Heh, screw Doom3. It'll be cool and all, but what I really, really want A3D to be resurrected for is Thief III. The Thief series just won't be the same without the fully modeled reverb effects.
I should really start a support group or something for all the Aureal orphans out there.
The thing that really chafes my ass isn't just that Creative didn't ever bother to write new drivers for the old Aureal cards -- they want to sell me an Audigy, not spend money to support a card that never made them any money, I understand. It's that once they bought out Aureal, they then buried Aureal's technology. They own A3D 2.0, and they still haven't produced a card that supports it, and are apparently never going to.
According to your description, your employers have given you a clear, comprehensible and not unreasonable-sounding mandate: don't deploy any software that doesn't have 24-hour, world-wide support.
Why not, then, do your job by finding and implementing packages that fit their requirements, rather than wasting their time trying to shoehorn in unsupported crapware because you happen to think it's K-Rad?
As a rule, companies that have requirements like the ones you describe have them for very good reasons.
God, I'd managed to completely forget that I'm a two-time loser via Creative Labs' mergers&acquisitions department. First my Ensoniq 1370, then my Aureal.
Well, it all depends on what you're doing with them. If you're going to be playing games, there's nothign wrong with an Audigy (or a used Live!) -- nobody's coding for A3D any more, and it's what all the game companies support.
If I were building a system from scratch right now, I'd just get an nForce2 motherboard: nVidia's builtin sound is easily equal to the Audigy.
If I had to buy a PCI card, I'd probably look at the current offerings from Guillemot/Hercules or Turtle Beach cards that use the Crystal CS4630 from Cirrus Logic.
If I had to do real professional sound work...I'd ask someone who knew.:)
Creative has to be right up there with Microsoft in terms of their consistant and blatant contempt for their own customers.
It's been over two years since Creative bought out Aureal, and they still have neither released a card that supports Aureal's A3D 2.0 standard (still lightyears ahead of any version of EAX), nor open-sourced the drivers for the old Aureal cards.
I can't think of a single hardware company I'd be less likely to give my money to. (What, me bitter about my old Diamond MX300? Why yes.)
(replying to an AC; someone mod the parent up, eh?)
The funny thing about Marathon's sounds is that a lot of them, particularly the loon sound that you mention, were apparently taken from some CD of pre-made sound effects that everyone now uses. I've heard that birdsong sample everywhere from screensavers to "environmental white noise machines" at Radio Shack, and every time I hear it, I'm right back in Waterloo Waterpark in Marathon:Infinity.
About ten years ago, I was home from college during the summer, and making a little extra cash by being a receptionist at an insurance company office.
Being the middle of summer, half of the adjusters were on vacation, and the rest of them were taking as many personal days as they could manage. There was nothing to do except answer the phone when it rang twice a day......and play Tetris on the 386 running Windows 3.1 on my desk. So I played it a lot. For hours on end, day in and day out: racking up some pretty impressive scores, and spending almost entire days in the Tetris Zone.
This went on for about three weeks, until one afternoon I had to put a particularly intense game on hold to go answer the call of nature. I ambled into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls and was all set to do my business, until I made a fatal mistake: I looked down...at the floor made out of thousands and thousands of 1.5" white square tiles.
I swear to god the entire room tilted sideways, and if I hadn't been sitting down, I would have fallen. I could feel the parts of my brain that had been doing nothing but tetris pattern recognition for the previous four hours having a near-meltdown as they looked at this solid mass of blocks and tried to map tetris shapes onto each of them. For about 15 seconds, it was like watching a thousand games of tetris played at once, transparently overlaid on each other. I imagine that the sensation was a little bit like what epileptics feel: a firestorm of neurons triggering all at once.
As drug experiences go, it had a lot to recommend it, but I have never really wanted to play Tetris since. Just say no.
Are you sure that the AAC files will play in any device that understands AAC? Since you're limited to three Macs for playback, my guess is that the file is encrypted and only Apple hardware will understand it.
The "three macs for playback" restriction is a function of iTunes. The files are not encrypted, and once burned to CD can be played anywhere.
For someone who used to work for a digital music company, you seem surprisingly uninformed about how this product actually works.
The files that Apple is offering are bog-standard MPEG-4 Audio files. You can burn them to CD and play them on any machine which speaks the AAC codec. No, AAC is not yet as widely supported as MP3, but it's getting there: there are free-as-in-free implementations available. Winamp and XMMS will already both play AAC/MP4 files.
No, not too many DVD players will play them, but that has nothing to do with any DRM "padlock", it's just that not many players bundle the codec yet. Given the intense interest that every hardware manufacturer has evidenced in MPEG-4, that can safely be expected to change sooner rather than later.
