It's an old, old nickname deriving from a Dragon magazine story that had a dwarf with a large warhammer who was named Assmasher, my wife thinks it's stupid too, LOL.
"but defines 'paid' merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers" - That doesn't say what you seem to insinuate it does in your post.
...their ISP connections and those payments are based upon a period of time, ergo, it represents (potentially) an expediture of wealth to download something when you could either be downloading something else or downloading something else faster? By extension, wouldn't a corporate entity posting fraudulent files that never complete or are blank be (arguably) committing a form of fraud? Fraud is probably not the swindle I'm looking for but... anyone...? anyone...? Bueller?
...I don't think I've ever seen so many ad hominem attacks against a non hominem.;)
Saying that OSX is better than Vista because OSX hasn't changed its UI much since 2001 (at least regarding buttons) and Vista has changed the look of the window bar buttons? That's just stupid.
Spending most of the first page of the article beating the dead horse of Cairo promises regarding WinFS and other things which have nothing to do with comparing Vista to OSX?
I'd much rather read an article by a Linux or Windows fanboy bashing each other unapologetically than listen to that author say "I'm going to compare A and B" and then spend half their time talking about C.
...this is an argument that focuses on a non-problem. In the scenario described the bandwidth advantage is obtained not through licensing or fees but through hardware and locality. Now you have to pay to get those things but the difference is that in a non net-neutral world you have to not only pay for those things but for the 'bandwidth' in which to operate them.
First, this is NOT why Microsoft has produced the format. It has produced the format so that it can claim that it uses an 'open' standard so that it doesn't find itself forced into support for ODF.
Second, you go the paranoid route (which is ok, M$ has done some crazy sh** in its time) and presume that Microsoft would actually make a new version of word's file format dependent upon a construct already marked 'deprecated' from word 95? Come on, you and I can both come up with crazy paranoia ideas that are better than that one;). Are you a hollywood writer?;)
...you would indeed need to support everything that is covered by the specification, duh, right? Well, how likely is anyone to even want to support OOXML fully except for Microsoft?
If I want to write a plugin for an open source text editor so that people can exchange word 2000 and later documents with my own editor I would certainly concern myself with supporting the aspects of OOXML which denote Word 95 emulation.
...doesn't that serve to immediately suggest that the RIAA is seeking damages that clearly do not reflect even their most preposterous possible loss due to file sharing?
I mean, has the music industry, over recorded history, even made a trillion dollars yet? Surely they can't accuse the site of such losses, then, right?
Perhaps, but they have two developers who chose to use OSS to implement their ideas. If the state/federal governments for some reason suddenly mandated that OSS was not to be used in libraries, the exact same design could quite easily be replicated without using OSS. This is why they haven't "staked their future" on OSS. The have implemented the system using OSS, but it they haven't staked their future on it. Only companies and/or individuals who seek to profit from OSS have staked their futures on it, i.e. Red Hat, MySQL, et al.
From the article it doesn't even appear if they've modified any GPL'd code, simply using GPL'd tools and binaries, and releasing their own code under GPL. These are admirable things; however, again, it does not match the hyperbole that is suggested by the title.
I would disagree with that reasoning because the changing from *any* large system to another is the only applicable place to apply "staking their future." It has nothing to do with either system being proprietary or not. If they'd transitioned from one closed system to another would the headling be accurate in saying "Librarians stake their future on "? I bet a ton of slashdot fanboys would have immediately started listing off the OSS projects that are in use around the world and how saying "Librarians" was misleading because it suggested numbers greater than the article actually mentions, et cetera, ad nauseum.
This is simply grandstanding by Linux news and I certainly don't think the people who implemented this ILS system would agree with the title. It is hypocritical because you certainly should admit that they'd object if someone treated a closed source usage the very same way.
Uh, from reading the article, they built a software product on their own and decided to release it with a GPL license. Why does that mean they have staked their future on OSS? I havne't stake my future on OSS, but I have released code with a 'free to use however you want' license (really 'open' source) several times. A little bit of hyperbole perhaps?
