IT is this.. IT is that. Does anyone here really think you can describe an entire totally diverse industry like IT and badge it one way or another? Thats plain nuts. Each company and organsiation has their own needs, and target audience. So trying to discern how an entire industry should tackle product development as a blanket method is dumb.
Should a research and dev company retard their technology development? Should a database developer create advanced new incompatible database technology?
I wonder whether this planet is spinning forwards or backwards..
It seems to me alot of people forget NASA is funded by tax dollars. Hence making sure the taxpayers think its a good idea is probably not so stupid. Also for collecting redshifts and such, it is alot more to do with data processing and not the actual telescope. As long as it has a decent enough imager it is more sensible to cover a wide spectrum than just one end of it. This is one of the great facilities of the hubble, its abilitiy to be used for a myriad of different targets.
And while on the 'ancient universe' thing, why dont we figure out how to help our fellow neighbours first... instead of looking up maybe we should look around a bit more... in the long run we dont have to go anywhere to see where we come from.. we are all made of stardust arent we...
I guess you also believe the pulling down of the Saddam statue was a public backlash against the regime.. it wasnt.. it was a staged media event. Dont beleive the hype.. the media owns what 'happens'.. just have a look at a couple of excellent independant media doccos have recently done on the war and postwar in Iraq.. the high majority of 'live' news reports were done in the "Media Centre".. the US Army had a rather massive TV studio (230 million dollars on a media centre, I guess you'd expect a decent studio), with a nice indoor sand dune, humvees and bradleys to boot.. dont believe for a second that 650 mill was found anywhere in a cache.. all smoke and mirrors.. read the UN report on the previous 10 years of sanctions and how it was recognised to have impacted childrens health - they admit it to have been the cause of 50,000 childrens deaths. Thats their own report. The sanctions werent just money they were _medecine_ too.. and spare parts for water pumps and so on.. and a myriad of other day to day items... Sure Saddam was no saint.. I never ever pretended he was.. but what I said about sanctions was they dont impact the rich and powerful in a country they only impact the poor and/or the powerless.
The UN is just a facade for richer countries to control the poorer countries. Always has been this way (in some form or another) and will more than likely always will be. Dont be deluded by media and political flag waving that goes on when something 'good' comes out of the UN. Its like all marketing, promote what you do well, and keep the things that go bad quiet.
- No world wars in 50 years This is a joke. So instead of a large conflict we have a huge number of smaller conflicts - in fact the number of conflicts has been increasing for the last 50 years. Look at Africa, South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, hardly what you would call 50 years of peace. LA riots ? I guess thats peaceful..
- Negotiated and enforced many peace treaties.. You kiddin me right? As other posters have noted, most treaties are broken on a regular basis, and the UN's 'force' is only a minimal contingent able to intervene in small conflicts. Israel for instance has broken more UN agreements than nearly any other country, and yet they dont seemed to have drawn much critism for it? Why not? Because it is the affluent countries that get to decide policy, not the less fortunate ones. Morals and political will tend to reside on the side with the most money.
- Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects.. This is plain rediculous. Sanctions were the main reason tens of thousands of Iraqi children died.. utterly ludicrous.. Even one high level UN official resigned directly because of this woeful stance. Economic sanctions only hurt the poor in countries that are often already very poor. Its a disgusting way to treat humans. Cut off any hope they have of being able to feed their nation, or give them health care, then blame the current political leader of the country for it!!! That makes me sick. Look at North Korea, look at all the economic sanctions the US has placed on them.. who does it _directly_ effect.. not the rich and powerful in the country because they can maintain their status quo from their powerbase, but the poor.. they suffer directly from any sanctions.. you should be ashamed to think sanctions are even a valid way to treat fellow human beings.
- WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world. This about the only good comment amongst this muck. Sadly the WHO is undermanned.. and under funded. And along with sanctions applied by the UN and trade embargos placed by countries they have their hands tied.. Fighting some of the worlds health issues without the abilities to supply cheap simple medicine due to some political wrangle..
