I'm an independant (riding the donkey this year) so you don't have to listen, but I'd advise you to: Support your football team when you're in a football setting. Support your representative when you're in a political setting.
Oh and try not to get angry when you're accused of flip-flopping for doing so.
(Oy this flip-flop BS is getting on my nerves... doesn't matter what you change your mind about as much as why you change it.)
On the subject of polygamy practiced by "mormons" you're only partially correct.
The bulk of "mormons" (people who subscribe to the writings in the Book of Mormon) belong to "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Most mormons you will ever meet belong to this church. In this church, polygamy is certain assurance of excommunication.
There are, however, "mormon" offshoots from this church such as "The True & Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days," and "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." These churches teach polygamy.
As it stands though, most "mormons" do not subscribe to this belief, and it's erroneous to refer to it as a current "mormon" belief.
Of course, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sort of practiced polygamy long ago... But that's a big issue. At a glance the Wikipedia article appears to be pretty accurate and unbiased. Have a look there if you're interested.
I would expect DivX support to be harder than ogg support. I can see why ogg would hold up a flash or CD player, or even a hard-drive audio player. But when we're already supporting video, I can't expect ogg to be so problematic.
But then, the only reason I've seen hardware manufacturers encounter difficulty with ogg was due to the floating point math required to decode, which was solved quite a while ago. We have a decoder that doesn't require floating point math now.
The only video I've found has no indication of which side was confronted by police. I'd post it but... you know, this is slashdot.
Email me (you or anybody): onu [dot] public at gmail [dot] com
If you want a quick synopsis well, it's very dark one can hardly see anything, but eventually the camera comes into focus. We see an older man (supposedly 67 yrs. according to sources) fall down, then a guy calmly kneels behind him to protect him from the police shots. That particular event is rather odd, I don't know how the old man fell, nor how his protector knew they'd be firing in that direction, but it was obviously his intention to protect this old man. It would seem possible that the police shot the old man in the leg and the protector reacted, but your guess is as good as mine. The old man manages to get up and walk away, same with his protector. The camera turns around to see the protector's bare back revealing a rather large welt (there are reportedly more but I couldn't see them, again it's a dark video). The camera turns back towards the police again and a shot is played in slow motion where a policeman shoves some other guy into a wall.
I couldn't hear anything that would identify the particular group that was under fire. It didn't seem to matter to them at that point, as they were all focused on the police.
Again, anybody e-mail me and I'll get you the video as well as the page I got it from.
I personally don't care whether it was pro or anti bush that got shot. I'm getting rather fed up at the government's opposition to peaceful assembly in general...
Guess I never got into that IM/Chat/E-mail while fragging thing. I must be one of those sucky players that can only make a kill when the game is all that's open.
Try killing X and starting a new X session with JUST Doom 3 running, if you haven't already.
I have roughly similar specs ( GeForce 6800 GT, Athlon XP 2800+, 1024 MB RAM, and I run Doom3 at the same settings).
Except I made a little script to allow me to boot into either XFCE4 or my choice of OpenGL game on Gentoo. I expect Doom3 to move just a little faster than it already does.
Reportedly the r_showtris, r_showLightCount, and r_showIntensity commands will also be inaccessible in multiplayer! Oh the humanity, the outrage, the primal struggle between innocent gamer and tyrranous developer!
Come off it. Cvars starting with "r_", mostly, concern renderer debugging. They're good for modders, and good for "oh neato wow" adventures in single player, but the very nature of the commands is to tell us more about a scene.
It wouldn't be fair if I was running around with bump-maps while someone else isn't. In most cases the difference between light levels is minimal, however this all depends on the bump maps. Some bump-maps can drastically reduce the amount of light visible on a surface, thereby giving the user with bump-maps enabled a handicap compared to the user with bump-maps disabled.
"
...you'd think folks would have the decency to understand that if someone creates something they should have the ultimate say on how its used".