Re:Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
"Amateurs and little tools companies...riiiight." - Are you not aware of who is using it at this very moment? Amateurs and little tools companies. Know anybody making PS3 games? I do. They don't use Collada. They don't even touch the Sony SDK if they can avoid it because "it's crap". This is a from a company who have been making games for longer than 6 months, and they have their own pipeline already. As an aside, they do love the PS3 though.
"Because amateurs have such high need for this kind of thing. Little bands of 2 or 3 coders with rendering farms and content creation pipelines." - Do you even know what a rendering farm does? LOL. What the hell does a rendering farm have to do with Collada that doesn't apply exactly the same to any other file format?
"Fuck you're an idiot. This ONLY makes sense for the big boys in the industry really, and surprise! They're the ones that came up with it!" - Funny, this idiot worked at SoftImage for 2 years until we beta'd Sumatra (XSi) and Avid bought the company, prior to that I specialized in Virtual Reality for on Irix/Solaris/NT including writing a large number of file importing code back when we 'idiots' had to do things the hard way. As for your extreme naivety, applying that same 'logic' suggests that the.X file format will be used by serious 3D graphics ISVs because a big boy in the industry 'Microsoft' has tools that use it.
"Read a bit next time would you?" - Maybe you should know something about the *professional* 3D graphics industry first before calling other people 'idiot.'
Re:Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
"Collada is rapidly being adopted because it works great as an open exchange format between 3D content creation tools. Maya, 3DS Max, XSI, Lightwave, Houdini, Blender, all have Collada support" - they all (at least 5 of the 6 for sure) have.X file format support as well, that doesn't make either of them good file formats.
"indeed good Collada support is a major selling point of the latest release of XSI." - Doesn't seem to be mentioned on the XSi 6 pages. I did see a blurb about integration being added in 5.1x, but that was on a softimage wiki, not XSi's site.
"Since Collada is the native format supported for Sony on the PS3 everyone is also motivated to support it well." - You mean supported by the PS3 SDK.
Re:Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
Sony? That doesn't mean anything, Microsoft uses the.X format, but I'm not aware of too many game companies that deliver content in that format or use it in their art pipeline.
Epic? Ships content in Collada format? Uses it for its own art pipeline? I'm just guessing but they probably support using it for mods, right? That the only format they support?
Nvidia? It isn't supported in 1.8, purported to be supported in 2.0. BTW, this tool also supports.X, so this certainly isn't validation of Collada being something viable for commercial 3D usage.
AGEIA? I presume their SDK and/or tools can let you drop in Collada files? Again, they probably support other formats as well, ergo it isn't like they're choosing Collada because it is a good file format as much as it is a format likely to be used by amateurs.
Now, I'm certainly not trying to use the term 'amateurs' in any derogatory fashion, we were all amateurs at one time or another, but there's a huge difference between hyping a file format because it solves problems that others cannot and hyping it because SONY is crapping eggrolls over XNA.
"COLLADA uses XML Schema for validation" - Why? Why would you need XML to do this? Standard file importer code will tell you if you encounter an invalid file.
"URIs for references between different locations (e.g. defining a piece of geometry, then adding several instances of it into a scene definition - and then changing it into an external URI if you don't want everything in the same file, or if you want to point to binary data instead of more XML" - Why would you need XML to do this? 3D file formats have been doing all of these things for years. External references, instancing, et al.
"...and having the standard XML tools deal with that correctly..." - Why? Why would I want to use 'standard XML tools' to view/edit my art asset? Especially given that the file format, although XML, is very difficult to follow for a human unless the file contains the very simplest geometry, and references.
"If your artists can export a model from 3ds Max, load it into FX Composer and tweak the shaders to make it look good, load it into a physics simulator to make sure it reacts sensibly, then have it converted into the optimised native format for whatever engine you're using" - Why would I want to make my artists work so hard? If you've got an engine and you'd like to make it easy for the artists to see what their assets will look like, you simply integrate your engine with their art tool of choice. This is relatively simple to do. No exporting, dropping out of MAX/MAYA/XSi, no starting up another app, tweaking shaders, exporting to physics simulator (which you presumably wrote), and back... The whole thing runs in your art tool. This has been common for years now.
