[...] Pixar asks, will Toy Story 2 count toward our 5 picture obligation? Disney says, hell no - it's not a new franchise. You still owe us three new films. Pixar makes Finding Nemo, Disney makes millions, etc.
I second that. I've always been a fan of Minidisc since its first incarnations (the R-37, R-50, etc.), which hold the same amount of music as a CD. But with the latest models (MDLP) you can hold almost 3 Cd's on a single little disc with almost no perceptible quality loss. And many models run on a single AA batery, and it runs almost foverer - I listen to music during my trips to work and home, and the batteries usually last around 3 weeks(!).
My only itch is the software for the NetMD models - they suck, and there's no version for Linux and even MacOS, and as the protocol is undocumented and proprietary, there is no chance of it being supported on Linux/MacOS in the near future, though there are efforts to reverse-engineer the protocol, but with little progress so far...
Just MHO, but I think Sony wouldn't bother on this market because they already have products that kind of fill that niche - Network Walkmans and MiniDiscs.
Granted, the iPod offers much more than those (more memory and flexibility), but most people use it just to hear music anyway.
Then again, while I'm very content with my MiniDisc for audio purposes, an iPod would be very nice for his hacking flexibility...
Yea, I really screwed up. In ATI's case, that's what I meant to say, "trade secrets"... On NVidia's case, actually I meant to say "licensed" technology, as in parts of the driver code that belong to third-parties, eg. NVidia's driver OpenGL code by SGI.
Now, I haven't heard anything like that about ATI, but it wouldn't surprise me if their driver had licensed code too.
2. ATI provides technical specs of cards to Linux community -> ATI drivers will be produced by hordes of raving Linux/Anti-M$ programmers.
Drivers produced by the community would never be as good as the one produced by the manufacturer itself. Only they know all the secrets about the card, which means they know much better how and where to optimize their drivers. Most of these "secrets" are undocumented, many on purpose, because revealing these secrets would either be a bad strategic move for their business or because they would be violating any contract or patent (see below), if there's any.
4. Repeat steps 1,2 for Nvidia.
They can't, because it is well known that their drivers contain patented technology. Indeed, this is the very reason (albeit probably not the only one) that NVidia release binary-only drivers. Releasing specs would probably mean that they would have to disclose some of the technology they use on their drivers, thus breaking patents.
ESound? Asd? ARTs? It seems a little different in concept, but I just can't get it. If it is, so cheers to the guys that made it... Linux at least (as I understand this is for X, so *BSDs and other *nix should benefit too) need a more standardized sound architecture (Yeah, I know about ALSA, but I mean something more higher level - like DirectSound)
The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.
Indeed. And while many attempts have been done on some 3D games, IMHO, none of them succeed really well. Specially Doom for GBA. It's a piece of crap, very slow, looks like they just did a straight port from the SNES version (which also isn't that good). Other 3D games (that I know of) seem to follow the same line.
Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.
Did a little diggin' to find it out, and while I couldn't find information about that, I found some neat stuff that's comming on the way:
Even seen comments on some forums about another 3D engine that can run Quake on GBA. But've got no links to that, unfortunately. Looks promising, anyway.
Although the Maximum resolution the SNES can achieve is the one you apointed, SNES also has a lower resolution, roughly half this one (256x224), which is just a little bigger than GBA's, and actually the resolution used on most games - very few games use the higher resolution.
[...]The GBA has the SNES beat hands down in terms of processing power. I don't know how many sprites the GBA can put on screen at once (or how big they can be), but it can display more colors at once than the SNES, and if it weren't for the small screen (and corresponding low resolution) and pitifully dark LCD I would say that the GBA had better graphics, too.
While I agree with you on that, I'd say that overall the GBA is a much better system than SNES. Is just that the full potential of the GBA wasn't explored yet, or was by very few games. When people ask me about the GBA, I usually say that the quality of the games are something between the SNES and PSX. Overrated? Maybe, but we'll see when this comes out. Don't know if it will be a good game, but surely will show what else the GBA can do.
The reason for this is because the red light increases the contrast of the surface it is lighting up. The tiny camera used to take pictures in the mouse is able to see changes in the surface better, offering excellent responsiveness.
