I submitted it. I did actually use "honour" but my submission was shorter than above (I never submitted anything before). The editor correctly added the description of the award, and in the process changed the spelling - I'm guessing here.
Not at all true. I solder tons of tiny SMD in last half-year using only regular iron (not even temp controlled!) and home-made PCBs, and a good loupe. I designed and built a portable digital-to-analog convertor (for audio), in several prototypes.
Not really. I don't order from 'net unless I have to. I want my stuff NOW and I don't want to waste HOURS calling Purolator to redirect package or going to their office in the middle of nowhere to pick up a package or hunting the corporate person at work to see if the package is in.
Also, unless you live in US, buying over the 'net is more expensive, more taxed and less convenient.
I prefer my local shop, which is cheaper than EB and also lets you put your old games on consignment where you set the price tag and they get 25% of that price when it's sold.
And you have no idea what a troll is. Trolls post stupid, illogical, simple posts as they are simple and stupid creatures. I find trolls funny. I don't find hate funny.
That post was flamebait if anything. I get caught on it, admittedly.
I second that. No way IN HELL I'd use 60Hz again. The only reason I ever had to is because I lived in a poor country. I'm either going to get at least 75 Hz or I'd start searching for a new job starting immediately. Proper way would be to sue the company but who has money for that... Remember, corps rule the world.
I am sure some of the best game programmers are like you described them, as I frequently read interviews with people like John Carmack or Tom Sweeney and others.
But you are talking about *very* intelligent people here. Those people are rare, they defy standard classification and can reach any height regardless of education. You can find them in any realm of life.
I very seriously doubt that most of non-top programmers, game or otherwise, read things like conference proceedings (I'm talking about something like IEEE proceedings) because a non-university educated average programer would have a very tough time understanding things like, say, wavelets (that are behind JPEG-2000), Fourier analysis and so on without some serious time studying math. And we're not talking two weekends with a textbook. You CAN learn anything on your own if you're good enough, but learning math and physics (or probably anything else) from a GOOD teacher is something no book is ever going to do.
Then again, I was educated in Eastern Europe, and from my experience university teachers there were much better on average than here in Canada. There, nobody gave a damn how many students passed the exams because it was all state-paid. So if you DID get a degree, that definitely meant something, since say 2500 people would apply, 450 would be admitted, and only 40-50 per year would graduate after obligatory 5 years of fixed curriculum. Well, 7 years on average;).
As an avid gamer (I *finish* 30-40 new games per year in all genres) and with 15 years of programming experience, I can honestly say that many games are coming with deficiencies are showing their programmer's lack of knowledge in areas such as, say, artificial intelligence (path finding for example). Good game companies usually release extremely polished products, well optimized and comparatively bug-free, no question about that. But take even for example ID Software, which had their Quake 3 release stalled for half a year until they got a programmer to code the bot AI. It's not at all that I doubt people there wouldn't be able to do it themselves given enough time to study the subject. It's just that, say, a masters degree holder in proper area from nearby university shouldn't have much problem doing it for them. Maybe I'm wrong in this particular case though.
One reason that *good* university educated people are not flocking to gaming industry (as you've seen the bad ones for yourself) could be that AFAIK the pay is in general lower than in other IT areas such as databases, jobs are extremely insecure and hours are hideous by any standard. I myself would gladly consider working on games even for lower pay, but at 100 hours per week, forget it. People that do that usually end up very deficient in other areas of life. That is why there's so much games that are unimaginative, using 200 word vocabulary, and going over same plots over and over. I'd have to sacrifice my interests in music, literature, playing other games, do-it-yourself electronics, writing and so on and become a work-eat-sleep-work drone whose highlight of the week would be a non-pizza dinner and seeing a blockbuster movie. No wonder then that Half-Life (a great game) gets accolades for its greatest storyline. From people whose yearly literature diet consists of game manuals, online reviews and movie lines, probably. Which seems to be a majority in the US anyway.