That's going a bit far. I don't like to nitpick, but this is how a lot of our DMCA/INDUCE/etc. ideas get presented to Congress. Let's be more clear and say that for a limited time, and with the intent of persuading artists, and inventers to do what they do best, we give them a monopoly on the distribution of their intellectual property.
But even this simple, and more slashdot friendly, idealogy has problems in modern-day application.
It used to be that the tools of artists and inventors were commodity items. There wasn't anything special about paint brushes, and noone was going to revolutionize the paint brush industry. Everything magical about a paint brush stemmed from the hand that held it.
Talent, originality, and determination made the intellectual property back then.
Now we have a technology industry, that creates intellectual property. This same intellectual property must be employed by other artists/inventors to create THEIR intellectual property. And these modern tools are high-priced items. Now artists/inventors can't sit down and do what they do best. Now there's more time spent worrying about producers/investors and how to attract them.
Is it possible for one to honestly believe that if we wiped out copyright violations that everything would just be grand? You're in the industry so you tell me, did all the artists that made it to the big leagues in your industry have money coming out of their behinds to actually pay for all the crap they needed to make a good impression and get signed?
I'll tell you that from MY industry (not the music business), it's pretty well expected that new artists will have been running off of either educational version of their software (much preferrable to copyright violation when it's available) or "pirated" software.
And it's also plenty well understood that they'll have a legal copy before they're in a position to start distributing real money making intellectual property of their own.
GameSpy: Are you going to retire after DOOM 3? John Carmack: No. I've got at least one more rendering engine to write. The development of rendering engines is driven by two major factors. One of these is, of course, the question, "When you finish a game, is it time to write a new engine?" The answer is based on what is happening in the hardware space...
They refer to DirectX 9.0 cards because that's what most people recognize. It IS an OpenGL card, and it will use OpenGL rendering paths. However the OpenGL enhancements present on a DirectX 9 card are better than the OpenGL enhancements on a DirectX 8 card......it's all a name game pretty much.
From this shot [hardocp.com], I would have to say, ATI looks nicer for quality of lighting. The blending seems more natural.
I couldn't find any real discernable difference between the ATI and nVidia side-by-side images, but I thought there must be at some microscopic level.
So when you pointed this one out I decided to test it.
I pulled the image into photoshop and copied the nVidia screen ontop of the ATI screen. I got them as best aligned as I could and then changed the nVidia layer's blending to "Difference." The thing is completely black (except for the gun, which occupies a different position and the text which was placed arbitrarily). Essentially this means there is almost no discernable difference in rendering quality.
What might make one look better than the other is probably a combination of a couple factors. 1: We're looking at a very hazy image. There's apparantly an additive transparent plane being cast from the light or gun or something. In the interest of making things look organic, the texture/shader on this haze probably moves or morphs in some manner, just to keep it from looking too static. 2: jpeg compression, combined with the minor differences between the two images has likely enhanced certain colors/shades to varying degrees.
Give it a try yourself though. I think you'll agree that there's very little difference between the rendering quality of these split screenshots.
Which isn't much of a surprise considering John Carmack's doing the programming.
I certainly hope, for their sake, X-Box Doom3 owners will only be able to play against each other on that little microsoft gaming network, "live," or whatever it's called.
I'd hate to be the poor sod trying to take on a Keyboard/Mouse user with a Controller in a First Person Shooter.
Have you, or the parent considered that maybe, just maybe, they didn't know about free/opensource?
You may both be in error assuming that they're scoffing free/opensource. We can all agree it isn't their priority, but perhaps if a polite person could introduce them to the benefits, and settle their fears, they would be willing to investigate.
Either way, you're both zealots as evidenced by your assuming that everyone knows what is, essentially, common knowledge amongst a very small subset of computer users.
Thanks for the information. I wish my system would take a GeForce 6, but it's a Shuttle XPC with a 250 Watt power supply. Even if they fit, I couldn't count on them to run... which is sad, before I knew about the power requirements I was planning to run nVidia.