"...and if you're no longer constrained in choice of tools (maybe you want to change from Max to Maya, or support a modding community with Blender, or load assets from your last game into your new engine) because they all support the same standard format, and you don't have to write all the code yourself - then it seems like it can have a practical benefit." - But you are constrained, unless the tool makers start making Collada exporters, and they do not do things like this, you're constrained by whatever features the person who wrote the exporter provides. For example, using MAX, stacked skin modifiers get baked how? Answer: however the exporter guy wanted which is unlikely to be the way you wanted it done. Unless you're going to do things simply, no tangent space information, normal map animations, et cetera, game development companies are not going to find the format really useful. This is the inherent problem with 3D file formats, if you make them flexible enough for many game companies to use then there's so much interpretation the developer must do that they would save time developi
Re:Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
Supported? I guess technically you could say that but that's like saying that.X supports skinning.;)
In my experience, people who are using art pipelines to generate content for serious commercial applications (whether games, visualization, or other verticals) will avoid this format because when you get down to it, if you're a 3D developer writing your own file format is trivial. Writing your own exporter is NOT; however, there are many exporters than are quite good at their job which you can use to produce assets in your own file format (Granny3D is an excellent example of this.)
Re:Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
XML makes zero sense for a 3D content system unless you have an overriding need to make the data human readable in its raw form. Again, I really like XML and i use it for event system communication throughout our enterprise architecture. The people in the 'industry' who know what they are doing? Like who? People who write Collado viewers? People who don't make games, don't make useful visualization products, people who write simple things like a model view. Let's put this another way. People much much more involved in the 3D industry will avoid this format on the simple grounds that it is a generic solution to a problem best solved by specific art pipelines.
Who, exactly, do they think is going to use this besides amateurs and little tools companies (like the ones linked to in the article) who cater to amateurs...? No game company is likely to use it. No visualization product company is likely to do more than *possibly* add import capabilities for the format. It really is just another file format.
Mentioning that you were involved with VRML...
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
...does not lend credibility to your review. Does collada support bones/skinning information or does it just support an extension mechanism (disaster)? Are there exporters/importers available currently? Now, I LOVE XML, but I would never suggest that XML is the best way to go for data 'full stop.' Such statements show inexperience in software engineering, especially given that his speciality is supposed to be 3D over the web LOL. Maybe he was referring to compressed and/or encrypted XML. Probably not, not if he had anything to do with that disgusting blob of a file format called VRML. Maybe I should say what I really think...?;)
So I guess this means you test your code against a different version of SQL Server database than runs in production, eh? If you did that at our company "you'd be out the door so fast your head would spin."
This is why people have QA servers to test against. I certainly hope, for the sake of your company, you don't just test against your workstation and then place it in production. LOL.
...a Windows zealot slagged for saying "How are you supposed know how to configure support in *nix if you can't get on the internet to do it?" Seriously...
"Sounds like a great idea, given the danger of putting an unpatched PC on the Internet to download security updates." - Who the heck said you should connect the unpatched machine to the 'net to grab this stuff? FFS, I bet ol' Karsten would go to town of the Windows zealot for playing stupid.;)
While there is a constant demand for new music, much of the iTunes sale has likely revolved around people duplicating albums they either used to have, tapes they've got in a box somewhere, or all the one or two track purchases they avoided previously because they didn't want the whole album. Personally I've spent several hundred dollars there but mostly grabbing stuff I only had on tape or songs from albums that I didn't like as a whole, I rarely buy anything from iTunes now because bands I tend to prefer either no longer release albums or rarely do so.
I think it's only unfair if they charge people and claim to do one thing and yet do another... Doesn't affect me personally, but imagine if it was Microsoft we were talking about?;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's an old, old nickname deriving from a Dragon magazine story that had a dwarf with a large warhammer who was named Assmasher, my wife thinks it's stupid too, LOL.