Good point, but as someone who is running two machines at home - one is always on - and has a relatively small apartment, the "not enough room" argument can be quite valid, for both direct and indirect reasons. PC tower itself won't take much space. But two monitors, keyboards, mouses?? Even a big room and desk would have a very big problem with these! I found that switchboxes are useless since the video quality is abysmal (I can see dual images, ghosts etc). Maybe there are some good switchboxes (which are probably impossible to find and/or get shipped to you), and some monitors have built-in switches (now THAT is really good), but in general, forget it.
And then there's noise. Lots of noise. Multiplied by *TWO*. Oh, and did I mention that I am overclocking?
At night it's ok, you go to another room and close the door, but if you have to sleep in the same room... shudder.
I started reading "To say nothing of the dog" which I picked up randomly at a bookstore. It's well written but I just can't swallow things like "Ms. such and such won't accept that you're sick on the verge of dying, you have to go back to work". Gimme a break, there's no such a person that will risk his life just so a stupid fat yelling woman, his employer, will stop bugging him. He'd quit and/or tell her to go to hell, or just sit in the hospital till he's ok. Is anyone making books that have *believable* characters in them any more??
Someone in Intel DID piss him off several years ago. Do people still remember his trouble when Intel was trying to shut his website down for posting some "undesirable" info? I think it was Pentium 2 preview with benchmarks that were not at all impressive. He was scrambling to get lawyers and money to move to faster servers. He still practised medicine in those days.
I don't think that he bashed Intel when their CPU's were clearly superior. In general his reviews are quite good, original, and present products in true light. However, the arrogance that his articles are laced with doesn't make him very popular. Money and fame can get to anyone's head.
Tom blew the whistle, but HardOCP supported his findings. Older readers of both websites know that these guys were quite "antagonistic" before they run into each other at some (Asian?) computer show a few months ago.
In this instance however Kyle from HardOCP supported Tom, as he had bad experience with the chip as well. And eventually HardOCP hosted the testing session with 3 CPUs (one from AnandTech, credit to them too) and an Intel's engineer, where the problems were confirmed.
I'm just pointing this out since HardOCP is relatively low-profile site, and they deserve some credit here. They are not as thorough as some other review sites but they sure are fun to read.
I am an avid overclocker, going through 2-3 cpus and as many motherboards a year, and I have always used linux kernel compile as the ultimate and last test to be performed to test the stability of a system. Especially overclocked system. Even ONE compile is usually enough, but for ultimate test, put it in a loop in a shell script and let it run overnight.
Another interesting thing is that this compile is usually very sensitive to FSB overclocking. It brings out nicely errors in memory access and disk access. For just CPU stability I found Unreal or UT loops left overnight as good enough. But if you wonder if your disk can keep up with > 33MHz PCI bus speed or if your memory timings are viable, you compile a kernel.
That is why I find results of these tests a little surprising. P3-1133 is not running at overclocked FSB, is it? Now, they used different motherboards, different memory sticks and even different types of memory in their tests, so it's hard to think of that as a culprit. Hard disk was the same though, but should it matter if FSB is the same? No.
I did this testing on my now year old linux box running dual celeron 330 at 550. It passed the kernel loop test and really is completely stable. At the moment it has over 120 days uptime, granted load is not high, mostly running masquerading for me and a dedicated Unreal Tournament server 24/7, but my apartment is very hot in summer.
AMD CPU's require VERY GOOD cooling, and many people would try to use either cheap heatsink/fans or ones meant for celeron or FCPGA P3. These are NOT interchangeable generally. In some cases contact will not be made with the chip (e.g. some Alpha coolers have small feet). AMD specs require higher contact force to be applied. Without heatsink/fan, the 1GHz cpu will burn in 8 seconds (source : AMD). There really is no chance to see this coming (like, system hanging or failing to boot); if you screw it up, it will be dead right there and then.
