"What's ATI doing to keep TWO of these in one box from overheating?"
Maybe they can put a label on the box: "Buy a decent exhaust fan instead of whining in a forum you dumbfuck."
It's a Lian Li PC 70 aluminum case with four fans. The Radeon 8500 ran hotter than my XP1800, which is pretty inexcusable when it's so sensitive to temperature.
I had a Radeon 8500 in my box and had to remove it because it runs much, much, much hotter than my GeForce3, and because it was more susceptible to heat problems. (The DVI-D output starts to fail as it approaches 60C or so.)
What's ATI doing to keep TWO of these in one box from overheating?
Many of the Lian Li cases have air filters, including the aluminum ones sold on ThinkGeek.
Re:network topology
on
Secure Printing?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Just make sure there's no hubs between your server and your printer, that they're on a switched network, and that client-to-server traffic is all encrypted. voila!
Many switches will fall over into broadcasting everything, or everything for a specific MAC if a MAC has appeared on more than one port.
Sniffing traffic on a switched network is often as easy as falsifying a MAC, pinging about now and then to keep the switch confused, and listening.
Consensus seems to say the major factors are differences in quality and playback. In addition I posit that the difference in features and even the price of copying (real copying, not converting it to something else) a DVD isn't favorable. With many DVD's running around $15 to $20, with surround sound, subtitles, menuing, and extra features, it just doesn't seem to be worth it to make a dvd-r/ram/rw duplicate, judging from blank dvd media prices at mainstream places like Ciircuit City, which run about $8/disc, $6-$7 for a 3-pack. That's already about 50% of the cost of the actual thing.
Not to mention the price of the burner. I just bought a HP DVD+RW and it set me back about $450. CD-RW burners can be had for one tenth of that price.
Have a presence at some of the local user groups. Having a clueful person there can make a difference. The audience isn't just the users there, but also anyone who they talk to. Word of mouth is your friend.
Advertise in other mom-and-pop shops. If there's something cool you can throw on a free CD-ROM for them to give away with purchases, you capture the minds of people who aren't living chain-store lifestyles.
Have a local news presence. Make friends at the local TV and radio stations. Be the first with answers about viruses and other computer-related news. It's a given that they let you plug your business in exchange for acting as an unpaid consultant.
Don't talk down your competitors. Don't be afraid to point to them as a source of things you don't have. If you send someone to the best buy to pick up a product you don't have, they remember that you had the answer, not that Best Buy had the product.
Bring the prices up just a touch so you have room to drop a couple bucks for repeat customers before they even ask. People love believing they're getting a bargain on top of good service.
Don't tell them about all the service benefits of being a local shop. Show them.
Look for a few high-profile places to drop a couple free systems. I'd bet most school papers would print a few nice ads and a favorable story in exchange for a system for their school paper, for exmaple. Set up a shelter or a church with internet access and some old PCs that might be thrown away otherwise. Toss in a few old "Learning Word" books or similar and you can be credited with creating a job skill learning center. It doesn't have to be fancy and great. People will talk even so.
Play up the locally owned bit. Patriotism and local pride is very big right now. It's a valid and honest thing to advertise.
As much as I agree in spirit (ha ha) with the ruling, I am pretty disappointed by it.
Why? Because it throws gasoline on the fire of the paranoid delusions of many Christians in this country that they are somehow a persecuted minority squaring off with an evil govenrment committed to state-enforced atheism.
I don't know how many detentions and how much ridicule I suffered in school for refusing to say that part of the pledge, with the teacher keeping a watchful eye, ready to pounce when I wouldn't say it.
Word got back to other parents, which made school functions very difficult for my parents, and which got me punished repeatedly at home. Later, word got to my parents' church through students talking.
I don't give a rat's ass about fueling Christians' paranoid delusions when there are likely other kids being persecuted for real over their (non-)religious convictions.
Keep in mind that the quarter million dollar figure may have nothing to do with the actual actual damages incurred. Companies often make up figures like this in order to get the FBI's attention, since nothing under $5000 worth of damage is worth investigating.
Keep in mind also, that if the cablemodem company prematurely upgraded their hardware and network to compensate for an inability to service customers due to the extra bandwidth, the cost could have been well over a quarter million.
It's pretty ugly, but so was the theft. And unfortunately, this action may also be neccessary for them to be able to recover damages, even if it's only via insurance.
You haven't provided enough information for any reasonable answer.
This sure sounds like a case where the only logical thing to do is to implement the code both ways if at all possible, and to benchmark both to determine whether the more compact version is fast enough for your needs.
