On of the most current high-profile examples of this is Kinetix (sp?) - the manufacturers of 3D Studio Max. I have it off the record from a senior exec that he doesn't care about end user piracy since it increases the skills base. More skills means more hires from companies needing those skills and consequently more licenses - since companies are the ones they make sure pay up.
Pity - because it's well written, technically sound and has the kind of insight you only get from years of progamming in assembly language on different generations of processors. It's not all anti-Intel. He also gives credit where credit is due - the design of the 386 and 486 chips for instance.
A good editor would have removed the BOYCOTT ALL INTEL stuff or at least moved it down a bit. But I feel for the author here: he paid $4000 for a system which isn't as good as a (much) cheaper Athlon.
Crusoe watchers take note: there's a nice little summary of the Crusoe's performance and why he's very impressed with that CPU's architecture. That summary alone is worth reading.
A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the manager retained his job.
The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I though it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward."
The manager, upon hearing this, remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!"
But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working one."
I think that we may be able to conclude that the Internet/Tech Stocks bubble has finally deflated. How has the rise and fall of Internet and tech stocks affected your lives and careers? If so, was it for better or for worse?"
That depends on how you look at it. Five years ago, which is the timeframe this article uses, there was one listed Internet company - AOL. It had a market cap of $1bn. Today Internet companies have a combined market cap of $1 trillion. So you're telling me an industry which has grown its net worth by a factor of 1000 in five years, created 2 million+ jobs and made who knows how many millionaires is "deflated"?
Don't confuse the difficulty of picking stocks with what real wealth creation has happened in this period.
ST PETERSBURG, Russia: 2000-10-27: In a joint sting operation, Russian
police and the FBI made a raid on a downtown apartment today, netting
four teenagers they suspect of being behind the Microsoft breakin.
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller applauded the operation, saying that
neighbours tipped off the police after noticing strange behaviour from
them.
"These were all very bright boys - cheerful, helpful and good at their
day programming jobs" said apartment resident Canya Bolyevtis. "But last
weekend that changed when they started walking around in a daze after an
all-night session, as if they had been exposed to some terribly
traumatic thing."
Californian software analyst Rich McGee says the teens were foolish to
allow themselves to be exposed to Microsoft source code.
"Here you have some very bright young guys with some Unix experience
suddenly coming into contact with the C source for kernel32.dll. I think
they were unprepared for the shock."
St. Petersburg police chief Konstantin Bolygubov thanked the public for
the information that led to the arrests, saying it was the easiest raid
he had done in a long time.
"When we broke down the door, none of them moved," he said. "They were
all just staring in horror at the screen of a PC in the corner of the
living room."
Gah - that will teach me to use the preview button:)
It isn't fair to certain processors as there are restrictions on using addresses with the same low 4 address bits back-to-back
(original Pentium certainly).
True - this example is meant to show how the Pentium (PPLain in Agner's docs) can be tripped up.
- You've chosen to access non-aligned data (accessing 16 bit values on an odd, and cache line spanning, address)
Very deliberately I might add:) The point I was making was that cache considerations play a big role in optimising inner loops. The above code is an example written by Niklas Beisert a.k.a Pascal of Cubic Team to show the effects of cache misses when doing snazzy bitmap effects.
Nearly identical loops, except the first one flies and the second one thrashes because it misses the cache 100% of the time. Can you say 10-50 times slower?
Don't worry - it won't become widespread. Cults which emphasise not eating are much like the ones that favour handling poisonous snakes - they tend to die out.
#1: Africans need running water, housing etc before worry about Linux
Answer: It's very hard to roll out water/housing/food projects without a proper communications infrastructure. Basic computer training goes a long way towards ensuring people are skilled anough to help themselves in this regard. The precedents are there to show that better communications and computer literacy are good for economic growth and living standards.
#2: What do Africans know about Linux anyway?
Answer: More than you might think. I personally know people on this continent who:
have commit access to the BSD kernel
have written drivers for the linux kernel
are Linux assembly programmers
have gone to Europe and USA to run multi-million dollar companies there.
train Cisco experts from the US on networks here because they feature topology and layout you can't study anywhere else
If the US is so well off, how come it keeps poaching skills from countries like South Africa all the time? The main problem is non-Africans tend to lump together the whole big land mass into one. When I was in the US last, friends asked me whether the land invasions in Zimbabwe were a cause for worry. I asked them in reply whether Quebec wanting to go its own way was a cause for worry. "Ah but that's a different country," they said. Bingo.
