I've been listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast, and found it highly entertaining, especially on long tedious drives down the motorway. But I'm certainly not going to pay for it, so goodbye then Mr Gervais.
Interestingly enough, the first piece of software proposed for the ENIAC has yet to be finished. Apparently the Duke Nukem Forever team are finding backwards-compatibility with the old ENIAC hardware a bit tricky.
James Randi ( http://www.randi.org/ ) has been offering his million dollar prize for evidence of the paranormal to the people selling "magnetic wine aging" gadgets for some time. Oddly enough, none of them seem willing to take the money by showing that their wotsit does what they claim it can.
Why not just make it an optional part of the Windows installation process? Or for pre-built machines, allow the user to optionally install it when they first set up windows.
I for one can't wait for the day when every newspaper and magazine is fully loaded with animated, brightly coloured, flashing advertisements. No doubt they'll soon figure out how to incorporate sound as well.
Still, at least porn mags could be enhanced considerably with this.
ID basically says this:
A Mysterious Being created everything, using Mysterious Methods, for Mysterious Reasons which we mere mortals will never understand.
Yup, that really adds to the sum of human knowledge.
Blockbuster (in the UK) once sent a collection agency after me for £1. Seriously. It must have cost them more than that in administration. So I sent them a cheque for £1, and an angry letter giving my opinion of their crappy business practices and obvious poor management, and also noting that their bank would probably charge them almost £1 anyway for depositing the cheque.
Using OpenGL for rendering is obviously a step up for QT, but one area that could well be a problem is text rendering. Big fan of OpenGL that I am, it has to be said it's not that great at rendering text. If you want fairly simple text, it's fine, but for high-speed, anti-aliased, Cleartype-smoothed fonts it's not easy.
On Windows at least, QT used the old GDI rendering code which can do arbitrary text rendering extremely well. Replicating the speed and functionality of that is not trivial in OpenGL. You can used texture-mapped fonts, which works quite well, but if your application requires lots of fonts, at lots of sizes, you may run out of texture space quite quickly. Also, replicating Cleartype smoothing (for LCDs) is practically impossible.
I looked through the release notes for QT 4 and it appears that they will render fonts in OpenGL as filled paths. I've tried that also, and it can be VERY slow, especially if you use very smooth glyphs when building the paths to render.
That does seem to be the obvious, short-term solution. If the browser spots a mixed-code URL, show the coded/decoded versions to the user and check that they really do want to follow the suspicious link.
I tried it a few years ago, and agree that the atmosphere was great and it was wonderfully creepy.
What made me eventually get annoyed to the point of giving up on it were things like the painfully slow movement of the character, and that the "zombies" not only could all use any weapon, but were extremely accurate with them as well whereas I couldn't even use a shotgun without acquiring the appropriate experience levels.
I began to find it more frustrating than playable, and quit. Which was a shame as I was looking forward to playing what I'd heard was a classic game. I'd still be interested in a sequel, though.
I have a, um... "friend" who works at a certain company and the management have no concept at all of what is involved in writing software. If they want a new feature, they ask him (and the other developers) to simply "turn it on", as if it's already in the code and isn't going to take two weeks to write.
Every bug is considered to be a show-stopper and the developers have to drop whatever they're doing (i.e. fixing the previous round of bugs) and start on the new problem, which leaves the other bug-fixes half-finished.
Deadlines and feature-sets are decided by salespeople, with no input from the developers at all. Every requested feature is "critical to the survival of the company", even though they are often dropped or changed beyond recognition before they're half-finished.
They're a good team of programmers, all with many years of experience, but as the parent poster said, not miracle workers.
Contrary to popular belief (popular among PHBs, that is) software doesn't magically appear in perfect condition overnight.
A typical situation would go like this: "We need this feature straight away! Or the company will go under!" "Erm.. but I've still got all these bugs to fix." "Never mind them, get to work on this. How long will it take?" "Ooh, at least two weeks to even get a working prototype." "Okay".
(one week later) "What's the hold up? You said it would be finished by now!" "Erm, no I didn't, I said -" "Never mind that, we can't use it now! Take it all out of the code. You have to do this new feature instead!" "Argh!"
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I've been listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast, and found it highly entertaining, especially on long tedious drives down the motorway. But I'm certainly not going to pay for it, so goodbye then Mr Gervais.
Interestingly enough, the first piece of software proposed for the ENIAC has yet to be finished.
Apparently the Duke Nukem Forever team are finding backwards-compatibility with the old ENIAC hardware a bit tricky.