Second problem is that cpu core is exposed and extremely fragile. Couple that with very hard to clip on heatsinks (see contact force above), and you get many cases of cracked core. I did it myself, luckily it was just a small scratch and it still works. The biggest offender was the very popular Golden Orb.
AMD chips runs very hot. VERY hot. So cool them well and they will serve you well.
Hm... all I know is that a month ago I programmed for a couple of weeks using Netbeans on linux. Then on the last day I transfered it to win2000 on the same (triple boot) machine.
Netbeans - which is itself written in Java - started up almost in HALF time on Windows 2000 than on linux. And yes, my kernel WAS optimized for K7 (Duron) and it was latest test5 or whatever, plus the latest either Sun or Blackdown JDK. Blackdown has built-in JIT and native threads. I haven't tried IBM's, I forgot about it.
The program was a multithreaded simulation (not a commercial quality code, it wasn't optimized or anything) and was able to run (I think) with more threads on win2k before choking. Still, it was disturbing since I was expecting clean sweep by linux.
Multimedia Technologies in Vancouver also carries some Loki's games for linux (in addition to just about every linux distribution under the sun, office suites and even BeOS, and how about XIG X-servers...).
The problem is: PRICE!!!!
I mean, it's a nice metal box, but $70 Canadian is way too much. Well ok, maybe not so bad when the game came out but they still have some older Loki games at insane "recommended retail" prices. Since Multimedia is the cheapest store in town, you have to walk about 5 meters and pick up windows version of the same game for 1/2 price. No wonder a single linux copy is sitting on shelves for months.
Supposedly the plot was taken from Stephen King's "The Mist" (?) short novel. Well, I read that novel earlier and Half-Life has very little similarity with it. Actually, the only similarity is that a secret government sci-base had caused a dimensional rift to appear and monsters started coming through. That's it. The King's novel is way better not to mention scary as hell, and is very dark and ends bleak.
Now Half-Life was a great game, but it was a definite proof for me that almost nobody reads books any more. If so many people think that HL story is the pinnacle of storytelling, then what has this world come to.
Actually... the demo kicks ass. It has the good old "Doom" feeling written all over it.
I was not impressed with graphics and level design. I *WAS* impressed with weapons, enemies, gameplay and - most of all - the athmosphere. As someone already said, THIS game will be Doom 3.
Yeah, Thomas Covenant series were great - even though Tolkien's shadow was quite visible everywhere (but I don't care). Although, second series had some quite original elements... Great books (and I even haven't read them in English).
Actually, I am not an anonymous coward
on
New Doom Details
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· Score: 1
...the message was mine. I should stick to posting from win2k where all the cookies are set (sigh).
He was the most loud advocate. Many people thought he was actually bought out by NVidia.
I don't doubt his benchmarks, I didn't bother investigating and I don't care. But the *titles* of his articles when GeForce was out were really not in the line with objective reporting. Just one example, goes something like this: "GeForce is out and NVidia has finally surpassed 3dfx!!". Why exactly "finally"? Like the whole world was watching and cheering for NVidia to stomp on 3dfx. Who cares anyway besides their shareholders? If he does, he should keep it to himself otherwise noone will believe he was objective even if he was.
He's still able to do some good, unique and useful articles but the way he talks about things, he really has a huge ego. Unfortunately that means that we have to deal with tons of stuff we don't really care when we read them. Sure, I want those dipswitch settings, but man, keep the ad-hoc predictions, bad language and bad attitude at home. I don't want your website to be a window to your home (or your mind), I want it to be a window to your lab.
I agree with you completely! I switched 1.5 years ago (I think) from RedHat when they introduced their new pricing scheme and priced even entry level at like $90 Canadian. They introduced "standard" version after a few months but they already lost me. I buy 2-3 distributions per year and I don't want to give them more than about 45-50 Canadian. Hell, if I wanted to pay more I'd get Microsoft!! (Oh wait, I do spend few hundred per year on m$ software). I mean, it's free OS! If you're gonna charge $150 then don't upgrade it more than once in two years and release only service packs for free. I am willing - and I **DO** pay like $150 CDN per year for linux, but don't push it man.
