This is a business model waiting to bring in the big bucks. Get some VC, some quality hardware people and have this guy join the team. Make good, true x-plattform cams. Profit.
A man with an asset like the knowlege he has is a gold mine when treated the right way.
It was the seventh post or so and the preceeding 5 or 6 where rants and trolling about Flash, Flex, etc. It was way above the ususal ratio, so I thought I'd add my 2 cents to that aswell.
This is a suprising move indeed, and changes the game for RIAs big time. As of now Flex is right up there with Laszlo and Co. when technical decision-makers talk about RIA generators and compilers. This dimishes the corporate media hype about Silverthingie from MS to a minor sidenote.
Kudos also to the Laszlo guys and the Motion Twin ActionScript Compiler and all the other projects listed at osflash.org for putting the presure on Adobemedia for the last few years. And Kudos to Sun for leading the way in open sourcing key technologies - I suspect that played a major role in this decision. And thanks to Adobe for scaring the living wee-wee out of Microsoft's Web Division. I can just imagine the look on their faces. Hehe.
Oh, and last but not least, to all the idiots here on slashdot allready ranting about Flash, Flex, Laszlo, RIAs and whatnot: Shut the f*ck up, you don't know squat what you're talking about.
It may be that AMD is worried because they had an ~650 Million Dollar loss last year. Yet I don't think they're worried to much - they are still well in the game. It would take but one thing to be the top-seller again: Move back to one single socket for all CPUs. And one only. When AMD came out with Socket A it was such a relief to know you are safe to know that your hardware will fit be it in economy, business or first class. If they'd ditch their socket confusion, people would turn to AMD simply for easy of use and system building & maintainance. Who cares nowadays if you're a few Flops slower or not. Ease of use and true upgradability is a key feature that has been entirely dissmissed within the last 5 years. AMD would only need to reintruduce the concept and they'd generate a solid revenue again.
The PC wasn't for the corporate market either when it came out. It was considered and ment to be a toy.
Apple is together with Google in offering Google Maps on the iPhone. I clearly remember the impressive presentation of that specific feature. It's bound to move toward a killer application for those offering Navigation systems. And before you can say 'MS Office sucks' we're likely to have Google Apps on mobile devices. And they definitely are a competion to anything MS in the mobile area.
Do you people still remember Ami Pro, Lotus 123 and Windows 3.1? That was all we needed back then and with the browser apps we get exactly that. On top of a bazillion layers running them on a performance hog called JavaScript. But it's all we need. With phones running 500Mhz CPUs and Full Scale Browsers stripped down versions of expensive proprietary shrinkwrap applications are getting more harder to sell by the minute. And MS is feeling that right now.
WTF? Even with Adobemedia I have allways been extra sceptic about their supposed trueness to Linux and Open Source (I'm a full-scale professional Multimedia Designer with 7 years of Flash experience under my belt). Flash Player 9 seems to have done away with the glitches and hopefully Linux developement will be in line with other Plattforms from here on. After the next two iterations have passed and Linux is not lagging behind again by two years in the Adobe line of plugins then it will be safe to say that we have a true x-plattform multimedia RIA kit from Adobe. If not, any professional RIA developer worth his rates will be away from Flash again. From a professional standpoint this MS Silverthingie isn't even worth mentioning - even if you are a MS user. There's Flash, then a large gap, then Java, then another large gap and then come XUL, the Laszlo Generator and tons of Ajax Kits. Somewhere down further down the way you'll find Wild Tangent, Curl, Director and some other older plattorms, along with an abandoned Blender plugin codebase. MS new PR stunt Multimedia tool isn't even on the radar of professionals. And it would take a complete instant 180 turn of MS policiy and 5 years of quality developement from MS for that to change. And we all know how likely that is. It's actually more likely that Java Multimedia will pick up, now that Java is GPLd.
Bottom line: Silverlight is absolutely nothing more than the usual MS semi-vaporware combined with marketing bullshit as a toping. I don't expect it to get any more attention than Curl.
