...I find Nintendo's losing market share rather perculiar. The only real difference between the two competitors, is that one releases many more adult theme games than the other. Funny, because by the looks of it, it appears that the GC has 3 good 'kiddie' game per 1 good adult game from PS2.
But what is even more funny, is that if Nintendo continues on the same track of creating fun family games, it's going to end up back on top, due to a generation of gamers settling down, getting married and having kids. I've had 5 friends in the last year talk about what console they should get for their rugrats and each one ended up with the GC, because of the family oriented games.
I'm sorry I'm posting this off-topic, but I can't seem to find any "dedicated" forums. The only ones I see, are the ones that belong to the news stories. I wish to ask a question to those Slashdotters who are programmers, where would I post such a question?
My Ti Powerbook G4 running at 800MHz runs just fine and it gets 6 hours of battery life. When are PC users going to realize that you don't need any more performance than that? Power savings is more important these days.
How about when games like Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron's Call 2 run over 20 frames per second? You read reviews all the time that have the same set of benchmarks, every single time. How old is Quake 3 anyways? Why are they still using this as a benchmark? Who knows... But the fact is, there are plenty of games outside the scope of that which are benchmarked in CPU / Video card reviews. And these games actually give the very latest and greatest hardware a severe beat down.
If you look at many of the latest MMORPGs / MMOs forums, one of the number one complaints you will see are players having performance issues who also happen to have high-end systems. So yes, I will take those extra 200Mhz, thank you.
The problem is, where do we draw the line? As computers start adding more and more to their lists of abilities, especially in areas such as pattern recognition and expert systems, are we going to claim that those things don't require intelligence, and can also all be brought down to number crunching? To me, it seems like a form of denial. Instead of clinging to the old ways, why not recognize that computers might just be better at a lot of things that we previously thought were "human-only" areas of skill, and adapt accordingly.
There is a flaw in your argument, computers are not the ones adapting. I have a 20 year old Apple IIGS sitting in my closet, which can still read my Chessmaster 2000 disk. Has my Apple in those 20 years, become better at chess? Of course not.
It's not the computers that are becoming better at these "human-only" areas, it is the programmers and mathematicians who are becoming better at describing the world around us with algorithms. A computer is a machine designed to process math very quickly. It only gives the apperance of been smart, because we humans have designed very good algorithms to describe the world around us.
Exactly what I was thinking, when I read the following:
[i]In this article guys try to find out how well computers can play chess and if it would be correct to say that artificial intelligence is superior to human mind.[/i]
I thought to myself, well of course not. Chess AIs are based on mathematical formulas for describing chess. And Math is something a computer is very good at. By the time a human is done with 10 arithmetic problems, a 1 GHz computer would have churn through ~1 billion. So does it really come of a surprise that a machine, which is designed to compute math problems rapidly, can play strong chess by using a formula? I would hope not.
Is it correct to say that AI is superior to a human brain? Definetly not. An AI is restricted by a programmer's design. In the case of the chess AI, it's limited by how good the math formula was for describing chess. The human brain on the other hand, is free to create new thought processes and have ingenuity.
Why does every news-web-site feel it obligated to post fake news, on April 1st? Does April 1st even have a meaning outside of the US? Readers from outside the US, will be looking at all these news bits with confusion. It is a waste of everybody's time.
The part that worries me is that rumor has it Pixar thinks Finding Nemo will be their weakest film and if there's fallout from that they may not be in the bargaining position they would be in right now if it doesn't do so well.
Weakest?! Umm... considering that every Pixar film is in the top 100 grossing films of all time (three on the top 50), I don't think there is much for them to worry about it. So they make $250 million this time instead of $260 million *shrug*
The article gave a false impression of what the future holds for MMORPGs, by focusing on the success of Everquest. Yes, this genre is coming out of it's infancy and there is potential there, however you have to keep in mind that these are still games. And if it's a poor game, it will not sell well and it will not succeed. i.e. Anarchy Online from Funcom, one of the newest MMORPGs, has failed. The company had to close down their other divisions in order to keep the game running longer.
