Normally I wouldn't bother, but I remember frequenting l0pht's old site back in 96/97, so I put it through the Way Back Machine. Turns out they had an archive from 1996 when l0pht was still offering "hard to find files from the computer underground and beyond" on their front page.
Exercise would be my first recommendation. It will keep your sleep habits in line pretty well. Physical activity seems to be what's missing from most of our lives today. If I don't make it to the gym, my schedule will slip quickly to 1AM, 2AM, 4AM...which isn't good since I left college years ago;-)
The other thing I would recommend is finding a buddy to go do exercise with you. It helps if you're both accountable to each other for showing up. And just having someone to do it with you doesn't hurt. This carries over to work as well.
I'd imagine you sit there thinking about a million things, but you can't concentrate on what you need to do because it seems like you can put it off. The later, you wind up with many things to do and little time. You get a bunch of work done at this point, but there's so much you have trouble keeping up with it. I had the very same problem in college.
Another thing that might help you is getting a job a couple hours a week. As long as I've had something constant to do, it's kept me going. Just don't get something that follows you home...go there, do your work and then head to class or do some homework.
Honestly, part of it is just sheer will as well. You have to resist the urge to just read a page and put stuff down. Set a bedtime for yourself and a wake up time for yourself and follow them.
That's about the best advice I can give you. If you do have some mental disorder such as ADHD only a psychologist can diagnose it. Although many times it's over diagnosed.
Why does every human need 100 IP addresses? Home routers seem to solve a lot of the problems. A simple IP Masq fix...
As for the days of every appliance in our homes having an IP... I think that dream of the late 90s has been shelved for a while. It'll probably be decades, if ever, before our fridges are calling up to get food delivered...
The average home generally has a couple PCs / laptops...maybe an XBox or PS2 connected to net.
I'm a Mac user myself. But Virtual PC has it's place. Alot of my job entails Visual C++ 6 programming, so being able to run that is nice.
I don't feel I'm betraying Mac because of it. Besides, how can you betray an inanimate object?
There is a good article about fanatacism over computers. In reality they're just tools to help us accomplish an end. Whether it be saving the world, or getting that file off my digital camera and sending it to Aunt Sally.
Some people get attached to them, fight wars over them, etc... but in the end there are different computers, many capable of doing a job. Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, IRIX...whatever. All are pretty decent.
If running Windows on Linux lets them do whatever they need to do, then who are we to criticize them?
The other special feature is GigaRec, which enables the PlexWriter to squeeze up to 40% more data than normal onto a piece of media. The process works by shortening the length of the pits being written to the disc; shorter pits means more pits fit on the disc, and more pits means more data. The problem, of course, is that because these pits are shorter than the standard for data or audio CDs, compatibility with other drives may be hit or miss. Plextor does guarantee that the PlexWriter Premium will read any GigaRec disc, but they make no guarantees about other drives.
So basically this will never catch on. The standard CD format is waaay to entrenched to be replaced. Other than for backup purposes, why would you want to burn a disc that's almost guaranteed not to work on another CD-ROM? The last thing need is another incompatible format of disc to worry about.. (DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc)
SecuRec
Now that we've evaluated the drives' performance, let's take a look at a couple of the features that make the PlexWriter Premium so special. The first of these is SecuRec, which encrypts data before it is written onto the CD. You specify a password before beginning the write process, and once the CD is written, you need that password in order to view the recorded data. If the password is ever lost, so is the data.
There are a couple of limitations with the SecuRec feature. First, discs need to be recorded in DAO (disc-at-once) mode, so you can't burn multiple sessions of encrypted data, and as you might expect, only data CDs (not audio CDs) are supported. Second, in order to view the data, you need a copy of Plextor's SecuViewer software. This isn't that big a deal for Windows users, as the program is freely downloadable from the Plextor website. Linux and/or Mac users, however, are out of luck as far as I know, as SecuViewer isn't available for operating systems other than Windows. Just so there's no confusion, I'll point out that while you need a PlexWriter Premium drive to create a SecuRec disc, any CD-ROM drive can read one with the SecuViewer software and the proper password.