Can any slashdotters divulge the channels through which the common man is acquiring nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultras, ATI Radeon X800 XTs, and X800 XT Platinums?
Why must people insist that it's just as easy to make a graphical interface as intuitive as a hardware interface?
Let's take a step back here. What's the difference between a computer and a hammer (from an interface perspective)?
They're both tools, used by people, to accomplish various tasks. Why can't a computer be as easy to use as a hammer (or any other elegant physical tool)?
Because we can't touch them.
It's that simple. In the hardware world we have hammers, to cars, to ipods, to... let your imagination go wild. It's entirely easier to make a hardware interface user friendly because a hardware interface designer can use their own intuition, and the intuition of others to make it easy.
Anyone ever ask themselves why hammers have a handle and a head? Anyone ever ask themselves why a walkman's volume is controlled by a dial? Do you commonly wonder why turning the steering wheel on your car turns your car?
Physical things can be made an order of magnitude easier than programs merely because they are physical things. The human mind easily pierces most facets of a physical object within seconds of its observation. The option to handle it makes it even easier.
Computers have a very serious handicap. We can't interact directly with our computer! Under most circumstances we have a keyboard and monitor as standard input and output. So we have our hardware interface. But this interface doesn't directly control the computer. We have to use this hardware interface to work with a software interface.
It's this simple little factor that trips people up: Interfacing with an interface.
To get a real life analogy of operating a program, use a hammer (and only a hammer, no hands) to operate your vehicle. No hands, no feet, use the hammer to accelerate and steer. Hell, I'll make it easy, you can use a hammer in each hand.
This being said, we've still got SO MUCH left to do in the graphical interface world. There's so much experimenting left to do, so many advances we've yet to make. Expecting the relatively young computer industry to produce interfaces that are as easy as interfaces that have been around since the stone-age is insane!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm an independant (riding the donkey this year) so you don't have to listen, but I'd advise you to:
Support your football team when you're in a football setting.
Support your representative when you're in a political setting.
Oh and try not to get angry when you're accused of flip-flopping for doing so.
(Oy this flip-flop BS is getting on my nerves... doesn't matter what you change your mind about as much as why you change it.)
Without developing a "Windows Update Firefox Extension" I don't think they'd be able to...
That quote is very interesting. Do you have any informative links that would explain this sentiment?
Hi,
former "mormon" here.
On the subject of polygamy practiced by "mormons" you're only partially correct.
The bulk of "mormons" (people who subscribe to the writings in the Book of Mormon) belong to "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Most mormons you will ever meet belong to this church. In this church, polygamy is certain assurance of excommunication.
There are, however, "mormon" offshoots from this church such as "The True & Living Church of Jesus Christ of Saints of the Last Days," and "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." These churches teach polygamy.
As it stands though, most "mormons" do not subscribe to this belief, and it's erroneous to refer to it as a current "mormon" belief.
Of course, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints sort of practiced polygamy long ago... But that's a big issue. At a glance the Wikipedia article appears to be pretty accurate and unbiased. Have a look there if you're interested.
I would expect DivX support to be harder than ogg support. I can see why ogg would hold up a flash or CD player, or even a hard-drive audio player. But when we're already supporting video, I can't expect ogg to be so problematic.
But then, the only reason I've seen hardware manufacturers encounter difficulty with ogg was due to the floating point math required to decode, which was solved quite a while ago. We have a decoder that doesn't require floating point math now.
The only video I've found has no indication of which side was confronted by police. I'd post it but... you know, this is slashdot.