I think EQ's success has to do more with timing than anything else. They came into the scene right at it's sweet point. Nobody else had a 3D MMORPG out there and Ultima Online, The Realm, and Meridian59 had already paved the road of making the public aware for this type of game. Had EQ not snatched most of the players 6 month before Asheron's Call was released, we could be very well to this day be reading articles on how Asheron's Call is the #1 MMORPG.
A deaf man composed some of the greatest music the world has ever heard. When will a blind man come along that will draw the greatest paintings?
Mad Hatter
Because with the "display sphere" you'll be able to see all sides of an object. Unlike your "stereo" images, were you will only be able to see one face/side of an object.
private static final int DEFAULT_WINDOW_WIDTH = 640
That won't be needing any comments.
You couldn't be more wrong.
on
The Age of Nvidia
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is not ment as a flame, but a correction.
They're the most successful for two reasons. First, unlike 3Dfx, they focused on quick turnaround of incrementally faster processors rather than spending a long dev cycle working on very advanced technology that was too complicated to fit into a 6-month product cycle
Actually, it was the exact opposite of this. nVidia never produced a video card that was faster than one of 3dfx's top model while they were still in business. In matter of fact, it was the technology in the early nVidia video cards that were driving their sales. Check out tom's hardware archive and read through the articles of the past and you will see that the benchmarks show 3dfx clearly winning the frame-rate race, but it was nVidia's 3D image quality that was coming on top each time. It was only when 3dfx went for an entire year without ever coming out with a new chipset, did nVidia finally catched up in speed.
The second principle of success which nVidia's strategy illustrates is a financial one, illustrated well by Enron. People invest more money with companies which are already financially successful than with ones who really need the money, so that inflating the bottom line is rewarded immensely--and punishes companies which are honest, by giving fu7nding to their competitors.
If you are talking about the whole SEC thing, that was a recent occurance that began at the start of last year. There was inside trading going on and that was what the investigation was about. However, in the beginning nVdida was a privately funded company. They went public AFTER 3dfx went bankrupt. Shadey handling of money had hardly anything to do with their triumph over 3dfx.
As did 3dfx, but 3dfx bettered nVidia in this respect by releasing a large chunk of code. nVidia has on the other hand been excruciatingly secretive with almost all code.
Quiet the opposite, nvidia has created a site to drive development of 3D software http://developer.nvidia.com/ They encourage open source and try to get the entire community in helping establish and designing standards. Which brings us to the last point...
Glide support work much better in Glide
Glide is the farthest thing you can get from programming standards. I cringe everytime someone spews the statement "Glide is better." Do you honestly have an understanding of what a proprietary API is? Glide works fast on a 3dfx card, because it's the "language" that voodoo "speaks". It's like running a windows application through an emulator on a Mac and whining that the G4 architecture isn't as good as x86 because it doesn't run as fast as on a native machine.
nVidia is a good company. They come this far through the work and sweat of a very talented group of designers and programmers. Don't try to smear that with the shadey business practices of certain individuals that unfortounetly worked at the company.
As shown on their memo, they are going to go through and remove any p2p software they find on the Blizzard LAN. Blizzard is not fighting Sony to keep p2p software on their machines, in matter of fact they agree with them. This is unlike bnetd, who is actually fighting against the DMCA
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit. Take their text ads - I love them - unobstrusive, get the point across, and NOT in teh main search results - they are clearly marked
The fact is that there is tens of thousands of people playing Warcraft3 beta illegal at any given time, while on Blizzard's Battle.net you can only find ~150 or so players online.
And this isn't an exaggeration. I was lucky enough to be invited to participated in the beta and 150-200 is roughly the amount of players you will find playing on Battle.net. Where as my co-worker who is using the illegal copy, showed me a page that gave the top 50 bnetd servers, ranked by population.
