Also it's not nearly as klunky as it used to be. If you take a look at Direct3D 8 for instance, what you see is _very much_ like OpenGL in terms of how you set up a scene, and the process you go through to push geometry down the pipeline. Microsoft's own architecture was realyl shitty in all previous versions, but version 8 (and to some lesser extent 7) were totally ripped out and rewritten to use a similar architecture to OpenGL.
yeah, i tried the hardware surface, and the double buffering and all that. None of which has actually been supported in any other mode than software emulation (i.e. copy the page not actually change the buffer that the card scans out of) on any machine i could put together using SDL on either linux or windows. I wrote a small terminal emulator in SDL and that was neat =:-) I just wouldn't use it for a 2d videogame where you actually have to blit graphics around =:-(
From playing with it, and noticing what has been conveniently removed from the documentation (but is still in the libraries), it looks like DirectX 8 is trying very hard to do away with driectdraw and work purely through the 3d engine. Sprites are just 2d textured polys, etc...
This leads me to believe that any future enhancements/optimizations/support/testing/etc... that will happen with directx will be only on the direct3d part, and directdraw is probably going to be unsupported. Do y'all have any plans to deal with that?
This is primarily a PC (as opposed to console) question:
I have tried writing a game for SDL under both Linux (redhat 6.2, XFree 4.0.1, Geforce DDR), and under windows 2000 (geforce DDR, and also tried with an ATI all in wonder pro). In all cases, i could not get a page flipping full screen mode to work, and i could not blit the screen full and "flip" to achieve anything faster than 16fps at 1024x768. This is a dual pIII 800 i've been trying this on.
If there is anything that has in general (at least in my experience) been the trademark of japanese engineering for the devices i use (motorcycles, computers, consumer electronics) it's the reliability. That's very neat, i hope they succeed in getting this thing up to orbit and back eventually, because compared to the shuttle, this is very cool.
Re:None that I know of, but it IS interesting
on
IBM's First Computer
·
· Score: 1
Cool, i'll go check that out. Thanks for the useful and interresting non-flame reply. =:-)
I would be very interested in playing with an emulator for this, or failing that, and having specs writing one. I might even write an emulator for in in PIC assembly language to have an actual physical emulator (now instead of taking kilowats it'd probably take milliwats. It would be fun though.)
So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them. Remove the "comment" from my address.
First, you're right that a single system (or maybe an agreed upon wrapper (sorta like MIME (maybe even MIME)) has to be adopted by a large number of people for this to work.
The other gremlin is in the key repository. For a public key system to be fully functional we need a trusted public key repository (to facilitate checking signatures and obtaining public keys for people whom you wish to send a message to). That's a sort of tough one to pull together though, because we obviously can't trust government, and it's such a basic and simple service that not many people would pay for it. It's also a high volume service, which means that volunteers will quickly be put out of house and home with bandwidth charges, plus it's a service that begs for a well established institution, because if it goes away all the sudden, it'll really suck for a lot of people.
Any good ideas? Public key encryption will still work without a public key registry, but it's subject to some limitations, because you have to be sure that the public key you get is really the key of your intended recipient, and for the same reason, checking signatures is sort of out.
Anybody who was programming in assembly language on DOS based 80x86 systems will probably remember (either fondly or with hatred, it tended to draw extreme views) a fairly powerful if non-standard shareware macro assembler that could do some _very_ spiffy stuff.
You were not allowed to distribute for money any software assembled with a86 unless you registered the program. To keep track of this, the author used some fairly clever information hiding in the machine language output to tag the files fairly unmistakably.
I remember hearing that he actually won a lawsuit against a company on account of the tags, but i'm not sure of any details so take it with a large grain of salt.
Among other famous LISP programs (Emacs, ABUSE, all the Sierra games (king's quest, etc...)), and some other good stuff, a decent portion of AliasWavefront is written in LISP.
I think in this debate, the biggest setback is that everybody is trying to design the be all and end all home automation/entertainment/information center, and that is just not going to happen. The design cycle is too long, and people to make a device that does it all is going to cost an arm and a leg.