If you look through the Slashdot archives, MSNBC has historically been one of the loudest mainstream (read: not theregister.co.uk) MSFT-criticisers. This is typical of them
Close, but no cigar. MSNBC has been openly critical of software approaches, but largely silent and forgiving of anything tangible. You'll find them endorsing whining about software practices, but not so much about Microsoft's marketing and legal tactics. You won't find them rallying for the current lawsuits the way the other media are.
There's no single answer. The RTF of 3D formats is DXF, however I don't think that's even been extended to support NURBS or complex texturing.
If most of your people will be using Maya, stick with the Maya format. 3D Studio people need to stick with 3D Studio. Hash, Hash. Any time you move between formats, you're going to lose data; you'll have to find the least common denominator format between two packages and find clever ways of shuttling the other data across.
If you can reduce the features you need out of the format, saying "Polygons are important, NURBS aren't, not worried about texturing at this state," etc then we can probably give a better answer.
I guarantee you that if you turn off the TV and force yourself to use the web for work-related research only, you'll be amazed at how much you can squeeze out of a day.
There's been a bit of a race to see who can afford to lose the most money in order to drive the competition out of the game. Essentially, companies with deep pockets are trying to make it unprofitable for other companies to enter or stay in the market.
Last man standing owns something worth far more than the money he lost in the five or ten years spent purchasing his monopoly.
For motion capture, you might suggest she look at Vicon, the most popular motion capture system. Plan to have a couple hundred thousand bucks set aside for an entry-level system though. (Ouch.)
For hand-editing, the character animation software in Maya may be a good place to start. Or, look at any of the "bipedal toolkits" for other 3D animation packages. There are packages designed specifically for facilitating hand-animation of humanoid figures. Still, you're talking several grand and a relatively beefy computer for this.
I believe that AnimationMaster has basic support for this stuff as well, and it can be had as cheaply as $299. Possibly worth some extra investigation there.
I missed the Actuality story. This was my take on that (also included below). It doesn't look like the new version is much of a jump forward...
Now, niftyneat as it looks, I see a few problems...
First and foremost, you're going to be stuck representing solid 1-color materials, wireframes and ghosts with this. You're also not going to be able to make objects appear to be lit correctly. Why? Because the display has no idea what angle you're viewing it from. I'll explain.
Hold your thumb in front of the screen. It's blocking some part of the display, right? Move your head back and forth a little, and it will block different parts. Raise your head up a little or drop it down and it will block different parts again. The thing is, the display has no idea where you're looking from, so every part needs to be visible at all times. It can't clip out bits that are behind other things like a traditional 2D display. The result is that if you show a screen full of text, and draw a thumb in front, you still see the text through the thumb. Both will appear to act like ghosts.
Now, consider drawing a Coke can with a flashlight shining on the side. Again, it has no idea which side you're viewing from, so it's got to draw all sides of the can. The thing is, as you move about it, the logo on the front of the can shouldn't be visible when looking at the back of the can. Similarly, when you look at the side opposite the flashlight, it should be all dark. But since the display uses volumetric texels, it has no idea about the facing of each texel. Every texel's going to be drawn, so a you'd see the backward logo when looking from the back, and you'd see what boils down to a really confusing lighting situation when viewing from the non-flashlight side. It's like ghosts or colored X-Rays.
If you're still with me, that covers the reason for no shadows or non-uniform dull, not-too-shiny surfaces.
Next problem is - it's gonna be SLOW! Sad, but true! If it were a 3D bitmap representing equal units of a cube, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, it represents slices of a bitmap rotating through space.
Now, let me say this: Computers hate round things. Arcs, swooshes, ribbons, none of these are much fun for a computer to draw (comparatively speaking), much less, to render into.
Normally, polygon raster operations boil down to setting up a bunch of lines, one per scanline, and for each, figuring out how you progress across the line in measured, discrete steps. "I'm starting here in the texture, and I'll be there in the texture. I need to get there in 32 screen pixels, and I advance n units through regular steps of screen, texel and 1/z space." This tells the computer do the expensive calculation once, and just do 32 iterative steps to render the 32 pixels on that scanline. Any modern 3D engine is actually optimized to do the expensive stuff 1-2 times, creating the per-scanline numbers iteratively as well.
The only places where this approach doesn't work are where you're clipping against the edge of the display area. Clipped triangles are traditionally an order of magnitude more expensive to render than non-clipped ones. So much so, that terrible tricks are used to avoid them or reduce them to categories of special cases that can be tackled to attempt to avoid reverting to a true clip. For example, many display systems actually create waste RAM in a border around the screen. If a triangle doesn't penetrate the waste area, the rasterizer will go ahead and draw (or pretend to draw) the dummy pixels. It's only in the case where triangles are partly on screen, but go even beyond the dummy area that the hideously expensive render functions are called. Drawing millions of pixels per second that you know the user will never see? That sure points to a problem!
