There Fripp goes, blowing my mind again! That man _rules_. Fripp on industry practice: What is a "real" record company? A "real" company seeks to take as much from the artist as it can. It does this firstly by paying as little in royalties as it can. It has become harder, following the abolition of legal slavery, to pay scandalously low rates, like single figures. So today a new artist might get 12-14%. This is paid on 70% of CD sales, because the technology of CDs is "new technology". Q. But CDs aren't "new technology" any more. A. You're quick. But this is company "standard practice". Then this figure is itself paid on 90% of sales, because of damage to the shellac or vinyl. Q. But CDs aren't made of shellac or vinyl. A. You're very quick. But that is also a "standard practice" from the time of 78s breaking in shipment to the stores. Then, that figure in turn is paid on 10/14ths of the money the record sells for. Q. Why? A. Because company policy (in this case Virgin) determines that record shops in the UK sell the record for £10. Q. But your CDs sell for around £13.99. A. Now you're really getting up to speed...
That's easy- I presume you're rotating the tree realtime? _All_ that requires is that the tree can be cached on the card, which is then issued commands. Why only one tree? What program, exactly, did this? There are some very serious questions to ask about demos like this. I, too, write software and try to come up with impressive claims. I can legitimately say that I'm writing a game with a ten million star universe with approximately sixteen million planets, of which the terrestrial ones (hundreds of actually landable-on planets) have terrains the size of the earth at 3 dots per inch for height information. This is misleading as I'm doing it _all_ algorithmically- it's fair to ask 'well, what does it work like?' but nonsensical to imagine that somehow I'm messing with kajilliobytes of data. It's faked. (I have stellar distribution whipped, am working currently on deriving star types, slightly modified according to actual galaxy distributions- main current task is to come up with RGB values for the actual colors of star types, as this is more like white point color temperatures than anything else- very close to updating my reference pictures. At any rate, will you believe me when I say that this reeks of demo? It wouldn't be that surprising if they used _all_ the capacity of the card to do that one tree. _I_ would. Might that be why there is only one tree and _no_ other detail at all (one ground poly, one horizon)? More relevantly, what was used in doing that? If it was vanilla OpenGL, then okay, I concede this is very big. If they had to write their own software to do that, then you have a problem. Here in Mac land (also LinuxPPC land;) ) we have a comparable problem- there are 4X the voodoo cards as anything else, because of availability, and we're getting 'em off you PCers who are buying nVidias (;) dirt cheap, too! ), but Apple only supports ATI- so many important development tools are _not_ supporting 3dfx or Glide, and we are once again suffering the recurrent apple disease of Thou Shalt Use Only One Solution- in this case, ATI 3d acceleration. And I personally like 3dfx rendering better than even _TNT_, but this helps me not. (reading User Friendly I have been!). You guys are looking at exactly the same situation here. Be damned careful. If you go with a proprietary technology you will fragment, and your developers will be faced with tough choices and could end up writing nVidia-only much as some developers in Mac land are writing ATI-only. This is bad. Do I have to explain why this is bad? Let's get some more information about exactly how you operate this geometry stuff before getting all giddy and flushed about it, shall we? I don't see how software will use it without rewriting the software. And when you do that- it's an open invitation for nVidia to make the thing completely proprietary and lock out other vendors. Or maybe they'd give the information out to people at no cost and not enforce their (presumed) patents for a while, only to turn around a year from now when they've locked in the market, and start bleeding people with basically total freedom to manipulate things any way they choose? But of course nobody (GIF) would think (GIF) of ever doing (GIF!) a thing like (GIFFF!) _that_...;P
Get a load of the supplied pictures. Gee, low poly models sure don't look that impressive when you DON'T TEXTURE THEM;P or do you really think the treads on the second tire are, or ought to be, geometry? So it pushes 15 million triangles a second and a PIII only does 3.5 million. Well, where do they come from? Exactly what is used to store these geometries? I'd say that if they went with a rather Voodoo Glide-esque approach of putting all the geometries on the card and then giving minimal commands to position, scale and rotate them, then it could be significant. This, however, would be pathetically incompatible with all existing games- and frankly the bus is the bottleneck, that PIII is probably pretty comparable for doing transforms, it just cannot get them across the _bus_ as fast as a cached copy of the geometry on the card. I saw what appeared to be a statistic that implied that games might see a 10% improvement in framerate. That, I think, is closer to the truth. Sorry guys- you've been Hyped.