- Its the worlds first.. rah-de-rah... Its not. If it were, then the US wouldnt have gone into Iraq (where was democracy then?).. If it were.. then poorer nations would have equal say in the way they should be treated - its almost as disgusting as the US senate, trying to buy votes for an ammendment.. if it were, then the world would have a plaform with which to deny people to bomb each other.. and Israel would listen.. if it were, then Palestine would have a border that doesnt move every two months. If it were, there would be no such thing as an 'Israelli settlement' inside Palestine.. If it were, East Timor would not have been saved just for a massive gas field and sold off to the rich for peanuts.. yes.. if it were...
- Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait.. Saved? Whom did they save? US, millions of dollars of oil.. yes.. saved indeed. Korea is saved? from whom.. North Korea has been saved by ensuring no goods from America get there.. along with many other goods from other countries.. including food.. saved.. South Korea.. yes.. they were saved.. they now have all the Coke they can drink and all the MacDonalds they can eat.. saved.. I guess saving the Balkans would be included, especally after finding a rather large oil field.. coincidence.. yes of course.. they went in to save the country that had be fighting for FIFTEEN YEARS!!!
In a perfect world the idea and the ideals of the UN wou
Its a shame that software developers forget this. I have seen so many 'Engineer and Programmer' developed UIs that are plain useless, because they forget the end user requirements and skill set. Id like to see a set of formal guidelines for UI's for target users - Most apps have a fairly targeted end user and i think that could help app developers focus on the important person in the chain - the end-user.
Its a tool. The idea is to help people do things with it - not to spend more time trying to figure out how to use it.
I also wonder whether UI design is an ego thing. I have been involved in assessing and developing tools for a while, and many programmers get personally offended when an end-user cant drive their app. The programmer response is usually - "they need training". At this point I usually whack them over the head and say "design a decent UI you fool."
Training the rest of the world to use clunky UIs or commandlines.. is well.. dumb. Make the tool.. and make it properly.. or dont complain when an end-user cant figure it out.
I wonder just how people summise these 'amazing events' into such bizarre outcomes?
How the hell could MS be happy? Lets do some math (is there anyone here that does it anymore?) MS make NO money on the HW, in fact they LOSE money on the HW. So, since you wont be buying software (which is where they make their money) they will be paying for you to play with their HW. Yeah, thats good sound economic sense.
Ripping your Xbox open, stoving in modchips will somehow drive up sales of Xbox. Does Slashdot have such a large opinion of itself to assume everyone here will buy one and do this? Are you guys crazy? Why would I rip open something I bought to convert to something I (and a huge number of ppl) JUST DONT NEED. FFS VHS STILL ISNT DEAD YET!
Does anyone actually read these damn news items anymore? I keep getting the feeling Im at a fatbabies forum trying to figure out who Eiger is.
true random data (no pattern matching), 1:1 is about it. The reason is simple, you cannot pattern match truly random data, because, its random. But programs like zip and rar use pattern matching techniques esp suited to computer based data. A good example is zipping an already zipped file. If it were truly able to handle random data then it could zip and zip.. until the cows came home:-) Sadly it cant, it pattern matches what it can, hash tables it, then thats it.
Itd be nice to pattern match random data, but then.. it wouldnt be random would it.
HAHAHA I love the option you give.. OS X.. HAHAHAH have you ever written a X windows app.. or game for that matter. HAHAHA.. Im working on the PS2 right now, and Id prefer to write a PS2 app to an X app ANYDAY - even with VU & DMA code.
Yes the tools are expensive, and you suggest that Sony make huge dollars off them. Well Im afraid they dont. Metroworks and SnSystems are expensive.. but because their tools are actually worth it for professional developers. All the R&D tech that goes into the devkits and the people researching the hardware is definiely not made up by the devkits. Nearly all Sony's (PS2 division) profit come purely from sold software - since they charge a 'stamping fee' per cd.
Sony definitely does not discourage development. You can use the gcc tools to build and debug on a Sony devkit or testkit or even PS2. You can (if you were very lucky) purchase a Linux users kit, that lets you develop on you home ps2.. hardly likely you will see ANY other console maker do that! And on the UK & AUS demo cd there was YABASIC to play with..