Enter the circular slice-based display space.
Here, for every single pixel, you've got to find which bits of a render go through. Essentially, you have to clip against the front and back of every single triangle you render as you calculate each slice. You're taking the worst hit on every single triangle!
What's even worse is that a single 'frame' (half rotation, assuming the rotating display plane is visible from front and back) consists of just shy of 200 renders. This means you're taking that 1% worst case scenario and repeating it 100% of the time, and repeating it about 200 times per frame. And because you're dealing with an arc for the rotational advancement (remember, computers like even, linear, discrete steps), you're dealing with curved surfaces instead of little cubes and the planes of a view frustum. Essentially, you're looking for the union of an arbitrary material and a stuffed piece of macaroni instead of merely finding the portion that fits within a little box. This makes the checks for pixel penetration several orders of magnitude more expensive and makes it even more expensive to attempt to reuse data from one slice to the next.
Hee. Plus the display is connected to your PC via SCSI2W, which is also a not-too-minor detail. You've got over 100 million pixels to send across per 'frame'. Even if they're just 1-byte pixels (256 color), and partial updates, that's asking a lot of a dual-channel 20MHz(?) bus.
Mind, we're still discovering things today which would have sped up rendering on our Commodore 64s. The computational cost will come down over time as more ways are developed for rendering in non-uniform/curved space, and as different spatial representation methods are explored. This is a nifty advance, certainly a step closers than the silly lenticular lens based 3D systems and the layered LCD-over-CRT approaches.
Still. Think of a ghosty AutoCAD on a 286. Look, but don't touch. We've still got a ways to go before 3D games and movies become a reality.
But don't get me wrong: It's a neat advancement, and it gives me hope. If I could borrow one, I think I'd make a noisy whirring ghost town snow globe. The shape just begs for it. And I'd love to get cracking on trying to find efficient algorithms for the unusual render space. *sigh.* $60k though. Maybe eBay can help me out on this one in another 20 years.
Is learning the specifics of the PS2 hardware that worthwhile? If someone wrote a decent game to a platform abstracted API like SDL (and even had it running on multiple platforms), would it be of less value?
That would be valuable, but not as much so. Guys who understand the engine-side stuff are golden, because there aren't enough of them out there. They can easily command six figure salaries just about anywhere.
Someone who mostly works through APIs and who is going to rely on others to do the dirty work is valuable, but may only earn half or two-thirds as much, and definitely has a lot more impressing to do in the interview.
The Quartz & Aqua GUI are no more an essential part of the OS than, say, X11 & KDE are. If the GUI freezes up, ssh into the box & restart it. GUI != a bad server OS.
It was meant to be funny, despite the 101 interpretations it's gotten.
Seriously, I'm quite impressed. Given the relative licensing costs alone, I'd encourage any datacenter to give the new Xserve units a serious look.
The times, they may be a changin' for the better!:)
What would be the advantage of writing PS2 Linux game vs. a DirectX or OpenGL PC game
as far as your hiring decision is concerned?
The benefits would be your having experience with the quirks of the hardware, and experience programming within a limited environment. Most applicants who have only had PC experience assume infinite resources and scads of pre-written libraries. Console code needs to be fairly lean, generally needs to bang on the hardware directly to get the best results, and generally doesn't rely on heaps of pre-written libraries.
Looking at your code, I can also determine whether you really understand the implications of the code you're writing. It's one thing when code is meant to be general-purpose, relying on the OS to translate everything into the most efficient formats. It's another when I can assume you should have had every opportunity to pick the right data formats and algorithms that work most efficiently on the given hardware.
On top of all that, the fact that you were interested enough to get a kit such as this one and make a game on your own speaks volumes about your dedication to game programming, and it takes dedicated people to make good games.
Slashdot Mirror
What's ATI doing to keep TWO of these in one box from overheating?
Many of the Lian Li cases have air filters, including the aluminum ones sold on ThinkGeek.
Sniffing traffic on a switched network is often as easy as falsifying a MAC, pinging about now and then to keep the switch confused, and listening.
Not to mention the price of the burner. I just bought a HP DVD+RW and it set me back about $450. CD-RW burners can be had for one tenth of that price.
Advertise in other mom-and-pop shops. If there's something cool you can throw on a free CD-ROM for them to give away with purchases, you capture the minds of people who aren't living chain-store lifestyles.
