back in high-school I enjoyed playing Doom and Doom2 all the way through using only the bazooka. I played everything else straight, no cheating on health or keys, just infinite ammo, used only for the bazooka.
I tell you -- it's HARD that way, since shooting somebody too close would hurt you too. Long hallways became dangerous territory.
Plus, I got to hear the sickening gib noise *constantly*.
I do a lot of work requiring realistic physics simulation ( using the Open Dynamics Engine ) -- I don't have the expertise or knowledge to attempt to vectorize ODE, nor do I have the time ( since my work is *using* the engine, not writing it. ). What I *do* know is that ODE, internally, does massive vector operations on float arrays ( float[4] vectors/quaternions, float[16] matices, etc etc ) and it clearly would benefit from SIMD optimizations. The trouble is, all the people who do know how to write such optimizations are on the x86 platform...
Anyway, my simulations are heavily CPU bound, and any improvements that can be had for "free" will make me happy as a clam.
I feel your pain. I wrote an image metadata generator which ran as a background process, listening for additions of images in particular folders and added stuff like resolution, dimensions, etc etc to their metadata. It was pretty nifty, but I never polished it enough to release it.
I did like BeOS's Translator kit -- I wrote the PSDTranslator addon way back in 99 or so. http://bebits.com/app/1343/
Programming BeOS was nice, though it had its rough edges. When the writing was on the wall about beOS's future I went to linux and didn't look back. Fortunately 99% of my code was pure POSIX, and portable to linux, and later to Mac OS X.
Personally, I like to separate my work from my life. It's not that I like one and not the other, it's that I like them to be different.
I do work in an office, but when I work on my own projects ( robotics & AI ) I do it in a coffee shop. It works for some mindsets. For me it gives me the comfort of *not* being cooped up in my apartment. I get to be surrounded by humanity, and in the chaos of noise, people and music, somehow my mind focuses like a needle.
When I work at home, I end up just being distracted and watch a movie, or spend time with my GF.
Tiger will only be graphics intensive for machines which CoreImage supports -- and then obviously it will be a non-issue.
If you watch any of the tiger developer conference stuff from back in july (?) you'll see that Apple has done some serious optimization work for *all* Quartz graphics paths -- not just CoreImage. Stuff like bezier paths and text rendering being orders of magnitude faster even for software rendering.
Apple is not stupid. Every release of OS X has been significantly faster than the previous. This may or may not continue to be the case in the future but it's pretty clear that it will be for Tiger at least.
Anecdote: I installed Panther on my mother's Cube ( I think 450 Mhz G4, craptacular video card). It had run OS 9 beautifully, very responsive, but 10.1 was SLOOW and 10.2, while a big improvement over 10.1, was still pretty pokey. Well, 10.3 bought responsiveness back to OS 9 levels. In fact, her Cube running 10.3 was faster and more responsive than my powerbook ( 866 Mhz G4, GF4MZ video ) running 10.2.
[begin BeOS whoring] BeOS did that back in the 90's. And it Worked, and it was Good. [end BeOS whoring]
Oh, and MS has been *trying* to do WinFS for what, a decade now? Good luck to them. They've got the brains, they've got the resources: but I suspect that by this point Windows is simply too HUGE and crufty now to really make something as significant as WinFS really integrate cleanly.
Waaay back in 1994 or so when I was in highschool... I was parallel parking into a tight space when I thought to myself "IDSPISPOPD" -- or "turn off clipping".
Realized I was playing too much Doom.
Another: A couple years later in college, right after Quake 1 was released, I spent one monster 5 or 6 hour deathmatch session with a pal when he wrote "Let's get dinner". So, we leave our rooms and meet in the hall, both of us holding our hands out in front of us locked in keyboard stance. He looked at me with this sad expression and said "I have to piss, but I don't remember how".
Good times.
Re:Except a PC is in your house, not your garage
on
Adding Pizazz to Your RAM
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But that's the difference between *style* and gaudiness.
Apples have style. They're like a well dressed man in a nice suit. or a ( car-analogy ) BMW. Restrained, not fancy -- but impressive.
The gamer machines are like one of those overweight jersey guys in shiny velour jogging suits or some sort of football team jersey; they're covered in gold chains and have so much gel in their hair that the specular highlights are visible from space. Or, conversely, like a ricer honda. All cheap rims, spoilers and stickers. Absolutely tasteless.
Ah. Very true -- I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.
That said, there are companies that sell 3rd party replacement parts. I don't know to what extent they provide backup hardware. My guess is it's slim, at best.