If there were some published open standard for modules that could perform some set of defined functions through a published interface, we would be a lot closer. I'm working under the assuption that an industry standard would develop for say video devices that would deal with thigs like seeking, playing, recording (if it's an rw device), and any other cleverness like naming tracks, etc... and each device could opt in with each of it's capabilities, publishing them to the "hub" device that would handle communication between devices.
This is important for several reasons, first, if a technology gets phased out, you can swap parts (or just add a new module) to keep up with things, rather than having to replace your entire system to deal with one standards revision or new media type.
The other reason off the top of my head is that a modular system would allow competition between manufacturers to produce the best module of a certain type, therefore raising the bar for quality, and also allowing users who need a less spiffy module of one type to buy a lower-spec'd but inexpensive one (for instance users on a budget could get the ntsc tv set instead of s-video for their home system, and be able to upgrade later).
As new device types are added, new control API's will probably be needed (i.e. MakeCoffee() ), to keep this from killing users, each device should also publish a default api->ui wrapper, so when they plug in their coffee maker they can use it right off the bat without any software installs, and then later when they want to install a module that automatically make coffee whenever there is a twilight zone marathon scheduled on the sci-fi channel they can do so.
Now i recognize that for the most part i'm just pissing in the wind here, because to get this started you'd need a non-profit organization willing to be the guardian of the standard (something like the w3c, but with teeth, so that incompatible systems could not be marketed as compatible (to keep bastards like microsoft and netscape running one-up wars of proprietary extensions developed for the sole reason of shitting on the other guy's picnic..))
The trick is the following:
Any company (or even an end user with the tools) should be able to produce a compatible device without paying expensive licencing fees. The fees should be on a volume scaled per-unit-shipped basis, so that the small players aren't killed by huge up-front licencing fees.
Every device should include the data necesary for no-frills full-functionality operation so that even the densest of users can plug the connector into their hub and all the right menus or icons will just be there when they next use the system.
I wonder how they keep the video signal from degrading over that distance... 200m is quite a ways. I guess if Ethernet can do it, they might be able to pull it off, but in my experience even adding 6 feet to a monitor cable adds blur...
Too bad it didn't get a foot logo! You should read the FAQ that goes with it. It's geek humor on par with the "Microsoft buys out the Holy Roman Catholic Church" spoof =:-)
On an enebriated saturday night, there's nothing that would have made my day more than this =;-)
The problem i see with this is that doing an software licence audit has a high direct cost (time spent doing it, xeroxing of papers, etc...), and also disrups normal operation of the company.
If a software company wants to, they could audit your licence compliance monthy and put you out of business _EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE A SINGLE PIRATED PROGRAM_. The fact that they are taking a week out of every one of your months will probably kill you.
I doubt they plan to send this widget up without a full seperate functionality audit, which they can do for an open source processor, but it might be hard to convince say Intel to let them pore over the VHDL for the celeron or whatever.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean they aren't going to put it through the same rigorous tests that they would put a commercial processor through.
They ignored Tesla when he said that alternating current was the way to go, and gave edison all the recognition for bringing electricity to the public, even though he tried and failed to do it with DC, and Tesla's proposed AC system ended up being the key.
This is another case where the inventer of a cool technology is for the most part ignored. Society tends to do that. It seems to happen a lot too. I wonder what will be remembered and forgotten about our current computer technology and it's creators...
Re:Criminal Applications? [ALREADY HAPPENS]
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
If you go to staples or any other similar place, you can sign up for prepaid cell service under any sort of false name. If you use a different phone than your normal phone, or if you just buy a really cheap phone for each time you sign up, you're golden.