"but defines 'paid' merely as communications to 500 or more members of the public, with no other qualifiers" - That doesn't say what you seem to insinuate it does in your post.
...or news commentators have to do this? This is, pardon the crassness, total and unmitigated bullshit.
...their ISP connections and those payments are based upon a period of time, ergo, it represents (potentially) an expediture of wealth to download something when you could either be downloading something else or downloading something else faster? By extension, wouldn't a corporate entity posting fraudulent files that never complete or are blank be (arguably) committing a form of fraud? Fraud is probably not the swindle I'm looking for but... anyone...? anyone...? Bueller?
...I don't think I've ever seen so many ad hominem attacks against a non hominem. ;)
Saying that OSX is better than Vista because OSX hasn't changed its UI much since 2001 (at least regarding buttons) and Vista has changed the look of the window bar buttons? That's just stupid.
Spending most of the first page of the article beating the dead horse of Cairo promises regarding WinFS and other things which have nothing to do with comparing Vista to OSX?
I'd much rather read an article by a Linux or Windows fanboy bashing each other unapologetically than listen to that author say "I'm going to compare A and B" and then spend half their time talking about C.
...this is an argument that focuses on a non-problem. In the scenario described the bandwidth advantage is obtained not through licensing or fees but through hardware and locality. Now you have to pay to get those things but the difference is that in a non net-neutral world you have to not only pay for those things but for the 'bandwidth' in which to operate them.
First, this is NOT why Microsoft has produced the format. It has produced the format so that it can claim that it uses an 'open' standard so that it doesn't find itself forced into support for ODF.
;). Are you a hollywood writer? ;)
Second, you go the paranoid route (which is ok, M$ has done some crazy sh** in its time) and presume that Microsoft would actually make a new version of word's file format dependent upon a construct already marked 'deprecated' from word 95? Come on, you and I can both come up with crazy paranoia ideas that are better than that one
...you would indeed need to support everything that is covered by the specification, duh, right? Well, how likely is anyone to even want to support OOXML fully except for Microsoft?
If I want to write a plugin for an open source text editor so that people can exchange word 2000 and later documents with my own editor I would certainly concern myself with supporting the aspects of OOXML which denote Word 95 emulation.
...doesn't that serve to immediately suggest that the RIAA is seeking damages that clearly do not reflect even their most preposterous possible loss due to file sharing?
I mean, has the music industry, over recorded history, even made a trillion dollars yet? Surely they can't accuse the site of such losses, then, right?
Perhaps, but they have two developers who chose to use OSS to implement their ideas. If the state/federal governments for some reason suddenly mandated that OSS was not to be used in libraries, the exact same design could quite easily be replicated without using OSS. This is why they haven't "staked their future" on OSS. The have implemented the system using OSS, but it they haven't staked their future on it. Only companies and/or individuals who seek to profit from OSS have staked their futures on it, i.e. Red Hat, MySQL, et al.
From the article it doesn't even appear if they've modified any GPL'd code, simply using GPL'd tools and binaries, and releasing their own code under GPL. These are admirable things; however, again, it does not match the hyperbole that is suggested by the title.
I would disagree with that reasoning because the changing from *any* large system to another is the only applicable place to apply "staking their future." It has nothing to do with either system being proprietary or not. If they'd transitioned from one closed system to another would the headling be accurate in saying "Librarians stake their future on "? I bet a ton of slashdot fanboys would have immediately started listing off the OSS projects that are in use around the world and how saying "Librarians" was misleading because it suggested numbers greater than the article actually mentions, et cetera, ad nauseum.
This is simply grandstanding by Linux news and I certainly don't think the people who implemented this ILS system would agree with the title. It is hypocritical because you certainly should admit that they'd object if someone treated a closed source usage the very same way.
Uh, from reading the article, they built a software product on their own and decided to release it with a GPL license. Why does that mean they have staked their future on OSS? I havne't stake my future on OSS, but I have released code with a 'free to use however you want' license (really 'open' source) several times. A little bit of hyperbole perhaps?
...more patents.