#3: Africans don't get it
Answer: Some of them get it immediately. When John Perry Barlow toured Africa a couple of years ago, he showed a nomad tribesman the Internet from his laptop. Immediately the guy realised he could market his wares (rock salt and animal skins) to anyone in the world using this technology. This from somone who has probably never left his home village in the middle of the Sahara.
#4: Price is not really the factor
Answer: Price is THE factor on this continent. As some posters have already pointed out, your typical MS Office bundle can be worth a year's salary. More important is that many people just can't afford the constant cycle of upgrades to hardware that new software releases demand. Linux is free - tough to beat.
I am an African, linux programmer and user since 1993. I wrote about free software for a major national newspaper in 1994 - long before it became trendy to do so. I've travelled - quite extensively in the US. As a country I love it. I just wish many Americans would realise that US methods of doing things don't often work here. What does work is a willingness to exchange information and work together - something the Internet has been really brilliant at doing.
...if you're a government or big corporation trying to resist the flow of information on the Internet.
jonkatz didn't mention it in his book review of The Sovereign Individual but one of the most telling quotes in there goes something like this: "Any government or corporation trying to fight the Internet will just accelerate their own demise." When I first read the book about three years ago, I had no idea what they meant. But now it's easy to see how this works: corporate/state pisses off consumers/taxpayers who just take their money elsewhere. Taxpayers can do this thanks to the Net, encryption and offshore funds, consumers will do the same. Any visible action against the Internet just focuses people - much like the MPAA has prompted the rise of software like LiViD.
Germany imposes taxes on copying equipment, manufacturers go elsewhere, consumers buy imported models and then tell Bertelsmann where to shove their tax.
We never learn. The more complex a system becomes, the more possible paths through that system there are and so the more bugs and potential security holes there are. Placing more and more technology in smaller and smaller places isn't going to be as wonderful as we think unless security is taken seriously from the very very beginning.
I'm willing to bet that today's Nokias are more powerful that the PCs of 15 years ago. What kind of security problems will we be seeing from phones in 5 years time?
..on Alien. On the 20th Anniversary edition DVD, he says a couple of times (in the director's commentary audio track) that he prefers to do something physically rather than using CGI.
I believe the quote is: "If you can do it physically then do it rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on computer graphics." Examples are the egg "waking up", all the sets, the shuddering during takeoff and landing, the outside shots of the derelict, Ash's death and of course the Alien itself.
Now Alien was made at a time when computer generated gfx were at the stone-knives and bearskins stage, but somehow it's aged extraordinarily well. It just has a kind of raw lifelike quality to it that you just didn't get in EP1 - you could feel the effort that went into the acting and directing.
Ironically enough, many people's favourite sequence in the Matrix is the lobby shootout - which hardly features any CGI at all (except the wire removal).
Get a grip George - work on your casting and story some more and you might have a film people like.
Amicrosof.170
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike, I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing: A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available. Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can
be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
Having worked on XENIX (argh that really dates me), I remember being glad when I first saw this announcement, but not so glad after the company bought a copy. How times change....NOT.
One thing Google's executives say they will
not do is transform their company into a Web portal. While the firm may add capabilities such as online image and music searches, according to its co-founders, it will stay away from calenders, news and chat.
This is probably the major reason why Google has succeeded - focus. If your technology is good enough in its own right, there's no need to clutter it with so-called "content" to keep bringing users back.
Indeed it was. Doom and Duke 3D were the two most high-profile games written using Watcom but there were some other good ones as well - Epic Pinball, One Must Fall and Toxic Bunny also spring to mind.
The game and demo programmer's paradise at x2ftp was - and still is - chock full of Watcom goodies. Some of those have been further developed to be successful commercial cross-platform rendering libraries in their own right.
But it was Doom that brought Watcom its popular fame - without a doubt. Game programmers and players everywhere were suddenly asking "DOS/4G? What the hell is this?" And when they found out that it was Watcom that could compile extended DOS programs (with none of the 16-bit memory model restrictions), there was a huge surge in games compiled using Watcom. Instead of all sorts of tricks with segments, EMS and/or XMS, you had a flat memory model. I remember drooling at the time because I'd just about had enough of huge pointers...
