Actually, the beauty of H.264 is that is DOESN'T take alot of hardware to decode them. Our macs at work are dual 1.25ghz G4s with some ancient ATI video card and could playback the 1080p trailers full size with ease. We were all amazed.
On the flipside, my Athlon 2200xp at work couldn't come CLOSE to playing a 720p trailer at full speed:(
Maya was a Mac app before ever running under Win32
Really?? That odd, being that back in, oh, '97 when I was working on SGIs using Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator (aka Alias) we had an NT workstation running Maya 1.0 betas and then 1.0 final. I never knew Maya to run on OS8 (Maya 1.0 was out very early in '98, OS9 didn't ship until '99)... or OS9. And it didn't come out for OSX until, what... v3.5?
Nice try, but Maya was initially released for NT 4 and Irix 6.2 (not sure about Linux)
Unless your organization has some vested interest in a particular language (ie: you know you'll want to make your own modifications to the site and your IT guy only knows PHP), don't worry about the language. Someone could in theory write equally capable code in any of those languages... but more importantly, equally BAD code can be written in any of those languages. Fact is, no matter what platform they use, the people coding it could be idiots and make a total mess of things.
Sadly, as a Senior Web Developer having worked at a variety of companies over the years, I've seen this firsthand too many times. It really depends on the skill of the people creating the site. But making an accurate assessment of that skill is near impossible. The companies will sweet talk you with a very professional proposal, show you amazing sites from their portfolio, let you talk with their very intelligent Senior Web Developer.... but they'll forget to metion that 75% of the proposal was from a template that they've honed over the years to look as good as possible, the people responsible for the amazing portfolio pieces no longer work there, and the Senior Web Developer won't ACTUALLY be involved in architecting the site. Assuming he's not retiring in 2 weeks.
I've unfortunately seen first hand alot of clients get the wool pulled over their eyes, and am sad to say that the only advice I can really offer is to go with your gut and/or get a reference from someone who's opinion you value, because most of the time when a company is courting you, it's 50% smoke and mirrors and 50% bullshit.
Comparing Doom3 to CS:Source??? Come on, that's ridiculous. Wouldn't a better comparison be something like Capture the Flag, Team Fortress, or maybe even Doom's Simpsons mod. I'm sure if any of those were updated to use the Doom3 engine, they'd be fairly well recieved... however, none of those have NEAR the popularity of CS, hence players probably WOULD want to see some newness in them.
In addition, as someone else noted, this is essentially an update, it's not supposed to be Counter-Strike 2. I didn't hear anyone complain about CS 1.6 being just like CS 1.5.
'Behaviors' are actually nothing new, Shake has been completely scriptable since at least v2 (v2 has been around since '99 or 2000, I believe) and discreet's Combustion 3 introduced scripting capabilities, as well (opting for Javascript for it's language). Not sure about After Effects or other packages.
I think the key difference here is the focus Apple is putting on Motion's behaviors for beginners, the easy access to the functions, and the amount of included behaviors. While it would certainly be easy for someone like myself to create a 'Throw' function in Shake, the same can't necessarily be said for a novice... and a 'Throw' function isn't already included in Shake. Though, in fact, some of Shake's nodes are essentially 'Behaviors'... such as the Shake node. It shakes your image and doesn't need to be keyframed.
Given the amount of freely downloadable macros for Shake, it wouldn't surprise me if someone duplicated all of Motion's behaviors for Shake. None the less, it's nice to see Apple including such a large library of behaviors for people to utilize in Motion.
As far as speed is concerned, a dual 2.5ghz with a faster video card can do RIDICULOUS things at full speed. Apple is actually utilizing their Core Image and Core Video APIs for Motion, which will be available for anyone to use come 10.4.
Over the past few weeks, Hotmail has been continuously deleting a set of about 60 emails out of my Inbox (yes, it needed cleaned out anyways, but that probably wasn't the way to go about doing it). Thankfully, I check my email enough that said emails are still in the trash and I can manually retrieve them.