Email me (you or anybody): onu [dot] public at gmail [dot] com
If you want a quick synopsis well, it's very dark one can hardly see anything, but eventually the camera comes into focus. We see an older man (supposedly 67 yrs. according to sources) fall down, then a guy calmly kneels behind him to protect him from the police shots. That particular event is rather odd, I don't know how the old man fell, nor how his protector knew they'd be firing in that direction, but it was obviously his intention to protect this old man. It would seem possible that the police shot the old man in the leg and the protector reacted, but your guess is as good as mine. The old man manages to get up and walk away, same with his protector. The camera turns around to see the protector's bare back revealing a rather large welt (there are reportedly more but I couldn't see them, again it's a dark video). The camera turns back towards the police again and a shot is played in slow motion where a policeman shoves some other guy into a wall.
I couldn't hear anything that would identify the particular group that was under fire. It didn't seem to matter to them at that point, as they were all focused on the police.
Again, anybody e-mail me and I'll get you the video as well as the page I got it from.
I personally don't care whether it was pro or anti bush that got shot. I'm getting rather fed up at the government's opposition to peaceful assembly in general...
Guess I never got into that IM/Chat/E-mail while fragging thing. I must be one of those sucky players that can only make a kill when the game is all that's open.
Try killing X and starting a new X session with JUST Doom 3 running, if you haven't already.
I have roughly similar specs ( GeForce 6800 GT, Athlon XP 2800+, 1024 MB RAM, and I run Doom3 at the same settings).
Except I made a little script to allow me to boot into either XFCE4 or my choice of OpenGL game on Gentoo. I expect Doom3 to move just a little faster than it already does.
Reportedly the r_showtris, r_showLightCount, and r_showIntensity commands will also be inaccessible in multiplayer! Oh the humanity, the outrage, the primal struggle between innocent gamer and tyrranous developer!
Come off it. Cvars starting with "r_", mostly, concern renderer debugging. They're good for modders, and good for "oh neato wow" adventures in single player, but the very nature of the commands is to tell us more about a scene.
It wouldn't be fair if I was running around with bump-maps while someone else isn't. In most cases the difference between light levels is minimal, however this all depends on the bump maps. Some bump-maps can drastically reduce the amount of light visible on a surface, thereby giving the user with bump-maps enabled a handicap compared to the user with bump-maps disabled.
That's going a bit far. I don't like to nitpick, but this is how a lot of our DMCA/INDUCE/etc. ideas get presented to Congress. Let's be more clear and say that for a limited time, and with the intent of persuading artists, and inventers to do what they do best, we give them a monopoly on the distribution of their intellectual property.
But even this simple, and more slashdot friendly, idealogy has problems in modern-day application.
It used to be that the tools of artists and inventors were commodity items. There wasn't anything special about paint brushes, and noone was going to revolutionize the paint brush industry. Everything magical about a paint brush stemmed from the hand that held it.
Talent, originality, and determination made the intellectual property back then.
Now we have a technology industry, that creates intellectual property. This same intellectual property must be employed by other artists/inventors to create THEIR intellectual property. And these modern tools are high-priced items. Now artists/inventors can't sit down and do what they do best. Now there's more time spent worrying about producers/investors and how to attract them.
Is it possible for one to honestly believe that if we wiped out copyright violations that everything would just be grand? You're in the industry so you tell me, did all the artists that made it to the big leagues in your industry have money coming out of their behinds to actually pay for all the crap they needed to make a good impression and get signed?
I'll tell you that from MY industry (not the music business), it's pretty well expected that new artists will have been running off of either educational version of their software (much preferrable to copyright violation when it's available) or "pirated" software.
And it's also plenty well understood that they'll have a legal copy before they're in a position to start distributing real money making intellectual property of their own.
John Carmack is an accessible public figure. If you want to know, ask him. There's no need for speculation.
We can't buy one because we can't get a refund on the "Microsoft Tax."
They refer to DirectX 9.0 cards because that's what most people recognize. It IS an OpenGL card, and it will use OpenGL rendering paths. However the OpenGL enhancements present on a DirectX 9 card are better than the OpenGL enhancements on a DirectX 8 card... ...it's all a name game pretty much.
I couldn't find any real discernable difference between the ATI and nVidia side-by-side images, but I thought there must be at some microscopic level.