How do you even get started doing 3D stuff? Both still images and animated 3D?
I'm looking for cost-free stuff that isn't cripware to get started. I have a very strong math/physics
background, so I have no problem describing equations of motion, but I haven't the faintest as to how to
get started.
It depends. If you want to program still and animated 3D graphics, then you have quite a few choices. Here are a (tiny) subset of the ones I know:
Here is a series of accessible tutorials on the mathematics and implementation of 3d graphics
OpenGL is the API of choice for most platforms. Simple, clear and easy to understand. It does assume that you know what the basics are though.
Mesa is a free workalike implementation of OpenGL for most platforms. Reading the source to the included demos is a good way to start learning.
Python is a very good language with OpenGL bindings with which to start messing around. If C and C++ seem too tedious just for experimenting then try PyOpenGL. Python itself can be learned in a weekend after which the GL module is there to play around with.
If you're not interested in programming - just modelling and creating then check out:
All of these tools and references are free and work on Windows and Linux alike.
Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?
All you need is a resonable midrange PC and a decent accelerator. A hardware-accelerated graphics card on your platform is a must to view complex 3D graphics at any kind of framerate. Vendors with good Linux support include include Ati, nVidia, Matrox and 3Dfx.
I noticed in Europe that some language are very difficult to understand when they're shouted. English, and German are easier to hear over distances and through noise because of their hard consonants.
It definitely helps to shout if you're an English speaker. Whenever I've been in Europe and the locals haven't understood me, I've just shouted louder...
...that the most subversive file extension in the world is not MP3, or JPG or DivX. It's TXT - the plain old written word in electronic format. Ma Bell's service may be useless for exchanging large files but it could well be a very useful service for anyone who wants to be published and can't right now for whatever reason.
It's all in the words folks. The Chinese Government doesn't give a toss about its citizens downloading MP3s. It *does* care a lot about what they read...
I was going to post this in reply to the first story but it's just as applicable in the followup. My point is this: Pro-Microsoft pieces in the media do not happen by accident - especially when the author is a well known inspector of Gates' colon. Spin, media relations and public perception are very carefully managed by most companies and Microsoft is no exception.
My guess as to what prompted this knee-jerk reaction: the IDC server software revenue figures. I don't have a URL but in a nutshell, units have soared but revenue is flat - thanks to the frightening growth in Linux servers. Microsoft are not at all happy about this and are desperately looking around for a reason to gain the upper hand in mindshare.
No doubt our Ed got a call and agreed (or decided) the best way to spearhead this quick FUD campaign was to put out the message that Linux is buggy. Anyone considering getting a Linux-based server would then think "uh-oh" and go back to safe, reliable old NT.
Of course, Microsoft have shot themselves in both feet by rushing this one. First, Moody's credibility has been given a serious dent - not the least of which because he can't (or won't) add properly. Secondly, the author - who's neutral - says he's impressed that the Linux community has "done an admirable job" in making a better product. So exactly the reverse effect has been achieved - Moody is seen as a Microsoft zealot and the Linux community is seen as full of reasonable, honest adherents.
Go Fred go! I look forward to your next piece on why Microsoft license agreements are so easy to understand...
Like the RIAA, they're after power. Power to decide where and when "their" software gets installed on
your machine. Whether it be their.Net program (where all of your applications are "upgraded" for a fee
over the Internet), or their OEM system ("This version of Windows 2000 is OEM only - if your format the
hard drive and put on the retail version without buying a copy of the retail version for this specific
computer, you're in violation!").
I agree. I think this case shows just how patently absurd it is when companies or a legal system treat identical streams of bits differently. Bit for bit, the two different copies of Windows mentioned in the Gartner piece are the same if I read it correctly.
That's why the Microsoft rep is so desperate to put the spin on the story, even if he grudgingly agrees with the facts. Hitherto quite happy customers might suddenly realise they've been asked to bend over and grease up over a techicality about a stream of bits which can be duplicated at zero cost. Mmmm - something wrong here...
I have this problem *all* the time. What works for me - apart from relaxing non-coding activities - is to take Sedgewick (or any classic text) and write one of the algorithms in there. Doesn't matter what it is: QuickSort, stack-based level order traversal of a binary tree, FFT - whatever. Pick a small one (so that it can be in one source file), read the chapter and then write it yourself. If you get stuck, you can always refer back to the text to see what's wrong.