You are wrong to 'applaud' Unisys for their business model. If proprietary algorithms really were desirable on the Web, we'd all be using FIF or something (remember, Fractal Image Format? Impressive ability to zoom in on images) Unisys kept mum for long enough to let GIF become substantially established on the Web- causing the majority of web browsers to make it the single most compatible web graphics format (I remember browsers that couldn't even display inline jpegs, and does your browser do jpegs as _background_ pictures?), and only then did they start trying to extort money out of people. This constitutes bait-and-switch tactics, and isn't acceptable behavior. Since Unisys cannot cause the whole Web to change to a new format no matter how obnoxious they act, they should lose LZW. They did not adequately warn adopters that they were going to be exercising extremely arbitrary control over access to LZW at the time that it was being widely adopted, and it's too late to un-adopt it. If you think inferior technology is easily supplanted by different technology, are you using a computer that uses near and far pointers?;P
It's startling to look at their methodology- these guys are merging thousands of changes a night into builds, they hand it off to a very intense team of testers, who then test it for SIX HOURS??? To put this into context, when the original Mac Finder, Teachtext, MacWrite etc. was being written, the coders would burn all night and then turn the program over to another computer program that would run _all_ _night_ making completely random and senseless GUI inputs all over to try and confuse and jockey the software into collapsing. These Microsoft guys- it sounds like they are _manually_ trying out programs. For six hours. Do you have any idea how pathetically inadequate human input is to test such a program for six hours? How prone humans are to falling into patterns that don't cover all the inputs? How prone humans are to skipping _stupid_ inputs that might crash the machine? This is a recipe for huge amounts of completely untested code to get out there. I'd suspected something like this, but reading Keepers Of The Build really drives it home forcibly- the project is TOO BIG to test. There is no way in hell they can jockey that software into all possible failure modes in six hours even _with_ 'virtual user' software- and how many sorts of machines are they testing on? Hell, even Apple ended up having to stop testing new software on every instance of machine they ever made- it got too expensive as there were hundreds of Macs and the logistics were impossible with so many software projects lining up to use the labs. It sounds like Microsoft is not even trying. Instead they are doing things that _seem_ like they would be effective. They get people who _look_ really intense, they set up a combative situation so people will think 'Boy, they're really trying!'. They use the latest PCs (oh, but 'most powerful multiprocessor systems in the world', hell...) so people will think, 'Wow, they must really be able to debug much more than they could on _my_ machine!'. They are using a flatly ludicrous one-day cycle for the fastest builds, with the peculiar notion that they can track bugs better if the whole build is changing _faster_ than anybody else's development process... I presume when they can't debug it doing this, and new bugs keep happening faster than old ones leave (I bet NT 3.51 would have stood up to the w2000test.com load for longer than w2k), they presumably throw more programmers at the problem.... How many other people have read this seemingly impressive picture of their build situation and gone "...hey......hey, _wait_ a minute!"? It's really wild and kind of scary to consider that not only are they doing this, they still think it will work. "For every 5 bugs that we squash, 7 more appear- so let's step up the pace and make the process happen five times as fast as it did! That'll help." *shudder*
Quickdraw rocks:) _somebody_ had to invent regions and fast graphics primitives! You do realise that _is_ where it all came from? Xerox PARC did _not_ have regions. I can hardly be too affronted, tho- what do you consider preferable, MFC? X? Face it, all software sucks- if you can't code on a tightwire don't code C/C++ for Mac, as you _do_ have to get everything right, and you _will_ be going *bam*bam*bam*bam* on the reset button. Hey, at least the registry won't corrupt from all the reset-bouncing!;P Do please stay away from MacOS. It doesn't like you either.
That's it- in REALbasic. I mean, if you're going to use a _messagebox_ then I don't even have to drag any controls into the project window at all. But I think that's cheating, it's not useful enough:)
*drag statictext to project window* *click in 'value' section* *type 'Hello World'* *run* That's on a Mac, but there's no reason this style of application framework couldn't be used on Linux. All it takes is someone to code it and keep things clean and uncluttered. 'Hello world' is not hard in a proper GUI builder. It shouldn't require _any_ code.
I can talk about the underlying structure of REALbasic, a rapid application development tool for the Mac. Essentially, the entry level is absurdly easy. RB has various controls that 'run themselves'- if you drag a button onto a project and immediately build it, the button knows how to be clicked, but doesn't do anything, and the project has a 'quit' menu item that has a 'command-Q' keyboard shortcut like a proper Mac app. When you write code (and you could make an IDE where you'd write C code this way), you go and open a code window where all the control objects reside (and separate methods, 'properties' (variables), that sort of thing), and there's a listbox- you select the button and open a disclosure triangle and there are various events, such as Action (button was clicked), mouse enter and exit events, etc. You mostly use the main ones like Action. Suppose you have a statictext object in the window, called StaticText1. You can give it characteristics in the IDE, but then to change it at runtime, you might have the button change it like so- in the Action event, it'd say-
StaticText1.text = "Note, assignment operator in RB is just ="
Then you just run the program and when you click the button that event fires and causes that code to execute. What happens after that is that the execution 'falls out the bottom of the method' and returns to the main event loop, and you never see the main event loop at all- to you, it's as if all the controls run themselves, and you write most of your code to work controls programmatically or be worked by them. Many programs end up totally centered around the 'Go' button, whatever that is- if there's a button that says 'Go' or 'Render' or 'Execute' then the bulk of the code is probably in there, the rest in methods, perhaps some in a separate thread (treated sort of like another control). The framework assumes everything will be based off of the GUI controls, and that half the hassle is making the controls be controls- so it implements them all, has them fully functional even if you write _no_ code (they just don't _do_ anything at all but actuate) and then you reference them with other code like if Checkbox1.value then RadioButton4.enabled = false end if ...that sort of thing. You can rename them- I just am using defaults to illustrate. The point is, everything is positioned as if it was a drawing application- nice slick GUI builder- then you can compile the mockup and actually run it, and begin adding code to controls bit by bit, constantly trying out the program to see how it's doing. The essence of this approach is the terms to which it can be reduced- you can drag simple controls onto the project, you can use the controls' simplest methods to do simple tasks- and a heck of a lot of programming tasks (ESPECIALLY for Unix!) only require _simple_ controls. You could do amazing housekeeping things in Unix with a project window, a statictext control, a editfield control with scrollbar, a button control, a file class (aka 'Folderitem' in RB), and a read-text-file and write-text-file method on the file class... This does gloss over some stuff- the string datatype in RB is very flexible and can dynamically scale up to gigs in size, in fact there IS no fixed length string, they are all the fancy dynamic (slower) type. But the point is approachability- and it's damned hard to beat REALbasic for approachability, even Visual Basic (somewhat the inspiration for RB) is far more cluttered with crud. RB is very clean- this limits, but it also makes simple tasks _real_ streamlined, and that has value too in an application framework. It's not going to be Mozilla- but it's worth seeing what it'll do.