I'm all for open source, as a developer myself, but I'm not against Blizzard shutting down bnet emmulators at this point. People may claim that they are only doing it because the game is not availiable for purchase, but that is a crock. We all know the same people are going to get the gold version of Warcraft 3 illegaly because it is easy.
>simply because pirates might be able to exploit it.
This is were you are "wrong". It isn't a possibility of it "might" happen, it is happening. bnetd had a population of four times as many people playing warcraft III illegaly, than Blizzard's Battle.net.
This has nothing to do with Blizzard been "evil". This project has been running for many years and Blizzard never touched it. Why all of sudden they sought to shut it down? Because of Warcraft III beta (and potentially it's release version as well.)
Hackers got a hold a of the beta and began distributing it. Now you can not play over B.net without a CD-key, so what do people do who don't have a legal copy? They go to bnetd, who doesn't require you to have a CD-key.
Warcraft III illegal distribution got so popular that bnetd had 3 to 4 times larger of a population online at any given time more than Blizzard's B.net! Now tell me... if you are a comapny who's product is been pirated by 80% of the people using it, are you just going to sit idealy by? I don't think so.
Blizzard has spent 4 years in the development of Warcraft III. I say they deserve to be rewarded for all the hard work they've poured into this wonderful game.
So it makes more sense to lose time writing monotonous code? When you start adding many widgets to a form and want any type of resizability, you need to use things like BorderLayouts and GridBagLayouts extensively. Writing good GridBagConstraints can be time consuming, therefore an IDE increases productivity. Real programmers are more intrested in getting an application done, not seeing how many keystrokes they can make.
Not if you follow some very simple good coding standards. Lacking the ability to use GridBagLayout well isn't an excuse for using an IDE exclusively.
You're joking right?
I'm not sure if you lack OOP concepts to the point that you don't know how to extend a simple component to paint it the way you want, or if you just don't understand graphics in AWT and Swing.
Take a look at the look-and-feel classes, Mac's LNF uses round buttons, no magic there.
Maybe you should just start out at the beginning with java for dummies [amazon.com] or something like that
I knew that you would pull that out as an example. No $h1t that you can paint circular buttons, but their context area still remains as a square. Just because it looks round doesn't mean it behaves at such.
jedit [sourceforge.net] does this and the source code is available.
Did you even look at the jedit code? The guy wrote it from the ground up, extending the most basic of Swing objects, JComponent. Meaning he didn't use any of widgets in Swing to form the gui. Technicaly he wrote it from scratch and simply used JComponent to have something to paint to.
Simply add a ComponentListener to your window for componentResized events and keep the component within your wanted bounds
This does not prevent a user from resizing a window beyond certain dimensions. They will stretch the gui and it will then get retracted, this is unaccaptable.
Add and remove a component and animate on the event queue
wtf is that suppose to mean?
Swing is however great as a general purpose API for GUI clients and has gotten better with each version
You've shown that you are a complete imbecile. Throwing examples into the air without fully understanding what you were presenting.
Maybe if you had some real world experience you'd be better equipped to spread your FUD
You are an egotistical dumbass. Please don't come on here and post as an anonymous coward who thinks he understands how things work, when you clearly don't. You proved this by given the most inane example, as JEdit to try to prove Swing is good. When in fact JEdit wasn't written using Swing! Freaking dumbass, geeze.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked for Sun in the late 70s and again in the mid-80s
You do realize that was nearly two decades ago? That's like a century in computer years.
Mad Hatter
...I find Nintendo's losing market share rather perculiar. The only real difference between the two competitors, is that one releases many more adult theme games than the other. Funny, because by the looks of it, it appears that the GC has 3 good 'kiddie' game per 1 good adult game from PS2.
But what is even more funny, is that if Nintendo continues on the same track of creating fun family games, it's going to end up back on top, due to a generation of gamers settling down, getting married and having kids. I've had 5 friends in the last year talk about what console they should get for their rugrats and each one ended up with the GC, because of the family oriented games.