Have a local news presence. Make friends at the local TV and radio stations. Be the first with answers about viruses and other computer-related news. It's a given that they let you plug your business in exchange for acting as an unpaid consultant.
Don't talk down your competitors. Don't be afraid to point to them as a source of things you don't have. If you send someone to the best buy to pick up a product you don't have, they remember that you had the answer, not that Best Buy had the product.
Bring the prices up just a touch so you have room to drop a couple bucks for repeat customers before they even ask. People love believing they're getting a bargain on top of good service.
Don't tell them about all the service benefits of being a local shop. Show them.
Look for a few high-profile places to drop a couple free systems. I'd bet most school papers would print a few nice ads and a favorable story in exchange for a system for their school paper, for exmaple. Set up a shelter or a church with internet access and some old PCs that might be thrown away otherwise. Toss in a few old "Learning Word" books or similar and you can be credited with creating a job skill learning center. It doesn't have to be fancy and great. People will talk even so.
Play up the locally owned bit. Patriotism and local pride is very big right now. It's a valid and honest thing to advertise.
Word got back to other parents, which made school functions very difficult for my parents, and which got me punished repeatedly at home. Later, word got to my parents' church through students talking.
I don't give a rat's ass about fueling Christians' paranoid delusions when there are likely other kids being persecuted for real over their (non-)religious convictions.
Keep in mind also, that if the cablemodem company prematurely upgraded their hardware and network to compensate for an inability to service customers due to the extra bandwidth, the cost could have been well over a quarter million.
It's pretty ugly, but so was the theft. And unfortunately, this action may also be neccessary for them to be able to recover damages, even if it's only via insurance.
Flamebait? Oh ho - no no no, that's German! "The" XBox, "Theee!"
This sure sounds like a case where the only logical thing to do is to implement the code both ways if at all possible, and to benchmark both to determine whether the more compact version is fast enough for your needs.
Your question netted 53,496 possible answers. I've filtered out similar answers, so let me just give you the first 1,000...
Close, but no cigar. MSNBC has been openly critical of software approaches, but largely silent and forgiving of anything tangible. You'll find them endorsing whining about software practices, but not so much about Microsoft's marketing and legal tactics. You won't find them rallying for the current lawsuits the way the other media are.
So it's like cablemodem, only with a worse bandwidth/user ratio?
If most of your people will be using Maya, stick with the Maya format. 3D Studio people need to stick with 3D Studio. Hash, Hash. Any time you move between formats, you're going to lose data; you'll have to find the least common denominator format between two packages and find clever ways of shuttling the other data across.
If you can reduce the features you need out of the format, saying "Polygons are important, NURBS aren't, not worried about texturing at this state," etc then we can probably give a better answer.
It's made for people just like you. *nod*
There's been a bit of a race to see who can afford to lose the most money in order to drive the competition out of the game. Essentially, companies with deep pockets are trying to make it unprofitable for other companies to enter or stay in the market.
Last man standing owns something worth far more than the money he lost in the five or ten years spent purchasing his monopoly.
For hand-editing, the character animation software in Maya may be a good place to start. Or, look at any of the "bipedal toolkits" for other 3D animation packages. There are packages designed specifically for facilitating hand-animation of humanoid figures. Still, you're talking several grand and a relatively beefy computer for this.
I believe that AnimationMaster has basic support for this stuff as well, and it can be had as cheaply as $299. Possibly worth some extra investigation there.
Now, niftyneat as it looks, I see a few problems...
First and foremost, you're going to be stuck representing solid 1-color materials, wireframes and ghosts with this. You're also not going to be able to make objects appear to be lit correctly. Why? Because the display has no idea what angle you're viewing it from. I'll explain.
Hold your thumb in front of the screen. It's blocking some part of the display, right? Move your head back and forth a little, and it will block different parts. Raise your head up a little or drop it down and it will block different parts again. The thing is, the display has no idea where you're looking from, so every part needs to be visible at all times. It can't clip out bits that are behind other things like a traditional 2D display. The result is that if you show a screen full of text, and draw a thumb in front, you still see the text through the thumb. Both will appear to act like ghosts.
Now, consider drawing a Coke can with a flashlight shining on the side. Again, it has no idea which side you're viewing from, so it's got to draw all sides of the can. The thing is, as you move about it, the logo on the front of the can shouldn't be visible when looking at the back of the can. Similarly, when you look at the side opposite the flashlight, it should be all dark. But since the display uses volumetric texels, it has no idea about the facing of each texel. Every texel's going to be drawn, so a you'd see the backward logo when looking from the back, and you'd see what boils down to a really confusing lighting situation when viewing from the non-flashlight side. It's like ghosts or colored X-Rays.