Likewise, the files will play on any portable player that supports AAC decoding. That's not just the iPod and yes, you can get all-solid-stateplayers that support it. Today.
Would it have killed you to research this a little bit, rather than spouting a barely-concealed advertisement for your former employer's service?
"nobody gives a damn about ogg"? man, give up smoking the cheap crack. take a look at people who embed audio in other projects - in-game music, for example. free code and specs availability and patent-freeness is making ogg a de-facto standard [vorbis.com] in that scene pretty rapidly.
Statistically, the fact that a small handful of gaming houses have adopted ogg as a cost-cutting measure still boils down to nobody gives a damn. It's nice, but it's a niche market, and a very, very small one. Apple alone sold nearly a million Ipods in the last 12 months. I like Croteam a lot, but they hardly balance it out.
I'd like ogg to succeed as much as the next geek, but between emusic and Apple's new thing, their window of opportunity basically closed this year.
The simple fact is, at 128kbps and up, Vorbis has no compelling quality advantage over AAC, RealOne or MP3Pro, and most of Vorbis' other features that geeks perceive as advantages (lack of patents, lack of DRM features, free encoder/decoder implementation) are not only perceived as disadvantages by the music industy, but are flat-out anathema to them. Nevermind the whole copyright issue: if a hardware industry CEO has to choose between spending an afternoon writing a memo directing his engineering team to support Vorbis, and several months of protracted negotiations with Microsoft, Real and Apple (which just happen to include expensed dinners, lunches, flights, hotels and "retreats" on their tab), he's going to pick the latter in a heartbeat. Yes, even in a recession.
Monty and the rest of the Xiph folks approached this from the standard geek mentality: build a cool tool and the market will create itself. It's admirable and occasionally true, but it's not how the entertainment business works.
Sorry. I have over 5,000 tracks ripped to vorbis myself, and I'm not planning on giving them up any time soon. But neither am I kidding myself that they're ever going to be supported in the same way that mp3 and AAC are.
It might behoove you to actually read the introduction to the book and the bios of the authors. The people who wrote it were not circa-2002 pro-Microsoft trolls; they were circa-1991 VMS and Multics refugees who as a rule knew more about operating system design and engineering than you'll ever learn.
Also, pointing out that idiotic mistakes such as "hidden" files have been perpetuated by newer operating systems does not negate the point that it was an idiotic mistake. (Quite the opposite, actually.)
I've never yet played a "survival horror" game that didn't make me want to laugh at its lame attempts at suspense...but Shock2, played in a dark room with good headphones (oh how I miss you, Aureal!), had me literally shaking in fear.
Please, god, let this be Warren Spector's next game...and let it be done right.
FPS games will mean nothing after this game, unless they can come up with their own massive multiplayer feature.
Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking after finishing up the original Half-Life: "This game was okay, but what it really needed was more 13-year-olds asking me "A/S/L?! HAHAHAHA F4G0T!!!" every five minutes.
Actually, Gabe Newell of Valve did officially confirm that HL2 was being "worked on" in an interview with PC Gamer a few months after Opposing Force was released. But wisely, that was the last thing ever heard from them on the subject until now.
Well my theory (oh no, wait, this is actually my direct experience) is that Quicktime for Windows has always been a giant dump. To even imply that it's optimized, or a reasonably cross-platform streaming solution is a joke
"Quicktime" really doesn't have much to do with this. If you have a problem with the playback speed/quality, talk to Sorenson Video, who wrote the codec.
You probably just need to replace the pickup wheels. You can occasionally find the real HP service kits on ebay, or there are a couple of companies that make aftermarket ones quite cheaply. Try fixyourownprinter.com.
IANAL either, but I suspect that since RedHat offers ISOs for download and still maintains a list of mirror sites on their website, it's safe to infer that they don't mind either of these cases.
Where our anonymous friend tripped up was that he was selling those ISOs on EBay.
Here's what you have to do to distribute your own CDs of RedHat Linux:
Step One: Remove the "redhat-logos" package. (If you want your installer to work, you'll probably have to remove the package file and the references to it in the kickstart package list.)
Step Two: Think of a name. It can be anything, as long as it's not "RedHat Linux."
That's pretty much it. The code is GPLed; their name and their art assets are not. Anyone who can't be bothered to do the two steps above, I don't really have much sympathy for when RedHat's lawyers engage the bitchslap machine.
Incidentally, this is all well documented on redhat.com. All you had to do was search for 'redistribution' on their website.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, screw Doom3. It'll be cool and all, but what I really, really want A3D to be resurrected for is Thief III. The Thief series just won't be the same without the fully modeled reverb effects.
I should really start a support group or something for all the Aureal orphans out there.
