heh - so much for my doc being "public". I did it while I was at SSI ('91-92), gave it to people at tons of other companies (games & later VR), looks like it never made it out anywhere Google is indexing.
I'll dig up the old docs for integration into what's still public, if anyone is interested, I looked over the docs Google found, and I had a bunch more chunks documented, especially animation, and all the material data...
The problem is that there is far more money to be made selling expensive seats to well funded studios, movie houses, and advertising agencies then in selling to game companies. Most game companies are cheap, and full of people who are biased against anything not written in-house.
I write engines now, but I spent a good 10 years as lead programmer of tools groups at various game companies (I distributed the first public reverse-engineering of 3ds file format, I think for version 2, had fun explaining that to a room full of lawyers...:)
I'm still dealing with these issues today. My current employer is starting a major project (MMORPG), we spent a decent part of the last year researching art tools. Ended up picking Maya, as its got a great C++ API that exposes darn near everything, as well as a great C++'ish scripting language for the technically inclined artists to use. (Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in Maya, etc...)
The problem is that it takes years to tune a decent editor - I started out in CAD/CAM/CAE and even I know better than to try and editor unless I've got a few man years to dedicate to infrastructure.
Unless the budget absolutely cannot handle it, I'd recommend taking Max or Maya and extending them with your own tools. Maybe even make some of them open source, like Pierre Terdiman did with his Flexporter system for Max, which saves a good man-year of work on 3ds Max exporter work!
But what he's not taking into consideration is that the CP is based on a force generated by the fins through the atmosphere. Model rockets generally stay below a few thousand feet where there's plenty of pressure. As you get higher, that CP starts moving forward again, so he'd also better make sure he completes his burn before CP gets too close to CG. There are other tradeoffs - throttle down to keep drag low by keeping speed low, vs. using inertia to get you as high as you can once air pressure has dropped enough that drag penalty is less net impact.
The only real problem w/ XML/SOAP based web-service security is patents. There are a rapidly growing set of patents being issued that cover, or will attempt to cover, every possible variation of method needed to transport XML and related datatypes securely.
This includes a broad patent on form signing which appears to cover most forms of hierarchical documents, such as XML.
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community. Yes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs'. But closed cell calorimetry is very hard to do right, and the electrodes are tricky to setup.
But bottom line, its an electrochemical cell that exposes dental x-ray film left next to the jar, and tritium is sometimes produced, all while little intermittent hot spots show up on IR.
So what if "its impossible!" Something interesting is happening, and it deserves to be studied properly, not dismissed...
I'm having a hard time understanding the conclusions reached in the announcement, given the data described in the announcement.
How does precisely measuring a number that is 1/3 of that predicted by the solar neutrino model prove that the neutrinos are changing and not that the model is incorrect?
Isn't that a bit like publishing Hubble's constant to 800 decimal places, but knowing that your answer is only accurate to +/- 10 orders of magnitude?
It should be noted that NORAD currently does a great deal of the work in this field, possibly making NASA's role redundant. I couldn't find a direct NORAD link, but here's one of their subcontractors that mentions they do some of the actual work at NORAD.
There are also a number of reports of the shuttle having to maneuver away from debris, such as here, its worth noting that the warning came from "U.S. Space Command", i.e. NORAD, not NASA's orbital debris office.
So some NASA PHB may think that NORAD's tracking is sufficient, and the money is better spent keeping the billion dollar dinosaur shuttle program flying...
OK, I started things by getting a bit too personal, but you sure jumped in.
I was responding to someone who implied that "professional" programmers could always write "good" code on demand, due merely to their professionallism.
As for myself, I started as an embedded system engineer, moved into semi-custom chip design, then into CAD/CAE/CAM software, left when bored as head of R&D, then moved into video games as head of tools & engines development, where I've now been for 15 years over ~40 games, except for the few years I took off to write cryptographic protocols at Cisco. As a hobby, I publish open source crypto libraries and work with a team developing a p2p infrastructure for massively scalable 3d clients.
You'd be surprised at what sort of code some of us/. posters can create, even if we're less modest online than in person. And you'd be absolutely amazed at how much tougher our hiring standards are than most industries...