"I'd also guess 50% of you smoke Marijuana on a "regular" basis. But yet, Your brains have not melted, you have a good job, and you don't sleep around." Er. What have _you_ been smoking?;P I smoked Marijuana for ten years on a regular basis. I tended not to be able to afford massive amounts of it, but I still ended up pretty spazzed out, unemployable, and feeling like worthless crap. I am so sorry to have to bust your bubble, but you're talking crap- you're making implications that are not warranted. Besides, what's with this 'sleep around' business? That's a weird tangent to take- where's that come from? When I was a stoner, I never _had_ sex. It was too difficult compared to getting high. Now that I'm clean and sober, well;) I've had sex. It was pretty cool, I enjoyed it, and in fact in a controlled way I've 'slept around'. Excuuuuse me if that doesn't meet with your hemp-laden morality;)
"I'd also guess 50% of you smoke Marijuana on a "regular" basis. But yet, Your brains have not melted, you have a good job, and you don't sleep around." Er. What have _you_ been smoking?;P I smoked Marijuana for ten years on a regular basis. I tended not to be able to afford massive amounts of it, but I still ended up pretty spazzed out, unemployable, and feeling like worthless crap. I am so sorry to have to bust your bubble, but you're talking crap- you're making implications that are not warranted. Besides, what's with this 'sleep around' business? That's a weird tangent to take- where's that come from? When I was a stoner, I never _had_ sex. It was too difficult compared to getting high. Now that I'm clean and sober, well;) I've had sex. It was pretty cool, I enjoyed it, and in fact in a controlled way I've 'slept around'. Excuuuuse me if that doesn't meet with your hemp-laden morality;)
I was a closet budsmoking genius for ten years. I sat and watched, in the clouds of smoke, the shadowy forms of a million brilliant ideas. Once I even built one- once in ten years. I stopped, and since then I've had two articles published in the top High End audio journal, have written a novel, have built most of the things I vaguely sensed were out there waiting to be invented, have released free software to the world under the GPL, and have a web site (see 'URL') full of pictures, writings, programs, essays, Window Maker titlebars and X pixmaps, music... _all_ of it after I stopped smoking, which I did because I was suffering and feeling really compelled and trapped in the stoner lifestyle, going nowhere reaaalll sloooowly. Sorry, man. The stereotype is true. I've been there. That's not to say it should be a crime- it shouldn't, I support legalization. But I support it so it can be taxed and so we don't have to spend so much money on jails for stoners, I don't support it for me. I hated being a worthless leech on society. Being a stanford-binet 'genius' did not help a damn bit. Sorry, dude. When I was a closet budsmoking genius- I smoked bud. Don't look for many people to be able to show you results. They can probably show you a lot of roaches, though, and if you're hurtin' you can scrape their bongs- nasty nasty stuff that is, but it'll give you a buzz and a headache. _That's_ the results. Sorry.
I do. Prohibition just ain't working- the government needs to be able to tax it. The money can be used to help people who are really addicted and _want_ to get their heads straight, and for a million other purposes more useful than hiring drug enforcers and building jails for pot smokers. That's just stupid. Put them in jail and throw away the key when they drive stoned and run over little kids or little old ladies- but let them rot on the couch all they want- you _cannot_ pressure a person to stop using drugs, it's addictive behavior and you _have_ to want to stop, otherwise forget it. I don't smoke, drink or use drugs. I also don't drink coffee, though I still find myself getting compulsive over coca-cola or tea- sheesh, it never stops, but you have to draw a line somewhere or you end up an ascetic drinking distilled water in a locked room. I used to do all those things, and it really messed with me, I'll tell you. I don't _regret_ it, but damned if I'll go back to what drugs ended up becoming for me, and that includes if pot gets legalized. If that happened I'd laugh until I cried, man. I can never use again without really _locking_ _in_ to that gimme-more, hide-out-and-use, full-on, take-no-prisoners using style I gradually developed over the course of ten years of smoking pot. It doesn't go backwards. I can never have that first high again. Not even if it's legal. Instead I'd have only compulsion and escapism to look forward to. That's a nasty trap- it's like a sort of torture- my instincts will always be telling me to use, but I don't have to, and I don't use now. Except for guzzling coca-cola;) if that bothered me as bad as pot ended up bothering me, I'd quit it too.
Uhhhhhh.... *COUGHCOUGHCOUGH* yeah man, I uhhhhhhh *COUUUUUGGGHH* I uhhhhhhhh *COUIIIIUUIIIIIIIIIIIGH* no risk man, I uhhhhhhh *HACK!* uhhhhhhhh.... *klunk* "My GOD, he's not dead! Gimme some of thaaaaaat!"
I personally support this fellow's perspective, but there's an angle that he didn't mention, which is addiction. Marijuana is damned addictive stuff, all in the psychological sense like getting addicted to food or compulsively handwashing. Claiming that it's not addictive is a crock, that's a technicality- _people_ are addictive, _people_ develop habits, and pot is about the most insidious thing you'll ever run into because it doesn't fsck you up physically (insert Cheech and Chong cough here, assume deadly pallor), it's not a hazard to society (okay, everybody who's _hit_ something like a bush or tree when driving in a car stoned, raise your hand), and it becomes your best friend (I've seen heroin junkies have a harder time giving up pot than their heroin!) You can't _get_ a more insidious drug. It doesn't _need_ to lead to anything to screw you up completely, especially if you lose the volition to do anything _but_ smoke pot and end up struggling to come up with the money to _get_ the pot. You'll lie, manipulate, and con anybody, your own mother, your best friend, to get it. I smoked it for years, years ago when I was growing up. Me and my best friend had a little routine we'd go through- we'd go in on a bag, and then one of us would divide and the other pick. This is my best friend and he couldn't trust me to be fair- he knew I couldn't- and of course I couldn't trust him either! How many of you have to do this? One divides and the other picks? Is that a really _mellow_ spiritual approach? *rrrgh* damn, spare me from Pot Nation...
