a pen and scribbling "lego lego lego lego lego".
So, what's with the inadequacy and obsessing?
Am I? Hoookay... And your name is Billy.
Slashdot has always been the stuff that Taco thinks is interesting.
Coming here and demanding that he changes his editorial policy seems slightly odd.
but the £5 note is their only note that will comfortably fit in my standard-sized wallet.
Wallets are designed to hold money. Not the other way round. Mine holds a wad of £50 notes quite easily.
Ecash systems don't need a central server. You can devise a system where everything is stored on the card. This just requires confidence in the authenticity of the card.
So, use e-cash instead. Chargeup a card. Everyone who sells goods or servies has an inexpensive reader. Touch the card on the bar. Drinks are paid for. Touch card on the door of a taxi. Journey is paid for. Give charity collectors readers.
The poker game is a bit harder.
Or some easily distinguishable raised section?
this has the added benefit of adding an extra anti-forgery mechnaism.
This product doesn't exist to make a profit for Microsoft. They're not expecting to beat Apple just yet.
What they're going to have, is a proof that Microsoft is a contender in the mp3 player market. This is just a very expensive piece of marketting for their next generation player.
But the thing is, with an AK47, you don't even need to think about that.
Cleaning a weapon is not too much to remember for trained army personel. It's another routine that can be drilled into a soldier. But the AK-47 is used by ad-hoc militia. You just stick the gun in someone's hand and tell him to shoot roughly at the approaching army.
I thoguht it was to ensure that a well regulated militia had adequate armaments. Any extrapolation on that is just an assumption.
But quite honestly, who gives a flying fuck what they thought 200 years ago? Just because they thought it back then doesn't mean it's a good idea now. If you think it is, then great, but the reasons it's a good idea now are not neccesarily the same reasons it was in 1786.