1.) Innocent until proven guilty. Ok, so we're in the US and Innocent until proven guilty becomes 'sort of, kinda, if we have a good day, innocent until proven guilty otherwise GUILTY! until we feel like maybe looking at the hard evidence'... This is the US, we can fuck you from all sides without lube and tell you you're living in the land of the free and most of the time you'll believe it too. Nothing new here (see Guantanamo and US inmate quota for further reference).
but (!)
2.) Isn't this also the famous US where people can sue each other into kindom come for sums that go bejond bizare proportions? Isn't the county, school, whoever in for their lawsuit of a lifetime? From what I can tell from here this kid can basically retire more or less straight away, or am I missing something here? What's in for him - a two digit million sum of dollars at least I'd say. 75% for the lawyers gives him a handfull of millions at least. No?... Cue educated US opinions, please...
A prime element in US society is insecurity. I believe that even in Germany, had we as much guns as the citizens in the US, there'd be still far fever shootings.
Some people compare this shooting to the death-toll with Bagdad. Curiously enough, I consider general 'arabian' society and the US society somewhat simular in certain aspects. Both are over-the-top prudish, both have a large amount of people indulging in hardcore porn (the former and the latter are definitely corelated), both have a tradition of generally strict pursuit of monotheistic confessions, etc... The swiss have many guns too, but while being somewhat conservative they are still extraordinarily liberal and cosmopolitan. They live in a society that believes in stability, relyability and safety and they are well educated. I can't say that about germany in general anymore. In many ways germany is going the way of the US, which scares me, a former US citizen, a little. The US, very much as many middle eastern muslim societies, are somewhat paranoid and uptight about certain basic social issues (sex, social interaction, peer-groups, code and/or sense of honor, etc.). I believe these ingredients to basically be the same ones that led to the Erfurt School shooting by Robert Steinhäuser. I believe that these aspects are key to wether a society is violent or not. I also consider a society that considers nudity and profanity a fellony but yet has no problem with their kids consuming the most brutal and violent of modern media somewhat psychotic and shizoid. There's no wondering that stuff like this happens.
The US in general needs to chill out a little and get a grip on how to improve a modern society. It's not that difficult. Make the NRA an official gourverment organisation, have anybody wanting to carry a weapon make a gun licence and make it as intense as the german drivers licence. Quit voting for blockheads and blowing trillions of dollars on weapons and tax cuts for the super-rich. Improve public schooling and education, medical care and the social welfare minimum. Keep the religious fanatics in check and out of the general education loop and reorganise the media and the media laws. Publicly fund independant media, as it is done in Germany... errrm, well ok, not exactly as it is done in Germany, but you get my point. Then in two decades, when the murdoc and fanatics factions have been pushed back into the marginal portions they came from, the US citizens will be a little smarter, a little more emotionally independant, a little more secure and these problems will start to go away. No matter if they have a few guns in the closet at home or not.
Why do manufacturers do this? I so would buy more DVDs if they weren't so bizarely priced and if I could rely on feature and quality stability. The movie industry would make tons of money. But no, they have to piss off their customers as much as possible. Would anybody of you give a damn about Bittorrent if each DVD would cost 8 dollars, come with all the extras, no CSS and no Region Code? I wouldn't. Sony and Co. would earn themselves a golden nose in the movie after-market called DVD-sales. But no, they have to chase away customers with crappy copies, a totally bizar publishing policy and DRM schemes that brink on the criminal. People go through all the bittorrent fuss just to get a movie. That should ring a bell with the execs. Then again, as proven before, probably only Steve Jobs is smart enough to see this. I hope Sony Entertainment chokes and dies on their new DVDs.
Why is the web and it's RIA winning so much attention? Because there is so much to win. Formats are being cracked wide open via RIAs, no matter how copmlicated they are to develop. The web is the easiest way around the last 10 years of MS stranglehold. And people want to take it, even if they can't exactly put a finger on what's nagging them. Webapps are easy to maintain. And where they're not, there's an OSS desktop application waiting to be installed with a few mouseclicks. But they are getting less. The truth is that webapps have allready replaced C64 and Amiga level desktop apps. And that is all the people need to work properly. Funktionality wise RIAs are somewhere in the early 90s - but that's all it takes to be productive. Google Spreadsheet is a performance hog and a slowpoke. But on a 2GHz Dual Core it's faster and more powerfull than the first Lotus123. Which is all most people need to say goodbye to a desktop spreadsheet. Go check out Google Apps and see what I mean. It is that combined with KDE and Ubuntu that must scare the living wee-wee out of Steve Balmer and the MS lot.