Mad Hatter
I'm sorry I'm posting this off-topic, but I can't seem to find any "dedicated" forums. The only ones I see, are the ones that belong to the news stories. I wish to ask a question to those Slashdotters who are programmers, where would I post such a question?
Thanks for any help,
Mad Hatter
My Ti Powerbook G4 running at 800MHz runs just fine and it gets 6 hours of battery life. When are PC users going to realize that you don't need any more performance than that? Power savings is more important these days.
How about when games like Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron's Call 2 run over 20 frames per second? You read reviews all the time that have the same set of benchmarks, every single time. How old is Quake 3 anyways? Why are they still using this as a benchmark? Who knows... But the fact is, there are plenty of games outside the scope of that which are benchmarked in CPU / Video card reviews. And these games actually give the very latest and greatest hardware a severe beat down.
If you look at many of the latest MMORPGs / MMOs forums, one of the number one complaints you will see are players having performance issues who also happen to have high-end systems. So yes, I will take those extra 200Mhz, thank you.
Mad Hatter
Why is it surprising that this story is interesting? :)
Mad Hatter
The problem is, where do we draw the line? As computers start adding more and more to their lists of abilities, especially in areas such as pattern recognition and expert systems, are we going to claim that those things don't require intelligence, and can also all be brought down to number crunching? To me, it seems like a form of denial. Instead of clinging to the old ways, why not recognize that computers might just be better at a lot of things that we previously thought were "human-only" areas of skill, and adapt accordingly.
There is a flaw in your argument, computers are not the ones adapting. I have a 20 year old Apple IIGS sitting in my closet, which can still read my Chessmaster 2000 disk. Has my Apple in those 20 years, become better at chess? Of course not.
It's not the computers that are becoming better at these "human-only" areas, it is the programmers and mathematicians who are becoming better at describing the world around us with algorithms. A computer is a machine designed to process math very quickly. It only gives the apperance of been smart, because we humans have designed very good algorithms to describe the world around us.
Mad Hatter
Exactly what I was thinking, when I read the following:
[i]In this article guys try to find out how well computers can play chess and if it would be correct to say that artificial intelligence is superior to human mind.[/i]
I thought to myself, well of course not. Chess AIs are based on mathematical formulas for describing chess. And Math is something a computer is very good at. By the time a human is done with 10 arithmetic problems, a 1 GHz computer would have churn through ~1 billion. So does it really come of a surprise that a machine, which is designed to compute math problems rapidly, can play strong chess by using a formula? I would hope not.
Is it correct to say that AI is superior to a human brain? Definetly not. An AI is restricted by a programmer's design. In the case of the chess AI, it's limited by how good the math formula was for describing chess. The human brain on the other hand, is free to create new thought processes and have ingenuity.
Mad Hatter
Sounds to me like this site is more useful serving as a central point on the web as a listing of links to pornographic cartoons.
Mad Hatter
Why does every news-web-site feel it obligated to post fake news, on April 1st? Does April 1st even have a meaning outside of the US? Readers from outside the US, will be looking at all these news bits with confusion. It is a waste of everybody's time.
Mad Hatter
They are called up-converters and they have existed for years now. Here is a listing of them:
http://www.dvdirect.com/Prods/TVO/default.htm
Mad Hatter
The reason why we remember so few memories while we were infants is because we took many naps :)
Mad Hatter
Pixar has a deal with Disney, were they must deliver 5 films, right? Thus:
1. Toy Story
2. A Bug's Life
3. Monster's Inc.
4. Finding Nemo (2003)
5. The Incredibles (2004)
(Notice that I did not include Toy Story 2 in that listing). That's all they need. Why are they maked a 6th film for Disney?
6. Cars (2005) ?
Mad Hatter
The part that worries me is that rumor has it Pixar thinks Finding Nemo will be their weakest film and if there's fallout from that they may not be in the bargaining position they would be in right now if it doesn't do so well.