I wasn't trying to disparage the medical profession...
But the fact remains that as a general rule, the practice of medicine is more about remembering which procedures to apply in response to the presented situation. There are even licensing and liability constraints that prevent significant variation from said 'established practice' without significant paperwork.
Expressed in terms of expert system design, the practice of medicine involves a mostly quantatative analysis resulting in the identification of a very small list of procedures or treatements. While there is a reasonable degree of art in the mechanics of surgical procedure, the rate of innovation is driven more from the creation of drugs and tools, than by the identification of new surgical methodologies. First principles are applied in the labratory, not the surgical center.
On the other hand, programming is an art where any given problem may be addressed by a nearly infinite number of approaches, of which a very large percentage are feasable. The decision tree for software design is many orders of magnitude larger, with a correspondingly larger degree of possible application of creative thought.
Again, I'm not disparaging the medical profession, I just think that as a general rule, creativity has more room for application in the practice of programming than in the practice of medicine.
I do agree that it is a different realm, and I do understand what you mean - I've been a first responder in a few severe traumas in the past, including one in which radical and creative intervention was required to keep at least one of the people alive until the helicopter arrived...
I'd have to make some exceptions to this position...
Being a surgeon is like being a very talented mechanic, with an excellent memory and fine motor skills. Additionally, the rigors of internship filter out those not qualified or capable. The creative muse has little place in a field where a few fractions of a mm slip in the right place can kill someone. A surgeon can get by with zero creativity other than adapting to "normal variation" in anatomy and being able to recall what procedures to apply, and still function very, very well.
OTOH, programming covers a wide breath of skills and abilities. Programming batch file processing scripts requires little creativity. Designing realtime attitude control systems requires grasp of many mechanical, electronic, control-theory, and scientifc fields beyond programming, and creativity to figure out how to acheive your goals. Bleeding edge 3d game engines require obscene amounts of creative design skills encompassing and correlating traditional CS, as well as physics, lighting, perceptual psychology, game theory, and much, much more.
A sr. programmer with a design responsibility on a bleeding edge project with 'creative block' can be unable to do their job "well", even if a "professional". Sure, you can sit down and hack something out anyway, and I've seen the results of that. Unfortunately, many companies can get away with crap code, and I guess yours is one of them...
Creativity results in elegant programming. Those who claim otherwise, likely do not write elegant code...
While I don't really know Romero, I'd place a large chunk of the blame for what transpired at Ion Storm on the shoulders of Todd Porter. I've worked with him (SSI), and I've worked at cleaning up the mess after he left (Twin Dolphin Games). Todd is something of a anti-legend in the industry, whom almost everyone has some horror story about, often how he managed to find yet another investor to burn. And unlike Todd, John Romero has made some lasting positive contributions to games.
Its not so much that they want them on the Internet, its that they want them to upload the buffer on response to certain criteria, and eventually the ability to remote query them.
After that, its only a matter of time before the Patriot act is ammended to include access to this data...
It should also be noted that if you check the fine print of your OnStar paperwork, this capability already exists, with no significant privacy warrantees, including no promise to require any warrant to access the data. In fact, according to a broad interpretation of my paperwork, there's nothing to prevent any OnStar employee from calling into my car at any time and browsing data, including where I am via the integrated GPS, possibly even turning on the in-car microphone and listening in. If you think these capabilities don't exist, look up the 'in-car speakerphone' and 'unlock my car by telephone' (through call to OnStar, which then calls your car) features of the system...
The "click of death" issue IS related to the iomega NAS appliance, in that it came from the same company, and said companies response to what came to be known as a serious design or manufacturing flaw turned many people away from trusting an iomega product in a critical role again.
Wouldn't you like to know, before purchasing a product from a company, that a previous product marketed for similar needs suffered a terrible defect? And even if the technology of the new product is dissimilar to that of the previous, wouldn't you like to know that companies customer service policy included such features as pretending the flaw didn't exist, refusing to issue RMA's on the defect, etc. ad nauseum?
I built something similar to this Lego Machine Gun once, though his is far prettier than mine was! Self-loading from a gravity-fed magazine of bricks, crank power, internal rubber band.