How this is better than a secure install program has got me... There's no real innovation here except that the encryption is moved to the CD Burning software. There are already quite a few tools to build installers that encrypt the installers and prompt for password to extract/install.
Basically it's just encrypting and then zipping except using a proprietary system....
Apple used FreeBSD as the platform on which to build the Mac OS X. However O'Reilly is right on in this case. Besides the modifications to the core kernal / toolset the Open Source community doesn't get much back.
It's not so much a case of them not distributing, but they don't distribute anything that was originally open source other than the core OS. Aqua, Quartz, Carbon, the Classic Environment and all the great apps (iTunes, Safari, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, etc, etc) are all proprietary.
So Apple gets the core of their OS devleoped for them by Open Source community. I'm not saying they don't give back, but they do get quite a bit out of the deal. And get to sell their software (&hardware) to boot.
In the end I guess Open Source is just a two edge sword.
Having read the article twice I'm not qutie sure I get O'Reilly's point.
What he's saying is correct, but it's not exactly earthshattering in anyway. Amazon puts together some services that rock. They patent them. And then they sell the service to others. That just seems logical.
How that ties into driving Open Source I'm not sure. If they're only devleoping proprietary things (services) on top of an open source backbone, they're not really driving Open Source devlopment. Just because I compile my program with gcc or use a perl script doesn't mean I'm driving open source development in anyway. They're just using it as the foundation to build on.
Open Source is by definition controlled by anyone who wants it to be. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like he's just stating the obvious and it has little to do with Open Source.
Actually it's not a Microsoft issue. Well, it is, but not quite how you describe it. They're not getting anything from Microsoft or migrating towards DirectX. They're actually very big proponents of OpenGL. However most of their customers develop on Windows Platforms.
The problem is more related to the fact we're one of the few people who actually use the Linux version of their Renderer. We own a site license and do some debugging for them, but it really doesn't cover their cost to produce it. They can maintain it because there is a lot of code reuse between Windows and Linux due to the fact of using OpenGL.
It sort of works like this:
We don't develop our own renderer because we'd end up paying 3-4 software engineers 80-100K a year to develop and maintain it. Where as we can obtain a site license for about $75,000 flat. We upgrade about once every two years to a new major release and get fixes for free inbetween, so it's about $27,500 a year to maintain the IG. So there's a rather sizable cost savings to using a pre-made solution and not making our own. ($27,500 per year vs. $240,000 -> $400,000) Of course we the cost we pay is that they can in a way dictate our architecture.
The problem for them is that we're one of the two customers who use the renderer on Linux. So they're expending quite a bit of resources for us, and on one other company. Where as they have quite a few Windows customers. So for them it's beneficial to migrate to Windows only and utilize their resources there.
In this case, they're doing what their clients are requesting. Developing an IG to meet their needs, ie: on Windows. (at this point the debate between MS technologies becomes academic. Most simulation vendors couldn't care less if the thing uses OpenGL, DirectX, or whatnot as the back end API. They're just interested in "can it render my X GB database at X Hz? does it support the special effects I need? how easy is the API to use? how many channels can i control simultaneously from a single process?") Although for the time being, they're supporting the API on Linux, so we can keep our simulation on Linux and migrate the rendering channels to Windows.
In the end though, it's still looks advantageous for us to move over to Windows. All the engineers who develop / maintain the simulation are still with us. They're very familiar with it's inner workings and most are familiar with both Windows and Linux. So for us it seems more beneficial to eventually migrate our simulation to Windows.
The real problem we see in the future is that if Linux doesn't catch on and continue to provide reason for companies like nVidia to continue Linux development, they may drop support for their drivers on future cards, just as our IG vendor is starting to. For us that's not a good gamble. We can't afford to get stuck using generation old technology. We push our hardware to the limit as it is.
The one great benefit of moving to Linux and the PC is that we can immediately take advantage of new hardware as it becomes available for relatively little cost. It's now starting to look as though we may need to move towards Windows to continue to have that benefit.