Weakest?! Umm... considering that every Pixar film is in the top 100 grossing films of all time (three on the top 50), I don't think there is much for them to worry about it. So they make $250 million this time instead of $260 million *shrug*
http://us.imdb.com/Charts/usatopmovies
Mad Hatter
The article gave a false impression of what the future holds for MMORPGs, by focusing on the success of Everquest. Yes, this genre is coming out of it's infancy and there is potential there, however you have to keep in mind that these are still games. And if it's a poor game, it will not sell well and it will not succeed. i.e. Anarchy Online from Funcom, one of the newest MMORPGs, has failed. The company had to close down their other divisions in order to keep the game running longer.
I think EQ's success has to do more with timing than anything else. They came into the scene right at it's sweet point. Nobody else had a 3D MMORPG out there and Ultima Online, The Realm, and Meridian59 had already paved the road of making the public aware for this type of game. Had EQ not snatched most of the players 6 month before Asheron's Call was released, we could be very well to this day be reading articles on how Asheron's Call is the #1 MMORPG.
SageMadHatter
A deaf man composed some of the greatest music the world has ever heard. When will a blind man come along that will draw the greatest paintings? Mad Hatter
Because with the "display sphere" you'll be able to see all sides of an object. Unlike your "stereo" images, were you will only be able to see one face/side of an object.
Let's define a constant in Java
private static final int DEFAULT_WINDOW_WIDTH = 640
That won't be needing any comments.
This is not ment as a flame, but a correction.
They're the most successful for two reasons. First, unlike 3Dfx, they focused on quick turnaround of incrementally faster processors rather than spending a long dev cycle working on very advanced technology that was too complicated to fit into a 6-month product cycle
Actually, it was the exact opposite of this. nVidia never produced a video card that was faster than one of 3dfx's top model while they were still in business. In matter of fact, it was the technology in the early nVidia video cards that were driving their sales. Check out tom's hardware archive and read through the articles of the past and you will see that the benchmarks show 3dfx clearly winning the frame-rate race, but it was nVidia's 3D image quality that was coming on top each time. It was only when 3dfx went for an entire year without ever coming out with a new chipset, did nVidia finally catched up in speed.
The second principle of success which nVidia's strategy illustrates is a financial one, illustrated well by Enron. People invest more money with companies which are already financially successful than with ones who really need the money, so that inflating the bottom line is rewarded immensely--and punishes companies which are honest, by giving fu7nding to their competitors.
If you are talking about the whole SEC thing, that was a recent occurance that began at the start of last year. There was inside trading going on and that was what the investigation was about. However, in the beginning nVdida was a privately funded company. They went public AFTER 3dfx went bankrupt. Shadey handling of money had hardly anything to do with their triumph over 3dfx.
As did 3dfx, but 3dfx bettered nVidia in this respect by releasing a large chunk of code. nVidia has on the other hand been excruciatingly secretive with almost all code.
Quiet the opposite, nvidia has created a site to drive development of 3D software http://developer.nvidia.com/ They encourage open source and try to get the entire community in helping establish and designing standards. Which brings us to the last point...
Glide support work much better in Glide
Glide is the farthest thing you can get from programming standards. I cringe everytime someone spews the statement "Glide is better." Do you honestly have an understanding of what a proprietary API is? Glide works fast on a 3dfx card, because it's the "language" that voodoo "speaks". It's like running a windows application through an emulator on a Mac and whining that the G4 architecture isn't as good as x86 because it doesn't run as fast as on a native machine.
nVidia is a good company. They come this far through the work and sweat of a very talented group of designers and programmers. Don't try to smear that with the shadey business practices of certain individuals that unfortounetly worked at the company.
As shown on their memo, they are going to go through and remove any p2p software they find on the Blizzard LAN. Blizzard is not fighting Sony to keep p2p software on their machines, in matter of fact they agree with them. This is unlike bnetd, who is actually fighting against the DMCA
Google has always seemed to be driven by a happy medium of civic duty and profit. Take their text ads - I love them - unobstrusive, get the point across, and NOT in teh main search results - they are clearly marked
Google has ads?