Look, man, just because I might not think you should go to _jail_ for getting stoned does _not_ mean that you become an intellectual wizard for doing it. That's an absolute crock. Now, if you're that maladjusted that you _cannot_ think or deal with reality _unless_ heavily numbed by THC, I sympathize- I've been there. But don't think for a moment that it's giving you a damn thing- it's not, no bud ever had an idea or drew a picture or played a note on an instrument. The best that you can say for it is that it might not get in the way too heavily when getting you out of yourself. That's not a good enough reason for relying on it constantly. Get _yourself_ out of yourself. As Frank Zappa said, you are bullshitting yourself if you expect pot to do this for you. Know why I stopped? It _stopped_ _working_ and I wasn't able to bullshit myself about it any more. Fear that...
This article is powerful stuff. It's interesting to consider the implications. Firstly. I'm incredibly reminded of the music industry. This is not a compliment. The music industry is incredibly exploitative- ask a Steve Albini, ask an insider, ask an indie player of some sort. It's really quite sick and horrible. In this light, the kids yelling 'Whiner!' are worthy of contempt- they've bought into the fantasy, but I think none of them are actually living the reality. I'm not living that reality either, but I retain a fascination with the stories of those who are:) at any rate, simply _insisting_ that the world is filled with opportunity does not make it be true. In some places there is opportunity. In others there is not. And many of these exploited game programmers will develop physical ailments such as ulcers which are life threatening and _not_ things that one automatically gets by being poor. My own choice? I'm setting out to write free software (i.e. GPL), and expect not to be able to make any money with it- so I have to be devious. I and some fellow techies have founded a web hosting service for nonprofits, we are _becoming_ a nonprofit, and we are setting out to offer ISP services. If we can do that and lose money doing great things, we can compete for grants effectively- and our job descriptions specifically cite 'writing software for nonprofits and people in general' without getting very specific as to _what_ software this would be... If we can have an ISP, then we will be able to release games that use a game server, and that's the plan. I'm thinking in terms of rather low bandwidth- for instance, I've mocked up an interface for an oil supertanker game- simple raycasting view from the helm, but the _depth_ of the game would be much more intense, and one vital part of it is that you'd be setting out on tanker journeys in real time, and your tanker would be steaming away unattended while you slept or tuned out- you'd go on line and fire up the client to control the ship, but it continues to exist without you (possibly running into other tankers if you ignore it). Kind of like tamagotchis only several billion times heavier and filled with oil;) There's a whole level of detail in just the oil pipe routing and tank filling alone- this would be pretty nearly a hardcore sim. There's also a space-based concept I'm putting a lot of work into, that's on a scale way beyond anything anyone's currently doing or contemplating, because it's based on emergent detail rather than the designer playing god and specifying everything accurately. The common factor here is this: I gotta make these work _first_. I have every intention of releasing all source as GPL and trying to entice Linux ports of it all (and working hard to help that to happen) but I don't believe for a second it'll happen unless there's already a playable game there, so the initial phase has to be 'produce something that plays' no matter how long it takes. It's extremely likely that these will be coming out on the Mac first. That doesn't mean there's no Linux interest, it means I can't program Linux yet:) and won't wait until I can release on all platforms to release something. I do have a sample or two of the space engine, at least. What you're seeing in the first one is the universe, which contains over ten million discrete stars (to be exact, 10,884,297). In this picture, every fully white pixel represents 255 stars or more, in an orthographic projection. Every star appears at a specific 32 bit by 32 bit by 32 bit location. The total data file that generates all this is sixteen megs... In the second picture you see a single slice through the universe, one sector deep, which shows the type of aliasing the algorithms produce. This engine is geared for speed of lookup, and the full map drawing program plotted the positions of 10,884,297 stars in about four hours on a 200Mhz 604 using a terribly unoptimised OOP basic (this, despite the fact that the engine is intentionally set up to make maximum use of bitshifts and rapid divides and multiplies, and also optimises the use of a PowerPC 'branch if equal' loop terminator)... Again- this isn't going to make me any money (and God knows how many people even bothered to follow the link and read my whole, typically-long diatribe). However, it _will_ make a deeper sort of game possible, on lots of levels- I've studied the dynamics of many online multiplayer games (I'm talking Warbirds here, not quake deathmatches- _large_ scale stuff), and am also ready to extend other areas (such as ship automated systems) into mostly uncharted areas, i.e. only RoboWar has done what I'm suggesting, and even that is a very different flavor- I've been designing a special set of opcodes for player assembly language programming for computer aided ship handling- assuming computer cores that run at about 60Hz- again, yes I know I could have one running much faster, but I'm planning on having _thousands_ all running in one large-scale engagement. On having superbattleships built by the cooperation of dozens of players who must get together and arrange duty rosters in order to be able to run the huge beast effectively.... there are really interesting issues involving gameplay and how to get people working together to wipe out others (instead of just trying to go and directly wipe out others);) You'll be hearing about this- and it'll see Linux- but it won't make me money, and it won't ever be mainstream. So much the worse for the mainstream;)
The Anagrams Page. Try to spot which companies and individuals and products are being talked about! "(Vast Lord Linus) had a gleam in his eye that looked like UNIX- except it wasn't going to be expensive corporate wares. No, what (Snarl... I'd Volt Us) had in mind was (In Flexure), and (Felix Rune), though still more cryptic than the simplified GUI operating systems, developed its own loyal following..." (written in October 1996!) Volt me, linus!;)
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You sound _scared_ that people will be able to get one of these and run Linux on it.
P'raps you _should_ be. >;)
There Fripp goes, blowing my mind again! That man _rules_.
Fripp on industry practice:
What is a "real" record company? A "real" company seeks to take as much from the artist as it can. It does this firstly by paying as little in royalties as it can. It has become harder, following the abolition of legal slavery, to pay scandalously low rates, like single figures. So today a new artist might get 12-14%. This is paid on 70% of CD sales, because the technology of CDs is "new technology".