On the horizon right now I see PCI Express (PCI-X) as technology that we'd want to take advantage of. Especially in conjunction with Serial ATA (yes, you can get that right now for PCI). In that migration, will Linux drivers be available for PCI-X cards we use? Now that Apple has gone to the desktop with 64-bit, the PC will probably see that transition within 2 years. How ready is Linux to deal with Intel and AMD's 64-bit offerings?
I've rambled on, but you can see some of the questions that we ask ourselves as we consider our development path. Also some of the reasons why we've come down the path we have.
An IG is an Image Generator. It's basically just a 3D render that is slaved to some other processes sometimes via ethernet.
Instead of dealing with all the rendering code yourself, you call into an API and say something like:
model MyCar; InstantiateModel(MyCar,"/home/databases/co mmon/MyC ar.flt", X, Y, Z, Heading, Pitch, Roll);
Relocate(MyCar, X, Y, Z); Rotate(MyCar, Heading, Pitch, Roll);
then you can do special effects like:
SpecialEffect(MyCar, ON_FIRE);
It comes with 3D models for doing things like fire, smoke, missile trails, etc. You just tell it you want it on fire. Maybe pass an offset from your model or a size of the fire, etc.
Those are of course just examples... not a real API. Generally it takes in to account quite a bit more, such as velocity and acceleration vectors for dead reckoning until the next update is received, etc..
While I read slashdot daily, and have an appreciation for Open Source software, I think a lot of you miss the point. I work for a company that builds 3D simulations. For years we used IRIX. SGI was simply the best graphics rendering stations you could buy. We still have some fridge sized boxes, an old Octane, and a couple O2s sitting around.
However, we've moved to Linux. We use Red Hat 7.2. Why? Because Open Source is great? Beacause we're giving back to the community? No. Because Linux allowed us to reuse all our simulation code that was built using Unix interoperabilty on more modern hardware, cheaper. We can go grab a GeForce4 Ti 4600 off the shelf, get a 8MB Buffered IDE HD, and Dual Athlon chips and they'll eat those O2s / Octanes, and even the old fridge sized Onyx. Slap six of them together and you've got a six channel renderer. We did have to change our IG software. We were using Performer, now we use a third party developed renderer.
For years our the company that developed our renderer has supported both Linux and Windows. Now they only support rendering on Windows. They still support the API for Linux though. So now we're looking three options:
1) Devoting time to developing our own Linux based renderer.
2) Continuing to use their API on Linux, but to control chanels on Windows boxes.
3) Converting the simulation over to Windows and dropping Linux.
At this point option 1 is pretty much out. While we have the in house skills to develop an IG, it would take several years to build something to meet our requirements (needs texture paging, terrain paging, must handle terrain sizes in excess of 2GB, etc).
Option 2 looks attractive because it's the least work. And will probably be what's implemented in the short run.
Option 3 will probably be our long run solution as we've had some trouble with nVidia and ATI drivers on Linux. While they do work in most cases, they don't seem quite as robust as their Windows counterparts. Ie with the Quadro cards...
Now if you go back and read over these things, what we considered in deciding what to use were:
1) time
2) cost
3) ease of implementation
You'll note we never said anything about Open Source. When we first moved to Linux we looked at Open Source issues. We use open source development tools. GCC, GIMP, ImageMagick, Glade... But it had nothing to do with the fact they were open source. If they had been sold to us like IRIX was and performed the same functionality we would have bought them.
We're interested in shipping our product, making $$$, and that's what managers are concerned with. The debate over whether or not we use Open Source software is irrelevent. The questions that have to be answered are how it would impact cost, time to delivery, learning curve. The other thing is, you shouldn't expect businesses to go out and just switch to Open Source because you wrote a persuasive article. If there is a system in place, it probably won't be replaced until it's necessary to do so. It's that whole cost thing again. Why replace something that's been paid for that works until it's necesary to do so.
If you answer that with anything other than it will make the company more $$$, or increase productivity, etc... you won't get very far with the suits.
Until Joe stops believing the bad press and 'informed' opinions such as yours, he can't overcome the first crucial hurdle to start using Linux
You make Linux sound like a bad cult. I've been using Linux since 1996 and it certainly isn't for everyone. Case in point. The Red Hat 8.0 install. I decided I would cleanse myself of the evil Microsoft and go straight over to Linux on the desktop.