IBM has a nice track record of cool things they introduced to the world. HDDs, Open Standard Components, etc.... This could be another one of those cool things that help shape the next few decades of technology.
I got news for you: Palm OS never went away.
on
Palm to go Linux
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· Score: 1
There is a Hollywood Studio that specializes in digital animal rigs (dunno the name right now). They started of with a sophisticated horse rig which was their only product for quite some time (a few years I recall). A good mamal rig takes lots of experience and hundreds of hours to build and optimize. There is a market for this and studios use content like this all the time. The famous William screams are just one example. And that's not even something you'd need stock content for, 'cause it's easyly made.
Stock content. You don't honestly believe that every game shop has it's own team rendering water and grabbing those renders, transfering them into displacement maps and putting them on to each puddle individually, do you? There are dev-shops and kits for specifically this purpose. You buy trees and procedurals by the dozen. It's perfectly likely that both teams bought the same stock water procedurals. F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig. No news here. Move on.
It's that simple (see headline). I do feel sorry for her and the shock she's gotten from some sick person photoshopping her into some porn scene or something and I really like her books (I got two of them myself) but there is one thing you should be prepared for when going public, be it as a popstar, a politician or a professional writer and blogger, and that is exposure. There are a measurable amount of sick people out there who get a hard-on from doing stuff like this. It's a perfectly normal state of things - like the slugs in your garden. Not very nice to look at, but in some way part of the ecosystem. In a way I feel sorry for these people.
1.) If I programmed it, it's my code. I, and nobody else, decides what happens to it. If I GPL it and you take it and close it again or release it with whatever licence you fancy, your generally considered breaking the law.
2.) If your doing it with all rights and laws in sight, you're a proactive criminal. Plain and simple.
3.) Amongst OSS developers, you talk to one another and resolve the issue of code 'theft' as real professionals do: without whining or bickering. The teams people involved in the, most probably, involuntarly code theft get briefed on licences and keeping an eye open, the original coders dual licence it for that specific purpose or help recode by giving the 'thieves' some air and time to clean up their project. In the end a few jokes BSD numbsculls and Linux whiners go back and forth and all ends well.
4.) If you don't get the above three points and start ranting on top of that, you are, as it's generally called in the OSS community, a prime class idi*t. Spare us your baseless ranting.
1.) This process is generally regarded as 'generating' rather than compiling. Compiling implies that something is transferred into a lower level language for speed and better runtime integration. Here it's the opposite. Thus: Generating. The servlet (or whatever) does it is generically refered to as 'generator'. Compiling is the wrong term.
2.) Prior Art. Tons of it. Laszlo and a bunch of other generators have been doing this for years. This patent won't even last a month. To many big players involved in RIA to let it pass. It's about as long lasting (and as silly) as the famous Gary Larson 'Chicken hung by a helium balloon floating into a pub full of Samurai'. Nothing new here, move on.
Kohan has scripted AIs and a AI scripting language. Some of them are pretty sophisitcated and specialized on a certain faction or even to a certain type of map. If I pick the best in a Game I allways lose.
First of all: All Delphi bashers please shut up. We know Delphi and the IDE concepts it represents are 15 years old but nevertheless it is a neat tool. Some of the best developers I know still like to use it. And if you don't remember the time when Borland jBuilder and it's other IDEs where like 10 years ahead of the rest then you're not qualified to rant. End of story. Thank you.
On Delphi for PHP: I watched the Screencasts (by some indish guy with a heavy accent). The features are cool and developing stuff goes really snappy. I liked the Ajax components shown. Then again it has downsides: a) Windows only. b) No integrated debugger - the other notable Windows-only PHP Tool 'NuSpere PHPEd' has a fully integrated webserver with a preinstalled runtime and callstack debugger + profiler. It's tough to beat that. What I kind of liked: I like the integrated Interbase/Firebird stuff - out-of the box views and stuff inside an integrated DB admin UI. Sadly without a grafical ERD interface. I also like the visual form layout tool. Allthough my designer would probably kill me if I'd use it in a project.:-)
For me it boils down to this: While I - amongst other PLs - do PHP for a living and thus have no trouble spending 300$ or more on a productivity tool that does it's job better and faster than EasyEclipse, the stuff they offer just isn't good enough.