I find this method helps a lot: you can produce a small elegant system which works. It's like "wow - this is really elegant and I coded it." It seems to switch your programming circuits on but leaves the blockers off. The result is you realise you *can* program after all and you'll have probably learned something in the process - maybe a deeper understanding of the algorithm or a faster way to do things. The brain is pretty good at self-organising which means any knowledge you gain doing this could well help you with a stumbling block elsewhere i.e. you're not wasting time on a trivial exercise...
It's only a theory mind you since I was 10 000 miles away from Siggraph. Here it is: Some Autodesk execs went to the Blender 2.0 launch and basically crapped in their pants when they saw the new modeller/gaming support.
My (completely conspiratorial and possibly completely incorrect) reasoning for this conclusion:
gMax is just an announcement at the moment - no.tar.gz or.zip files to download - if it was a real announcement, the site would be/.'ed already
gMax will only be available after the winter release of the next Max - plenty of time to get a source release bashed out after a knee-jerk announcement
Blender has gone from 0-100mph in a frightening amount of time - and it's free. In a year's time it could start eating into non-free competitors' profits
plenty of modellers are sick of Windows crashes
Linux is just starting to become a viable modelling/rendering platform for commercial 3d games
Put it all together and it's an interesting hypothesis. Unless an Autodesk exec can show me an internal e-mail from weeks before the show:)
As I said, it's only a theory. I have another theory - ahem ahem....
SDL is shaping up to be the Linux gaming API of choice. It's written by Loki's lead programmer and has been used by the company to port all sorts of games to Linux. It provides:
full sound, threads and timer capability
Linux, BSD, Windows, BeoS and Mac support
X, Framebuffer, svgalib, win32 DirectX and a whole lot more
support for OpenGL contexts (accelerated if your card is)
real-world tested by most of Loki's commercial ports
Slashdot Mirror
On of the most current high-profile examples of this is Kinetix (sp?) - the manufacturers of 3D Studio Max. I have it off the record from a senior exec that he doesn't care about end user piracy since it increases the skills base. More skills means more hires from companies needing those skills and consequently more licenses - since companies are the ones they make sure pay up.
A good editor would have removed the BOYCOTT ALL INTEL stuff or at least moved it down a bit. But I feel for the author here: he paid $4000 for a system which isn't as good as a (much) cheaper Athlon.
Crusoe watchers take note: there's a nice little summary of the Crusoe's performance and why he's very impressed with that CPU's architecture. That summary alone is worth reading.
The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I though it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward."
The manager, upon hearing this, remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!"
But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working one."
Oh, and Mame in the corner too :)
That depends on how you look at it. Five years ago, which is the timeframe this article uses, there was one listed Internet company - AOL. It had a market cap of $1bn. Today Internet companies have a combined market cap of $1 trillion. So you're telling me an industry which has grown its net worth by a factor of 1000 in five years, created 2 million+ jobs and made who knows how many millionaires is "deflated"?
Don't confuse the difficulty of picking stocks with what real wealth creation has happened in this period.
"These were all very bright boys - cheerful, helpful and good at their day programming jobs" said apartment resident Canya Bolyevtis. "But last weekend that changed when they started walking around in a daze after an all-night session, as if they had been exposed to some terribly traumatic thing."
Californian software analyst Rich McGee says the teens were foolish to allow themselves to be exposed to Microsoft source code.
"Here you have some very bright young guys with some Unix experience suddenly coming into contact with the C source for kernel32.dll. I think they were unprepared for the shock."
St. Petersburg police chief Konstantin Bolygubov thanked the public for the information that led to the arrests, saying it was the easiest raid he had done in a long time.
"When we broke down the door, none of them moved," he said. "They were all just staring in horror at the screen of a PC in the corner of the living room."
It isn't fair to certain processors as there are restrictions on using addresses with the same low 4 address bits back-to-back (original Pentium certainly).
True - this example is meant to show how the Pentium (PPLain in Agner's docs) can be tripped up.