Why do i know this? 'cause an old friend of mine worked at staples for a couple years, and he said that more than 25% of the people who came in for prepaid cell-phones were _really_ sketchy characters. Many paid in cash and even went so far as to wear dark glasses!
pointless consumer culture
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 2
** RANT WARNING **
*sigh* As americans about the last thing we need is more disposable cheap devices to feed our pointless consumer culture. Since the whole post-war lack of shortages, we have been trying our absolute hardest to bury ourselves in garbage. So you say they could be made recycleable? Well, look around you. NOBODY except a couple of granola hippies EVER buys things made with a significant amount of post-consumer recycled content, unless it's a novelty like those unsightly "indestructible" park benches that the bloody fucking new york state highway department put in a couple of their rest areas as a publicity stunt.
Not to get off topic or anything, but it's just depressing to see how people are encouraging this sort of thing. I think the whole thing is a tremendous waste of time.
I love videogames, and i am proficent in 6502 assembly language (the main processor in the atari 2600, the apple II, the old nintendo, and several other 8 bit monstrosities...) =:-)
If anybody is actually involved in this, and needs help, it sounds rad, and my e-mail address is here.
If somebody had told me 4 years ago that any of this stuff would happen (the DeCSS t-shirts, legally protected pig latin "encryption", etc...) i would have laughed out loud. I saw this story today, and i thought "okay, this seems logical" but then upon taking a step back, holy shit the computer culture has gotten even sillier than it was before...
Two things: A friend of mine was taking some ee classes at cornell on chip design, and he said he attended an optinal lecture (not related to his class, but his professor suggested that everybody go anyhow), and the person giving the lecture had built an asynchronous MIPS chip... That's cool =:-)
The second thing: I'd hope he'd have made some advances in programmability in the mean time...
That's a fairly spiffy idea. I fear that expensive lawyers and other such evils may foil the plan, but it is clever.
If the RIAA or whatever goes after the service in court and looses, they look like a bunch of dildos and are SOL. If they win, they have just set a precedent against their own copy-protection laws, including the anti-circumvention clause.
That being sait, i'm no lawyer, and the details in the story are sparse, but i'm afraid that the big business players will find a way around doing a frontal assault on the DMCA to get rid of Aimster... I guess we'll see...
Slashdot Mirror
Also it's not nearly as klunky as it used to be. If you take a look at Direct3D 8 for instance, what you see is _very much_ like OpenGL in terms of how you set up a scene, and the process you go through to push geometry down the pipeline. Microsoft's own architecture was realyl shitty in all previous versions, but version 8 (and to some lesser extent 7) were totally ripped out and rewritten to use a similar architecture to OpenGL.
yeah, i tried the hardware surface, and the double buffering and all that. None of which has actually been supported in any other mode than software emulation (i.e. copy the page not actually change the buffer that the card scans out of) on any machine i could put together using SDL on either linux or windows. I wrote a small terminal emulator in SDL and that was neat =:-) I just wouldn't use it for a 2d videogame where you actually have to blit graphics around =:-(
From playing with it, and noticing what has been conveniently removed from the documentation (but is still in the libraries), it looks like DirectX 8 is trying very hard to do away with driectdraw and work purely through the 3d engine. Sprites are just 2d textured polys, etc...
This leads me to believe that any future enhancements/optimizations/support/testing/etc... that will happen with directx will be only on the direct3d part, and directdraw is probably going to be unsupported. Do y'all have any plans to deal with that?
This is primarily a PC (as opposed to console) question:
I have tried writing a game for SDL under both Linux (redhat 6.2, XFree 4.0.1, Geforce DDR), and under windows 2000 (geforce DDR, and also tried with an ATI all in wonder pro). In all cases, i could not get a page flipping full screen mode to work, and i could not blit the screen full and "flip" to achieve anything faster than 16fps at 1024x768. This is a dual pIII 800 i've been trying this on.
My question is: Is it hardware or software?
If there is anything that has in general (at least in my experience) been the trademark of japanese engineering for the devices i use (motorcycles, computers, consumer electronics) it's the reliability. That's very neat, i hope they succeed in getting this thing up to orbit and back eventually, because compared to the shuttle, this is very cool.