I want Zope with intergrated full-blow Ajax (YUI or something) and a web based developement interface with quasi-grafic ERD, View and Object assembly. All in PHP so it runs on the most shoddy webspace available. With the looks of the Joomla Backend, so my eyes don't bleed after 5 minutes. With a Java of Flash client if needed.
The sad thing I have to tell Borland and Nusphere is that all this will probably be finished by the OSS community even before they port their tools to Linux and OS X. We've got Symfony, CakePHP, Prado, Yahoos YUI, and ten bazillion other PHP and Ajax kits, not to mention the hysteric Rails crowd. Plus the Zope and Django people. We've got KDevelop and Eclipse and Netbeans and Anjuta and Erics Python IDE and Whatnot competing over who's got the larges dick and when MySQL AB finally get's their shit together we'll have MySQL Workbench for free which will give MySQL 5 yet another big push forward and scare the living wee-wee out of Oracle and Co. .
The world simply is moving to fast for me to just buy an IDE that forces me back on to the plattform I hate on a hunch. Mix Delphi for PHP and NuSpere PHPEd and add a visual case tool. Then I'll consider spending 300$ and installing Win2k again. Until then I'll stick with EasyEclipse for PHP on OS X. Even though it's a slowpoke at times.
Mono is factually sponsored by MS. The Novel/MS deal was all about Mono! The patent-deal thing was a feint (with a neat side effect, mind you)! No, hear me out. Just reading his talk and arriving at page 2 made me notice it. I honestly believe it is and it's not that Miquel is seriously bullshitting about his opinions. Allthough they are notably influenced by black MS accounts - which I am now certain of. Allthough maybe without him knowing for a fact.
Figure this: If there is any way MS can prepare to hop the OSS bandwagon that is continously growing without losing their face it is the mono(t)rail (pun intended). In a well built mono they can without haste probe the OSS market for sophisticated free developer tools and their chances to get into OSS bases servicing and specialized proprietary offers without thinning the.Net brand or attracting attention. All the while having Mono on the leash. If the test fails, they pull the plug, go completely off trail with.Net and leave behind yet another OSS plattform along with the XUL, Ajax, Java, QT, etc. bunch to bash their heads competing for attention. If it does work out they can slowly shift to OS independant services and tools. They can even combine both with varying intensity in which ever way they require it.
Think about it. It's a very smart move and not that a stupid notion at all. They can continue to slowpoke about with their bloated NT/2k/Vista Kernels and go 'plattform independant' whenever the need arises, squishing whatever Zends, SuSEs, Novels and RedHats get in the way. And with a 'Mono excuse' they won't even raise a blip on the antitrust radar doing so. If this works out we'll see yet another rare of strange things: MS actually trying to build quality software again. For a short period of time that is. Until they regain their stranglehold. Then it's business as usual again.
No, friends, it's absolutely clear to me: Novel bought Ximian, SuSE and then some. Then they went f*cking around aimlessly with those brands for two years. They are MSes easiest, least dangerous, most hidden, most powerfull and - oh, the irony - cheapest way into a potential MS dominated OSS market. This is what's behind all this.
I don't like OpenOffice. The best all-out Office Suite I know is Lotus SmartSuite, but that sadly has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Then again i is the best non-monopolist Suite out there. Just the other day I was using Excel - which is actually considered a good Spreadsheet programm, be it MS or not - and tried to export into something other than xls. In order to do that to be able to process the sheet with a script I had to click myself through 3 popups per action at least. You won't miss anything if you're ok with MS Office. Some things are a little different with OOo but it's basically the same without the pricetag and the lockin.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a business model waiting to bring in the big bucks. Get some VC, some quality hardware people and have this guy join the team. Make good, true x-plattform cams. Profit.
A man with an asset like the knowlege he has is a gold mine when treated the right way.