While I've exported my important email to Thunderbird, I still have plenty of non-crucial stuff in Hotmail. It wouldn't have been the end of the world had the files been deleted, but it was pretty disconcerting none-the-less.
I finally sent them an email explaining the problem and my annoyance. I recieved a form e-mail saying I would get a response within 24 hours.... which I didn't. Though all my e-mails have stayed intact so far... but it's only been a few days. If the problem doesn't come back, it seems to imply the problem is fixable.
Re:Why Final Fantasy failed.
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Shrek 2 How-To
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You also need to realize that, at least in my market, it was on at like 8am during the week. At which point the main viewers are probably little kids. You can only expect the ratings to be so good when the majority of your -intended- viewing audience is at work or at school.
On top of that, as you mentioned, there were also many internal issues. So I wouldn't say that disproves my point.
Sports Night (a completely unrelated show) also lasted only 2 seasons, yet was critically acclaimed and won 3 emmys. Everyone I've made watch it loved it. So merely running 2 seasons doesn't necessarily communicate how people feel about a show.
From the first link:
"Our user interface software is completely X11/OpenGL based and only relies on features used in Quake."
I knew Shrek always looked familiar, but I could never put my finger on it!!
Re:Why Final Fantasy failed.
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While I appreciate what you're saying, I have to disagree, at least to some extent. The reason being Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles. This was an animated series that went for a realistic look. No, it wasn't at the level of Final Fantasy, but they also had a far smaller budget and far tighter timeline. Even still, some of the shots were pretty impressive (though the large bodies of water stunk most of the time, however some of the water effects (splooshes and such, but not the wakes) were quite nice).
This didn't have a GI Joe type plot, it was serious, and had serious plotlines. When characters died, they weren't forgotten in the next episode... it would shake the troops up and they would remember said character(s). I personally loved the series for its visual elements, but even moreso for its plot.
I think the problem with FF was not so much the fact that it was a serious plot in an animation, but simply that it was a plot that didn't particularly interest people, plain and simple. I'm sure the same plot wouldn't have worked so well even if it were live action.
Interestingly, my 2000 Celica GT, which is rated at around 24 city/33 highway, gets better mileage than this guy is claiming. On long highway trips, I've seen over 40mpg (even with a passenger)... on average, with a good combination of city and highway driving, I'll see mid-30's.
My Celica actually weighs in at around 200lbs less than the Civic Hybrid (actual difference is dependent on which model and transmision you get in the Civic). I didn't see mention of this guy's transmission (manual or CVT), but I've got a 5-speed manual.
This raises a few questions in my mind... first off, why exactly am I getting better mileage than this guy?? Is it largely the weight? Is it more efficient for my 140hp engine to do 70mph than for that 85-87hp engine to try to carry even more weight at that speed??
I'm thrilled I get the mileage that I do, but this just seems a little curious. Maybe I'm just too eager to believe the hype about hydrids.
Ok, alot of people seem to be commenting on the comparison used here, saying the poster is comparing high-end GPUs to low-end CPUs. For one, the poster doesn't specifically target high-end GPUs... though we'll make the assumption that's what he's talking about. People have said that the CPUs are all low-end, and/or that the G5 doesn't have low power consupmtion...
According to this, a PowerPC 970FX (the G5's being used in Apple's Xserves and the chip that will be in Apple's desktops this year) uses ~24.5W at 2.0ghz. So two of these are still only using half the wattage of a single Prescott chip, and obviously they can perform, too.
So yes, many of the chips he mentioned are not performance oriented, but the PowerPC 970FX certainly is, and it's safe to say it has made huge headway in power efficiency.
Um, that's probably why the poster didn't list the latest Pentium 4's in the CPUs he named. He didn't say ALL CPUs had any type of focus on power savings... let's stick to what's actually being discussed.
The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.