Finally, your idea of volunteer GPL video games on a Sony console is pretty ludicrous - Sony only allows registered businesses to apply for devkits, and at $10,000 Im not sure you would get many 'home' programmers buying one, and on top of that to actually become a developer you must submit you project to Sony for scrutiny (They arent too bad.. they just dont want to let total BS get built for PS2) and you must be prepared to stamp a minimum of 10,000 cds (not cheap either).
Its pretty hard to coordinate a PC online GPL project let alone one for a console.
In the long run its all about money. Is there any doubt that M$ as a company is blatantly screwing other businesses? I mean, please, just because they can keep the government in the courts for years doesnt mean they are right.. and meanwhile they grow bigger/stronger.
M$ represents consumer computer market because there really is noone else.. and they have made sure of that! And if this company is NOT regulated and this industry NOT cleaned up, we might as well call in Al Capone to help run it. Why isnt anyone else worried that the most powerful man in the world is not the US president, but a computer nerd.. this is scary.
The computer industry is in a huge growth stage, and at a time when they are massive profits to be made. The main problem is there are no litigation and controls to make sure the companies involved are doin the right thing. Please dont be blind by the M$ marketing BS.. if we dont do the right things now, the whole computer industry may suffer in the long run.
I sadly think its too late to stop M$, and through their media manipulation and business practices they will be the new governors of the world. Not the UN, Japan, US or Europe... Not bad for a company that sells something that the world really needs.
"If my car was an MS product, It'd be the size of a house, and I would have to wait 2 minutes for it to warm up every morning."
"There are nearly 1.5 million vertices rendered every second just to create the hair in the demo. That is more than the average number of hairs on the human head!"
ooohh.. ahhh.. 1.5 million.. erm at 60FPS try only 25000.. Oh.. but thats right.. it doesnt run at 60FPS.. or did they just work out how many in a frame and multiply by 60.. hehe.. stats.. you just gotta love them..
From the Yahoo article:
"The real-time demonstration was made possible by NVIDIA's nfiniteFX(TM) shading technology, including vertex and pixel shaders, to overcome the technical challenges presented in creating realistic skin, hair, clothing and other organic attributes."
But the odd thing is - why do they quote vertices when they state they are using vertex/pixel shaders for effects?
That pretty much means those 1.5 million vertices are just hardware algo generated verts/pixels (and not from the actual scene), which really means stuff all. And in fact it is very disturbing they are trying to bluff people with statistics (although NVIDIA are getting good at it - anyone remember their driver fiasco for the GF3).
Really, all this is, is fluffy crud to make people go.. "ooooh.. ahhhh.." I doubt very much they are are rendering anywhere near the full scene poly count, when a single scene enters the poly per pixel level, at 2000x1600.. you work it out.
Not true. PS2 has full vesa output abilities.. there is no reason you could not hook up to a vga and have a high res screen. The supported res's go up to 1280x1024 at 75Hz.. hrm pretty nice really.. although 75 is a bit low..
Your description is not quite true. Have you seen or programmed one? I assume not. And it is not technically a cluster. The current gscube actually has 64 EE+GS chipsets working together, and it is running a unix-like OS;-)
PS2 devkits are very much aligned to Linux. Infact a great number of development teams use linux as their development platform. All executeable PS2 files are 'elfs', YES - generated by GNU based compilers and linkers.
At E3 last year it was a 16 EE+GS set.. and it did render the bar scene in the "Ants" movie at 2000x1200 at 60fps.. which is pretty kool. But this development system is trialing what the next console is going to be.. the Sony EE manager actually said they want to have a 1000 times the power of the ps2 in the next generation console.. hrm.. 1000 EE+GS chip sets would be an easy way to achieve this although rather odd way to do it.. you'd prolly need 2000 to achieve the 1000 times factor:-)
The gscube may not be a home consumer product, but it is definitely a development system for future products.
Slashdot Mirror
IT is this.. IT is that. Does anyone here really think you can describe an entire totally diverse industry like IT and badge it one way or another? Thats plain nuts. Each company and organsiation has their own needs, and target audience. So trying to discern how an entire industry should tackle product development as a blanket method is dumb.