... If you buy condoms on friday night, you get a nailed hard, ...
I'd say it's my girlfriend who get's nailed hard.
*DaaDum Crash! Thud.*
It was the seventh post or so and the preceeding 5 or 6 where rants and trolling about Flash, Flex, etc. It was way above the ususal ratio, so I thought I'd add my 2 cents to that aswell.
This is a suprising move indeed, and changes the game for RIAs big time. As of now Flex is right up there with Laszlo and Co. when technical decision-makers talk about RIA generators and compilers. This dimishes the corporate media hype about Silverthingie from MS to a minor sidenote.
Kudos also to the Laszlo guys and the Motion Twin ActionScript Compiler and all the other projects listed at osflash.org for putting the presure on Adobemedia for the last few years. And Kudos to Sun for leading the way in open sourcing key technologies - I suspect that played a major role in this decision. And thanks to Adobe for scaring the living wee-wee out of Microsoft's Web Division. I can just imagine the look on their faces. Hehe.
Oh, and last but not least, to all the idiots here on slashdot allready ranting about Flash, Flex, Laszlo, RIAs and whatnot: Shut the f*ck up, you don't know squat what you're talking about.
It may be that AMD is worried because they had an ~650 Million Dollar loss last year. Yet I don't think they're worried to much - they are still well in the game. It would take but one thing to be the top-seller again: Move back to one single socket for all CPUs. And one only.
When AMD came out with Socket A it was such a relief to know you are safe to know that your hardware will fit be it in economy, business or first class. If they'd ditch their socket confusion, people would turn to AMD simply for easy of use and system building & maintainance. Who cares nowadays if you're a few Flops slower or not. Ease of use and true upgradability is a key feature that has been entirely dissmissed within the last 5 years. AMD would only need to reintruduce the concept and they'd generate a solid revenue again.
My 2 cents.
The PC wasn't for the corporate market either when it came out. It was considered and ment to be a toy.
Apple is together with Google in offering Google Maps on the iPhone. I clearly remember the impressive presentation of that specific feature. It's bound to move toward a killer application for those offering Navigation systems. And before you can say 'MS Office sucks' we're likely to have Google Apps on mobile devices. And they definitely are a competion to anything MS in the mobile area.
Do you people still remember Ami Pro, Lotus 123 and Windows 3.1? That was all we needed back then and with the browser apps we get exactly that. On top of a bazillion layers running them on a performance hog called JavaScript. But it's all we need. With phones running 500Mhz CPUs and Full Scale Browsers stripped down versions of expensive proprietary shrinkwrap applications are getting more harder to sell by the minute. And MS is feeling that right now.
Nobody jumped to conclusions. At least not more than the usual percentage.
WTF? Even with Adobemedia I have allways been extra sceptic about their supposed trueness to Linux and Open Source (I'm a full-scale professional Multimedia Designer with 7 years of Flash experience under my belt). Flash Player 9 seems to have done away with the glitches and hopefully Linux developement will be in line with other Plattforms from here on. After the next two iterations have passed and Linux is not lagging behind again by two years in the Adobe line of plugins then it will be safe to say that we have a true x-plattform multimedia RIA kit from Adobe. If not, any professional RIA developer worth his rates will be away from Flash again.
From a professional standpoint this MS Silverthingie isn't even worth mentioning - even if you are a MS user.
There's Flash, then a large gap, then Java, then another large gap and then come XUL, the Laszlo Generator and tons of Ajax Kits. Somewhere down further down the way you'll find Wild Tangent, Curl, Director and some other older plattorms, along with an abandoned Blender plugin codebase.
MS new PR stunt Multimedia tool isn't even on the radar of professionals. And it would take a complete instant 180 turn of MS policiy and 5 years of quality developement from MS for that to change. And we all know how likely that is. It's actually more likely that Java Multimedia will pick up, now that Java is GPLd.
Bottom line:
Silverlight is absolutely nothing more than the usual MS semi-vaporware combined with marketing bullshit as a toping. I don't expect it to get any more attention than Curl.
That would be my question to US slashdotters.