Yeah, sure, you can say they have cheap software only version, or it's free for download - but that's just not it. Besides it's not really all that black and white, suse comes out on ftp almost a month after it's released and is about 20% of the full distro size (just one CD usually)), so I always buy it. I do have a cable modem and CD burner and I even have time to do all that but I find it too time consuming and besides I have better things to do.
I want one version and one price. Sure, go ahead and publish "e-commerce edition" with commercial stuff for $$$ but if you're gonna introduce a "professional" version costing more than $50 CDN and force me to buy a "regular" (read: "weenie, beginner, looser") one, then forget it! Especially since DM is quite low compared to CDN right now (and NO, Canada is not US, you can't just convert US price to Canadian, we don't earn gazillions here).
As you may tell, this pisses me off. Bloody marketing types destroying my corner of the world.
You're right. I am not sure whether wavelet "compression" is a right term at all. There is a wavelet transform or wavelet decomposition. After you've done it, you didn't do any compression at all. All you did (and that's the most important thing) is to separate "crude" details from "fine" details (in layman terms).
The benefit is that now you can quantize them, and use far more agressive quantization on the "fine" details because our eyes are far less sensitive to them. Then comes the actual compression - and that's probably the part that has most patents, and some very clever algorithms.
I doubt the idea of the wavelet transform itself has any patents - it was developed by French matematicians (I believe), not some corporate slave with pen in one hand and the phone (to call the patent office) in the other...
Slashdot Mirror
I submitted it. I did actually use "honour" but my submission was shorter than above (I never submitted anything before). The editor correctly added the description of the award, and in the process changed the spelling - I'm guessing here.
Not at all true. I solder tons of tiny SMD in last half-year using only regular iron (not even temp controlled!) and home-made PCBs, and a good loupe. I designed and built a portable digital-to-analog convertor (for audio), in several prototypes.
Not really. I don't order from 'net unless I have to. I want my stuff NOW and I don't want to waste HOURS calling Purolator to redirect package or going to their office in the middle of nowhere to pick up a package or hunting the corporate person at work to see if the package is in. Also, unless you live in US, buying over the 'net is more expensive, more taxed and less convenient. I prefer my local shop, which is cheaper than EB and also lets you put your old games on consignment where you set the price tag and they get 25% of that price when it's sold.
And you have no idea what a troll is. Trolls post stupid, illogical, simple posts as they are simple and stupid creatures. I find trolls funny. I don't find hate funny.
That post was flamebait if anything. I get caught on it, admittedly.
>If we miss a few times in testing and accidently >vaporize a third-world village or two, well >that's TOO BAD.
I guess the only reason that this guy is not in a asylum is that healthcare in US is not free...
I second that. No way IN HELL I'd use 60Hz again. The only reason I ever had to is because I lived in a poor country. I'm either going to get at least 75 Hz or I'd start searching for a new job starting immediately. Proper way would be to sue the company but who has money for that... Remember, corps rule the world.
I am sure some of the best game programmers are like you described them, as I frequently read interviews with people like John Carmack or Tom Sweeney and others.
;).
But you are talking about *very* intelligent people here. Those people are rare, they defy standard classification and can reach any height regardless of education. You can find them in any realm of life.
I very seriously doubt that most of non-top programmers, game or otherwise, read things like conference proceedings (I'm talking about something like IEEE proceedings) because a non-university educated average programer would have a very tough time understanding things like, say, wavelets (that are behind JPEG-2000), Fourier analysis and so on without some serious time studying math. And we're not talking two weekends with a textbook. You CAN learn anything on your own if you're good enough, but learning math and physics (or probably anything else) from a GOOD teacher is something no book is ever going to do.