Boy was I wrong. Got past the install, and low and behold the first problem was my ethernet card. The drivers it installed were crap. I'd go get new ones, but wait...I have no internet connection. Boot back into Windows... Download the only version later than that, a beta none the less. Get it compiled against the kernel source. All is good...sort of. Now I want ICQ. Whoops, no Licq build for GCC 3.0. Get the lastest daily source. Recompile. Friend sends me an MP3. XMMS doesn't do MP3s anymore in the default install. Track down the rpm. Friend ICQs me a mpg. No player... have to track to down the source for an engine and a program. Modify the compile options because GCC 3.0 now requires -libstdc++ and doesn't include it by default. Get that going. Then I decided I wanted to scan some photos. No drivers...
If the average home user can figure that out, they're not the average home user. A user should not need to do all that just to do basic tasks the computer/OS was designed for.
At this point I cursed the day I downloaded that damned Red Hat 8.0 CDs. I love Linux for development. Enigma (7.2) is wonderful. But I'll be damned if it ever becomes my desktop OS unless they fix some serious ease of use Issues. I went back to WinXP and have yet to have a single problem since. Maybe Microsoft has something going for them after all.
Generally it's $0.10 to send from your phone, $0.02 to receive on your phone.
If you get their $2.99 package that includes 100 free messages. But it counts them either way, sending or receiving. So sending you make out at $0.03 a pop. But for receiving you get screwed a penny a message.
Since I hate typing on the phone, I just use the web to send free messages to my friends and pay the $0.02 for receiving. I can still send up to 10 messages a month and receive 100 for $3.00. Turns out I rarely send any, and always receive less than 50. So figure I pay $1.00/month. That's $24 a year savings.;-)
We are geeks. This means we won't do to you we wouldn't want done to us.
Yup. That is until the guy with the dark blue suit walks in with a nice shiney case for full of $$$ and offers to buy the addresses from you. You'll look at your web server bills, scratch your chin, and BAM! Suddenly my e-mail box will get bombarded with all sorts of advertisements for viagra, breast enlargment, hair regrowth, septic system maintenance (why the fuck?!), porn of various flavors, virii from n00b spamers who get infected and then the virus mass mails everyone on their spam list, and of course MLM schemes.
This is exactly why I keep a junk account at yahoo. Everyone promises to keep my address confidential, but some how I get 80-100 spams a day there. That's why my personal address is well...personal. Only my friends get it. And I have never gotten a spam on that account. Ever.
I don't really need it honestly. I have a desktop at work with net access. I have broadband at home for net access. I have a laptop I take with me on business travel. The hotel will definetly have dialup at a minimum. (I have yet to run into a case where they haven't and generally find broadband.) The places I work while on travel have net access.
The only place I don't have it is when I go somewhere with friends or to the store, etc.. in which case I don't want to bring the f-ing net with me. And people can still call me on my cell / text message me.
So why would I want to catch that boat?
Ever get the feeling...
on
Is 3G Irrelevant?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
That technological development was seriously outpacing consumer need?
I admit a lot of these things are interesting, but just not practical. For instance, downloadable java games. I know atleast 25 people with cell phones... none of them play games on it. Why would you? Can't wait until you get home to your PC/PS2/XBox?
Sending pictures is pretty cool, but again it's very rare that I need to send someone a photo RIGHT NOW! I'll just get my digital camera, snap a photo, and e-mail it.
The only application on Cell phones I use besides actually talking is text messaging... that's rare, and definetly not 3G...
Unless said software is classified, in which you'll also get your security clearance permanently revoked. And you'll get to know the FBI more intimately than you would like.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally I wouldn't bother, but I remember frequenting l0pht's old site back in 96/97, so I put it through the Way Back Machine. Turns out they had an archive from 1996 when l0pht was still offering "hard to find files from the computer underground and beyond" on their front page.
Nope, no crack smokin' tonight. Their old site www.l0pht.com still forwards to @stake. But I'd say it's not just their company name that changed.
Things have changed a bit around their shop since they "turned pro" and stopped being L0pht Heavy Industries.