The thing that really chafes my ass isn't just that Creative didn't ever bother to write new drivers for the old Aureal cards -- they want to sell me an Audigy, not spend money to support a card that never made them any money, I understand. It's that once they bought out Aureal, they then buried Aureal's technology. They own A3D 2.0, and they still haven't produced a card that supports it, and are apparently never going to.
Oh well, that's the way the industry goes.
According to your description, your employers have given you a clear, comprehensible and not unreasonable-sounding mandate: don't deploy any software that doesn't have 24-hour, world-wide support.
Why not, then, do your job by finding and implementing packages that fit their requirements, rather than wasting their time trying to shoehorn in unsupported crapware because you happen to think it's K-Rad?
As a rule, companies that have requirements like the ones you describe have them for very good reasons.
God, I'd managed to completely forget that I'm a two-time loser via Creative Labs' mergers&acquisitions department. First my Ensoniq 1370, then my Aureal.
Well, it all depends on what you're doing with them. If you're going to be playing games, there's nothign wrong with an Audigy (or a used Live!) -- nobody's coding for A3D any more, and it's what all the game companies support.
:)
If I were building a system from scratch right now, I'd just get an nForce2 motherboard: nVidia's builtin sound is easily equal to the Audigy.
If I had to buy a PCI card, I'd probably look at the current offerings from Guillemot/Hercules or Turtle Beach cards that use the Crystal CS4630 from Cirrus Logic.
If I had to do real professional sound work...I'd ask someone who knew.
Creative has to be right up there with Microsoft in terms of their consistant and blatant contempt for their own customers.
It's been over two years since Creative bought out Aureal, and they still have neither released a card that supports Aureal's A3D 2.0 standard (still lightyears ahead of any version of EAX), nor open-sourced the drivers for the old Aureal cards.
I can't think of a single hardware company I'd be less likely to give my money to. (What, me bitter about my old Diamond MX300? Why yes.)
(replying to an AC; someone mod the parent up, eh?)
The funny thing about Marathon's sounds is that a lot of them, particularly the loon sound that you mention, were apparently taken from some CD of pre-made sound effects that everyone now uses. I've heard that birdsong sample everywhere from screensavers to "environmental white noise machines" at Radio Shack, and every time I hear it, I'm right back in Waterloo Waterpark in Marathon:Infinity.
Obviously, you never had a serious tetris addiction. :)
About ten years ago, I was home from college during the summer, and making a little extra cash by being a receptionist at an insurance company office.
...and play Tetris on the 386 running Windows 3.1 on my desk. So I played it a lot. For hours on end, day in and day out: racking up some pretty impressive scores, and spending almost entire days in the Tetris Zone.
Being the middle of summer, half of the adjusters were on vacation, and the rest of them were taking as many personal days as they could manage. There was nothing to do except answer the phone when it rang twice a day...
This went on for about three weeks, until one afternoon I had to put a particularly intense game on hold to go answer the call of nature. I ambled into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls and was all set to do my business, until I made a fatal mistake: I looked down...at the floor made out of thousands and thousands of 1.5" white square tiles.
I swear to god the entire room tilted sideways, and if I hadn't been sitting down, I would have fallen. I could feel the parts of my brain that had been doing nothing but tetris pattern recognition for the previous four hours having a near-meltdown as they looked at this solid mass of blocks and tried to map tetris shapes onto each of them. For about 15 seconds, it was like watching a thousand games of tetris played at once, transparently overlaid on each other. I imagine that the sensation was a little bit like what epileptics feel: a firestorm of neurons triggering all at once.
As drug experiences go, it had a lot to recommend it, but I have never really wanted to play Tetris since. Just say no.
Are you sure that the AAC files will play in any device that understands AAC? Since you're limited to three Macs for playback, my guess is that the file is encrypted and only Apple hardware will understand it.
The "three macs for playback" restriction is a function of iTunes. The files are not encrypted, and once burned to CD can be played anywhere.
Seriously.
:)
Not that it's prevented anyone here from bitching about it.
For someone who used to work for a digital music company, you seem surprisingly uninformed about how this product actually works.
The files that Apple is offering are bog-standard MPEG-4 Audio files. You can burn them to CD and play them on any machine which speaks the AAC codec. No, AAC is not yet as widely supported as MP3, but it's getting there: there are free-as-in-free implementations available. Winamp and XMMS will already both play AAC/MP4 files.
No, not too many DVD players will play them, but that has nothing to do with any DRM "padlock", it's just that not many players bundle the codec yet. Given the intense interest that every hardware manufacturer has evidenced in MPEG-4, that can safely be expected to change sooner rather than later.