... This is the US, we can fuck you from all sides without lube and tell you you're living in the land of the free and most of the time you'll believe it too. Nothing new here (see Guantanamo and US inmate quota for further reference).
... Cue educated US opinions, please ...
1.) Innocent until proven guilty. Ok, so we're in the US and Innocent until proven guilty becomes 'sort of, kinda, if we have a good day, innocent until proven guilty otherwise GUILTY! until we feel like maybe looking at the hard evidence'
but (!)
2.) Isn't this also the famous US where people can sue each other into kindom come for sums that go bejond bizare proportions? Isn't the county, school, whoever in for their lawsuit of a lifetime? From what I can tell from here this kid can basically retire more or less straight away, or am I missing something here? What's in for him - a two digit million sum of dollars at least I'd say. 75% for the lawyers gives him a handfull of millions at least. No?
A prime element in US society is insecurity. I believe that even in Germany, had we as much guns as the citizens in the US, there'd be still far fever shootings.
... errrm, well ok, not exactly as it is done in Germany, but you get my point. Then in two decades, when the murdoc and fanatics factions have been pushed back into the marginal portions they came from, the US citizens will be a little smarter, a little more emotionally independant, a little more secure and these problems will start to go away. No matter if they have a few guns in the closet at home or not.
Some people compare this shooting to the death-toll with Bagdad.
Curiously enough, I consider general 'arabian' society and the US society somewhat simular in certain aspects. Both are over-the-top prudish, both have a large amount of people indulging in hardcore porn (the former and the latter are definitely corelated), both have a tradition of generally strict pursuit of monotheistic confessions, etc...
The swiss have many guns too, but while being somewhat conservative they are still extraordinarily liberal and cosmopolitan. They live in a society that believes in stability, relyability and safety and they are well educated. I can't say that about germany in general anymore. In many ways germany is going the way of the US, which scares me, a former US citizen, a little.
The US, very much as many middle eastern muslim societies, are somewhat paranoid and uptight about certain basic social issues (sex, social interaction, peer-groups, code and/or sense of honor, etc.). I believe these ingredients to basically be the same ones that led to the Erfurt School shooting by Robert Steinhäuser.
I believe that these aspects are key to wether a society is violent or not. I also consider a society that considers nudity and profanity a fellony but yet has no problem with their kids consuming the most brutal and violent of modern media somewhat psychotic and shizoid. There's no wondering that stuff like this happens.
The US in general needs to chill out a little and get a grip on how to improve a modern society. It's not that difficult. Make the NRA an official gourverment organisation, have anybody wanting to carry a weapon make a gun licence and make it as intense as the german drivers licence. Quit voting for blockheads and blowing trillions of dollars on weapons and tax cuts for the super-rich. Improve public schooling and education, medical care and the social welfare minimum. Keep the religious fanatics in check and out of the general education loop and reorganise the media and the media laws. Publicly fund independant media, as it is done in Germany
My 2 cents.
Why do manufacturers do this? I so would buy more DVDs if they weren't so bizarely priced and if I could rely on feature and quality stability. The movie industry would make tons of money. But no, they have to piss off their customers as much as possible. Would anybody of you give a damn about Bittorrent if each DVD would cost 8 dollars, come with all the extras, no CSS and no Region Code? I wouldn't. Sony and Co. would earn themselves a golden nose in the movie after-market called DVD-sales. But no, they have to chase away customers with crappy copies, a totally bizar publishing policy and DRM schemes that brink on the criminal. People go through all the bittorrent fuss just to get a movie. That should ring a bell with the execs. Then again, as proven before, probably only Steve Jobs is smart enough to see this.
I hope Sony Entertainment chokes and dies on their new DVDs.
Why is the web and it's RIA winning so much attention? Because there is so much to win. Formats are being cracked wide open via RIAs, no matter how copmlicated they are to develop. The web is the easiest way around the last 10 years of MS stranglehold. And people want to take it, even if they can't exactly put a finger on what's nagging them. Webapps are easy to maintain. And where they're not, there's an OSS desktop application waiting to be installed with a few mouseclicks. But they are getting less.
The truth is that webapps have allready replaced C64 and Amiga level desktop apps. And that is all the people need to work properly.