James Randi ( http://www.randi.org/ ) has been offering his million dollar prize for evidence of the paranormal to the people selling "magnetic wine aging" gadgets for some time. Oddly enough, none of them seem willing to take the money by showing that their wotsit does what they claim it can.
Meh.. I won't be happy until I have one GPU per pixel.
The Hubble must have a pretty powerful flash to light the outer planets up so well.
Atheism is not a belief system.
Obviously a very, very small Bigfoot.
Why not just make it an optional part of the Windows installation process? Or for pre-built machines, allow the user to optionally install it when they first set up windows.
Don't forget -
Hero saves the day and gets the girl.
...if it goes up to 11.
The TPS seemed to work quite well for me. Since signing up we rarely get any calls at all.
I for one can't wait for the day when every newspaper and magazine is fully loaded with animated, brightly coloured, flashing advertisements. No doubt they'll soon figure out how to incorporate sound as well.
Still, at least porn mags could be enhanced considerably with this.
Nobody will ever need more than 640k of memory!
Virgin birth, no miracle required.
Can't imagine anybody getting upset over that...
Because I often need to know Pi to a million decimal places at short notice.
ID basically says this: A Mysterious Being created everything, using Mysterious Methods, for Mysterious Reasons which we mere mortals will never understand. Yup, that really adds to the sum of human knowledge.
Blockbuster (in the UK) once sent a collection agency after me for £1. Seriously. It must have cost them more than that in administration. So I sent them a cheque for £1, and an angry letter giving my opinion of their crappy business practices and obvious poor management, and also noting that their bank would probably charge them almost £1 anyway for depositing the cheque.
Using OpenGL for rendering is obviously a step up for QT, but one area that could well be a problem is text rendering. Big fan of OpenGL that I am, it has to be said it's not that great at rendering text. If you want fairly simple text, it's fine, but for high-speed, anti-aliased, Cleartype-smoothed fonts it's not easy.
On Windows at least, QT used the old GDI rendering code which can do arbitrary text rendering extremely well. Replicating the speed and functionality of that is not trivial in OpenGL. You can used texture-mapped fonts, which works quite well, but if your application requires lots of fonts, at lots of sizes, you may run out of texture space quite quickly. Also, replicating Cleartype smoothing (for LCDs) is practically impossible.
I looked through the release notes for QT 4 and it appears that they will render fonts in OpenGL as filled paths. I've tried that also, and it can be VERY slow, especially if you use very smooth glyphs when building the paths to render.
Anyone know how they can overcome these issues?
Microsoft will start patenting all the innovations that the other browsers have developed over the years.
/* I have no idea what the hell this is supposed to do */
That does seem to be the obvious, short-term solution.
If the browser spots a mixed-code URL, show the coded/decoded versions to the user and check that they really do want to follow the suspicious link.
...there were some cheap method of cleaning the CD-ROM lens, without resorting to legal action.
I tried it a few years ago, and agree that the atmosphere was great and it was wonderfully creepy.
What made me eventually get annoyed to the point of giving up on it were things like the painfully slow movement of the character, and that the "zombies" not only could all use any weapon, but were extremely accurate with them as well whereas I couldn't even use a shotgun without acquiring the appropriate experience levels.
I began to find it more frustrating than playable, and quit. Which was a shame as I was looking forward to playing what I'd heard was a classic game. I'd still be interested in a sequel, though.
I'm waiting for the Duke Nukem Forever movie.
Anytime soon, apparently.
Agreed entirely.
I have a, um... "friend" who works at a certain company and the management have no concept at all of what is involved in writing software. If they want a new feature, they ask him (and the other developers) to simply "turn it on", as if it's already in the code and isn't going to take two weeks to write.
Every bug is considered to be a show-stopper and the developers have to drop whatever they're doing (i.e. fixing the previous round of bugs) and start on the new problem, which leaves the other bug-fixes half-finished.
Deadlines and feature-sets are decided by salespeople, with no input from the developers at all. Every requested feature is "critical to the survival of the company", even though they are often dropped or changed beyond recognition before they're half-finished.
They're a good team of programmers, all with many years of experience, but as the parent poster said, not miracle workers.
Contrary to popular belief (popular among PHBs, that is) software doesn't magically appear in perfect condition overnight.
A typical situation would go like this:
"We need this feature straight away! Or the company will go under!"
"Erm.. but I've still got all these bugs to fix."
"Never mind them, get to work on this. How long will it take?"
"Ooh, at least two weeks to even get a working prototype."
"Okay".
(one week later)
"What's the hold up? You said it would be finished by now!"
"Erm, no I didn't, I said -"
"Never mind that, we can't use it now! Take it all out of the code. You have to do this new feature instead!"
"Argh!"
(rinse and repeat)