Guess being security expert puts things in a different light than being a group hackers.
never heard of *67 eh?
SLASHDOTTERS ATTACK!
Actually that's:
In Democratic America, GNU Mirrors you.
Exercise would be my first recommendation. It will keep your sleep habits in line pretty well. Physical activity seems to be what's missing from most of our lives today. If I don't make it to the gym, my schedule will slip quickly to 1AM, 2AM, 4AM...which isn't good since I left college years ago ;-)
The other thing I would recommend is finding a buddy to go do exercise with you. It helps if you're both accountable to each other for showing up. And just having someone to do it with you doesn't hurt. This carries over to work as well.
I'd imagine you sit there thinking about a million things, but you can't concentrate on what you need to do because it seems like you can put it off. The later, you wind up with many things to do and little time. You get a bunch of work done at this point, but there's so much you have trouble keeping up with it. I had the very same problem in college.
Another thing that might help you is getting a job a couple hours a week. As long as I've had something constant to do, it's kept me going. Just don't get something that follows you home...go there, do your work and then head to class or do some homework.
Honestly, part of it is just sheer will as well. You have to resist the urge to just read a page and put stuff down. Set a bedtime for yourself and a wake up time for yourself and follow them.
That's about the best advice I can give you. If you do have some mental disorder such as ADHD only a psychologist can diagnose it. Although many times it's over diagnosed.
Why does every human need 100 IP addresses? Home routers seem to solve a lot of the problems. A simple IP Masq fix...
As for the days of every appliance in our homes having an IP... I think that dream of the late 90s has been shelved for a while. It'll probably be decades, if ever, before our fridges are calling up to get food delivered...
The average home generally has a couple PCs / laptops...maybe an XBox or PS2 connected to net.
I'm a Mac user myself. But Virtual PC has it's place. Alot of my job entails Visual C++ 6 programming, so being able to run that is nice.
I don't feel I'm betraying Mac because of it. Besides, how can you betray an inanimate object? There is a good article about fanatacism over computers. In reality they're just tools to help us accomplish an end. Whether it be saving the world, or getting that file off my digital camera and sending it to Aunt Sally.
Some people get attached to them, fight wars over them, etc... but in the end there are different computers, many capable of doing a job. Windows, Linux, BSD, OS X, IRIX...whatever. All are pretty decent.
If running Windows on Linux lets them do whatever they need to do, then who are we to criticize them?
Just like you can't get into the XBOX...
Just not at the same time.
GigaRec
The other special feature is GigaRec, which enables the PlexWriter to squeeze up to 40% more data than normal onto a piece of media. The process works by shortening the length of the pits being written to the disc; shorter pits means more pits fit on the disc, and more pits means more data. The problem, of course, is that because these pits are shorter than the standard for data or audio CDs, compatibility with other drives may be hit or miss. Plextor does guarantee that the PlexWriter Premium will read any GigaRec disc, but they make no guarantees about other drives.
So basically this will never catch on. The standard CD format is waaay to entrenched to be replaced. Other than for backup purposes, why would you want to burn a disc that's almost guaranteed not to work on another CD-ROM? The last thing need is another incompatible format of disc to worry about.. (DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM, etc)
SecuRec
Now that we've evaluated the drives' performance, let's take a look at a couple of the features that make the PlexWriter Premium so special. The first of these is SecuRec, which encrypts data before it is written onto the CD. You specify a password before beginning the write process, and once the CD is written, you need that password in order to view the recorded data. If the password is ever lost, so is the data.
There are a couple of limitations with the SecuRec feature. First, discs need to be recorded in DAO (disc-at-once) mode, so you can't burn multiple sessions of encrypted data, and as you might expect, only data CDs (not audio CDs) are supported. Second, in order to view the data, you need a copy of Plextor's SecuViewer software. This isn't that big a deal for Windows users, as the program is freely downloadable from the Plextor website. Linux and/or Mac users, however, are out of luck as far as I know, as SecuViewer isn't available for operating systems other than Windows. Just so there's no confusion, I'll point out that while you need a PlexWriter Premium drive to create a SecuRec disc, any CD-ROM drive can read one with the SecuViewer software and the proper password.