Quote from page: "I can empty the 17-round magazine in about 1.9 seconds, which translates to a rate of fire of over 500 rounds per minute."
They have tons of money invested in hardware they don't want to replace. Sticking to IPv4 makes it easy to keep user bases behind short-lease DHCP, which helps to keep the average user from mounting a public server that'll eat bandwidth the ISP doesn't want to provide.
Also a few Cisco points: 1) While some routers do support IPv6, the cheaper ones don't, and a decent percentage of older high end routers have routing algs implimented in semi-custom silicon - not software upgradable! 2) The enterprise network management software is lagging behind in IPv6 support last I heard (I used to work there), not much demand.
How is it "Flamebait" to correctly point out that one of the sources misrepresented the procedure, and back that assertion with direct quotes from the source?
"He used molecular tests to identify which eggs were free of the genetic mutation, fertilized them with her husband's sperm and transferred four of the resulting embryos to her uterus."
the JAMA abstract (which is likely correct) states:
"Analysis undertaken in 1999-2000 of DNA for the V717L mutation (valine to leucine substitution at codon 717) in the APP gene in the first and second polar bodies, obtained by sequential sampling of oocytes following in vitro fertilization, to preselect and transfer back to the patient only the embryos that resulted from mutation-free oocytes."
This means that fertilized eggs were destroyed, which meets most definitions of abortion.
Re:Blizzard had it right.
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2
Blizzard did quite a few things right, especially making compelling games and not releasing them until they were actually fun to play.
As for their matching service, it is rumored in the games industry that they have during a few quarters made a small profit from their ad banners, but I haven't seen this in writing and I'm rather skeptical.
Blizzards online model only works 'cause 'their servers' are little more than matching servers, and games are still played peer-to-peer for the most part. The server hosted characters and maps are primarily checksum and signing certificate databases. Even then, you'd be surprised to see how quickly running this gets expensive. Nothing eats bandwidth like games, and colocated servers are expensive, even with the bulk discounts offered to game companies.
Bottom line, Blizzard's online services are heavily subsidized by box revenue, and the reason few other companies can afford it is simply that most other companies games suck too much to subsidize online services AND executive bonus pools.
(Yes, I work in the industry, now writing MMORPG...)
Strictly speaking, I agree with you. But here in the US it's a wee bit more complicated.
#1. Media arms of corporations are at least as powerful as any other entity in the socio-economic strata of the US, and hold considerable control over the general population and how they vote.
#2. The first amendment has been interpreted so strictly to date that it would be extremely obvious that significant constitutional circumvention was in progress if they messed with it. (It has been argued that if the second amendment was interpreted as strictly, private ownership of nukes may be legal.)
#3. Preserving broad freedom of speech does wonders to squelch legitimate issues under the noise that the general populace is bombarded with.
Your assertion that in the US police do NOT throw people in jail for political speech, shoot people randomly, and torture people in a highly arbitrary fashion is correct. These acts are generally perpetrated only against members of the US populace that lack the financial resources to seek redress in the courts, or when the police believe the victim will either remain silent or their accusations will not be believed. See #3.
Not that I'm recommending using the memory bus for 3d, but...
PCI/AGP are great for uploading static textures, on that you are correct.
However, there's more data than that to saturate the bus:
* Procedural textures
* Vertex cloud animation (bones aren't always appropriate!)
* Swapping textures when insufficient video ram is available.
Any of these can cause bus saturation. While many games are following the Half-Life model (static everything, use matrix driven hierarchical bones animation), this creates pretty bland worlds.
If you want to realistic water, more organically animated content, or more subtle animations, this bandwidth becomes critical. Vertex/pixel shaders regain some of this by allowing processing to be moved back into the 3D GPU, but that only works for inherently procedural and low order polynomial effects - data driven or more complex procedurals still need to upload obscene amounts of data!
I should also mention that accelerator card drivers are optimizing pipelines for static textures, Unreal ran into this problem badly, and it continues to this day.