- You've chosen to access non-aligned data (accessing 16 bit values on an odd, and cache line spanning, address)
Very deliberately I might add :) The point I was making was that cache considerations play a big role in optimising inner loops. The above code is an example written by Niklas Beisert a.k.a Pascal of Cubic Team to show the effects of cache misses when doing snazzy bitmap effects.
fast:
mov dx,12
l1:
mov cx,32768
l2:
mov ax,[0]
mov ax,[0]
mov ax,[0]
dec cx
jnz l2
dec dx
jnz l1
slow:
mov dx,12
l3:
mov cx,32768
l4:
mov ax,[4095]
mov ax,[8191]
mov ax,[12287]
dec cx
jnz l4
dec dx
jnz l3
Nearly identical loops, except the first one flies and the second one thrashes because it misses the cache 100% of the time. Can you say 10-50 times slower?
Answer: It's very hard to roll out water/housing/food projects without a proper communications infrastructure. Basic computer training goes a long way towards ensuring people are skilled anough to help themselves in this regard. The precedents are there to show that better communications and computer literacy are good for economic growth and living standards.
#2: What do Africans know about Linux anyway?
Answer: More than you might think. I personally know people on this continent who:
If the US is so well off, how come it keeps poaching skills from countries like South Africa all the time? The main problem is non-Africans tend to lump together the whole big land mass into one. When I was in the US last, friends asked me whether the land invasions in Zimbabwe were a cause for worry. I asked them in reply whether Quebec wanting to go its own way was a cause for worry. "Ah but that's a different country," they said. Bingo.
#3: Africans don't get it
Answer: Some of them get it immediately. When John Perry Barlow toured Africa a couple of years ago, he showed a nomad tribesman the Internet from his laptop. Immediately the guy realised he could market his wares (rock salt and animal skins) to anyone in the world using this technology. This from somone who has probably never left his home village in the middle of the Sahara.
#4: Price is not really the factor
Answer: Price is THE factor on this continent. As some posters have already pointed out, your typical MS Office bundle can be worth a year's salary. More important is that many people just can't afford the constant cycle of upgrades to hardware that new software releases demand. Linux is free - tough to beat.
I am an African, linux programmer and user since 1993. I wrote about free software for a major national newspaper in 1994 - long before it became trendy to do so. I've travelled - quite extensively in the US. As a country I love it. I just wish many Americans would realise that US methods of doing things don't often work here. What does work is a willingness to exchange information and work together - something the Internet has been really brilliant at doing.
jonkatz didn't mention it in his book review of The Sovereign Individual but one of the most telling quotes in there goes something like this: "Any government or corporation trying to fight the Internet will just accelerate their own demise." When I first read the book about three years ago, I had no idea what they meant. But now it's easy to see how this works: corporate/state pisses off consumers/taxpayers who just take their money elsewhere. Taxpayers can do this thanks to the Net, encryption and offshore funds, consumers will do the same. Any visible action against the Internet just focuses people - much like the MPAA has prompted the rise of software like LiViD.
Germany imposes taxes on copying equipment, manufacturers go elsewhere, consumers buy imported models and then tell Bertelsmann where to shove their tax.
I'm willing to bet that today's Nokias are more powerful that the PCs of 15 years ago. What kind of security problems will we be seeing from phones in 5 years time?
I believe the quote is: "If you can do it physically then do it rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on computer graphics." Examples are the egg "waking up", all the sets, the shuddering during takeoff and landing, the outside shots of the derelict, Ash's death and of course the Alien itself.
Now Alien was made at a time when computer generated gfx were at the stone-knives and bearskins stage, but somehow it's aged extraordinarily well. It just has a kind of raw lifelike quality to it that you just didn't get in EP1 - you could feel the effort that went into the acting and directing.
Ironically enough, many people's favourite sequence in the Matrix is the lobby shootout - which hardly features any CGI at all (except the wire removal).
Get a grip George - work on your casting and story some more and you might have a film people like.
net.micro
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!microsof!gordon
Tue Feb 2 09:53:34 1982
XENIX - real UNIX
In response to the characterization of XENIX as a UNIX look-alike, I would like to point out that Microsoft XENIX is the real thing: A superset of Bell V7 UNIX.
We have our 3.0 distribution, and XENIX 3.0 will soon be available. Bell forces us to call it something besides UNIX (the word 'UNIX' can be used only in the context of 'the UNIX operating system'), so XENIX it is.
gordon letwin
decvax!microso
Having worked on XENIX (argh that really dates me), I remember being glad when I first saw this announcement, but not so glad after the company bought a copy. How times change....NOT.
This is probably the major reason why Google has succeeded - focus. If your technology is good enough in its own right, there's no need to clutter it with so-called "content" to keep bringing users back.