How this is better than a secure install program has got me... There's no real innovation here except that the encryption is moved to the CD Burning software. There are already quite a few tools to build installers that encrypt the installers and prompt for password to extract/install.
Basically it's just encrypting and then zipping except using a proprietary system....
I think a good example of this is Mac OS X.
Apple used FreeBSD as the platform on which to build the Mac OS X. However O'Reilly is right on in this case. Besides the modifications to the core kernal / toolset the Open Source community doesn't get much back.
It's not so much a case of them not distributing, but they don't distribute anything that was originally open source other than the core OS. Aqua, Quartz, Carbon, the Classic Environment and all the great apps (iTunes, Safari, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, etc, etc) are all proprietary.
So Apple gets the core of their OS devleoped for them by Open Source community. I'm not saying they don't give back, but they do get quite a bit out of the deal. And get to sell their software (&hardware) to boot.
In the end I guess Open Source is just a two edge sword.
Having read the article twice I'm not qutie sure I get O'Reilly's point.
What he's saying is correct, but it's not exactly earthshattering in anyway. Amazon puts together some services that rock. They patent them. And then they sell the service to others. That just seems logical.
How that ties into driving Open Source I'm not sure. If they're only devleoping proprietary things (services) on top of an open source backbone, they're not really driving Open Source devlopment. Just because I compile my program with gcc or use a perl script doesn't mean I'm driving open source development in anyway. They're just using it as the foundation to build on.
Open Source is by definition controlled by anyone who wants it to be. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems like he's just stating the obvious and it has little to do with Open Source.
Actually I was offered a job at Sprint (Networking division) in 1999. They wanted a 2 year no-compete. One of the reasons I didn't take the job.
Actually it's not a Microsoft issue. Well, it is, but not quite how you describe it. They're not getting anything from Microsoft or migrating towards DirectX. They're actually very big proponents of OpenGL. However most of their customers develop on Windows Platforms.
The problem is more related to the fact we're one of the few people who actually use the Linux version of their Renderer. We own a site license and do some debugging for them, but it really doesn't cover their cost to produce it. They can maintain it because there is a lot of code reuse between Windows and Linux due to the fact of using OpenGL.
It sort of works like this:
We don't develop our own renderer because we'd end up paying 3-4 software engineers 80-100K a year to develop and maintain it. Where as we can obtain a site license for about $75,000 flat. We upgrade about once every two years to a new major release and get fixes for free inbetween, so it's about $27,500 a year to maintain the IG. So there's a rather sizable cost savings to using a pre-made solution and not making our own. ($27,500 per year vs. $240,000 -> $400,000) Of course we the cost we pay is that they can in a way dictate our architecture.
The problem for them is that we're one of the two customers who use the renderer on Linux. So they're expending quite a bit of resources for us, and on one other company. Where as they have quite a few Windows customers. So for them it's beneficial to migrate to Windows only and utilize their resources there.
In this case, they're doing what their clients are requesting. Developing an IG to meet their needs, ie: on Windows. (at this point the debate between MS technologies becomes academic. Most simulation vendors couldn't care less if the thing uses OpenGL, DirectX, or whatnot as the back end API. They're just interested in "can it render my X GB database at X Hz? does it support the special effects I need? how easy is the API to use? how many channels can i control simultaneously from a single process?") Although for the time being, they're supporting the API on Linux, so we can keep our simulation on Linux and migrate the rendering channels to Windows.
In the end though, it's still looks advantageous for us to move over to Windows. All the engineers who develop / maintain the simulation are still with us. They're very familiar with it's inner workings and most are familiar with both Windows and Linux. So for us it seems more beneficial to eventually migrate our simulation to Windows.
The real problem we see in the future is that if Linux doesn't catch on and continue to provide reason for companies like nVidia to continue Linux development, they may drop support for their drivers on future cards, just as our IG vendor is starting to. For us that's not a good gamble. We can't afford to get stuck using generation old technology. We push our hardware to the limit as it is.
The one great benefit of moving to Linux and the PC is that we can immediately take advantage of new hardware as it becomes available for relatively little cost. It's now starting to look as though we may need to move towards Windows to continue to have that benefit.