I agree with you on everything except the short life cycles. We have a number of 1999/2000 era g4 powermacs running OS 10.2/3 happily running Illustrator CS, Photoshop CS and Quark 6.
These machines are slow by todays standards, but they *work*, and reliably. The only upgrades they've seen are extra memory and firewire hard disks.
This is a lot more than I can say about any of the > 3 year old PCs at my office. Some of those machines can barely boot XP, much less run office effectively.
It would seem that was just a really ugly screenshot. Some of their other stuff -- particularly trees and grass -- look pretty good to me.
Oh well. I don't play these games anyway. But I have been trying to add trees and grass to a game I'm writing and have found it isn't easy...
While I agree 100% it is also smart to know when 3rd parties are smarter than you.
I avoided the STL for a long time, assuming I could hack out simple, lightweight containers as I needed. Turned out I often a) Made dumb mistakes b) Wrote code that wasn't any faster than, say, std::whathaveyou, and c) Wasted time that could have been better spent on algorithms.
Stuff like the STL, Boost, etc are written by SMART people who know what they're doing. Don't assume that because it's generic it's inefficient.
That said, even if you're using 3rd party stuff, any programmer worth employing should know how to roll it himself, should the need arise.
Well, when a debug build of the simulation work I'm doing takes up nearly 500 megs of disk space for object files and other caches ( Xcode on Mac OS X ) I'd say any space available helps. And my program isn't that big, only about 49 kloc.
That said, I've got "only" a 60GB hard disc on my powerbook and with music, a few games, fuck-tons of my code, backups, etc etc etc... I've still got 30gb free.
I'm sure anyway that three or four years from now code built with full debug symbols will take ten times the space as today, and will take up the same percentage of space on my ten-times-larger drive.
Last April, when I was going about 75 mph on 495 ( Washington DC beltway ) late at night and hit a pothole the size of a beachball. It bent my rim and my tire deflated -- and then it shredded before I could pull to the shoulder. Thank heaven I didn't lose control.
Shit happens. And, I've had plenty of bike flats as well.
That said, the tweel doesn't sound like it would have helped much here; I imagine it would have been destroyed just as well.
True, true. But consider, back in the 50's or 60's car makers didn't want to install seatbelts because it implied their cars were unsafe.
Would you prefer we *not* have seat-belts, as an imperative to drive more safely?
Well, I'd like to see everybody on Windows using Firefox and Thunderbird but it isn't going to happen. They might as well have *some* officially sanctioned protection. Nothing to stop them from using the 3rd party spyware tools too.
These days I even get spam with *nothing* in it. No link, no gibberish, no porn, nothing.
WTF? How could this possibly make anybody any money?
The only thing it achieves is that it tends to make it through Apple Mail's spam filter, which is otherwise excellent. But then again, what is achieved? I don't have any clue what they're trying to hock.
As an opengl programmer, I understand, and have noticed this too. The thing is that in a way, they're showing off. They're showing how good their per-pixel specular lighting is and as a result everything gets the quasi-shiny effect.
This is almost certainly their way of saying "look how next-gen our lighting system is" since a few years ago you had to rely on the fixed pipeline for lighting textured fragments, and this resulted in very non-shiny materials.
I haven't played any of these games ( I'm on a Mac, sigh ) but I'm guessing it's really just a matter of art direction. Farcry, Painkiller, et al, have artists who Know What They're Doing. The ID team are great programmers, but their artwork looks like old Boris Valejo fantasy paintings. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But they probably could use a little breadth to their work.
Clearly, the Doom 3 engine is amazing. They just happen to have painted themselves into a dark, gloomy, *shiny* corner.
I'll wager there will be also be a black market of either old pre-palladium* computers, or illegal non-palladium chinese/taiwanese models.
Restrictive systems, be it technological, puritanical or otherwise tend to foster powerful black markets.
*For "palladium" I refer as a whole to whatever motherboard/bios DRM the manufacturers settle on. This makes me sad because I don't doubt apples will have something like this too.
Slashdot Mirror
back in high-school I enjoyed playing Doom and Doom2 all the way through using only the bazooka. I played everything else straight, no cheating on health or keys, just infinite ammo, used only for the bazooka.
I tell you -- it's HARD that way, since shooting somebody too close would hurt you too. Long hallways became dangerous territory.
Plus, I got to hear the sickening gib noise *constantly*.
That's what has me tingling!