Should a research and dev company retard their technology development? Should a database developer create advanced new incompatible database technology?
I wonder whether this planet is spinning forwards or backwards..
It seems to me alot of people forget NASA is funded by tax dollars. Hence making sure the taxpayers think its a good idea is probably not so stupid. Also for collecting redshifts and such, it is alot more to do with data processing and not the actual telescope. As long as it has a decent enough imager it is more sensible to cover a wide spectrum than just one end of it. This is one of the great facilities of the hubble, its abilitiy to be used for a myriad of different targets.
And while on the 'ancient universe' thing, why dont we figure out how to help our fellow neighbours first... instead of looking up maybe we should look around a bit more... in the long run we dont have to go anywhere to see where we come from.. we are all made of stardust arent we...
If they could wear ripple soled shoes, itd give the ants a 50/50 chance...
I guess you also believe the pulling down of the Saddam statue was a public backlash against the regime.. it wasnt.. it was a staged media event. Dont beleive the hype.. the media owns what 'happens'.. just have a look at a couple of excellent independant media doccos have recently done on the war and postwar in Iraq.. the high majority of 'live' news reports were done in the "Media Centre".. the US Army had a rather massive TV studio (230 million dollars on a media centre, I guess you'd expect a decent studio), with a nice indoor sand dune, humvees and bradleys to boot.. dont believe for a second that 650 mill was found anywhere in a cache.. all smoke and mirrors.. read the UN report on the previous 10 years of sanctions and how it was recognised to have impacted childrens health - they admit it to have been the cause of 50,000 childrens deaths. Thats their own report. The sanctions werent just money they were _medecine_ too.. and spare parts for water pumps and so on.. and a myriad of other day to day items... Sure Saddam was no saint.. I never ever pretended he was.. but what I said about sanctions was they dont impact the rich and powerful in a country they only impact the poor and/or the powerless.
The UN is just a facade for richer countries to control the poorer countries. Always has been this way (in some form or another) and will more than likely always will be. Dont be deluded by media and political flag waving that goes on when something 'good' comes out of the UN. Its like all marketing, promote what you do well, and keep the things that go bad quiet.
.. If it were.. then poorer nations would have equal say in the way they should be treated - its almost as disgusting as the US senate, trying to buy votes for an ammendment.. if it were, then the world would have a plaform with which to deny people to bomb each other.. and Israel would listen.. if it were, then Palestine would have a border that doesnt move every two months. If it were, there would be no such thing as an 'Israelli settlement' inside Palestine.. If it were, East Timor would not have been saved just for a massive gas field and sold off to the rich for peanuts.. yes.. if it were...
- No world wars in 50 years
This is a joke. So instead of a large conflict we have a huge number of smaller conflicts - in fact the number of conflicts has been increasing for the last 50 years. Look at Africa, South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe, hardly what you would call 50 years of peace. LA riots ? I guess thats peaceful..
- Negotiated and enforced many peace treaties..
You kiddin me right? As other posters have noted, most treaties are broken on a regular basis, and the UN's 'force' is only a minimal contingent able to intervene in small conflicts. Israel for instance has broken more UN agreements than nearly any other country, and yet they dont seemed to have drawn much critism for it? Why not? Because it is the affluent countries that get to decide policy, not the less fortunate ones. Morals and political will tend to reside on the side with the most money.
- Economic and other sanctions have had positive effects..
This is plain rediculous. Sanctions were the main reason tens of thousands of Iraqi children died.. utterly ludicrous.. Even one high level UN official resigned directly because of this woeful stance. Economic sanctions only hurt the poor in countries that are often already very poor. Its a disgusting way to treat humans. Cut off any hope they have of being able to feed their nation, or give them health care, then blame the current political leader of the country for it!!! That makes me sick. Look at North Korea, look at all the economic sanctions the US has placed on them.. who does it _directly_ effect.. not the rich and powerful in the country because they can maintain their status quo from their powerbase, but the poor.. they suffer directly from any sanctions.. you should be ashamed to think sanctions are even a valid way to treat fellow human beings.
- WHO has done some fantastic work in the 3rd world.