SageMadHatter
The fact is that there is tens of thousands of people playing Warcraft3 beta illegal at any given time, while on Blizzard's Battle.net you can only find ~150 or so players online.
And this isn't an exaggeration. I was lucky enough to be invited to participated in the beta and 150-200 is roughly the amount of players you will find playing on Battle.net. Where as my co-worker who is using the illegal copy, showed me a page that gave the top 50 bnetd servers, ranked by population.
I'm all for open source, as a developer myself, but I'm not against Blizzard shutting down bnet emmulators at this point. People may claim that they are only doing it because the game is not availiable for purchase, but that is a crock. We all know the same people are going to get the gold version of Warcraft 3 illegaly because it is easy.
SageMadHatter
>simply because pirates might be able to exploit it.
This is were you are "wrong". It isn't a possibility of it "might" happen, it is happening. bnetd had a population of four times as many people playing warcraft III illegaly, than Blizzard's Battle.net.
SageMadHatter
This has nothing to do with Blizzard been "evil". This project has been running for many years and Blizzard never touched it. Why all of sudden they sought to shut it down? Because of Warcraft III beta (and potentially it's release version as well.)
Hackers got a hold a of the beta and began distributing it. Now you can not play over B.net without a CD-key, so what do people do who don't have a legal copy? They go to bnetd, who doesn't require you to have a CD-key.
Warcraft III illegal distribution got so popular that bnetd had 3 to 4 times larger of a population online at any given time more than Blizzard's B.net! Now tell me... if you are a comapny who's product is been pirated by 80% of the people using it, are you just going to sit idealy by? I don't think so.
Blizzard has spent 4 years in the development of Warcraft III. I say they deserve to be rewarded for all the hard work they've poured into this wonderful game.
SageMadHatter
So it makes more sense to lose time writing monotonous code? When you start adding many widgets to a form and want any type of resizability, you need to use things like BorderLayouts and GridBagLayouts extensively. Writing good GridBagConstraints can be time consuming, therefore an IDE increases productivity. Real programmers are more intrested in getting an application done, not seeing how many keystrokes they can make.
Not if you follow some very simple good coding standards. Lacking the ability to use GridBagLayout well isn't an excuse for using an IDE exclusively.
You're joking right? I'm not sure if you lack OOP concepts to the point that you don't know how to extend a simple component to paint it the way you want, or if you just don't understand graphics in AWT and Swing. Take a look at the look-and-feel classes, Mac's LNF uses round buttons, no magic there. Maybe you should just start out at the beginning with java for dummies [amazon.com] or something like that
I knew that you would pull that out as an example. No $h1t that you can paint circular buttons, but their context area still remains as a square. Just because it looks round doesn't mean it behaves at such.
jedit [sourceforge.net] does this and the source code is available.
Did you even look at the jedit code? The guy wrote it from the ground up, extending the most basic of Swing objects, JComponent. Meaning he didn't use any of widgets in Swing to form the gui. Technicaly he wrote it from scratch and simply used JComponent to have something to paint to.
Simply add a ComponentListener to your window for componentResized events and keep the component within your wanted bounds
This does not prevent a user from resizing a window beyond certain dimensions. They will stretch the gui and it will then get retracted, this is unaccaptable. Add and remove a component and animate on the event queue
wtf is that suppose to mean? Swing is however great as a general purpose API for GUI clients and has gotten better with each version
You've shown that you are a complete imbecile. Throwing examples into the air without fully understanding what you were presenting.
Maybe if you had some real world experience you'd be better equipped to spread your FUD
You are an egotistical dumbass. Please don't come on here and post as an anonymous coward who thinks he understands how things work, when you clearly don't. You proved this by given the most inane example, as JEdit to try to prove Swing is good. When in fact JEdit wasn't written using Swing! Freaking dumbass, geeze.
SageMadHatter
...I wonder how much more will it receive.
SageMadHatter