Likewise, the files will play on any portable player that supports AAC decoding. That's not just the iPod and yes, you can get all-solid-stateplayers that support it. Today.
Would it have killed you to research this a little bit, rather than spouting a barely-concealed advertisement for your former employer's service?
Statistically, the fact that a small handful of gaming houses have adopted ogg as a cost-cutting measure still boils down to nobody gives a damn. It's nice, but it's a niche market, and a very, very small one. Apple alone sold nearly a million Ipods in the last 12 months. I like Croteam a lot, but they hardly balance it out.
I'd like ogg to succeed as much as the next geek, but between emusic and Apple's new thing, their window of opportunity basically closed this year.
The simple fact is, at 128kbps and up, Vorbis has no compelling quality advantage over AAC, RealOne or MP3Pro, and most of Vorbis' other features that geeks perceive as advantages (lack of patents, lack of DRM features, free encoder/decoder implementation) are not only perceived as disadvantages by the music industy, but are flat-out anathema to them. Nevermind the whole copyright issue: if a hardware industry CEO has to choose between spending an afternoon writing a memo directing his engineering team to support Vorbis, and several months of protracted negotiations with Microsoft, Real and Apple (which just happen to include expensed dinners, lunches, flights, hotels and "retreats" on their tab), he's going to pick the latter in a heartbeat. Yes, even in a recession.
Monty and the rest of the Xiph folks approached this from the standard geek mentality: build a cool tool and the market will create itself. It's admirable and occasionally true, but it's not how the entertainment business works.
Sorry. I have over 5,000 tracks ripped to vorbis myself, and I'm not planning on giving them up any time soon. But neither am I kidding myself that they're ever going to be supported in the same way that mp3 and AAC are.
It might behoove you to actually read the introduction to the book and the bios of the authors. The people who wrote it were not circa-2002 pro-Microsoft trolls; they were circa-1991 VMS and Multics refugees who as a rule knew more about operating system design and engineering than you'll ever learn.
Also, pointing out that idiotic mistakes such as "hidden" files have been perpetuated by newer operating systems does not negate the point that it was an idiotic mistake. (Quite the opposite, actually.)
Yes.
Right fucking on.
The many sings to us. Your flesh...betrays you.
I've never yet played a "survival horror" game that didn't make me want to laugh at its lame attempts at suspense...but Shock2, played in a dark room with good headphones (oh how I miss you, Aureal!), had me literally shaking in fear.
Please, god, let this be Warren Spector's next game...and let it be done right.
FPS games will mean nothing after this game, unless they can come up with their own massive multiplayer feature.
Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking after finishing up the original Half-Life: "This game was okay, but what it really needed was more 13-year-olds asking me "A/S/L?! HAHAHAHA F4G0T!!!" every five minutes.
Actually, Gabe Newell of Valve did officially confirm that HL2 was being "worked on" in an interview with PC Gamer a few months after Opposing Force was released. But wisely, that was the last thing ever heard from them on the subject until now.
You said his name three times! Are you insane?
I'd sleep in aluminum body armor tonight if I were you.
Well my theory (oh no, wait, this is actually my direct experience) is that Quicktime for Windows has always been a giant dump. To even imply that it's optimized, or a reasonably cross-platform streaming solution is a joke
"Quicktime" really doesn't have much to do with this. If you have a problem with the playback speed/quality, talk to Sorenson Video, who wrote the codec.
You probably just need to replace the pickup wheels. You can occasionally find the real HP service kits on ebay, or there are a couple of companies that make aftermarket ones quite cheaply. Try fixyourownprinter.com.
IANAL either, but I suspect that since RedHat offers ISOs for download and still maintains a list of mirror sites on their website, it's safe to infer that they don't mind either of these cases.
Where our anonymous friend tripped up was that he was selling those ISOs on EBay.
Here's what you have to do to distribute your own CDs of RedHat Linux:
Step One: Remove the "redhat-logos" package. (If you want your installer to work, you'll probably have to remove the package file and the references to it in the kickstart package list.)
Step Two: Think of a name. It can be anything, as long as it's not "RedHat Linux."
That's pretty much it. The code is GPLed; their name and their art assets are not. Anyone who can't be bothered to do the two steps above, I don't really have much sympathy for when RedHat's lawyers engage the bitchslap machine.
Incidentally, this is all well documented on redhat.com. All you had to do was search for 'redistribution' on their website.
For a good discussion of the various deficiencies of Linux's threading implementation, even with the introduction of NTPL, see here.
I think they were referring to it being the first Macintosh version that will only run under Mac OS X, not carbonized or executable under Classic.
No. There was never (and will never be) a Carbon or Classic version of Shake. It's been OSX-only from the get-go.