This about the only good comment amongst this muck. Sadly the WHO is undermanned.. and under funded. And along with sanctions applied by the UN and trade embargos placed by countries they have their hands tied.. Fighting some of the worlds health issues without the abilities to supply cheap simple medicine due to some political wrangle..
- Its the worlds first.. rah-de-rah...
Its not. If it were, then the US wouldnt have gone into Iraq (where was democracy then?)
- Has, respectively, saved the countries of Korea, Kuwait..
Saved? Whom did they save? US, millions of dollars of oil.. yes.. saved indeed. Korea is saved? from whom.. North Korea has been saved by ensuring no goods from America get there.. along with many other goods from other countries.. including food.. saved.. South Korea.. yes.. they were saved.. they now have all the Coke they can drink and all the MacDonalds they can eat.. saved.. I guess saving the Balkans would be included, especally after finding a rather large oil field.. coincidence.. yes of course.. they went in to save the country that had be fighting for FIFTEEN YEARS!!!
In a perfect world the idea and the ideals of the UN wou
Its a shame that software developers forget this. I have seen so many 'Engineer and Programmer' developed UIs that are plain useless, because they forget the end user requirements and skill set. Id like to see a set of formal guidelines for UI's for target users - Most apps have a fairly targeted end user and i think that could help app developers focus on the important person in the chain - the end-user.
Its a tool. The idea is to help people do things with it - not to spend more time trying to figure out how to use it.
I also wonder whether UI design is an ego thing. I have been involved in assessing and developing tools for a while, and many programmers get personally offended when an end-user cant drive their app. The programmer response is usually - "they need training". At this point I usually whack them over the head and say "design a decent UI you fool."
Training the rest of the world to use clunky UIs or commandlines.. is well.. dumb. Make the tool.. and make it properly.. or dont complain when an end-user cant figure it out.
I wonder just how people summise these 'amazing events' into such bizarre outcomes?
How the hell could MS be happy? Lets do some math (is there anyone here that does it anymore?) MS make NO money on the HW, in fact they LOSE money on the HW. So, since you wont be buying software (which is where they make their money) they will be paying for you to play with their HW. Yeah, thats good sound economic sense.
Ripping your Xbox open, stoving in modchips will somehow drive up sales of Xbox. Does Slashdot have such a large opinion of itself to assume everyone here will buy one and do this? Are you guys crazy? Why would I rip open something I bought to convert to something I (and a huge number of ppl) JUST DONT NEED. FFS VHS STILL ISNT DEAD YET!
Does anyone actually read these damn news items anymore? I keep getting the feeling Im at a fatbabies forum trying to figure out who Eiger is.
mpg, divx, mp3 are all lossy compression algos.
:-) Sadly it cant, it pattern matches what it can, hash tables it, then thats it.
true random data (no pattern matching), 1:1 is about it. The reason is simple, you cannot pattern match truly random data, because, its random. But programs like zip and rar use pattern matching techniques esp suited to computer based data. A good example is zipping an already zipped file. If it were truly able to handle random data then it could zip and zip.. until the cows came home
Itd be nice to pattern match random data, but then.. it wouldnt be random would it.
HAHAHA I love the option you give.. OS X.. HAHAHAH have you ever written a X windows app.. or game for that matter. HAHAHA.. Im working on the PS2 right now, and Id prefer to write a PS2 app to an X app ANYDAY - even with VU & DMA code.
Yes the tools are expensive, and you suggest that Sony make huge dollars off them. Well Im afraid they dont. Metroworks and SnSystems are expensive.. but because their tools are actually worth it for professional developers. All the R&D tech that goes into the devkits and the people researching the hardware is definiely not made up by the devkits. Nearly all Sony's (PS2 division) profit come purely from sold software - since they charge a 'stamping fee' per cd.
Sony definitely does not discourage development. You can use the gcc tools to build and debug on a Sony devkit or testkit or even PS2. You can (if you were very lucky) purchase a Linux users kit, that lets you develop on you home ps2.. hardly likely you will see ANY other console maker do that! And on the UK & AUS demo cd there was YABASIC to play with..