On the horizon right now I see PCI Express (PCI-X) as technology that we'd want to take advantage of. Especially in conjunction with Serial ATA (yes, you can get that right now for PCI). In that migration, will Linux drivers be available for PCI-X cards we use? Now that Apple has gone to the desktop with 64-bit, the PC will probably see that transition within 2 years. How ready is Linux to deal with Intel and AMD's 64-bit offerings?
I've rambled on, but you can see some of the questions that we ask ourselves as we consider our development path. Also some of the reasons why we've come down the path we have.
An IG is an Image Generator. It's basically just a 3D render that is slaved to some other processes sometimes via ethernet.
o mmon/MyC ar.flt", X, Y, Z, Heading, Pitch, Roll);
Instead of dealing with all the rendering code yourself, you call into an API and say something like:
model MyCar;
InstantiateModel(MyCar,"/home/databases/c
Relocate(MyCar, X, Y, Z);
Rotate(MyCar, Heading, Pitch, Roll);
then you can do special effects like:
SpecialEffect(MyCar, ON_FIRE);
It comes with 3D models for doing things like fire, smoke, missile trails, etc. You just tell it you want it on fire. Maybe pass an offset from your model or a size of the fire, etc.
Those are of course just examples... not a real API. Generally it takes in to account quite a bit more, such as velocity and acceleration vectors for dead reckoning until the next update is received, etc..
While I read slashdot daily, and have an appreciation for Open Source software, I think a lot of you miss the point. I work for a company that builds 3D simulations. For years we used IRIX. SGI was simply the best graphics rendering stations you could buy. We still have some fridge sized boxes, an old Octane, and a couple O2s sitting around.
However, we've moved to Linux. We use Red Hat 7.2. Why? Because Open Source is great? Beacause we're giving back to the community? No. Because Linux allowed us to reuse all our simulation code that was built using Unix interoperabilty on more modern hardware, cheaper. We can go grab a GeForce4 Ti 4600 off the shelf, get a 8MB Buffered IDE HD, and Dual Athlon chips and they'll eat those O2s / Octanes, and even the old fridge sized Onyx. Slap six of them together and you've got a six channel renderer. We did have to change our IG software. We were using Performer, now we use a third party developed renderer.
For years our the company that developed our renderer has supported both Linux and Windows. Now they only support rendering on Windows. They still support the API for Linux though. So now we're looking three options:
1) Devoting time to developing our own Linux based renderer.
2) Continuing to use their API on Linux, but to control chanels on Windows boxes.
3) Converting the simulation over to Windows and dropping Linux.
At this point option 1 is pretty much out. While we have the in house skills to develop an IG, it would take several years to build something to meet our requirements (needs texture paging, terrain paging, must handle terrain sizes in excess of 2GB, etc).
Option 2 looks attractive because it's the least work. And will probably be what's implemented in the short run.
Option 3 will probably be our long run solution as we've had some trouble with nVidia and ATI drivers on Linux. While they do work in most cases, they don't seem quite as robust as their Windows counterparts. Ie with the Quadro cards...
Now if you go back and read over these things, what we considered in deciding what to use were:
1) time
2) cost
3) ease of implementation
You'll note we never said anything about Open Source. When we first moved to Linux we looked at Open Source issues. We use open source development tools. GCC, GIMP, ImageMagick, Glade... But it had nothing to do with the fact they were open source. If they had been sold to us like IRIX was and performed the same functionality we would have bought them.
We're interested in shipping our product, making $$$, and that's what managers are concerned with. The debate over whether or not we use Open Source software is irrelevent. The questions that have to be answered are how it would impact cost, time to delivery, learning curve. The other thing is, you shouldn't expect businesses to go out and just switch to Open Source because you wrote a persuasive article. If there is a system in place, it probably won't be replaced until it's necessary to do so. It's that whole cost thing again. Why replace something that's been paid for that works until it's necesary to do so.
If you answer that with anything other than it will make the company more $$$, or increase productivity, etc... you won't get very far with the suits.