Q. But CDs aren't "new technology" any more.
A. You're quick. But this is company "standard practice". Then this figure is itself paid on 90% of sales, because of damage to the shellac or vinyl.
Q. But CDs aren't made of shellac or vinyl.
A. You're very quick. But that is also a "standard practice" from the time of 78s breaking in shipment to the stores. Then, that figure in turn is paid on 10/14ths of the money the record sells for.
Q. Why?
A. Because company policy (in this case Virgin) determines that record shops in the UK sell the record for £10.
Q. But your CDs sell for around £13.99.
A. Now you're really getting up to speed...
That's easy- I presume you're rotating the tree realtime? _All_ that requires is that the tree can be cached on the card, which is then issued commands. ;) ) we have a comparable problem- there are 4X the voodoo cards as anything else, because of availability, and we're getting 'em off you PCers who are buying nVidias ( ;) dirt cheap, too! ), but Apple only supports ATI- so many important development tools are _not_ supporting 3dfx or Glide, and we are once again suffering the recurrent apple disease of Thou Shalt Use Only One Solution- in this case, ATI 3d acceleration. And I personally like 3dfx rendering better than even _TNT_, but this helps me not. (reading User Friendly I have been!). ;P
Why only one tree? What program, exactly, did this? There are some very serious questions to ask about demos like this. I, too, write software and try to come up with impressive claims. I can legitimately say that I'm writing a game with a ten million star universe with approximately sixteen million planets, of which the terrestrial ones (hundreds of actually landable-on planets) have terrains the size of the earth at 3 dots per inch for height information.
This is misleading as I'm doing it _all_ algorithmically- it's fair to ask 'well, what does it work like?' but nonsensical to imagine that somehow I'm messing with kajilliobytes of data. It's faked. (I have stellar distribution whipped, am working currently on deriving star types, slightly modified according to actual galaxy distributions- main current task is to come up with RGB values for the actual colors of star types, as this is more like white point color temperatures than anything else- very close to updating my reference pictures.
At any rate, will you believe me when I say that this reeks of demo? It wouldn't be that surprising if they used _all_ the capacity of the card to do that one tree. _I_ would. Might that be why there is only one tree and _no_ other detail at all (one ground poly, one horizon)?
More relevantly, what was used in doing that? If it was vanilla OpenGL, then okay, I concede this is very big. If they had to write their own software to do that, then you have a problem. Here in Mac land (also LinuxPPC land
You guys are looking at exactly the same situation here. Be damned careful. If you go with a proprietary technology you will fragment, and your developers will be faced with tough choices and could end up writing nVidia-only much as some developers in Mac land are writing ATI-only. This is bad. Do I have to explain why this is bad?
Let's get some more information about exactly how you operate this geometry stuff before getting all giddy and flushed about it, shall we? I don't see how software will use it without rewriting the software. And when you do that- it's an open invitation for nVidia to make the thing completely proprietary and lock out other vendors.
Or maybe they'd give the information out to people at no cost and not enforce their (presumed) patents for a while, only to turn around a year from now when they've locked in the market, and start bleeding people with basically total freedom to manipulate things any way they choose? But of course nobody (GIF) would think (GIF) of ever doing (GIF!) a thing like (GIFFF!) _that_...
Get a load of the supplied pictures. Gee, low poly models sure don't look that impressive when you DON'T TEXTURE THEM ;P or do you really think the treads on the second tire are, or ought to be, geometry?
So it pushes 15 million triangles a second and a PIII only does 3.5 million. Well, where do they come from? Exactly what is used to store these geometries? I'd say that if they went with a rather Voodoo Glide-esque approach of putting all the geometries on the card and then giving minimal commands to position, scale and rotate them, then it could be significant. This, however, would be pathetically incompatible with all existing games- and frankly the bus is the bottleneck, that PIII is probably pretty comparable for doing transforms, it just cannot get them across the _bus_ as fast as a cached copy of the geometry on the card.
I saw what appeared to be a statistic that implied that games might see a 10% improvement in framerate. That, I think, is closer to the truth.
Sorry guys- you've been Hyped.
You are wrong to 'applaud' Unisys for their business model. If proprietary algorithms really were desirable on the Web, we'd all be using FIF or something (remember, Fractal Image Format? Impressive ability to zoom in on images) ;P
Unisys kept mum for long enough to let GIF become substantially established on the Web- causing the majority of web browsers to make it the single most compatible web graphics format (I remember browsers that couldn't even display inline jpegs, and does your browser do jpegs as _background_ pictures?), and only then did they start trying to extort money out of people. This constitutes bait-and-switch tactics, and isn't acceptable behavior. Since Unisys cannot cause the whole Web to change to a new format no matter how obnoxious they act, they should lose LZW. They did not adequately warn adopters that they were going to be exercising extremely arbitrary control over access to LZW at the time that it was being widely adopted, and it's too late to un-adopt it.
If you think inferior technology is easily supplanted by different technology, are you using a computer that uses near and far pointers?
*grumble* and you had me looking up book-ographies to remind myself of the title ;)
Better yet, one that was actually MST3Ked!
_You_ forgot
8) If I get a bunch of heads and stick them all over my body can I turn myself into a Beowulf cl... *WHACK* ow! *WHACK* hey! *WHACK* eek!
Here is MPW for download at no cost (if that's what you really meant). Here is the direct link to the FTP site for downloading it. Here is a big list of Mac open source software, which also includes my own stuff, mostly GPLed (anything serious is GPLed).
:)
It's startling to look at their methodology- these guys are merging thousands of changes a night into builds, they hand it off to a very intense team of testers, who then test it for SIX HOURS??? ...hey, _wait_ a minute!"? It's really wild and kind of scary to consider that not only are they doing this, they still think it will work.