DEC Alpha AXP executable use: $2000 / year
HP9000 HP-UX executable use: $2000 / year
IBM RS/6000 executable use: $2000 / year
DOS/Win3.1/95 executable use: $1000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x executable use: $2000 / year
DEC ALPHA OSF/1 source access: $7000 / year
SGI IRIX 5.x source access: $7000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x source access: $7000 / year
Slashdot Mirror
Try PLIB! I'm working on one too, but it won't be ready for release for some time...
heh - so much for my doc being "public". I did it while I was at SSI ('91-92), gave it to people at tons of other companies (games & later VR), looks like it never made it out anywhere Google is indexing.
I'll dig up the old docs for integration into what's still public, if anyone is interested, I looked over the docs Google found, and I had a bunch more chunks documented, especially animation, and all the material data...
I write engines now, but I spent a good 10 years as lead programmer of tools groups at various game companies (I distributed the first public reverse-engineering of 3ds file format, I think for version 2, had fun explaining that to a room full of lawyers... :)
I'm still dealing with these issues today. My current employer is starting a major project (MMORPG), we spent a decent part of the last year researching art tools. Ended up picking Maya, as its got a great C++ API that exposes darn near everything, as well as a great C++'ish scripting language for the technically inclined artists to use. (Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in Maya, etc...)
The problem is that it takes years to tune a decent editor - I started out in CAD/CAM/CAE and even I know better than to try and editor unless I've got a few man years to dedicate to infrastructure.
Unless the budget absolutely cannot handle it, I'd recommend taking Max or Maya and extending them with your own tools. Maybe even make some of them open source, like Pierre Terdiman did with his Flexporter system for Max, which saves a good man-year of work on 3ds Max exporter work!
But what he's not taking into consideration is that the CP is based on a force generated by the fins through the atmosphere. Model rockets generally stay below a few thousand feet where there's plenty of pressure. As you get higher, that CP starts moving forward again, so he'd also better make sure he completes his burn before CP gets too close to CG. There are other tradeoffs - throttle down to keep drag low by keeping speed low, vs. using inertia to get you as high as you can once air pressure has dropped enough that drag penalty is less net impact.
My 2000 Suburban 1500-LT cuts the gas at ~95mph, until the speed drops back below ~92MPH.
This includes a broad patent on form signing which appears to cover most forms of hierarchical documents, such as XML.
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community. Yes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs'. But closed cell calorimetry is very hard to do right, and the electrodes are tricky to setup.
But bottom line, its an electrochemical cell that exposes dental x-ray film left next to the jar, and tritium is sometimes produced, all while little intermittent hot spots show up on IR.
So what if "its impossible!" Something interesting is happening, and it deserves to be studied properly, not dismissed...
I'm having a hard time understanding the conclusions reached in the announcement, given the data described in the announcement.
How does precisely measuring a number that is 1/3 of that predicted by the solar neutrino model prove that the neutrinos are changing and not that the model is incorrect?
Isn't that a bit like publishing Hubble's constant to 800 decimal places, but knowing that your answer is only accurate to +/- 10 orders of magnitude?
oops, posted too soon. NORAD only tracks debris over 10cm, whereas NASA's program tracks everything else.
:)
I'd bet this funding will be restored, some PHB did as bad a job checking facts as I did...
There are also a number of reports of the shuttle having to maneuver away from debris, such as here, its worth noting that the warning came from "U.S. Space Command", i.e. NORAD, not NASA's orbital debris office.
So some NASA PHB may think that NORAD's tracking is sufficient, and the money is better spent keeping the billion dollar dinosaur shuttle program flying...
OK, I started things by getting a bit too personal, but you sure jumped in.
/. posters can create, even if we're less modest online than in person. And you'd be absolutely amazed at how much tougher our hiring standards are than most industries...
I was responding to someone who implied that "professional" programmers could always write "good" code on demand, due merely to their professionallism.
As for myself, I started as an embedded system engineer, moved into semi-custom chip design, then into CAD/CAE/CAM software, left when bored as head of R&D, then moved into video games as head of tools & engines development, where I've now been for 15 years over ~40 games, except for the few years I took off to write cryptographic protocols at Cisco. As a hobby, I publish open source crypto libraries and work with a team developing a p2p infrastructure for massively scalable 3d clients.
You'd be surprised at what sort of code some of us
I wasn't trying to disparage the medical profession...