So, I guess the red color wasn't choosen for nothing...:-P Indeed, the article says that the mod will only work fine if you use high-intensity blue LED's.
[...] I should try bumping down the textures to 32 and bumping back the detail (cause I zoom all the way out anyway). I'll try next time.
Tried that here, didn't help much. Even using the 16Mb textures didn't a big improvement.
What video card do you have?
Thought I said above... an nVidia GeForce2 MX200, 64Mb. Yeah, I know, crappy card and all that, but it does just fine on almost all other games I have. Whatever, I'll just end up by replacing it by a GF4 eventually. Too bad it costs so much over here.
Exactly the same situation here. Looks like the guys at Bioware should have done a better testing and profiling of that beast. Even after a long delay to release the game, apart from the fact of being slow (not just on graphics, but on stuff like loading areas, saving/retrieving games, etc.), it still feels very buggy... yes, it crashes, and has some strange behaviors sometimes. And don't come and tell me that it might be a hardware flaw, because all the other games I have doesn't behave like that.
Then again, I just can't get away of it... That's why I'm getting ready to buy a new computer with a new card.
What resolution, color depth and how big the texture size and other stuff? I've a GF3, and I pull about 13fps at 1024x768x32 with 64mb texture packs.
I use 800x600 on almost all games (including NWN). Anything above that gives me something around 30~45fps (on other games, of course, not NWN). For color depth, on NWN it's 32bpp (it doesn't (officially) support less color depth than that), 32Meg texture size (even though my card has 64Meg). EAX 2 is enabled for sound (i've got a SB Live). On all other games I use 16bpp. While the image quality gets just a bit worse (more on Q3, actually), I still prefer this than losing some 10~20fps.
I've got an Athlon TB 800, 256Megs, and I'm using the latest drivers of everything (including the Via 4in1 drivers). Even though the CPU isn't too high end, I still think the video card is more to blame.
I've got a GeForce2 MX200. Sure it's a crappy card, but Quake 3, Counter-strike and a lot of others have a more than acceptable performance, around 72fps. (Most other games goes around 60~80fps).
But NWN does a mere 20fps on that card. Very frustrating.
"When a company invests a lot of time and money to come up with an idea [...]"
and then,
"and society will be all the poorer for that."
So, first you say that the idea is all for the company to please, and then you try to make the point that the idea was "for the people". Yeah, right, the idea is for us, the condition being that we should depend on the company, on a symbiotic relationship.
Actually I got your point, but what if Newton would have patented the gravity theory? And what if I decide to patent every piece of code I write? Afterall, it's mine, right?
Ok, I see I've gone a bit too far now, but anyway, It's like the guy on the other post said, it's all about execution of the ideas. The ideas themselves are worth nothing, the more brilliant they might be. IMHO, patents just protect the lazy people, who want to do something nice just once and then sit on the corner and smoke a cigarette, and forget the meaning of the word "innovation".
The X bug is very serious. It's possible to set up a web site that will cause any X based computer looking at it to crash. But it's not a microsoft product so I expect the majority of people here will just ignore it and carry on bashing microsoft products as usual.
Please, don't compare Apples to Oranges. The bug in IIS affects a niche of boxes: Servers. And, you know, servers can't go down or be open to attacks. The X bug affects, on majority, another niche: users. Tell me, how many Linux servers you have seen being used as browsing stations? Hell, most of the servers I've seen and the ones I manage doesn't even run X! Besides, the user have to be stupid enough to willingly access a page that has a font size of 1666667 (or whatever bogus number it is).
Then again, as was stated by someone here, the IIS bug affects only machines that haven't been locked down - so if one gets attacked, the admin of such box is to blame too, not just M$.
Also, I agree with the poster below that says that this X bug is rather a symptom of a greater problem: Linux shouldn't allow a process to make such a mess on the system, IMHO.
Slackware 8.0 (without patching) runs the 3.3.6 XFree86 tree
This is incorrect. Stock Slackware 8.0 runs the XFree86 4.1 tree. Your claim is true for the Slack until 7.1.