To put this into context, when the original Mac Finder, Teachtext, MacWrite etc. was being written, the coders would burn all night and then turn the program over to another computer program that would run _all_ _night_ making completely random and senseless GUI inputs all over to try and confuse and jockey the software into collapsing.
These Microsoft guys- it sounds like they are _manually_ trying out programs. For six hours. Do you have any idea how pathetically inadequate human input is to test such a program for six hours? How prone humans are to falling into patterns that don't cover all the inputs? How prone humans are to skipping _stupid_ inputs that might crash the machine?
This is a recipe for huge amounts of completely untested code to get out there. I'd suspected something like this, but reading Keepers Of The Build really drives it home forcibly- the project is TOO BIG to test. There is no way in hell they can jockey that software into all possible failure modes in six hours even _with_ 'virtual user' software- and how many sorts of machines are they testing on? Hell, even Apple ended up having to stop testing new software on every instance of machine they ever made- it got too expensive as there were hundreds of Macs and the logistics were impossible with so many software projects lining up to use the labs. It sounds like Microsoft is not even trying.
Instead they are doing things that _seem_ like they would be effective. They get people who _look_ really intense, they set up a combative situation so people will think 'Boy, they're really trying!'. They use the latest PCs (oh, but 'most powerful multiprocessor systems in the world', hell...) so people will think, 'Wow, they must really be able to debug much more than they could on _my_ machine!'. They are using a flatly ludicrous one-day cycle for the fastest builds, with the peculiar notion that they can track bugs better if the whole build is changing _faster_ than anybody else's development process... I presume when they can't debug it doing this, and new bugs keep happening faster than old ones leave (I bet NT 3.51 would have stood up to the w2000test.com load for longer than w2k), they presumably throw more programmers at the problem....
How many other people have read this seemingly impressive picture of their build situation and gone "...hey...
"For every 5 bugs that we squash, 7 more appear- so let's step up the pace and make the process happen five times as fast as it did! That'll help."
*shudder*
Quickdraw rocks :) _somebody_ had to invent regions and fast graphics primitives! You do realise that _is_ where it all came from? Xerox PARC did _not_ have regions. ;P Do please stay away from MacOS. It doesn't like you either.
I can hardly be too affronted, tho- what do you consider preferable, MFC? X? Face it, all software sucks- if you can't code on a tightwire don't code C/C++ for Mac, as you _do_ have to get everything right, and you _will_ be going *bam*bam*bam*bam* on the reset button. Hey, at least the registry won't corrupt from all the reset-bouncing!
Open() //open event of app
:)
msgbox "Hello World"
That's it- in REALbasic. I mean, if you're going to use a _messagebox_ then I don't even have to drag any controls into the project window at all. But I think that's cheating, it's not useful enough
*drag statictext to project window*
*click in 'value' section*
*type 'Hello World'*
*run*
That's on a Mac, but there's no reason this style of application framework couldn't be used on Linux. All it takes is someone to code it and keep things clean and uncluttered. 'Hello world' is not hard in a proper GUI builder. It shouldn't require _any_ code.
I can talk about the underlying structure of REALbasic, a rapid application development tool for the Mac.
Essentially, the entry level is absurdly easy. RB has various controls that 'run themselves'- if you drag a button onto a project and immediately build it, the button knows how to be clicked, but doesn't do anything, and the project has a 'quit' menu item that has a 'command-Q' keyboard shortcut like a proper Mac app.
When you write code (and you could make an IDE where you'd write C code this way), you go and open a code window where all the control objects reside (and separate methods, 'properties' (variables), that sort of thing), and there's a listbox- you select the button and open a disclosure triangle and there are various events, such as Action (button was clicked), mouse enter and exit events, etc. You mostly use the main ones like Action.
Suppose you have a statictext object in the window, called StaticText1. You can give it characteristics in the IDE, but then to change it at runtime, you might have the button change it like so- in the Action event, it'd say-
StaticText1.text = "Note, assignment operator in RB is just ="
Then you just run the program and when you click the button that event fires and causes that code to execute. What happens after that is that the execution 'falls out the bottom of the method' and returns to the main event loop, and you never see the main event loop at all- to you, it's as if all the controls run themselves, and you write most of your code to work controls programmatically or be worked by them. Many programs end up totally centered around the 'Go' button, whatever that is- if there's a button that says 'Go' or 'Render' or 'Execute' then the bulk of the code is probably in there, the rest in methods, perhaps some in a separate thread (treated sort of like another control).
The framework assumes everything will be based off of the GUI controls, and that half the hassle is making the controls be controls- so it implements them all, has them fully functional even if you write _no_ code (they just don't _do_ anything at all but actuate) and then you reference them with other code like
if Checkbox1.value then
RadioButton4.enabled = false
end if
...that sort of thing. You can rename them- I just am using defaults to illustrate. The point is, everything is positioned as if it was a drawing application- nice slick GUI builder- then you can compile the mockup and actually run it, and begin adding code to controls bit by bit, constantly trying out the program to see how it's doing.
The essence of this approach is the terms to which it can be reduced- you can drag simple controls onto the project, you can use the controls' simplest methods to do simple tasks- and a heck of a lot of programming tasks (ESPECIALLY for Unix!) only require _simple_ controls. You could do amazing housekeeping things in Unix with a project window, a statictext control, a editfield control with scrollbar, a button control, a file class (aka 'Folderitem' in RB), and a read-text-file and write-text-file method on the file class...
This does gloss over some stuff- the string datatype in RB is very flexible and can dynamically scale up to gigs in size, in fact there IS no fixed length string, they are all the fancy dynamic (slower) type. But the point is approachability- and it's damned hard to beat REALbasic for approachability, even Visual Basic (somewhat the inspiration for RB) is far more cluttered with crud. RB is very clean- this limits, but it also makes simple tasks _real_ streamlined, and that has value too in an application framework. It's not going to be Mozilla- but it's worth seeing what it'll do.