I do a lot of work requiring realistic physics simulation ( using the Open Dynamics Engine ) -- I don't have the expertise or knowledge to attempt to vectorize ODE, nor do I have the time ( since my work is *using* the engine, not writing it. ). What I *do* know is that ODE, internally, does massive vector operations on float arrays ( float[4] vectors/quaternions, float[16] matices, etc etc ) and it clearly would benefit from SIMD optimizations. The trouble is, all the people who do know how to write such optimizations are on the x86 platform...
Anyway, my simulations are heavily CPU bound, and any improvements that can be had for "free" will make me happy as a clam.
That's it. That sounds dangerously like double-think. Report to the Ministry of Truth ( aka Guantanamo )
++good.
I feel your pain. I wrote an image metadata generator which ran as a background process, listening for additions of images in particular folders and added stuff like resolution, dimensions, etc etc to their metadata. It was pretty nifty, but I never polished it enough to release it.
I did like BeOS's Translator kit -- I wrote the PSDTranslator addon way back in 99 or so. http://bebits.com/app/1343/
Programming BeOS was nice, though it had its rough edges. When the writing was on the wall about beOS's future I went to linux and didn't look back. Fortunately 99% of my code was pure POSIX, and portable to linux, and later to Mac OS X.
Not everybody *enjoys* working from home.
;)
Personally, I like to separate my work from my life. It's not that I like one and not the other, it's that I like them to be different.
I do work in an office, but when I work on my own projects ( robotics & AI ) I do it in a coffee shop. It works for some mindsets. For me it gives me the comfort of *not* being cooped up in my apartment. I get to be surrounded by humanity, and in the chaos of noise, people and music, somehow my mind focuses like a needle.
When I work at home, I end up just being distracted and watch a movie, or spend time with my GF.
E.g., not productive
Tiger will only be graphics intensive for machines which CoreImage supports -- and then obviously it will be a non-issue.
If you watch any of the tiger developer conference stuff from back in july (?) you'll see that Apple has done some serious optimization work for *all* Quartz graphics paths -- not just CoreImage. Stuff like bezier paths and text rendering being orders of magnitude faster even for software rendering.
Apple is not stupid. Every release of OS X has been significantly faster than the previous. This may or may not continue to be the case in the future but it's pretty clear that it will be for Tiger at least.
Anecdote: I installed Panther on my mother's Cube ( I think 450 Mhz G4, craptacular video card). It had run OS 9 beautifully, very responsive, but 10.1 was SLOOW and 10.2, while a big improvement over 10.1, was still pretty pokey. Well, 10.3 bought responsiveness back to OS 9 levels. In fact, her Cube running 10.3 was faster and more responsive than my powerbook ( 866 Mhz G4, GF4MZ video ) running 10.2.
Anyway, just saying.
[begin BeOS whoring]
BeOS did that back in the 90's. And it Worked, and it was Good.
[end BeOS whoring]
Oh, and MS has been *trying* to do WinFS for what, a decade now? Good luck to them. They've got the brains, they've got the resources: but I suspect that by this point Windows is simply too HUGE and crufty now to really make something as significant as WinFS really integrate cleanly.
Again, good luck to MS.
A List Apart did it, using 100% CSS layout.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot/
Waaay back in 1994 or so when I was in highschool... I was parallel parking into a tight space when I thought to myself "IDSPISPOPD" -- or "turn off clipping".
Realized I was playing too much Doom.
Another: A couple years later in college, right after Quake 1 was released, I spent one monster 5 or 6 hour deathmatch session with a pal when he wrote "Let's get dinner". So, we leave our rooms and meet in the hall, both of us holding our hands out in front of us locked in keyboard stance. He looked at me with this sad expression and said "I have to piss, but I don't remember how".
Good times.
But that's the difference between *style* and gaudiness.
Apples have style. They're like a well dressed man in a nice suit. or a ( car-analogy ) BMW. Restrained, not fancy -- but impressive.
The gamer machines are like one of those overweight jersey guys in shiny velour jogging suits or some sort of football team jersey; they're covered in gold chains and have so much gel in their hair that the specular highlights are visible from space. Or, conversely, like a ricer honda. All cheap rims, spoilers and stickers. Absolutely tasteless.
There's a difference.
Ah. Very true -- I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.
That said, there are companies that sell 3rd party replacement parts. I don't know to what extent they provide backup hardware. My guess is it's slim, at best.
I agree with you on everything except the short life cycles. We have a number of 1999/2000 era g4 powermacs running OS 10.2/3 happily running Illustrator CS, Photoshop CS and Quark 6.
These machines are slow by todays standards, but they *work*, and reliably. The only upgrades they've seen are extra memory and firewire hard disks.