Finally, your idea of volunteer GPL video games on a Sony console is pretty ludicrous - Sony only allows registered businesses to apply for devkits, and at $10,000 Im not sure you would get many 'home' programmers buying one, and on top of that to actually become a developer you must submit you project to Sony for scrutiny (They arent too bad.. they just dont want to let total BS get built for PS2) and you must be prepared to stamp a minimum of 10,000 cds (not cheap either).
Its pretty hard to coordinate a PC online GPL project let alone one for a console.
In the long run its all about money. Is there any doubt that M$ as a company is blatantly screwing other businesses? I mean, please, just because they can keep the government in the courts for years doesnt mean they are right.. and meanwhile they grow bigger/stronger.
M$ represents consumer computer market because there really is noone else.. and they have made sure of that! And if this company is NOT regulated and this industry NOT cleaned up, we might as well call in Al Capone to help run it. Why isnt anyone else worried that the most powerful man in the world is not the US president, but a computer nerd.. this is scary.
The computer industry is in a huge growth stage, and at a time when they are massive profits to be made. The main problem is there are no litigation and controls to make sure the companies involved are doin the right thing. Please dont be blind by the M$ marketing BS.. if we dont do the right things now, the whole computer industry may suffer in the long run.
I sadly think its too late to stop M$, and through their media manipulation and business practices they will be the new governors of the world. Not the UN, Japan, US or Europe... Not bad for a company that sells something that the world really needs.
"If my car was an MS product, It'd be the size of a house, and I would have to wait 2 minutes for it to warm up every morning."
Great. Lets start an OGL vs D3D war again.
Thanks John.
Back to some more interesting, technical articles on slashdot now....
Son, whats a Carmack.. sounds like something I have lying on the floor of my toyota crown.
"There are nearly 1.5 million vertices rendered every second just to create the hair in the demo. That is more than the average number of hairs on the human head!"
ooohh.. ahhh.. 1.5 million.. erm at 60FPS try only 25000.. Oh.. but thats right.. it doesnt run at 60FPS.. or did they just work out how many in a frame and multiply by 60.. hehe.. stats.. you just gotta love them..
From the Yahoo article: "The real-time demonstration was made possible by NVIDIA's nfiniteFX(TM) shading technology, including vertex and pixel shaders, to overcome the technical challenges presented in creating realistic skin, hair, clothing and other organic attributes."
But the odd thing is - why do they quote vertices when they state they are using vertex/pixel shaders for effects?
That pretty much means those 1.5 million vertices are just hardware algo generated verts/pixels (and not from the actual scene), which really means stuff all. And in fact it is very disturbing they are trying to bluff people with statistics (although NVIDIA are getting good at it - anyone remember their driver fiasco for the GF3).
Really, all this is, is fluffy crud to make people go.. "ooooh.. ahhhh.." I doubt very much they are are rendering anywhere near the full scene poly count, when a single scene enters the poly per pixel level, at 2000x1600.. you work it out.
Man, I hate marketing..
Not true. PS2 has full vesa output abilities.. there is no reason you could not hook up to a vga and have a high res screen. The supported res's go up to 1280x1024 at 75Hz.. hrm pretty nice really.. although 75 is a bit low..
Your description is not quite true. Have you seen or programmed one? I assume not. And it is not technically a cluster. The current gscube actually has 64 EE+GS chipsets working together, and it is running a unix-like OS ;-)
.. which is pretty kool. But this development system is trialing what the next console is going to be.. the Sony EE manager actually said they want to have a 1000 times the power of the ps2 in the next generation console.. hrm.. 1000 EE+GS chip sets would be an easy way to achieve this although rather odd way to do it.. you'd prolly need 2000 to achieve the 1000 times factor :-)
PS2 devkits are very much aligned to Linux. Infact a great number of development teams use linux as their development platform. All executeable PS2 files are 'elfs', YES - generated by GNU based compilers and linkers.
At E3 last year it was a 16 EE+GS set.. and it did render the bar scene in the "Ants" movie at 2000x1200 at 60fps
The gscube may not be a home consumer product, but it is definitely a development system for future products.
this is the future workstation.