Don't you trust your friends?
"I'd also guess 50% of you smoke Marijuana on a "regular" basis. But yet, Your brains have not melted, you have a good job, and you don't sleep around." ;P ;) I've had sex. It was pretty cool, I enjoyed it, and in fact in a controlled way I've 'slept around'. Excuuuuse me if that doesn't meet with your hemp-laden morality ;)
Er. What have _you_ been smoking?
I smoked Marijuana for ten years on a regular basis. I tended not to be able to afford massive amounts of it, but I still ended up pretty spazzed out, unemployable, and feeling like worthless crap.
I am so sorry to have to bust your bubble, but you're talking crap- you're making implications that are not warranted.
Besides, what's with this 'sleep around' business? That's a weird tangent to take- where's that come from? When I was a stoner, I never _had_ sex. It was too difficult compared to getting high. Now that I'm clean and sober, well
"I'd also guess 50% of you smoke Marijuana on a "regular" basis. But yet, Your brains have not melted, you have a good job, and you don't sleep around." ;P ;) I've had sex. It was pretty cool, I enjoyed it, and in fact in a controlled way I've 'slept around'. Excuuuuse me if that doesn't meet with your hemp-laden morality ;)
Er. What have _you_ been smoking?
I smoked Marijuana for ten years on a regular basis. I tended not to be able to afford massive amounts of it, but I still ended up pretty spazzed out, unemployable, and feeling like worthless crap.
I am so sorry to have to bust your bubble, but you're talking crap- you're making implications that are not warranted.
Besides, what's with this 'sleep around' business? That's a weird tangent to take- where's that come from? When I was a stoner, I never _had_ sex. It was too difficult compared to getting high. Now that I'm clean and sober, well
I was a closet budsmoking genius for ten years. I sat and watched, in the clouds of smoke, the shadowy forms of a million brilliant ideas. Once I even built one- once in ten years.
I stopped, and since then I've had two articles published in the top High End audio journal, have written a novel, have built most of the things I vaguely sensed were out there waiting to be invented, have released free software to the world under the GPL, and have a web site (see 'URL') full of pictures, writings, programs, essays, Window Maker titlebars and X pixmaps, music... _all_ of it after I stopped smoking, which I did because I was suffering and feeling really compelled and trapped in the stoner lifestyle, going nowhere reaaalll sloooowly.
Sorry, man. The stereotype is true. I've been there. That's not to say it should be a crime- it shouldn't, I support legalization. But I support it so it can be taxed and so we don't have to spend so much money on jails for stoners, I don't support it for me. I hated being a worthless leech on society. Being a stanford-binet 'genius' did not help a damn bit.
Sorry, dude. When I was a closet budsmoking genius- I smoked bud. Don't look for many people to be able to show you results. They can probably show you a lot of roaches, though, and if you're hurtin' you can scrape their bongs- nasty nasty stuff that is, but it'll give you a buzz and a headache. _That's_ the results.
Sorry.
I do. Prohibition just ain't working- the government needs to be able to tax it. The money can be used to help people who are really addicted and _want_ to get their heads straight, and for a million other purposes more useful than hiring drug enforcers and building jails for pot smokers. That's just stupid. Put them in jail and throw away the key when they drive stoned and run over little kids or little old ladies- but let them rot on the couch all they want- you _cannot_ pressure a person to stop using drugs, it's addictive behavior and you _have_ to want to stop, otherwise forget it. I don't smoke, drink or use drugs. I also don't drink coffee, though I still find myself getting compulsive over coca-cola or tea- sheesh, it never stops, but you have to draw a line somewhere or you end up an ascetic drinking distilled water in a locked room. I used to do all those things, and it really messed with me, I'll tell you. I don't _regret_ it, but damned if I'll go back to what drugs ended up becoming for me, and that includes if pot gets legalized. If that happened I'd laugh until I cried, man. I can never use again without really _locking_ _in_ to that gimme-more, hide-out-and-use, full-on, take-no-prisoners using style I gradually developed over the course of ten years of smoking pot. It doesn't go backwards. I can never have that first high again. Not even if it's legal. Instead I'd have only compulsion and escapism to look forward to. That's a nasty trap- it's like a sort of torture- my instincts will always be telling me to use, but I don't have to, and I don't use now. Except for guzzling coca-cola ;) if that bothered me as bad as pot ended up bothering me, I'd quit it too.
Uhhhhhh.... *COUGHCOUGHCOUGH* yeah man, I uhhhhhhh *COUUUUUGGGHH* I uhhhhhhhh *COUIIIIUUIIIIIIIIIIIGH* no risk man, I uhhhhhhh *HACK!* uhhhhhhhh....
*klunk*
"My GOD, he's not dead! Gimme some of thaaaaaat!"
I personally support this fellow's perspective, but there's an angle that he didn't mention, which is addiction. Marijuana is damned addictive stuff, all in the psychological sense like getting addicted to food or compulsively handwashing. Claiming that it's not addictive is a crock, that's a technicality- _people_ are addictive, _people_ develop habits, and pot is about the most insidious thing you'll ever run into because it doesn't fsck you up physically (insert Cheech and Chong cough here, assume deadly pallor), it's not a hazard to society (okay, everybody who's _hit_ something like a bush or tree when driving in a car stoned, raise your hand), and it becomes your best friend (I've seen heroin junkies have a harder time giving up pot than their heroin!)
You can't _get_ a more insidious drug. It doesn't _need_ to lead to anything to screw you up completely, especially if you lose the volition to do anything _but_ smoke pot and end up struggling to come up with the money to _get_ the pot. You'll lie, manipulate, and con anybody, your own mother, your best friend, to get it. I smoked it for years, years ago when I was growing up. Me and my best friend had a little routine we'd go through- we'd go in on a bag, and then one of us would divide and the other pick. This is my best friend and he couldn't trust me to be fair- he knew I couldn't- and of course I couldn't trust him either! How many of you have to do this? One divides and the other picks? Is that a really _mellow_ spiritual approach?