Which brings up an interesting point... maybe XFree86 versions earlier than 4.2 are not affected by this bug. But I don't have any machine to check this out, my home linux box runs Slack 8.0 but with an updated (an probably "buggy", I'll check it out when I get home) 4.2 Xfree86 package, along with other stuff I've updated myself.
Play Total Annihilation for a week and you'll have army management and base construction skills that will kick the ass of any StarCraft or AoE player.
Oops, I disagree here. I've played both TA and SC, and SC is definately much more complex. It's much more harder to manage resources vs. army on SC than it is on TA. Also, I think the IA in normal skill mode is poorer on TA than in SC (on SC you can't select the skill level anyway). TA on a hard skill mode get kind of levelled with SC, but SC is still more complex, in the sense that you have to think in many more stuff at the same time to get the job done. Anyway, I like TA better...
May be it's just because I'm a bad RTS player...:-P
Re:Testing it out (formatted this time... :-P)
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 1
Well, the source is not that wacked. Yes, it has some artifacts, but not all that much to justify an increase of 80%. Enough with talking, see it for yourself.
I'm not sure if this relates to the same problem with mp3's -> ogg's. In this case, the main problem is that we "transcode" from a lossy format to another, thence, we loose even more audio quality than a wav -> mp3 encoding, but still we have a smaller file size.
Re:Testing it out (formatted this time... :-P)
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 1
Can't forget to preview before posting... 8-P
Ok, now I gave a try at Jasper [ece.ubc.ca], a sample jpeg2k encoder. But I think I did something wrong:
JasPer Transcoder (Version 1.500.4). Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc. and the University of British Columbia. Copyright (c) 2001-2002 Michael David Adams. All rights reserved.
For more information about this software, please visit the following web sites/pages: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper http://www.imagepower.com To be added to the (moderated) JasPer software announcements mailing list, send an email to: jasper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com To be added to the (unmoderated) JasPer software discussion mailing list, send an email to: jasper-discussion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Pleas e send any bug reports to: mdadams@ieee.org
warning: color model apparently not RGB decoding time = 1.960000 encoding time = 13.530000
Ok, now I gave a try at Jasper, a sample jpeg2k encoder. But I think I've done something wrong:
$./jasper --input ~/test.jpg --output ~/test.jp2 --input-format jpg --output-format jp2 --verbose
JasPer Transcoder (Version 1.500.4).
Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc. and the University of
British Columbia.
Copyright (c) 2001-2002 Michael David Adams.
All rights reserved.
For more information about this software, please visit the following
web sites/pages:
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper
http://www.imagepower.com
To be added to the (moderated) JasPer software announcements
mailing list, send an email to:
jasper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To be added to the (unmoderated) JasPer software discussion
mailing list, send an email to:
jasper-discussion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Please send any bug reports to:
mdadams@ieee.org
warning: color model apparently not RGB
decoding time = 1.960000
encoding time = 13.530000
$ ls -la test.jp?
-rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1815731 Apr 7 23:15 test.jp2
-rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1118155 Apr 7 23:14 test.jpg
any clues?
A friend of mine who works with me and happen to also be an artist, said that to the folks at my job and this generated a funny discussion about the concept of what is art and what is not. The guys over there, and me as well, agreed that the concept of art is something too subjective. My friend's arguments was exactly yours, and he gone even further by saying "if you draw a single line on a paper and call it an art, so it is".
Oh c'mon... That's way too much... I tend to think that art is a more common sense concepted. If a group of people think something is art, even if the author itself doesn't think it is, so it is...:-P
IMHO, anyway...
Before all the mess that hapenned to Be, BeOS used to have and (I dare to say) still have some commercial market share. The Media OS, remember?
So you're saying that just because someone wants to make an open clone of it (which in time will certainly improve over the current version of BeOS, that... you know, is dead), it has no chance to make into the market?
Please, elaborate more on your point of view, it looks interesting to me, but it couldn't convice me.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] Pixar asks, will Toy Story 2 count toward our 5 picture obligation? Disney says, hell no - it's not a new franchise. You still owe us three new films. Pixar makes Finding Nemo, Disney makes millions, etc.