This is a lot more than I can say about any of the > 3 year old PCs at my office. Some of those machines can barely boot XP, much less run office effectively.
Mine's called "Default"... and has no password.
;)
Oh, wait... it's not mine, it's my neighbor's. That's why I don't need to pay for broadband service
It would seem that was just a really ugly screenshot. Some of their other stuff -- particularly trees and grass -- look pretty good to me. Oh well. I don't play these games anyway. But I have been trying to add trees and grass to a game I'm writing and have found it isn't easy...
I don't -- I sped up some of my code once by a factor of about 10 by going *from* std::vector to a vanilla new'd array.
But most of the time STL is shockingly fast, and correct. Just make certain you use the right access/iteration semantics for the container type.
While I agree 100% it is also smart to know when 3rd parties are smarter than you.
I avoided the STL for a long time, assuming I could hack out simple, lightweight containers as I needed. Turned out I often a) Made dumb mistakes b) Wrote code that wasn't any faster than, say, std::whathaveyou, and c) Wasted time that could have been better spent on algorithms.
Stuff like the STL, Boost, etc are written by SMART people who know what they're doing. Don't assume that because it's generic it's inefficient.
That said, even if you're using 3rd party stuff, any programmer worth employing should know how to roll it himself, should the need arise.
Well, when a debug build of the simulation work I'm doing takes up nearly 500 megs of disk space for object files and other caches ( Xcode on Mac OS X ) I'd say any space available helps. And my program isn't that big, only about 49 kloc.
That said, I've got "only" a 60GB hard disc on my powerbook and with music, a few games, fuck-tons of my code, backups, etc etc etc... I've still got 30gb free.
I'm sure anyway that three or four years from now code built with full debug symbols will take ten times the space as today, and will take up the same percentage of space on my ten-times-larger drive.
The more it changes...
Not to mention how insulting it is to call us *consumers*. I am a *customer* for f*ck's sake.
I suppose the switch from customer to consumer happened around when people stopped saying stuff like "the customer is always right".
Keep calling me a consumer, and I will no longer be your customer.
Last April, when I was going about 75 mph on 495 ( Washington DC beltway ) late at night and hit a pothole the size of a beachball. It bent my rim and my tire deflated -- and then it shredded before I could pull to the shoulder. Thank heaven I didn't lose control.
Shit happens. And, I've had plenty of bike flats as well.
That said, the tweel doesn't sound like it would have helped much here; I imagine it would have been destroyed just as well.
True, true. But consider, back in the 50's or 60's car makers didn't want to install seatbelts because it implied their cars were unsafe.
Would you prefer we *not* have seat-belts, as an imperative to drive more safely?
Well, I'd like to see everybody on Windows using Firefox and Thunderbird but it isn't going to happen. They might as well have *some* officially sanctioned protection. Nothing to stop them from using the 3rd party spyware tools too.
That said, I'll stick with OS X.
These days I even get spam with *nothing* in it. No link, no gibberish, no porn, nothing.
WTF? How could this possibly make anybody any money?
The only thing it achieves is that it tends to make it through Apple Mail's spam filter, which is otherwise excellent. But then again, what is achieved? I don't have any clue what they're trying to hock.
Shhhh! Shut up! Shut up!
As an opengl programmer, I understand, and have noticed this too. The thing is that in a way, they're showing off. They're showing how good their per-pixel specular lighting is and as a result everything gets the quasi-shiny effect.
This is almost certainly their way of saying "look how next-gen our lighting system is" since a few years ago you had to rely on the fixed pipeline for lighting textured fragments, and this resulted in very non-shiny materials.
I haven't played any of these games ( I'm on a Mac, sigh ) but I'm guessing it's really just a matter of art direction. Farcry, Painkiller, et al, have artists who Know What They're Doing. The ID team are great programmers, but their artwork looks like old Boris Valejo fantasy paintings. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But they probably could use a little breadth to their work.
Clearly, the Doom 3 engine is amazing. They just happen to have painted themselves into a dark, gloomy, *shiny* corner.
I'll wager there will be also be a black market of either old pre-palladium* computers, or illegal non-palladium chinese/taiwanese models.
Restrictive systems, be it technological, puritanical or otherwise tend to foster powerful black markets.
*For "palladium" I refer as a whole to whatever motherboard/bios DRM the manufacturers settle on. This makes me sad because I don't doubt apples will have something like this too.
I agree. I can see the worthless sitcom of the month + advertising *just fine* on my 20 year old zenith.
:/
Admittedly, I had to buy an adapter so I could watch DVDs