"Amateurs and little tools companies...riiiight." - Are you not aware of who is using it at this very moment? Amateurs and little tools companies. Know anybody making PS3 games? I do. They don't use Collada. They don't even touch the Sony SDK if they can avoid it because "it's crap". This is a from a company who have been making games for longer than 6 months, and they have their own pipeline already. As an aside, they do love the PS3 though.
.X file format will be used by serious 3D graphics ISVs because a big boy in the industry 'Microsoft' has tools that use it.
"Because amateurs have such high need for this kind of thing. Little bands of 2 or 3 coders with rendering farms and content creation pipelines." - Do you even know what a rendering farm does? LOL. What the hell does a rendering farm have to do with Collada that doesn't apply exactly the same to any other file format?
"Fuck you're an idiot. This ONLY makes sense for the big boys in the industry really, and surprise! They're the ones that came up with it!" - Funny, this idiot worked at SoftImage for 2 years until we beta'd Sumatra (XSi) and Avid bought the company, prior to that I specialized in Virtual Reality for on Irix/Solaris/NT including writing a large number of file importing code back when we 'idiots' had to do things the hard way. As for your extreme naivety, applying that same 'logic' suggests that the
"Read a bit next time would you?" - Maybe you should know something about the *professional* 3D graphics industry first before calling other people 'idiot.'
"Collada is rapidly being adopted because it works great as an open exchange format between 3D content creation tools. Maya, 3DS Max, XSI, Lightwave, Houdini, Blender, all have Collada support" - they all (at least 5 of the 6 for sure) have .X file format support as well, that doesn't make either of them good file formats.
"indeed good Collada support is a major selling point of the latest release of XSI." - Doesn't seem to be mentioned on the XSi 6 pages. I did see a blurb about integration being added in 5.1x, but that was on a softimage wiki, not XSi's site.
"Since Collada is the native format supported for Sony on the PS3 everyone is also motivated to support it well." - You mean supported by the PS3 SDK.
"Sony (PS3 SDK). Epic (Unreal Engine 3). Nvidia (FX Composer). AGEIA (physics)"
.X format, but I'm not aware of too many game companies that deliver content in that format or use it in their art pipeline.
.X, so this certainly isn't validation of Collada being something viable for commercial 3D usage.
Sony? That doesn't mean anything, Microsoft uses the
Epic? Ships content in Collada format? Uses it for its own art pipeline? I'm just guessing but they probably support using it for mods, right? That the only format they support?
Nvidia? It isn't supported in 1.8, purported to be supported in 2.0. BTW, this tool also supports
AGEIA? I presume their SDK and/or tools can let you drop in Collada files? Again, they probably support other formats as well, ergo it isn't like they're choosing Collada because it is a good file format as much as it is a format likely to be used by amateurs.
Now, I'm certainly not trying to use the term 'amateurs' in any derogatory fashion, we were all amateurs at one time or another, but there's a huge difference between hyping a file format because it solves problems that others cannot and hyping it because SONY is crapping eggrolls over XNA.
"COLLADA uses XML Schema for validation" - Why? Why would you need XML to do this? Standard file importer code will tell you if you encounter an invalid file.
"URIs for references between different locations (e.g. defining a piece of geometry, then adding several instances of it into a scene definition - and then changing it into an external URI if you don't want everything in the same file, or if you want to point to binary data instead of more XML" - Why would you need XML to do this? 3D file formats have been doing all of these things for years. External references, instancing, et al.
"...and having the standard XML tools deal with that correctly..." - Why? Why would I want to use 'standard XML tools' to view/edit my art asset? Especially given that the file format, although XML, is very difficult to follow for a human unless the file contains the very simplest geometry, and references.
"If your artists can export a model from 3ds Max, load it into FX Composer and tweak the shaders to make it look good, load it into a physics simulator to make sure it reacts sensibly, then have it converted into the optimised native format for whatever engine you're using" - Why would I want to make my artists work so hard? If you've got an engine and you'd like to make it easy for the artists to see what their assets will look like, you simply integrate your engine with their art tool of choice. This is relatively simple to do. No exporting, dropping out of MAX/MAYA/XSi, no starting up another app, tweaking shaders, exporting to physics simulator (which you presumably wrote), and back... The whole thing runs in your art tool. This has been common for years now.