Then again, I was educated in Eastern Europe, and from my experience university teachers there were much better on average than here in Canada. There, nobody gave a damn how many students passed the exams because it was all state-paid. So if you DID get a degree, that definitely meant something, since say 2500 people would apply, 450 would be admitted, and only 40-50 per year would graduate after obligatory 5 years of fixed curriculum. Well, 7 years on average
As an avid gamer (I *finish* 30-40 new games per year in all genres) and with 15 years of programming experience, I can honestly say that many games are coming with deficiencies are showing their programmer's lack of knowledge in areas such as, say, artificial intelligence (path finding for example). Good game companies usually release extremely polished products, well optimized and comparatively bug-free, no question about that. But take even for example ID Software, which had their Quake 3 release stalled for half a year until they got a programmer to code the bot AI. It's not at all that I doubt people there wouldn't be able to do it themselves given enough time to study the subject. It's just that, say, a masters degree holder in proper area from nearby university shouldn't have much problem doing it for them. Maybe I'm wrong in this particular case though.
One reason that *good* university educated people are not flocking to gaming industry (as you've seen the bad ones for yourself) could be that AFAIK the pay is in general lower than in other IT areas such as databases, jobs are extremely insecure and hours are hideous by any standard. I myself would gladly consider working on games even for lower pay, but at 100 hours per week, forget it. People that do that usually end up very deficient in other areas of life. That is why there's so much games that are unimaginative, using 200 word vocabulary, and going over same plots over and over. I'd have to sacrifice my interests in music, literature, playing other games, do-it-yourself electronics, writing and so on and become a work-eat-sleep-work drone whose highlight of the week would be a non-pizza dinner and seeing a blockbuster movie. No wonder then that Half-Life (a great game) gets accolades for its greatest storyline. From people whose yearly literature diet consists of game manuals, online reviews and movie lines, probably. Which seems to be a majority in the US anyway.
Oh c'mon!! It's funny, not off topic!
Good point, but as someone who is running two machines at home - one is always on - and has a relatively small apartment, the "not enough room" argument can be quite valid, for both direct and indirect reasons. PC tower itself won't take much space. But two monitors, keyboards, mouses?? Even a big room and desk would have a very big problem with these! I found that switchboxes are useless since the video quality is abysmal (I can see dual images, ghosts etc). Maybe there are some good switchboxes (which are probably impossible to find and/or get shipped to you), and some monitors have built-in switches (now THAT is really good), but in general, forget it.
And then there's noise. Lots of noise. Multiplied by *TWO*. Oh, and did I mention that I am overclocking?
At night it's ok, you go to another room and close the door, but if you have to sleep in the same room... shudder.
I started reading "To say nothing of the dog" which I picked up randomly at a bookstore. It's well written but I just can't swallow things like "Ms. such and such won't accept that you're sick on the verge of dying, you have to go back to work". Gimme a break, there's no such a person that will risk his life just so a stupid fat yelling woman, his employer, will stop bugging him. He'd quit and/or tell her to go to hell, or just sit in the hospital till he's ok. Is anyone making books that have *believable* characters in them any more??
Someone in Intel DID piss him off several years ago. Do people still remember his trouble when Intel was trying to shut his website down for posting some "undesirable" info? I think it was Pentium 2 preview with benchmarks that were not at all impressive. He was scrambling to get lawyers and money to move to faster servers. He still practised medicine in those days.
I don't think that he bashed Intel when their CPU's were clearly superior. In general his reviews are quite good, original, and present products in true light. However, the arrogance that his articles are laced with doesn't make him very popular. Money and fame can get to anyone's head.
Tom blew the whistle, but HardOCP supported his findings. Older readers of both websites know that these guys were quite "antagonistic" before they run into each other at some (Asian?) computer show a few months ago.