Funktionality wise RIAs are somewhere in the early 90s - but that's all it takes to be productive. Google Spreadsheet is a performance hog and a slowpoke. But on a 2GHz Dual Core it's faster and more powerfull than the first Lotus123. Which is all most people need to say goodbye to a desktop spreadsheet. Go check out Google Apps and see what I mean. It is that combined with KDE and Ubuntu that must scare the living wee-wee out of Steve Balmer and the MS lot.
IBM has a nice track record of cool things they introduced to the world. HDDs, Open Standard Components, etc. ...
This could be another one of those cool things that help shape the next few decades of technology.
See Subject.
There is a Hollywood Studio that specializes in digital animal rigs (dunno the name right now). They started of with a sophisticated horse rig which was their only product for quite some time (a few years I recall). A good mamal rig takes lots of experience and hundreds of hours to build and optimize. There is a market for this and studios use content like this all the time. The famous William screams are just one example. And that's not even something you'd need stock content for, 'cause it's easyly made.
Stock content. You don't honestly believe that every game shop has it's own team rendering water and grabbing those renders, transfering them into displacement maps and putting them on to each puddle individually, do you?
There are dev-shops and kits for specifically this purpose. You buy trees and procedurals by the dozen. It's perfectly likely that both teams bought the same stock water procedurals. F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig.
No news here. Move on.
It's that simple (see headline). I do feel sorry for her and the shock she's gotten from some sick person photoshopping her into some porn scene or something and I really like her books (I got two of them myself) but there is one thing you should be prepared for when going public, be it as a popstar, a politician or a professional writer and blogger, and that is exposure.
There are a measurable amount of sick people out there who get a hard-on from doing stuff like this. It's a perfectly normal state of things - like the slugs in your garden. Not very nice to look at, but in some way part of the ecosystem. In a way I feel sorry for these people.
1.) If I programmed it, it's my code. I, and nobody else, decides what happens to it. If I GPL it and you take it and close it again or release it with whatever licence you fancy, your generally considered breaking the law.
2.) If your doing it with all rights and laws in sight, you're a proactive criminal. Plain and simple.
3.) Amongst OSS developers, you talk to one another and resolve the issue of code 'theft' as real professionals do: without whining or bickering. The teams people involved in the, most probably, involuntarly code theft get briefed on licences and keeping an eye open, the original coders dual licence it for that specific purpose or help recode by giving the 'thieves' some air and time to clean up their project. In the end a few jokes BSD numbsculls and Linux whiners go back and forth and all ends well.
4.) If you don't get the above three points and start ranting on top of that, you are, as it's generally called in the OSS community, a prime class idi*t. Spare us your baseless ranting.
1.) This process is generally regarded as 'generating' rather than compiling. Compiling implies that something is transferred into a lower level language for speed and better runtime integration. Here it's the opposite. Thus: Generating. The servlet (or whatever) does it is generically refered to as 'generator'. Compiling is the wrong term.
2.) Prior Art. Tons of it. Laszlo and a bunch of other generators have been doing this for years. This patent won't even last a month. To many big players involved in RIA to let it pass. It's about as long lasting (and as silly) as the famous Gary Larson 'Chicken hung by a helium balloon floating into a pub full of Samurai'. Nothing new here, move on.
Kohan has scripted AIs and a AI scripting language. Some of them are pretty sophisitcated and specialized on a certain faction or even to a certain type of map. If I pick the best in a Game I allways lose.
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First of all: All Delphi bashers please shut up. We know Delphi and the IDE concepts it represents are 15 years old but nevertheless it is a neat tool. Some of the best developers I know still like to use it. And if you don't remember the time when Borland jBuilder and it's other IDEs where like 10 years ahead of the rest then you're not qualified to rant. End of story. Thank you.
:-)
On Delphi for PHP:
I watched the Screencasts (by some indish guy with a heavy accent). The features are cool and developing stuff goes really snappy. I liked the Ajax components shown.
Then again it has downsides:
a) Windows only.
b) No integrated debugger - the other notable Windows-only PHP Tool 'NuSpere PHPEd' has a fully integrated webserver with a preinstalled runtime and callstack debugger + profiler. It's tough to beat that.