Wow, I never realized that Tony Fadell, who worked briefly at RealNetworks, which is led by Rob Glaser, who of course developed the Rhapsody music service, was the one responsible for leading the iPod design team, whom developed the iPod, which has more computing power than an early mac, in just six months, or that you could have this many commas holding a sentence together, for this long, and not think back to yourself, "Perhaps this sentence is a bit long", or something to that effect, so now you can flame away, if you want.
Another possible consideration would be nVidia's newly announced Gelato. $2750 per license, plus the cost of a good Quadro card to make it worthwhile. It's yet to be seen what kind of performance and quality this will offer, but certainly something to keep an eye on.
On another note, I haven't been keeping up with my 3D like I used to, but some software, such as Renderman, can do distributed rendering on a single frame, and then automagically merge the results. I don't think Brazil offers this yet (could be wrong?), but they're working on it (under the name of Banshee, bottom of page. If your renderer of choice offers such a feature, you could build some serious distributed rendering for $12k.
By both drives, what are you referring to?? I mentioned two 52x burners... do you mean "both" as in two of those? Or as in a 52x and a hard drive on the same bus?
A 52x drive will reach a max speed of under 8megs/sec... so if you mean burning two 52x cd's on a single bus or burning a single 52x cd with the hard drive on the same bus, either way you're only talking ~15megs/sec -max-. Nowhere close to ATA66's max specs, let alone ATA100 or ATA133. And while I understand that being on the same bus leads to the need for devices to take turns talking, that happens fast enough that the burner's buffer can easily handle the penalties.
I think most buffer underruns are due to the hard drive not being able to keep up for whatever reason.... whether it's because it's just not fast enough or because it's being accessed by multiple resources at the same time, or maybe the files being burnt are severely fragmented. If the drive can't keep up, it can't keep up... taking a device off of it's channel isn't going to help, since the bus is nowhere near being saturated.
S-ATA seems to be the solution for the data transfers involved with 16x DVD recording and the fast 52x CD-RW drives.
Since when have optical drives been needing more bandwidth than PATA can offer?? A friend of mine has TWO 52x cd burners setup on ATA 100, and can burn full speed on both of them simultaneously. So, um, how exactly do SATA optical drives solve anything? (note that I am all in favor of SATA opticals, if for no other reason than the cabling)
I did this fascinating thing called "reading the article" and immediately noticed that this post should read, "interview with Ion Storm's Harvey Smith, announcing his departure from the Deus Ex developer".
Harvey Smith left and Randy Smith is no longer the lead designer on Thief. And they're still not related.
While your concept is nice, it just doesn't work out that way. Perhaps you've never been accused of cheating (when you weren't). It's not simply one person who happens to say, "Cheater". It's repeated rants full of explitives. Games are supposed to be fun! How fun can a game be when the entire time you're being called a cock-sucking pussy fuck cheater?? Seriously. Even by people on your own team.
But that's only the beginning. Some games allow players to be even more proactive... ie: voting. Believe me, when you're playing fair and square and every few minutes a vote comes up to kick and/or ban you from the server..... not my idea of fun. Especially if you actually DO get kicked. Talk about killing the mood.
Yeah, it's flattering in a way. But it gets old FAST.
This is a valid point, one that has crossed my mind in the past. But consider how many databases are out there in the world. Many with incomprehensible amounts of data. Given this, stability is obviously a number one priority to users and developers of databases, and certainly something that was considered before the Subversion folks a) chose to use a database backend and b) chose BerkeleyDB. Subversion has been self-hosted (they used Subversion for their source control) for over a year, and have yet to lose any data. While a year isn't that long, it's a start.
But using a database DOES provide advantages, as stated in the article. Mostly speed advantages, but also the ability to do live backups. If you try backing up an online (as in live) CVS server's files, there's nothing stopping people from doing commits, thus possibly botching your backup (you're no longer backing up the files you thought you were).
And when it comes down to it, backups are really where your safety lies. In the last CVS project I worked on, the repository was hosed twice. Once due to a careless admin, and once due to the hard drive dying. While we had some down time, virtually no work was lost, largely due to our nightly backups. The fact that CVS stored its data as plain text files certainly didn't protect us.