But the fact remains that as a general rule, the practice of medicine is more about remembering which procedures to apply in response to the presented situation. There are even licensing and liability constraints that prevent significant variation from said 'established practice' without significant paperwork.
Expressed in terms of expert system design, the practice of medicine involves a mostly quantatative analysis resulting in the identification of a very small list of procedures or treatements. While there is a reasonable degree of art in the mechanics of surgical procedure, the rate of innovation is driven more from the creation of drugs and tools, than by the identification of new surgical methodologies. First principles are applied in the labratory, not the surgical center.
On the other hand, programming is an art where any given problem may be addressed by a nearly infinite number of approaches, of which a very large percentage are feasable. The decision tree for software design is many orders of magnitude larger, with a correspondingly larger degree of possible application of creative thought.
Again, I'm not disparaging the medical profession, I just think that as a general rule, creativity has more room for application in the practice of programming than in the practice of medicine.
I do agree that it is a different realm, and I do understand what you mean - I've been a first responder in a few severe traumas in the past, including one in which radical and creative intervention was required to keep at least one of the people alive until the helicopter arrived...
I'd have to make some exceptions to this position...
Being a surgeon is like being a very talented mechanic, with an excellent memory and fine motor skills. Additionally, the rigors of internship filter out those not qualified or capable. The creative muse has little place in a field where a few fractions of a mm slip in the right place can kill someone. A surgeon can get by with zero creativity other than adapting to "normal variation" in anatomy and being able to recall what procedures to apply, and still function very, very well.
OTOH, programming covers a wide breath of skills and abilities. Programming batch file processing scripts requires little creativity. Designing realtime attitude control systems requires grasp of many mechanical, electronic, control-theory, and scientifc fields beyond programming, and creativity to figure out how to acheive your goals. Bleeding edge 3d game engines require obscene amounts of creative design skills encompassing and correlating traditional CS, as well as physics, lighting, perceptual psychology, game theory, and much, much more.
A sr. programmer with a design responsibility on a bleeding edge project with 'creative block' can be unable to do their job "well", even if a "professional". Sure, you can sit down and hack something out anyway, and I've seen the results of that. Unfortunately, many companies can get away with crap code, and I guess yours is one of them...
Creativity results in elegant programming. Those who claim otherwise, likely do not write elegant code...
While I don't really know Romero, I'd place a large chunk of the blame for what transpired at Ion Storm on the shoulders of Todd Porter. I've worked with him (SSI), and I've worked at cleaning up the mess after he left (Twin Dolphin Games). Todd is something of a anti-legend in the industry, whom almost everyone has some horror story about, often how he managed to find yet another investor to burn. And unlike Todd, John Romero has made some lasting positive contributions to games.
After that, its only a matter of time before the Patriot act is ammended to include access to this data...
It should also be noted that if you check the fine print of your OnStar paperwork, this capability already exists, with no significant privacy warrantees, including no promise to require any warrant to access the data. In fact, according to a broad interpretation of my paperwork, there's nothing to prevent any OnStar employee from calling into my car at any time and browsing data, including where I am via the integrated GPS, possibly even turning on the in-car microphone and listening in. If you think these capabilities don't exist, look up the 'in-car speakerphone' and 'unlock my car by telephone' (through call to OnStar, which then calls your car) features of the system...
I'm afraid I must disagree.
The "click of death" issue IS related to the iomega NAS appliance, in that it came from the same company, and said companies response to what came to be known as a serious design or manufacturing flaw turned many people away from trusting an iomega product in a critical role again.
Wouldn't you like to know, before purchasing a product from a company, that a previous product marketed for similar needs suffered a terrible defect? And even if the technology of the new product is dissimilar to that of the previous, wouldn't you like to know that companies customer service policy included such features as pretending the flaw didn't exist, refusing to issue RMA's on the defect, etc. ad nauseum?
Quote from page: "I can empty the 17-round magazine in about 1.9 seconds, which translates to a rate of fire of over 500 rounds per minute."
They have tons of money invested in hardware they don't want to replace. Sticking to IPv4 makes it easy to keep user bases behind short-lease DHCP, which helps to keep the average user from mounting a public server that'll eat bandwidth the ISP doesn't want to provide.