Until Joe stops believing the bad press and 'informed' opinions such as yours, he can't overcome the first crucial hurdle to start using Linux
You make Linux sound like a bad cult. I've been using Linux since 1996 and it certainly isn't for everyone. Case in point. The Red Hat 8.0 install. I decided I would cleanse myself of the evil Microsoft and go straight over to Linux on the desktop.
Boy was I wrong. Got past the install, and low and behold the first problem was my ethernet card. The drivers it installed were crap. I'd go get new ones, but wait...I have no internet connection. Boot back into Windows... Download the only version later than that, a beta none the less. Get it compiled against the kernel source. All is good...sort of. Now I want ICQ. Whoops, no Licq build for GCC 3.0. Get the lastest daily source. Recompile. Friend sends me an MP3. XMMS doesn't do MP3s anymore in the default install. Track down the rpm. Friend ICQs me a mpg. No player... have to track to down the source for an engine and a program. Modify the compile options because GCC 3.0 now requires -libstdc++ and doesn't include it by default. Get that going. Then I decided I wanted to scan some photos. No drivers...
If the average home user can figure that out, they're not the average home user. A user should not need to do all that just to do basic tasks the computer/OS was designed for.
At this point I cursed the day I downloaded that damned Red Hat 8.0 CDs. I love Linux for development. Enigma (7.2) is wonderful. But I'll be damned if it ever becomes my desktop OS unless they fix some serious ease of use Issues. I went back to WinXP and have yet to have a single problem since. Maybe Microsoft has something going for them after all.
So you're saying you car gets 49.5 feet on 63 gallons of gas?
I'm calling the EPA...
I wasn't really trying to correct anything. Just adding additional information.
Actually Verizon's packages are a bit sketchy.
;-)
Generally it's $0.10 to send from your phone, $0.02 to receive on your phone.
If you get their $2.99 package that includes 100 free messages. But it counts them either way, sending or receiving. So sending you make out at $0.03 a pop. But for receiving you get screwed a penny a message.
Since I hate typing on the phone, I just use the web to send free messages to my friends and pay the $0.02 for receiving. I can still send up to 10 messages a month and receive 100 for $3.00. Turns out I rarely send any, and always receive less than 50. So figure I pay $1.00/month. That's $24 a year savings.
Why you may ask?
We are geeks. This means we won't do to you we wouldn't want done to us.
Yup. That is until the guy with the dark blue suit walks in with a nice shiney case for full of $$$ and offers to buy the addresses from you. You'll look at your web server bills, scratch your chin, and BAM! Suddenly my e-mail box will get bombarded with all sorts of advertisements for viagra, breast enlargment, hair regrowth, septic system maintenance (why the fuck?!), porn of various flavors, virii from n00b spamers who get infected and then the virus mass mails everyone on their spam list, and of course MLM schemes.
This is exactly why I keep a junk account at yahoo. Everyone promises to keep my address confidential, but some how I get 80-100 spams a day there. That's why my personal address is well...personal. Only my friends get it. And I have never gotten a spam on that account. Ever.
Because the cost to benefit is way out of whack.
I don't really need it honestly. I have a desktop at work with net access. I have broadband at home for net access. I have a laptop I take with me on business travel. The hotel will definetly have dialup at a minimum. (I have yet to run into a case where they haven't and generally find broadband.) The places I work while on travel have net access.
The only place I don't have it is when I go somewhere with friends or to the store, etc.. in which case I don't want to bring the f-ing net with me. And people can still call me on my cell / text message me.
So why would I want to catch that boat?
That technological development was seriously outpacing consumer need?
I admit a lot of these things are interesting, but just not practical. For instance, downloadable java games. I know atleast 25 people with cell phones... none of them play games on it. Why would you? Can't wait until you get home to your PC/PS2/XBox?
Sending pictures is pretty cool, but again it's very rare that I need to send someone a photo RIGHT NOW! I'll just get my digital camera, snap a photo, and e-mail it.
The only application on Cell phones I use besides actually talking is text messaging... that's rare, and definetly not 3G...
Unless said software is classified, in which you'll also get your security clearance permanently revoked. And you'll get to know the FBI more intimately than you would like.