Indeed it was. Doom and Duke 3D were the two most high-profile games written using Watcom but there were some other good ones as well - Epic Pinball, One Must Fall and Toxic Bunny also spring to mind.
The game and demo programmer's paradise at x2ftp was - and still is - chock full of Watcom goodies. Some of those have been further developed to be successful commercial cross-platform rendering libraries in their own right.
But it was Doom that brought Watcom its popular fame - without a doubt. Game programmers and players everywhere were suddenly asking "DOS/4G? What the hell is this?" And when they found out that it was Watcom that could compile extended DOS programs (with none of the 16-bit memory model restrictions), there was a huge surge in games compiled using Watcom. Instead of all sorts of tricks with segments, EMS and/or XMS, you had a flat memory model. I remember drooling at the time because I'd just about had enough of huge pointers...
It depends. If you want to program still and animated 3D graphics, then you have quite a few choices. Here are a (tiny) subset of the ones I know:
If you're not interested in programming - just modelling and creating then check out:
All of these tools and references are free and work on Windows and Linux alike.
Also, how prohibitive is the hardware for this kind of thing?
All you need is a resonable midrange PC and a decent accelerator. A hardware-accelerated graphics card on your platform is a must to view complex 3D graphics at any kind of framerate. Vendors with good Linux support include include Ati, nVidia, Matrox and 3Dfx.
It definitely helps to shout if you're an English speaker. Whenever I've been in Europe and the locals haven't understood me, I've just shouted louder...
It's all in the words folks. The Chinese Government doesn't give a toss about its citizens downloading MP3s. It *does* care a lot about what they read...
My guess as to what prompted this knee-jerk reaction: the IDC server software revenue figures. I don't have a URL but in a nutshell, units have soared but revenue is flat - thanks to the frightening growth in Linux servers. Microsoft are not at all happy about this and are desperately looking around for a reason to gain the upper hand in mindshare.
No doubt our Ed got a call and agreed (or decided) the best way to spearhead this quick FUD campaign was to put out the message that Linux is buggy. Anyone considering getting a Linux-based server would then think "uh-oh" and go back to safe, reliable old NT.
Of course, Microsoft have shot themselves in both feet by rushing this one. First, Moody's credibility has been given a serious dent - not the least of which because he can't (or won't) add properly. Secondly, the author - who's neutral - says he's impressed that the Linux community has "done an admirable job" in making a better product. So exactly the reverse effect has been achieved - Moody is seen as a Microsoft zealot and the Linux community is seen as full of reasonable, honest adherents.
Go Fred go! I look forward to your next piece on why Microsoft license agreements are so easy to understand...
I agree. I think this case shows just how patently absurd it is when companies or a legal system treat identical streams of bits differently. Bit for bit, the two different copies of Windows mentioned in the Gartner piece are the same if I read it correctly.
That's why the Microsoft rep is so desperate to put the spin on the story, even if he grudgingly agrees with the facts. Hitherto quite happy customers might suddenly realise they've been asked to bend over and grease up over a techicality about a stream of bits which can be duplicated at zero cost. Mmmm - something wrong here...
I find this method helps a lot: you can produce a small elegant system which works. It's like "wow - this is really elegant and I coded it." It seems to switch your programming circuits on but leaves the blockers off. The result is you realise you *can* program after all and you'll have probably learned something in the process - maybe a deeper understanding of the algorithm or a faster way to do things. The brain is pretty good at self-organising which means any knowledge you gain doing this could well help you with a stumbling block elsewhere i.e. you're not wasting time on a trivial exercise...
My (completely conspiratorial and possibly completely incorrect) reasoning for this conclusion:
- gMax is just an announcement at the moment - no
.tar.gz or .zip files to download - if it was a real announcement, the site would be /.'ed already - gMax will only be available after the winter release of the next Max - plenty of time to get a source release bashed out after a knee-jerk announcement
- Blender has gone from 0-100mph in a frightening amount of time - and it's free. In a year's time it could start eating into non-free competitors' profits
- plenty of modellers are sick of Windows crashes
- Linux is just starting to become a viable modelling/rendering platform for commercial 3d games
Put it all together and it's an interesting hypothesis. Unless an Autodesk exec can show me an internal e-mail from weeks before the showAs I said, it's only a theory. I have another theory - ahem ahem....
As a gaming API, it's currently unmatched IMHO...