It's not open source, and you do have to sign up to download it (just username and email, I think... and I've been on their list for years and only get maybe 2 emails a year from them)... but it is free and it's a pretty nifty piece of software, allowing you to make large webs of thoughts, relate any node to any other node, link files & emails, etc.
Ahanix DOES NOT MAKE SilenX PSUs!!!!!!!!!! This important, please mod this up!!!! See www.silenx.com to see what I'm talking about.... Ahanix is basically a rip off company (you'll notice their homepage is even a rip off of Samsung's).
Also, while Zalman PSUs may be quiet, they're not on the same level as the SilenX. The parent article notes that the SilenX is "much quiter" than a PSU which he reviewed as being "much quieter" than the Zalman. So the SilenX is essentially "much, much quieter" than the Zalman:) Seriously though, Zalman's specs rate their 400W PSU at 20-30db. SilenX's is rated at ~11.5-14db. If you're going for true silence, 30db compared to 14db will make a huge difference.
I've seen some posts asking what's so special about this PSU, as "silent" PSU's have been around for a long time... I have to say, I've been following reviews of this brand for the last few months (and plan to order one myself in a week or so) and from all the reviews I've read, these take silent to another level, and are high quality, to boot.
Tom's Hardware has a few PSU roundups (older, newer) which include noise level testing... as you can see, other "silent" PSUs are much louder than 14db (nor do said PSUs even claim to be that quiet). At best, you're talking about PSU's doing 25 (low load) to 33db (full load), and they tend to get louder as the wattage rating increases. All SilenX PSUs (I believe they go up to 600watta) are rated around 11.5 (minimum) to 14 (maximum) db. So it really is a big difference. I know my "silent" PSU which is around 30db is -much- louder than my 80mm case fan which claims to be 20db.
Anyhow, literally EVERY SilenX review I've read has said they a) really are quiet (much quieter than other "silent" PSUs, apparently) and b) are very high quality.
Also note that you have to buy them from www.silenx.com or (soon) NewEgg. You'll see "SilenX 14db" PSUs on Pricewatch and such, but they are imposter PSUs of inferior build made by a company named Ahanix, whom SilenX is currently involved in lawsuits with regarding this issue, and whose site is a blatant rip-off of Samsung's.
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On the flipside, my Athlon 2200xp at work couldn't come CLOSE to playing a 720p trailer at full speed :(
Really?? That odd, being that back in, oh, '97 when I was working on SGIs using Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator (aka Alias) we had an NT workstation running Maya 1.0 betas and then 1.0 final. I never knew Maya to run on OS8 (Maya 1.0 was out very early in '98, OS9 didn't ship until '99)... or OS9. And it didn't come out for OSX until, what... v3.5?
Nice try, but Maya was initially released for NT 4 and Irix 6.2 (not sure about Linux)
The boys at Ars Technica seem to think differently. See what's really changed with Quicktime.
Sadly, as a Senior Web Developer having worked at a variety of companies over the years, I've seen this firsthand too many times. It really depends on the skill of the people creating the site. But making an accurate assessment of that skill is near impossible. The companies will sweet talk you with a very professional proposal, show you amazing sites from their portfolio, let you talk with their very intelligent Senior Web Developer.... but they'll forget to metion that 75% of the proposal was from a template that they've honed over the years to look as good as possible, the people responsible for the amazing portfolio pieces no longer work there, and the Senior Web Developer won't ACTUALLY be involved in architecting the site. Assuming he's not retiring in 2 weeks.
I've unfortunately seen first hand alot of clients get the wool pulled over their eyes, and am sad to say that the only advice I can really offer is to go with your gut and/or get a reference from someone who's opinion you value, because most of the time when a company is courting you, it's 50% smoke and mirrors and 50% bullshit.
In addition, as someone else noted, this is essentially an update, it's not supposed to be Counter-Strike 2. I didn't hear anyone complain about CS 1.6 being just like CS 1.5.