You forget Monsters Inc. One of the best, IMHO.
Just one movie left for Pixar...
I second that. I've always been a fan of Minidisc since its first incarnations (the R-37, R-50, etc.), which hold the same amount of music as a CD. But with the latest models (MDLP) you can hold almost 3 Cd's on a single little disc with almost no perceptible quality loss. And many models run on a single AA batery, and it runs almost foverer - I listen to music during my trips to work and home, and the batteries usually last around 3 weeks(!).
My only itch is the software for the NetMD models - they suck, and there's no version for Linux and even MacOS, and as the protocol is undocumented and proprietary, there is no chance of it being supported on Linux/MacOS in the near future, though there are efforts to reverse-engineer the protocol, but with little progress so far...
...Lazarus?
Just MHO, but I think Sony wouldn't bother on this market because they already have products that kind of fill that niche - Network Walkmans and MiniDiscs.
Granted, the iPod offers much more than those (more memory and flexibility), but most people use it just to hear music anyway.
Then again, while I'm very content with my MiniDisc for audio purposes, an iPod would be very nice for his hacking flexibility...
and patched August 31, 2003
Huh? Are you from the future?
Yea, I really screwed up. In ATI's case, that's what I meant to say, "trade secrets"... On NVidia's case, actually I meant to say "licensed" technology, as in parts of the driver code that belong to third-parties, eg. NVidia's driver OpenGL code by SGI.
Now, I haven't heard anything like that about ATI, but it wouldn't surprise me if their driver had licensed code too.
2. ATI provides technical specs of cards to Linux community -> ATI drivers will be produced by hordes of raving Linux/Anti-M$ programmers.
Drivers produced by the community would never be as good as the one produced by the manufacturer itself. Only they know all the secrets about the card, which means they know much better how and where to optimize their drivers. Most of these "secrets" are undocumented, many on purpose, because revealing these secrets would either be a bad strategic move for their business or because they would be violating any contract or patent (see below), if there's any.
4. Repeat steps 1,2 for Nvidia.
They can't, because it is well known that their drivers contain patented technology. Indeed, this is the very reason (albeit probably not the only one) that NVidia release binary-only drivers. Releasing specs would probably mean that they would have to disclose some of the technology they use on their drivers, thus breaking patents.
ESound? Asd? ARTs? It seems a little different in concept, but I just can't get it. If it is, so cheers to the guys that made it... Linux at least (as I understand this is for X, so *BSDs and other *nix should benefit too) need a more standardized sound architecture (Yeah, I know about ALSA, but I mean something more higher level - like DirectSound)
The GBA may not have any 3D acceleration hardware, but that doesn't mean it can't do 3D. It's more work, but that didn't seem to stop people from doing it on PCs before 3D acceleration became ubiquitous. Just look at Quake, Descent, etc.
Indeed. And while many attempts have been done on some 3D games, IMHO, none of them succeed really well. Specially Doom for GBA. It's a piece of crap, very slow, looks like they just did a straight port from the SNES version (which also isn't that good). Other 3D games (that I know of) seem to follow the same line.
Maybe the guys doing the Wing Commander game you linked to could make some extra cash by licensing their engine to other GBA developers. Or at least the part of it that rasterizes the polygons; not everyone wants to develop space combat games.
Did a little diggin' to find it out, and while I couldn't find information about that, I found some neat stuff that's comming on the way:
The company that made Wing Commander's Engine
Some demos of that engine
Another 3D Engine from a company on the UK
Even seen comments on some forums about another 3D engine that can run Quake on GBA. But've got no links to that, unfortunately. Looks promising, anyway.
SNES RESOLUTION: 512x448
Although the Maximum resolution the SNES can achieve is the one you apointed, SNES also has a lower resolution, roughly half this one (256x224), which is just a little bigger than GBA's, and actually the resolution used on most games - very few games use the higher resolution.
[...]The GBA has the SNES beat hands down in terms of processing power. I don't know how many sprites the GBA can put on screen at once (or how big they can be), but it can display more colors at once than the SNES, and if it weren't for the small screen (and corresponding low resolution) and pitifully dark LCD I would say that the GBA had better graphics, too.