In this instance however Kyle from HardOCP supported Tom, as he had bad experience with the chip as well. And eventually HardOCP hosted the testing session with 3 CPUs (one from AnandTech, credit to them too) and an Intel's engineer, where the problems were confirmed.
I'm just pointing this out since HardOCP is relatively low-profile site, and they deserve some credit here. They are not as thorough as some other review sites but they sure are fun to read.
I am an avid overclocker, going through 2-3 cpus and as many motherboards a year, and I have always used linux kernel compile as the ultimate and last test to be performed to test the stability of a system. Especially overclocked system. Even ONE compile is usually enough, but for ultimate test, put it in a loop in a shell script and let it run overnight.
Another interesting thing is that this compile is usually very sensitive to FSB overclocking. It brings out nicely errors in memory access and disk access. For just CPU stability I found Unreal or UT loops left overnight as good enough. But if you wonder if your disk can keep up with > 33MHz PCI bus speed or if your memory timings are viable, you compile a kernel.
That is why I find results of these tests a little surprising. P3-1133 is not running at overclocked FSB, is it? Now, they used different motherboards, different memory sticks and even different types of memory in their tests, so it's hard to think of that as a culprit. Hard disk was the same though, but should it matter if FSB is the same? No.
I did this testing on my now year old linux box running dual celeron 330 at 550. It passed the kernel loop test and really is completely stable. At the moment it has over 120 days uptime, granted load is not high, mostly running masquerading for me and a dedicated Unreal Tournament server 24/7, but my apartment is very hot in summer.
AMD CPU's require VERY GOOD cooling, and many people would try to use either cheap heatsink/fans or ones meant for celeron or FCPGA P3. These are NOT interchangeable generally. In some cases contact will not be made with the chip (e.g. some Alpha coolers have small feet). AMD specs require higher contact force to be applied. Without heatsink/fan, the 1GHz cpu will burn in 8 seconds (source : AMD). There really is no chance to see this coming (like, system hanging or failing to boot); if you screw it up, it will be dead right there and then.
Second problem is that cpu core is exposed and extremely fragile. Couple that with very hard to clip on heatsinks (see contact force above), and you get many cases of cracked core. I did it myself, luckily it was just a small scratch and it still works. The biggest offender was the very popular Golden Orb.
AMD chips runs very hot. VERY hot. So cool them well and they will serve you well.
Hm... all I know is that a month ago I programmed for a couple of weeks using Netbeans on linux. Then on the last day I transfered it to win2000 on the same (triple boot) machine.
Netbeans - which is itself written in Java - started up almost in HALF time on Windows 2000 than on linux. And yes, my kernel WAS optimized for K7 (Duron) and it was latest test5 or whatever, plus the latest either Sun or Blackdown JDK. Blackdown has built-in JIT and native threads. I haven't tried IBM's, I forgot about it.
The program was a multithreaded simulation (not a commercial quality code, it wasn't optimized or anything) and was able to run (I think) with more threads on win2k before choking. Still, it was disturbing since I was expecting clean sweep by linux.
Multimedia Technologies in Vancouver also carries some Loki's games for linux (in addition to just about every linux distribution under the sun, office suites and even BeOS, and how about XIG X-servers...).
The problem is: PRICE!!!!
I mean, it's a nice metal box, but $70 Canadian is way too much. Well ok, maybe not so bad when the game came out but they still have some older Loki games at insane "recommended retail" prices. Since Multimedia is the cheapest store in town, you have to walk about 5 meters and pick up windows version of the same game for 1/2 price. No wonder a single linux copy is sitting on shelves for months.
Supposedly the plot was taken from Stephen King's "The Mist" (?) short novel. Well, I read that novel earlier and Half-Life has very little similarity with it. Actually, the only similarity is that a secret government sci-base had caused a dimensional rift to appear and monsters started coming through. That's it. The King's novel is way better not to mention scary as hell, and is very dark and ends bleak.