Also a few Cisco points: 1) While some routers do support IPv6, the cheaper ones don't, and a decent percentage of older high end routers have routing algs implimented in semi-custom silicon - not software upgradable! 2) The enterprise network management software is lagging behind in IPv6 support last I heard (I used to work there), not much demand.
How is it "Flamebait" to correctly point out that one of the sources misrepresented the procedure, and back that assertion with direct quotes from the source?
Someone is abusing moderation to editorialize.
While the Post article states:
"He used molecular tests to identify which eggs were free of the genetic mutation, fertilized them with her husband's sperm and transferred four of the resulting embryos to her uterus."
the JAMA abstract (which is likely correct) states:
"Analysis undertaken in 1999-2000 of DNA for the V717L mutation (valine to leucine substitution at codon 717) in the APP gene in the first and second polar bodies, obtained by sequential sampling of oocytes following in vitro fertilization, to preselect and transfer back to the patient only the embryos that resulted from mutation-free oocytes."
This means that fertilized eggs were destroyed, which meets most definitions of abortion.
Blizzard did quite a few things right, especially making compelling games and not releasing them until they were actually fun to play.
As for their matching service, it is rumored in the games industry that they have during a few quarters made a small profit from their ad banners, but I haven't seen this in writing and I'm rather skeptical.
Blizzards online model only works 'cause 'their servers' are little more than matching servers, and games are still played peer-to-peer for the most part. The server hosted characters and maps are primarily checksum and signing certificate databases. Even then, you'd be surprised to see how quickly running this gets expensive. Nothing eats bandwidth like games, and colocated servers are expensive, even with the bulk discounts offered to game companies.
Bottom line, Blizzard's online services are heavily subsidized by box revenue, and the reason few other companies can afford it is simply that most other companies games suck too much to subsidize online services AND executive bonus pools.
(Yes, I work in the industry, now writing MMORPG...)
See "humor". See also "sarcasm".
Strictly speaking, I agree with you. But here in the US it's a wee bit more complicated.
#1. Media arms of corporations are at least as powerful as any other entity in the socio-economic strata of the US, and hold considerable control over the general population and how they vote.
#2. The first amendment has been interpreted so strictly to date that it would be extremely obvious that significant constitutional circumvention was in progress if they messed with it. (It has been argued that if the second amendment was interpreted as strictly, private ownership of nukes may be legal.)
#3. Preserving broad freedom of speech does wonders to squelch legitimate issues under the noise that the general populace is bombarded with.
Your assertion that in the US police do NOT throw people in jail for political speech, shoot people randomly, and torture people in a highly arbitrary fashion is correct. These acts are generally perpetrated only against members of the US populace that lack the financial resources to seek redress in the courts, or when the police believe the victim will either remain silent or their accusations will not be believed. See #3.
Not that I'm recommending using the memory bus for 3d, but...
PCI/AGP are great for uploading static textures, on that you are correct.
However, there's more data than that to saturate the bus:
* Procedural textures
* Vertex cloud animation (bones aren't always appropriate!)
* Swapping textures when insufficient video ram is available.
Any of these can cause bus saturation. While many games are following the Half-Life model (static everything, use matrix driven hierarchical bones animation), this creates pretty bland worlds.
If you want to realistic water, more organically animated content, or more subtle animations, this bandwidth becomes critical. Vertex/pixel shaders regain some of this by allowing processing to be moved back into the 3D GPU, but that only works for inherently procedural and low order polynomial effects - data driven or more complex procedurals still need to upload obscene amounts of data!
I should also mention that accelerator card drivers are optimizing pipelines for static textures, Unreal ran into this problem badly, and it continues to this day.
Unix source docs: $250
DEC Alpha AXP executable use: $2000 / year
HP9000 HP-UX executable use: $2000 / year
IBM RS/6000 executable use: $2000 / year
DOS/Win3.1/95 executable use: $1000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x executable use: $2000 / year
DEC ALPHA OSF/1 source access: $7000 / year
SGI IRIX 5.x source access: $7000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x source access: $7000 / year
Be nice when this code IS actually open source.