So when you pointed this one out I decided to test it.
I pulled the image into photoshop and copied the nVidia screen ontop of the ATI screen. I got them as best aligned as I could and then changed the nVidia layer's blending to "Difference." The thing is completely black (except for the gun, which occupies a different position and the text which was placed arbitrarily). Essentially this means there is almost no discernable difference in rendering quality.
What might make one look better than the other is probably a combination of a couple factors. 1: We're looking at a very hazy image. There's apparantly an additive transparent plane being cast from the light or gun or something. In the interest of making things look organic, the texture/shader on this haze probably moves or morphs in some manner, just to keep it from looking too static. 2: jpeg compression, combined with the minor differences between the two images has likely enhanced certain colors/shades to varying degrees.
Give it a try yourself though. I think you'll agree that there's very little difference between the rendering quality of these split screenshots.
Which isn't much of a surprise considering John Carmack's doing the programming.
I certainly hope, for their sake, X-Box Doom3 owners will only be able to play against each other on that little microsoft gaming network, "live," or whatever it's called.
I'd hate to be the poor sod trying to take on a Keyboard/Mouse user with a Controller in a First Person Shooter.
That's the thing. In 13th Floor, the setting is a simulation inside a simulation.
In the Matrix, you decided it's a simulation inside a simulation. Did you ever bother to see Revolutions?
Have you, or the parent considered that maybe, just maybe, they didn't know about free/opensource?
You may both be in error assuming that they're scoffing free/opensource. We can all agree it isn't their priority, but perhaps if a polite person could introduce them to the benefits, and settle their fears, they would be willing to investigate.
Either way, you're both zealots as evidenced by your assuming that everyone knows what is, essentially, common knowledge amongst a very small subset of computer users.
Wow, thanks for the information. Thank you very much.
That's like disregarding every Star Trek episode ever made as soon as they traveled back in time.
Thanks for the information. I wish my system would take a GeForce 6, but it's a Shuttle XPC with a 250 Watt power supply. Even if they fit, I couldn't count on them to run... which is sad, before I knew about the power requirements I was planning to run nVidia.
Can any slashdotters divulge the channels through which the common man is acquiring nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultras, ATI Radeon X800 XTs, and X800 XT Platinums?
Why must people insist that it's just as easy to make a graphical interface as intuitive as a hardware interface?
Let's take a step back here. What's the difference between a computer and a hammer (from an interface perspective)?
They're both tools, used by people, to accomplish various tasks. Why can't a computer be as easy to use as a hammer (or any other elegant physical tool)?
Because we can't touch them.
It's that simple. In the hardware world we have hammers, to cars, to ipods, to... let your imagination go wild. It's entirely easier to make a hardware interface user friendly because a hardware interface designer can use their own intuition, and the intuition of others to make it easy.
Anyone ever ask themselves why hammers have a handle and a head? Anyone ever ask themselves why a walkman's volume is controlled by a dial? Do you commonly wonder why turning the steering wheel on your car turns your car?
Physical things can be made an order of magnitude easier than programs merely because they are physical things. The human mind easily pierces most facets of a physical object within seconds of its observation. The option to handle it makes it even easier.
Computers have a very serious handicap. We can't interact directly with our computer! Under most circumstances we have a keyboard and monitor as standard input and output. So we have our hardware interface. But this interface doesn't directly control the computer. We have to use this hardware interface to work with a software interface.
It's this simple little factor that trips people up: Interfacing with an interface.
To get a real life analogy of operating a program, use a hammer (and only a hammer, no hands) to operate your vehicle. No hands, no feet, use the hammer to accelerate and steer. Hell, I'll make it easy, you can use a hammer in each hand.
This being said, we've still got SO MUCH left to do in the graphical interface world. There's so much experimenting left to do, so many advances we've yet to make. Expecting the relatively young computer industry to produce interfaces that are as easy as interfaces that have been around since the stone-age is insane!