Now Half-Life was a great game, but it was a definite proof for me that almost nobody reads books any more. If so many people think that HL story is the pinnacle of storytelling, then what has this world come to.
Actually... the demo kicks ass. It has the good old "Doom" feeling written all over it.
I was not impressed with graphics and level design. I *WAS* impressed with weapons, enemies, gameplay and - most of all - the athmosphere. As someone already said, THIS game will be Doom 3.
Yeah, Thomas Covenant series were great - even though Tolkien's shadow was quite visible everywhere (but I don't care). Although, second series had some quite original elements... Great books (and I even haven't read them in English).
...the message was mine. I should stick to posting from win2k where all the cookies are set (sigh).
HEHEHE, oh this one is good :). :).
I don't have any points left, sorry, or I'd give you one up
Tom trashing GeForce????
He was the most loud advocate. Many people thought he was actually bought out by NVidia.
I don't doubt his benchmarks, I didn't bother investigating and I don't care. But the *titles* of his articles when GeForce was out were really not in the line with objective reporting. Just one example, goes something like this: "GeForce is out and NVidia has finally surpassed 3dfx!!". Why exactly "finally"? Like the whole world was watching and cheering for NVidia to stomp on 3dfx. Who cares anyway besides their shareholders? If he does, he should keep it to himself otherwise noone will believe he was objective even if he was.
He's still able to do some good, unique and useful articles but the way he talks about things, he really has a huge ego. Unfortunately that means that we have to deal with tons of stuff we don't really care when we read them. Sure, I want those dipswitch settings, but man, keep the ad-hoc predictions, bad language and bad attitude at home. I don't want your website to be a window to your home (or your mind), I want it to be a window to your lab.
You are correct. Somebody mod this up.
Too few overclockers and hardware junkies post here it seems. I mean *practical* hardware junkies not theoretical ones.
I agree with you completely! I switched 1.5 years ago (I think) from RedHat when they introduced their new pricing scheme and priced even entry level at like $90 Canadian. They introduced "standard" version after a few months but they already lost me. I buy 2-3 distributions per year and I don't want to give them more than about 45-50 Canadian. Hell, if I wanted to pay more I'd get Microsoft!! (Oh wait, I do spend few hundred per year on m$ software). I mean, it's free OS! If you're gonna charge $150 then don't upgrade it more than once in two years and release only service packs for free. I am willing - and I **DO** pay like $150 CDN per year for linux, but don't push it man.
Yeah, sure, you can say they have cheap software only version, or it's free for download - but that's just not it. Besides it's not really all that black and white, suse comes out on ftp almost a month after it's released and is about 20% of the full distro size (just one CD usually)), so I always buy it. I do have a cable modem and CD burner and I even have time to do all that but I find it too time consuming and besides I have better things to do.
I want one version and one price. Sure, go ahead and publish "e-commerce edition" with commercial stuff for $$$ but if you're gonna introduce a "professional" version costing more than $50 CDN and force me to buy a "regular" (read: "weenie, beginner, looser") one, then forget it! Especially since DM is quite low compared to CDN right now (and NO, Canada is not US, you can't just convert US price to Canadian, we don't earn gazillions here).
As you may tell, this pisses me off. Bloody marketing types destroying my corner of the world.
You're right. I am not sure whether wavelet "compression" is a right term at all. There is a wavelet transform or wavelet decomposition. After you've done it, you didn't do any compression at all. All you did (and that's the most important thing) is to separate "crude" details from "fine" details (in layman terms).
The benefit is that now you can quantize them, and use far more agressive quantization on the "fine" details because our eyes are far less sensitive to them. Then comes the actual compression - and that's probably the part that has most patents, and some very clever algorithms.
I doubt the idea of the wavelet transform itself has any patents - it was developed by French matematicians (I believe), not some corporate slave with pen in one hand and the phone (to call the patent office) in the other...