While I agree with you on that, I'd say that overall the GBA is a much better system than SNES. Is just that the full potential of the GBA wasn't explored yet, or was by very few games. When people ask me about the GBA, I usually say that the quality of the games are something between the SNES and PSX. Overrated? Maybe, but we'll see when this comes out. Don't know if it will be a good game, but surely will show what else the GBA can do.
Excerpt from the article:
The reason for this is because the red light increases the contrast of the surface it is lighting up. The tiny camera used to take pictures in the mouse is able to see changes in the surface better, offering excellent responsiveness.
So, I guess the red color wasn't choosen for nothing... :-P Indeed, the article says that the mod will only work fine if you use high-intensity blue LED's.
[...] I should try bumping down the textures to 32 and bumping back the detail (cause I zoom all the way out anyway). I'll try next time.
Tried that here, didn't help much. Even using the 16Mb textures didn't a big improvement.
What video card do you have?
Thought I said above... an nVidia GeForce2 MX200, 64Mb. Yeah, I know, crappy card and all that, but it does just fine on almost all other games I have. Whatever, I'll just end up by replacing it by a GF4 eventually. Too bad it costs so much over here.
Exactly the same situation here. Looks like the guys at Bioware should have done a better testing and profiling of that beast. Even after a long delay to release the game, apart from the fact of being slow (not just on graphics, but on stuff like loading areas, saving/retrieving games, etc.), it still feels very buggy... yes, it crashes, and has some strange behaviors sometimes. And don't come and tell me that it might be a hardware flaw, because all the other games I have doesn't behave like that.
Then again, I just can't get away of it... That's why I'm getting ready to buy a new computer with a new card.
Yeah, I know, I'm a consumer whore... :-P
What resolution, color depth and how big the texture size and other stuff? I've a GF3, and I pull about 13fps at 1024x768x32 with 64mb texture packs.
I use 800x600 on almost all games (including NWN). Anything above that gives me something around 30~45fps (on other games, of course, not NWN). For color depth, on NWN it's 32bpp (it doesn't (officially) support less color depth than that), 32Meg texture size (even though my card has 64Meg). EAX 2 is enabled for sound (i've got a SB Live). On all other games I use 16bpp. While the image quality gets just a bit worse (more on Q3, actually), I still prefer this than losing some 10~20fps.
I've got an Athlon TB 800, 256Megs, and I'm using the latest drivers of everything (including the Via 4in1 drivers). Even though the CPU isn't too high end, I still think the video card is more to blame.
I've got a GeForce2 MX200. Sure it's a crappy card, but Quake 3, Counter-strike and a lot of others have a more than acceptable performance, around 72fps. (Most other games goes around 60~80fps).
But NWN does a mere 20fps on that card. Very frustrating.
Do you see the controversy in your point?
First,
"When a company invests a lot of time and money to come up with an idea [...]"
and then,
"and society will be all the poorer for that."
So, first you say that the idea is all for the company to please, and then you try to make the point that the idea was "for the people". Yeah, right, the idea is for us, the condition being that we should depend on the company, on a symbiotic relationship.
Actually I got your point, but what if Newton would have patented the gravity theory? And what if I decide to patent every piece of code I write? Afterall, it's mine, right?
Ok, I see I've gone a bit too far now, but anyway, It's like the guy on the other post said, it's all about execution of the ideas. The ideas themselves are worth nothing, the more brilliant they might be. IMHO, patents just protect the lazy people, who want to do something nice just once and then sit on the corner and smoke a cigarette, and forget the meaning of the word "innovation".
The X bug is very serious. It's possible to set up a web site that will cause any X based computer looking at it to crash. But it's not a microsoft product so I expect the majority of people here will just ignore it and carry on bashing microsoft products as usual.
Please, don't compare Apples to Oranges. The bug in IIS affects a niche of boxes: Servers. And, you know, servers can't go down or be open to attacks. The X bug affects, on majority, another niche: users. Tell me, how many Linux servers you have seen being used as browsing stations? Hell, most of the servers I've seen and the ones I manage doesn't even run X! Besides, the user have to be stupid enough to willingly access a page that has a font size of 1666667 (or whatever bogus number it is).