If you're still with me, that covers the reason for no shadows or non-uniform dull, not-too-shiny surfaces.
Next problem is - it's gonna be SLOW! Sad, but true! If it were a 3D bitmap representing equal units of a cube, that would be one thing. Unfortunately, it represents slices of a bitmap rotating through space.
Now, let me say this: Computers hate round things. Arcs, swooshes, ribbons, none of these are much fun for a computer to draw (comparatively speaking), much less, to render into.
Normally, polygon raster operations boil down to setting up a bunch of lines, one per scanline, and for each, figuring out how you progress across the line in measured, discrete steps. "I'm starting here in the texture, and I'll be there in the texture. I need to get there in 32 screen pixels, and I advance n units through regular steps of screen, texel and 1/z space." This tells the computer do the expensive calculation once, and just do 32 iterative steps to render the 32 pixels on that scanline. Any modern 3D engine is actually optimized to do the expensive stuff 1-2 times, creating the per-scanline numbers iteratively as well.
The only places where this approach doesn't work are where you're clipping against the edge of the display area. Clipped triangles are traditionally an order of magnitude more expensive to render than non-clipped ones. So much so, that terrible tricks are used to avoid them or reduce them to categories of special cases that can be tackled to attempt to avoid reverting to a true clip. For example, many display systems actually create waste RAM in a border around the screen. If a triangle doesn't penetrate the waste area, the rasterizer will go ahead and draw (or pretend to draw) the dummy pixels. It's only in the case where triangles are partly on screen, but go even beyond the dummy area that the hideously expensive render functions are called. Drawing millions of pixels per second that you know the user will never see? That sure points to a problem!
Enter the circular slice-based display space.
Here, for every single pixel, you've got to find which bits of a render go through. Essentially, you have to clip against the front and back of every single triangle you render as you calculate each slice. You're taking the worst hit on every single triangle!
What's even worse is that a single 'frame' (half rotation, assuming the rotating display plane is visible from front and back) consists of just shy of 200 renders. This means you're taking that 1% worst case scenario and repeating it 100% of the time, and repeating it about 200 times per frame. And because you're dealing with an arc for the rotational advancement (remember, computers like even, linear, discrete steps), you're dealing with curved surfaces instead of little cubes and the planes of a view frustum. Essentially, you're looking for the union of an arbitrary material and a stuffed piece of macaroni instead of merely finding the portion that fits within a little box. This makes the checks for pixel penetration several orders of magnitude more expensive and makes it even more expensive to attempt to reuse data from one slice to the next.
Hee. Plus the display is connected to your PC via SCSI2W, which is also a not-too-minor detail. You've got over 100 million pixels to send across per 'frame'. Even if they're just 1-byte pixels (256 color), and partial updates, that's asking a lot of a dual-channel 20MHz(?) bus.
Mind, we're still discovering things today which would have sped up rendering on our Commodore 64s. The computational cost will come down over time as more ways are developed for rendering in non-uniform/curved space, and as different spatial representation methods are explored. This is a nifty advance, certainly a step closers than the silly lenticular lens based 3D systems and the layered LCD-over-CRT approaches.
Still. Think of a ghosty AutoCAD on a 286. Look, but don't touch. We've still got a ways to go before 3D games and movies become a reality.
But don't get me wrong: It's a neat advancement, and it gives me hope. If I could borrow one, I think I'd make a noisy whirring ghost town snow globe. The shape just begs for it. And I'd love to get cracking on trying to find efficient algorithms for the unusual render space. *sigh.* $60k though. Maybe eBay can help me out on this one in another 20 years.
Someone who mostly works through APIs and who is going to rely on others to do the dirty work is valuable, but may only earn half or two-thirds as much, and definitely has a lot more impressing to do in the interview.
Seriously, I'm quite impressed. Given the relative licensing costs alone, I'd encourage any datacenter to give the new Xserve units a serious look.
The times, they may be a changin' for the better! :)
Looking at your code, I can also determine whether you really understand the implications of the code you're writing. It's one thing when code is meant to be general-purpose, relying on the OS to translate everything into the most efficient formats. It's another when I can assume you should have had every opportunity to pick the right data formats and algorithms that work most efficiently on the given hardware.
On top of all that, the fact that you were interested enough to get a kit such as this one and make a game on your own speaks volumes about your dedication to game programming, and it takes dedicated people to make good games.
If you wrote a decent PS2 Linux game on your own, I'd hire you in a heartbeat, even if you had no industry experience.
How's that?