"...and if you're no longer constrained in choice of tools (maybe you want to change from Max to Maya, or support a modding community with Blender, or load assets from your last game into your new engine) because they all support the same standard format, and you don't have to write all the code yourself - then it seems like it can have a practical benefit." - But you are constrained, unless the tool makers start making Collada exporters, and they do not do things like this, you're constrained by whatever features the person who wrote the exporter provides. For example, using MAX, stacked skin modifiers get baked how? Answer: however the exporter guy wanted which is unlikely to be the way you wanted it done. Unless you're going to do things simply, no tangent space information, normal map animations, et cetera, game development companies are not going to find the format really useful. This is the inherent problem with 3D file formats, if you make them flexible enough for many game companies to use then there's so much interpretation the developer must do that they would save time developi
Supported? I guess technically you could say that but that's like saying that .X supports skinning. ;)
In my experience, people who are using art pipelines to generate content for serious commercial applications (whether games, visualization, or other verticals) will avoid this format because when you get down to it, if you're a 3D developer writing your own file format is trivial. Writing your own exporter is NOT; however, there are many exporters than are quite good at their job which you can use to produce assets in your own file format (Granny3D is an excellent example of this.)
XML makes zero sense for a 3D content system unless you have an overriding need to make the data human readable in its raw form. Again, I really like XML and i use it for event system communication throughout our enterprise architecture. The people in the 'industry' who know what they are doing? Like who? People who write Collado viewers? People who don't make games, don't make useful visualization products, people who write simple things like a model view. Let's put this another way. People much much more involved in the 3D industry will avoid this format on the simple grounds that it is a generic solution to a problem best solved by specific art pipelines.
Who, exactly, do they think is going to use this besides amateurs and little tools companies (like the ones linked to in the article) who cater to amateurs...? No game company is likely to use it. No visualization product company is likely to do more than *possibly* add import capabilities for the format. It really is just another file format.
...does not lend credibility to your review. Does collada support bones/skinning information or does it just support an extension mechanism (disaster)? Are there exporters/importers available currently? Now, I LOVE XML, but I would never suggest that XML is the best way to go for data 'full stop.' Such statements show inexperience in software engineering, especially given that his speciality is supposed to be 3D over the web LOL. Maybe he was referring to compressed and/or encrypted XML. Probably not, not if he had anything to do with that disgusting blob of a file format called VRML. Maybe I should say what I really think...? ;)
So I guess this means you test your code against a different version of SQL Server database than runs in production, eh? If you did that at our company "you'd be out the door so fast your head would spin."
This is why people have QA servers to test against. I certainly hope, for the sake of your company, you don't just test against your workstation and then place it in production. LOL.
...it was never QA'd on 2000. Even Microsoft has resource limits.
...a Windows zealot slagged for saying "How are you supposed know how to configure support in *nix if you can't get on the internet to do it?" Seriously...
;)
"Sounds like a great idea, given the danger of putting an unpatched PC on the Internet to download security updates." - Who the heck said you should connect the unpatched machine to the 'net to grab this stuff? FFS, I bet ol' Karsten would go to town of the Windows zealot for playing stupid.
While there is a constant demand for new music, much of the iTunes sale has likely revolved around people duplicating albums they either used to have, tapes they've got in a box somewhere, or all the one or two track purchases they avoided previously because they didn't want the whole album. Personally I've spent several hundred dollars there but mostly grabbing stuff I only had on tape or songs from albums that I didn't like as a whole, I rarely buy anything from iTunes now because bands I tend to prefer either no longer release albums or rarely do so.
I think it's only unfair if they charge people and claim to do one thing and yet do another... Doesn't affect me personally, but imagine if it was Microsoft we were talking about? ;)
Yeah, I was just joshing... ;) I was wondering why mom hadn't sent me cookies for Xmas like I asked. Damn you Earthlink! Damn you to hell!