*rrrgh* damn, spare me from Pot Nation...
Look, man, just because I might not think you should go to _jail_ for getting stoned does _not_ mean that you become an intellectual wizard for doing it. That's an absolute crock. Now, if you're that maladjusted that you _cannot_ think or deal with reality _unless_ heavily numbed by THC, I sympathize- I've been there. But don't think for a moment that it's giving you a damn thing- it's not, no bud ever had an idea or drew a picture or played a note on an instrument.
The best that you can say for it is that it might not get in the way too heavily when getting you out of yourself. That's not a good enough reason for relying on it constantly. Get _yourself_ out of yourself. As Frank Zappa said, you are bullshitting yourself if you expect pot to do this for you. Know why I stopped? It _stopped_ _working_ and I wasn't able to bullshit myself about it any more. Fear that...
This article is powerful stuff. It's interesting to consider the implications. :) at any rate, simply _insisting_ that the world is filled with opportunity does not make it be true. In some places there is opportunity. In others there is not. And many of these exploited game programmers will develop physical ailments such as ulcers which are life threatening and _not_ things that one automatically gets by being poor. ;) :) and won't wait until I can release on all platforms to release something. ;) ;)
Firstly. I'm incredibly reminded of the music industry. This is not a compliment. The music industry is incredibly exploitative- ask a Steve Albini, ask an insider, ask an indie player of some sort. It's really quite sick and horrible.
In this light, the kids yelling 'Whiner!' are worthy of contempt- they've bought into the fantasy, but I think none of them are actually living the reality. I'm not living that reality either, but I retain a fascination with the stories of those who are
My own choice? I'm setting out to write free software (i.e. GPL), and expect not to be able to make any money with it- so I have to be devious. I and some fellow techies have founded a web hosting service for nonprofits, we are _becoming_ a nonprofit, and we are setting out to offer ISP services. If we can do that and lose money doing great things, we can compete for grants effectively- and our job descriptions specifically cite 'writing software for nonprofits and people in general' without getting very specific as to _what_ software this would be...
If we can have an ISP, then we will be able to release games that use a game server, and that's the plan. I'm thinking in terms of rather low bandwidth- for instance, I've mocked up an interface for an oil supertanker game- simple raycasting view from the helm, but the _depth_ of the game would be much more intense, and one vital part of it is that you'd be setting out on tanker journeys in real time, and your tanker would be steaming away unattended while you slept or tuned out- you'd go on line and fire up the client to control the ship, but it continues to exist without you (possibly running into other tankers if you ignore it). Kind of like tamagotchis only several billion times heavier and filled with oil
There's a whole level of detail in just the oil pipe routing and tank filling alone- this would be pretty nearly a hardcore sim.
There's also a space-based concept I'm putting a lot of work into, that's on a scale way beyond anything anyone's currently doing or contemplating, because it's based on emergent detail rather than the designer playing god and specifying everything accurately.
The common factor here is this: I gotta make these work _first_. I have every intention of releasing all source as GPL and trying to entice Linux ports of it all (and working hard to help that to happen) but I don't believe for a second it'll happen unless there's already a playable game there, so the initial phase has to be 'produce something that plays' no matter how long it takes. It's extremely likely that these will be coming out on the Mac first. That doesn't mean there's no Linux interest, it means I can't program Linux yet
I do have a sample or two of the space engine, at least. What you're seeing in the first one is the universe, which contains over ten million discrete stars (to be exact, 10,884,297). In this picture, every fully white pixel represents 255 stars or more, in an orthographic projection. Every star appears at a specific 32 bit by 32 bit by 32 bit location. The total data file that generates all this is sixteen megs... In the second picture you see a single slice through the universe, one sector deep, which shows the type of aliasing the algorithms produce. This engine is geared for speed of lookup, and the full map drawing program plotted the positions of 10,884,297 stars in about four hours on a 200Mhz 604 using a terribly unoptimised OOP basic (this, despite the fact that the engine is intentionally set up to make maximum use of bitshifts and rapid divides and multiplies, and also optimises the use of a PowerPC 'branch if equal' loop terminator)...
Again- this isn't going to make me any money (and God knows how many people even bothered to follow the link and read my whole, typically-long diatribe). However, it _will_ make a deeper sort of game possible, on lots of levels- I've studied the dynamics of many online multiplayer games (I'm talking Warbirds here, not quake deathmatches- _large_ scale stuff), and am also ready to extend other areas (such as ship automated systems) into mostly uncharted areas, i.e. only RoboWar has done what I'm suggesting, and even that is a very different flavor- I've been designing a special set of opcodes for player assembly language programming for computer aided ship handling- assuming computer cores that run at about 60Hz- again, yes I know I could have one running much faster, but I'm planning on having _thousands_ all running in one large-scale engagement. On having superbattleships built by the cooperation of dozens of players who must get together and arrange duty rosters in order to be able to run the huge beast effectively.... there are really interesting issues involving gameplay and how to get people working together to wipe out others (instead of just trying to go and directly wipe out others)
You'll be hearing about this- and it'll see Linux- but it won't make me money, and it won't ever be mainstream. So much the worse for the mainstream
The Anagrams Page. ;)
Try to spot which companies and individuals and products are being talked about!
"(Vast Lord Linus) had a gleam in his eye that looked like UNIX- except it wasn't going to be expensive corporate wares. No, what (Snarl... I'd Volt Us) had in mind was (In Flexure), and (Felix Rune), though still more cryptic than the simplified GUI operating systems, developed its own loyal following..." (written in October 1996!)
Volt me, linus!
"I've written a book and too many stories to count on this subject"
s/to count / /
yeesh.