Just my two cents
I think the key difference here is the focus Apple is putting on Motion's behaviors for beginners, the easy access to the functions, and the amount of included behaviors. While it would certainly be easy for someone like myself to create a 'Throw' function in Shake, the same can't necessarily be said for a novice... and a 'Throw' function isn't already included in Shake. Though, in fact, some of Shake's nodes are essentially 'Behaviors'... such as the Shake node. It shakes your image and doesn't need to be keyframed.
Given the amount of freely downloadable macros for Shake, it wouldn't surprise me if someone duplicated all of Motion's behaviors for Shake. None the less, it's nice to see Apple including such a large library of behaviors for people to utilize in Motion.
As far as speed is concerned, a dual 2.5ghz with a faster video card can do RIDICULOUS things at full speed. Apple is actually utilizing their Core Image and Core Video APIs for Motion, which will be available for anyone to use come 10.4.
Hey, at least they didn't spell it "Xtreme"
While I've exported my important email to Thunderbird, I still have plenty of non-crucial stuff in Hotmail. It wouldn't have been the end of the world had the files been deleted, but it was pretty disconcerting none-the-less.
I finally sent them an email explaining the problem and my annoyance. I recieved a form e-mail saying I would get a response within 24 hours.... which I didn't. Though all my e-mails have stayed intact so far... but it's only been a few days. If the problem doesn't come back, it seems to imply the problem is fixable.
On top of that, as you mentioned, there were also many internal issues. So I wouldn't say that disproves my point.
Sports Night (a completely unrelated show) also lasted only 2 seasons, yet was critically acclaimed and won 3 emmys. Everyone I've made watch it loved it. So merely running 2 seasons doesn't necessarily communicate how people feel about a show.
"Our user interface software is completely X11/OpenGL based and only relies on features used in Quake."
I knew Shrek always looked familiar, but I could never put my finger on it!!
This didn't have a GI Joe type plot, it was serious, and had serious plotlines. When characters died, they weren't forgotten in the next episode... it would shake the troops up and they would remember said character(s). I personally loved the series for its visual elements, but even moreso for its plot.
I think the problem with FF was not so much the fact that it was a serious plot in an animation, but simply that it was a plot that didn't particularly interest people, plain and simple. I'm sure the same plot wouldn't have worked so well even if it were live action.
My two cents.
Honda Insight
2003 Honda Civic Hybrid
My Celica actually weighs in at around 200lbs less than the Civic Hybrid (actual difference is dependent on which model and transmision you get in the Civic). I didn't see mention of this guy's transmission (manual or CVT), but I've got a 5-speed manual.
This raises a few questions in my mind... first off, why exactly am I getting better mileage than this guy?? Is it largely the weight? Is it more efficient for my 140hp engine to do 70mph than for that 85-87hp engine to try to carry even more weight at that speed??
I'm thrilled I get the mileage that I do, but this just seems a little curious. Maybe I'm just too eager to believe the hype about hydrids.
I introduce this document as reference.
According to this, a PowerPC 970FX (the G5's being used in Apple's Xserves and the chip that will be in Apple's desktops this year) uses ~24.5W at 2.0ghz. So two of these are still only using half the wattage of a single Prescott chip, and obviously they can perform, too.
So yes, many of the chips he mentioned are not performance oriented, but the PowerPC 970FX certainly is, and it's safe to say it has made huge headway in power efficiency.
Um, that's probably why the poster didn't list the latest Pentium 4's in the CPUs he named. He didn't say ALL CPUs had any type of focus on power savings... let's stick to what's actually being discussed.
Wow, I never realized that Tony Fadell, who worked briefly at RealNetworks, which is led by Rob Glaser, who of course developed the Rhapsody music service, was the one responsible for leading the iPod design team, whom developed the iPod, which has more computing power than an early mac, in just six months, or that you could have this many commas holding a sentence together, for this long, and not think back to yourself, "Perhaps this sentence is a bit long", or something to that effect, so now you can flame away, if you want.