Cool, i'll go check that out. Thanks for the useful and interresting non-flame reply. =:-)
I would be very interested in playing with an emulator for this, or failing that, and having specs writing one. I might even write an emulator for in in PIC assembly language to have an actual physical emulator (now instead of taking kilowats it'd probably take milliwats. It would be fun though.)
So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them. Remove the "comment" from my address.
First, you're right that a single system (or maybe an agreed upon wrapper (sorta like MIME (maybe even MIME)) has to be adopted by a large number of people for this to work.
The other gremlin is in the key repository. For a public key system to be fully functional we need a trusted public key repository (to facilitate checking signatures and obtaining public keys for people whom you wish to send a message to). That's a sort of tough one to pull together though, because we obviously can't trust government, and it's such a basic and simple service that not many people would pay for it. It's also a high volume service, which means that volunteers will quickly be put out of house and home with bandwidth charges, plus it's a service that begs for a well established institution, because if it goes away all the sudden, it'll really suck for a lot of people.
Any good ideas? Public key encryption will still work without a public key registry, but it's subject to some limitations, because you have to be sure that the public key you get is really the key of your intended recipient, and for the same reason, checking signatures is sort of out.
Anybody who was programming in assembly language on DOS based 80x86 systems will probably remember (either fondly or with hatred, it tended to draw extreme views) a fairly powerful if non-standard shareware macro assembler that could do some _very_ spiffy stuff.
You were not allowed to distribute for money any software assembled with a86 unless you registered the program. To keep track of this, the author used some fairly clever information hiding in the machine language output to tag the files fairly unmistakably.
I remember hearing that he actually won a lawsuit against a company on account of the tags, but i'm not sure of any details so take it with a large grain of salt.
Among other famous LISP programs (Emacs, ABUSE, all the Sierra games (king's quest, etc...)), and some other good stuff, a decent portion of AliasWavefront is written in LISP.
I think in this debate, the biggest setback is that everybody is trying to design the be all and end all home automation/entertainment/information center, and that is just not going to happen. The design cycle is too long, and people to make a device that does it all is going to cost an arm and a leg.
If there were some published open standard for modules that could perform some set of defined functions through a published interface, we would be a lot closer. I'm working under the assuption that an industry standard would develop for say video devices that would deal with thigs like seeking, playing, recording (if it's an rw device), and any other cleverness like naming tracks, etc... and each device could opt in with each of it's capabilities, publishing them to the "hub" device that would handle communication between devices.
This is important for several reasons, first, if a technology gets phased out, you can swap parts (or just add a new module) to keep up with things, rather than having to replace your entire system to deal with one standards revision or new media type.
The other reason off the top of my head is that a modular system would allow competition between manufacturers to produce the best module of a certain type, therefore raising the bar for quality, and also allowing users who need a less spiffy module of one type to buy a lower-spec'd but inexpensive one (for instance users on a budget could get the ntsc tv set instead of s-video for their home system, and be able to upgrade later).
As new device types are added, new control API's will probably be needed (i.e. MakeCoffee() ), to keep this from killing users, each device should also publish a default api->ui wrapper, so when they plug in their coffee maker they can use it right off the bat without any software installs, and then later when they want to install a module that automatically make coffee whenever there is a twilight zone marathon scheduled on the sci-fi channel they can do so.
Now i recognize that for the most part i'm just pissing in the wind here, because to get this started you'd need a non-profit organization willing to be the guardian of the standard (something like the w3c, but with teeth, so that incompatible systems could not be marketed as compatible (to keep bastards like microsoft and netscape running one-up wars of proprietary extensions developed for the sole reason of shitting on the other guy's picnic..))
The trick is the following:
Any company (or even an end user with the tools) should be able to produce a compatible device without paying expensive licencing fees. The fees should be on a volume scaled per-unit-shipped basis, so that the small players aren't killed by huge up-front licencing fees.
Every device should include the data necesary for no-frills full-functionality operation so that even the densest of users can plug the connector into their hub and all the right menus or icons will just be there when they next use the system.