What I kind of liked:
I like the integrated Interbase/Firebird stuff - out-of the box views and stuff inside an integrated DB admin UI. Sadly without a grafical ERD interface. I also like the visual form layout tool. Allthough my designer would probably kill me if I'd use it in a project.
For me it boils down to this: While I - amongst other PLs - do PHP for a living and thus have no trouble spending 300$ or more on a productivity tool that does it's job better and faster than EasyEclipse, the stuff they offer just isn't good enough.
I want Zope with intergrated full-blow Ajax (YUI or something) and a web based developement interface with quasi-grafic ERD, View and Object assembly. All in PHP so it runs on the most shoddy webspace available. With the looks of the Joomla Backend, so my eyes don't bleed after 5 minutes. With a Java of Flash client if needed.
The sad thing I have to tell Borland and Nusphere is that all this will probably be finished by the OSS community even before they port their tools to Linux and OS X. We've got Symfony, CakePHP, Prado, Yahoos YUI, and ten bazillion other PHP and Ajax kits, not to mention the hysteric Rails crowd. Plus the Zope and Django people. We've got KDevelop and Eclipse and Netbeans and Anjuta and Erics Python IDE and Whatnot competing over who's got the larges dick and when MySQL AB finally get's their shit together we'll have MySQL Workbench for free which will give MySQL 5 yet another big push forward and scare the living wee-wee out of Oracle and Co. .
The world simply is moving to fast for me to just buy an IDE that forces me back on to the plattform I hate on a hunch. Mix Delphi for PHP and NuSpere PHPEd and add a visual case tool. Then I'll consider spending 300$ and installing Win2k again. Until then I'll stick with EasyEclipse for PHP on OS X. Even though it's a slowpoke at times.
My 2 cents.
Mono is factually sponsored by MS. The Novel/MS deal was all about Mono! The patent-deal thing was a feint (with a neat side effect, mind you)! No, hear me out. Just reading his talk and arriving at page 2 made me notice it. I honestly believe it is and it's not that Miquel is seriously bullshitting about his opinions. Allthough they are notably influenced by black MS accounts - which I am now certain of. Allthough maybe without him knowing for a fact.
.Net brand or attracting attention. All the while having Mono on the leash. If the test fails, they pull the plug, go completely off trail with .Net and leave behind yet another OSS plattform along with the XUL, Ajax, Java, QT, etc. bunch to bash their heads competing for attention. If it does work out they can slowly shift to OS independant services and tools. They can even combine both with varying intensity in which ever way they require it.
Figure this:
If there is any way MS can prepare to hop the OSS bandwagon that is continously growing without losing their face it is the mono(t)rail (pun intended). In a well built mono they can without haste probe the OSS market for sophisticated free developer tools and their chances to get into OSS bases servicing and specialized proprietary offers without thinning the
Think about it. It's a very smart move and not that a stupid notion at all. They can continue to slowpoke about with their bloated NT/2k/Vista Kernels and go 'plattform independant' whenever the need arises, squishing whatever Zends, SuSEs, Novels and RedHats get in the way. And with a 'Mono excuse' they won't even raise a blip on the antitrust radar doing so.
If this works out we'll see yet another rare of strange things: MS actually trying to build quality software again. For a short period of time that is. Until they regain their stranglehold. Then it's business as usual again.
No, friends, it's absolutely clear to me: Novel bought Ximian, SuSE and then some. Then they went f*cking around aimlessly with those brands for two years. They are MSes easiest, least dangerous, most hidden, most powerfull and - oh, the irony - cheapest way into a potential MS dominated OSS market. This is what's behind all this.
My 2 dollars.
Nastrovje! ... or something like that.
I don't like OpenOffice. The best all-out Office Suite I know is Lotus SmartSuite, but that sadly has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Then again i is the best non-monopolist Suite out there. Just the other day I was using Excel - which is actually considered a good Spreadsheet programm, be it MS or not - and tried to export into something other than xls. In order to do that to be able to process the sheet with a script I had to click myself through 3 popups per action at least.
You won't miss anything if you're ok with MS Office. Some things are a little different with OOo but it's basically the same without the pricetag and the lockin.