On another note, I haven't been keeping up with my 3D like I used to, but some software, such as Renderman, can do distributed rendering on a single frame, and then automagically merge the results. I don't think Brazil offers this yet (could be wrong?), but they're working on it (under the name of Banshee, bottom of page. If your renderer of choice offers such a feature, you could build some serious distributed rendering for $12k.
A 52x drive will reach a max speed of under 8megs/sec... so if you mean burning two 52x cd's on a single bus or burning a single 52x cd with the hard drive on the same bus, either way you're only talking ~15megs/sec -max-. Nowhere close to ATA66's max specs, let alone ATA100 or ATA133. And while I understand that being on the same bus leads to the need for devices to take turns talking, that happens fast enough that the burner's buffer can easily handle the penalties.
I think most buffer underruns are due to the hard drive not being able to keep up for whatever reason.... whether it's because it's just not fast enough or because it's being accessed by multiple resources at the same time, or maybe the files being burnt are severely fragmented. If the drive can't keep up, it can't keep up... taking a device off of it's channel isn't going to help, since the bus is nowhere near being saturated.
Just my two cents :)
Since when have optical drives been needing more bandwidth than PATA can offer?? A friend of mine has TWO 52x cd burners setup on ATA 100, and can burn full speed on both of them simultaneously. So, um, how exactly do SATA optical drives solve anything? (note that I am all in favor of SATA opticals, if for no other reason than the cabling)
Harvey Smith left and Randy Smith is no longer the lead designer on Thief. And they're still not related.
But that's only the beginning. Some games allow players to be even more proactive... ie: voting. Believe me, when you're playing fair and square and every few minutes a vote comes up to kick and/or ban you from the server..... not my idea of fun. Especially if you actually DO get kicked. Talk about killing the mood.
Yeah, it's flattering in a way. But it gets old FAST.
But using a database DOES provide advantages, as stated in the article. Mostly speed advantages, but also the ability to do live backups. If you try backing up an online (as in live) CVS server's files, there's nothing stopping people from doing commits, thus possibly botching your backup (you're no longer backing up the files you thought you were).
And when it comes down to it, backups are really where your safety lies. In the last CVS project I worked on, the repository was hosed twice. Once due to a careless admin, and once due to the hard drive dying. While we had some down time, virtually no work was lost, largely due to our nightly backups. The fact that CVS stored its data as plain text files certainly didn't protect us.
If you're running Windows, it's at least worth checking out. http://www.thebrain.com
Also, while Zalman PSUs may be quiet, they're not on the same level as the SilenX. The parent article notes that the SilenX is "much quiter" than a PSU which he reviewed as being "much quieter" than the Zalman. So the SilenX is essentially "much, much quieter" than the Zalman :) Seriously though, Zalman's specs rate their 400W PSU at 20-30db. SilenX's is rated at ~11.5-14db. If you're going for true silence, 30db compared to 14db will make a huge difference.
Tom's Hardware has a few PSU roundups (older, newer) which include noise level testing... as you can see, other "silent" PSUs are much louder than 14db (nor do said PSUs even claim to be that quiet). At best, you're talking about PSU's doing 25 (low load) to 33db (full load), and they tend to get louder as the wattage rating increases. All SilenX PSUs (I believe they go up to 600watta) are rated around 11.5 (minimum) to 14 (maximum) db. So it really is a big difference. I know my "silent" PSU which is around 30db is -much- louder than my 80mm case fan which claims to be 20db.
Anyhow, literally EVERY SilenX review I've read has said they a) really are quiet (much quieter than other "silent" PSUs, apparently) and b) are very high quality.
Also note that you have to buy them from www.silenx.com or (soon) NewEgg. You'll see "SilenX 14db" PSUs on Pricewatch and such, but they are imposter PSUs of inferior build made by a company named Ahanix, whom SilenX is currently involved in lawsuits with regarding this issue, and whose site is a blatant rip-off of Samsung's.