I wonder how they keep the video signal from degrading over that distance... 200m is quite a ways. I guess if Ethernet can do it, they might be able to pull it off, but in my experience even adding 6 feet to a monitor cable adds blur...
Too bad it didn't get a foot logo! You should read the FAQ that goes with it. It's geek humor on par with the "Microsoft buys out the Holy Roman Catholic Church" spoof =:-)
On an enebriated saturday night, there's nothing that would have made my day more than this =;-)
The problem i see with this is that doing an software licence audit has a high direct cost (time spent doing it, xeroxing of papers, etc...), and also disrups normal operation of the company.
If a software company wants to, they could audit your licence compliance monthy and put you out of business _EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE A SINGLE PIRATED PROGRAM_. The fact that they are taking a week out of every one of your months will probably kill you.
Well, i guess they really do withhold updates... Who would have guessed =:-)
Sorta like how dust puppy from user friendly plays quake =:-)
I doubt they plan to send this widget up without a full seperate functionality audit, which they can do for an open source processor, but it might be hard to convince say Intel to let them pore over the VHDL for the celeron or whatever.
Just because it's open source doesn't mean they aren't going to put it through the same rigorous tests that they would put a commercial processor through.
They ignored Tesla when he said that alternating current was the way to go, and gave edison all the recognition for bringing electricity to the public, even though he tried and failed to do it with DC, and Tesla's proposed AC system ended up being the key. This is another case where the inventer of a cool technology is for the most part ignored. Society tends to do that. It seems to happen a lot too. I wonder what will be remembered and forgotten about our current computer technology and it's creators...
If you go to staples or any other similar place, you can sign up for prepaid cell service under any sort of false name. If you use a different phone than your normal phone, or if you just buy a really cheap phone for each time you sign up, you're golden.
Why do i know this? 'cause an old friend of mine worked at staples for a couple years, and he said that more than 25% of the people who came in for prepaid cell-phones were _really_ sketchy characters. Many paid in cash and even went so far as to wear dark glasses!
** RANT WARNING **
*sigh* As americans about the last thing we need is more disposable cheap devices to feed our pointless consumer culture. Since the whole post-war lack of shortages, we have been trying our absolute hardest to bury ourselves in garbage. So you say they could be made recycleable? Well, look around you. NOBODY except a couple of granola hippies EVER buys things made with a significant amount of post-consumer recycled content, unless it's a novelty like those unsightly "indestructible" park benches that the bloody fucking new york state highway department put in a couple of their rest areas as a publicity stunt.
Not to get off topic or anything, but it's just depressing to see how people are encouraging this sort of thing. I think the whole thing is a tremendous waste of time.
Cool Link =:-)
I love videogames, and i am proficent in 6502 assembly language (the main processor in the atari 2600, the apple II, the old nintendo, and several other 8 bit monstrosities...) =:-)
If anybody is actually involved in this, and needs help, it sounds rad, and my e-mail address is here.
If somebody had told me 4 years ago that any of this stuff would happen (the DeCSS t-shirts, legally protected pig latin "encryption", etc...) i would have laughed out loud. I saw this story today, and i thought "okay, this seems logical" but then upon taking a step back, holy shit the computer culture has gotten even sillier than it was before...
Two things: A friend of mine was taking some ee classes at cornell on chip design, and he said he attended an optinal lecture (not related to his class, but his professor suggested that everybody go anyhow), and the person giving the lecture had built an asynchronous MIPS chip... That's cool =:-)
The second thing: I'd hope he'd have made some advances in programmability in the mean time...
That's a fairly spiffy idea. I fear that expensive lawyers and other such evils may foil the plan, but it is clever.
If the RIAA or whatever goes after the service in court and looses, they look like a bunch of dildos and are SOL. If they win, they have just set a precedent against their own copy-protection laws, including the anti-circumvention clause.
That being sait, i'm no lawyer, and the details in the story are sparse, but i'm afraid that the big business players will find a way around doing a frontal assault on the DMCA to get rid of Aimster... I guess we'll see...