Then again, as was stated by someone here, the IIS bug affects only machines that haven't been locked down - so if one gets attacked, the admin of such box is to blame too, not just M$.
Also, I agree with the poster below that says that this X bug is rather a symptom of a greater problem: Linux shouldn't allow a process to make such a mess on the system, IMHO.
Slackware 8.0 (without patching) runs the 3.3.6 XFree86 tree
This is incorrect. Stock Slackware 8.0 runs the XFree86 4.1 tree. Your claim is true for the Slack until 7.1.
Which brings up an interesting point... maybe XFree86 versions earlier than 4.2 are not affected by this bug. But I don't have any machine to check this out, my home linux box runs Slack 8.0 but with an updated (an probably "buggy", I'll check it out when I get home) 4.2 Xfree86 package, along with other stuff I've updated myself.
Anyone care to check this out?
Play Total Annihilation for a week and you'll have army management and base construction skills that will kick the ass of any StarCraft or AoE player.
Oops, I disagree here. I've played both TA and SC, and SC is definately much more complex. It's much more harder to manage resources vs. army on SC than it is on TA. Also, I think the IA in normal skill mode is poorer on TA than in SC (on SC you can't select the skill level anyway). TA on a hard skill mode get kind of levelled with SC, but SC is still more complex, in the sense that you have to think in many more stuff at the same time to get the job done. Anyway, I like TA better...
May be it's just because I'm a bad RTS player... :-P
Well, the source is not that wacked. Yes, it has some artifacts, but not all that much to justify an increase of 80%. Enough with talking, see it for yourself.
I'm not sure if this relates to the same problem with mp3's -> ogg's. In this case, the main problem is that we "transcode" from a lossy format to another, thence, we loose even more audio quality than a wav -> mp3 encoding, but still we have a smaller file size.
Can't forget to preview before posting... 8-P
Ok, now I gave a try at Jasper [ece.ubc.ca], a sample jpeg2k encoder. But I think I did something wrong:
I think that almost 80% increase in size is a little wrong for a codec that is supposed to kick others ass... any clues?Ok, now I gave a try at Jasper, a sample jpeg2k encoder. But I think I've done something wrong: $ ./jasper --input ~/test.jpg --output ~/test.jp2 --input-format jpg --output-format jp2 --verbose
JasPer Transcoder (Version 1.500.4).
Copyright (c) 1999-2000 Image Power, Inc. and the University of
British Columbia.
Copyright (c) 2001-2002 Michael David Adams.
All rights reserved.
For more information about this software, please visit the following
web sites/pages:
http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~mdadams/jasper
http://www.imagepower.com
To be added to the (moderated) JasPer software announcements
mailing list, send an email to:
jasper-announce-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To be added to the (unmoderated) JasPer software discussion
mailing list, send an email to:
jasper-discussion-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Please send any bug reports to:
mdadams@ieee.org
warning: color model apparently not RGB
decoding time = 1.960000
encoding time = 13.530000
$ ls -la test.jp?
-rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1815731 Apr 7 23:15 test.jp2
-rw-r--r-- 1 foobar users 1118155 Apr 7 23:14 test.jpg
any clues?
A friend of mine who works with me and happen to also be an artist, said that to the folks at my job and this generated a funny discussion about the concept of what is art and what is not. The guys over there, and me as well, agreed that the concept of art is something too subjective. My friend's arguments was exactly yours, and he gone even further by saying "if you draw a single line on a paper and call it an art, so it is". Oh c'mon... That's way too much... I tend to think that art is a more common sense concepted. If a group of people think something is art, even if the author itself doesn't think it is, so it is... :-P
IMHO, anyway...
Before all the mess that hapenned to Be, BeOS used to have and (I dare to say) still have some commercial market share. The Media OS, remember? So you're saying that just because someone wants to make an open clone of it (which in time will certainly improve over the current version of BeOS, that... you know, is dead), it has no chance to make into the market? Please, elaborate more on your point of view, it looks interesting to me, but it couldn't convice me.