I'm pretty sure they sell the Corn Syrup version in the US because we've got a huge tariff on importing sugar, not because of some sort of regional taste.
An OpenCL implementation of Bullet physics is coming. It's Open Source and is already being used in commercial games -- once it gets GPU acceleration there will probably be little demand for PhysX.
The feature I look forward to most is how easy it is to have multiple people in one conversation.
I have to deal with people pretty often, who are older and somewhere between "complete technophobe" and "AOL mom". I usually end up in a two hour long conference call that could have been done faster, clearer, and unscheduled via email. If only they could grasp the concept of not top replying that the Open Source and newsgroup community has used so well. A forum is too heavyweight and met with just as much resistance.
Wave seems like the perfect middle ground, the ease of email with a sprinkle of organization. And a lot of extra power if needed, but given the typical Google polish to keep the interface clean and easy to use.
I don't know anything about the new one, but the old one was definitely crap.
Windows Mobile uses almost exactly the same APIs we're used to on the desktop. Anyone that knows how to code a Windows GUI app should have no trouble coding one for Mobile. Hell you can even use.NET if you want, so there is a whole other class of developers who can do it too. In short, the possible developer pool is *huge*.
The problem is, apps tend to look and feel too much like they should be running on a desktop. In their rush to make the development experience so similar, they didn't think to make the UI actually work on a phone. They completely missed the touch window. Even now, I have yet to see a really intuitive touch interface for Windows Mobile that isn't a completely custom third-party shell.
If they want to attract users, they need an intuitive UI and a single place to find apps. If they want to attract developers, they need easy tools to make intuitive UIs and a single place to sell apps. It's not a hard concept, but they're failing pretty spectacularly at it.
If the Gizmodo article's title ("250-Foot Long Hybrid Airship Will Spy Over Afghanistan Battlefields in 2011") is any indication, it should be "...in 2011".
They're just looking for an easy way out, to make Microsoft pay for the state's own economic blunders. Surely Washington has known about this for a while but chose to ignore it. They can close the "loophole" now, but I don't see why it is fair for them to make it retroactively illegal. I actually thought such ex-post-facto laws were illegal themselves.
802.11g is a little under 7MB/s maximum, with a lot less in most cases. I've never used an iphone or ipod touch, but I'd be surprised if it couldn't use more than 7MB/s. Single-stream 802.11n is about 20MB/s maximum, which doesn't seem too impossible either.
Is Windows 7 revolutionary? No, not at all. But it has a lot more than TCP improvements. Off the top of my head:
Direct2D gives acceleration (via DX10 video cards) for 2D drawing and text rendering. Text rendering now supports more advanced OpenType stuff and implements vertical antialiasing for ClearType rendering, to further improve the quality of text.
GDI (what most desktop apps use) now uses Direct2D under the hood where possible, and has improved concurrency between processes.
User Mode Scheduling improves performance by vastly reducing the cost of context switching in highly-threaded apps.
The DWM's memory usage has been reduced by 40-50%, and has got some optimizations that should affect all apps including games.
Power management has been greatly improved, you should notice an increase in battery life on portables.
Native Wireless has been implemented with dual-band and some awesome fault-tolerant roaming support. Bluetooth 2.1 support is there too.
AVC/AAC support along with MP4/M4A/etc. has been included.
Some basic mouse gestures have been added which I've found incredibly useful, like dragging a window to the side of the screen to have it resize and take up that half of the screen. There has also been a big focus on making the OS work fantastic with touchscreens and multi-touch gestures.
The general feeling of responsiveness has been improved by performing work as late as possible (like starting some services on demand instead of on boot), giving visual feedback earlier, reducing stalls in the UI, etc. -- this doesn't actually make it run faster, but it makes it feel like it is, and that actually helps a lot when you're sitting in front of a PC all day.
Media Center is a lot better, and supports some new DRM crap (via BDA+) that should be enough for CableCard to finally let PC hardware be sold retail.
Is there Open Source software around to replace their product? I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve. What about a backing company who is able and ready to sell a complete package using it (hardware, support, training, etc.), who can be liable and responsible if anything goes wrong?
With the low quality crap these Diebold people keep bringing out, you'd think there would be 100 other companies in line to take their place.
You can usually spot them if you mention a cool new game and the first words out of their mouth ask how the graphics are or comment on how bad they looked in a youtube video. I know people who _despite reading terrible reviews_ will acquire games hoping the graphics make up for bad gameplay. I'm not certain if that is the majority market segment, but it's probably pretty high up there and it makes sense to market heavily to them.
The majority of this marketing isn't meant for the average gaming slashdotter who still plays 10 year old games just because they were fun as hell.
Google is what happens when developers and IT talk to each other correctly. Normally there is a brick wall separating the two, with IT guys being at the mercy of whatever the well-meaning but typically oblivious (to IT problems) devs cook up.
Intel's netbook Atoms run at 2.5W/11.8W right now -- already beating them out for power usage. Because of how important battery life is to netbook users, I don't think this has much hope of competing there. Intel does have other higher-power Atom CPUs that aren't meant for netbooks, so maybe that's the market AMD is going for. I'd be curious to see how large that market is, though.
Indeed. GPL doesn't stop you from releasing your code under another license. It just requires that any code linked to GPL and redistributed must be additionally available under the GPL.
IMHO the GPL, even v3, needs some work to clarify this question and also to close the hole for the software-as-a-service industry to modify GPL code without reciprocating.
I would like to see the GPL get clarified, too. Some companies play pretty loose with the GPL's definition -- like MySQL saying their protocol documentation is under GPL, and interpreting that to mean any code you write using that documentation must be under the GPL too.
FSF has done part of what you mention, though -- see the AGPL. It explicitly closes the SaaS hole.
This will probably be an excellent campaign -- hopefully designed with all the experience and flaws of the previous ones in mind -- and I'm really happy about it being released. But I can't help feeling what this really says is "we made a conscious decision to spend as little as possible on Left 4 Dead when we have a sequel coming out, so we made this much smaller map to end our obligation to past promises of content."
Being able to somewhat believably portray an average white guy is hard enough. Add in females, skin tones, age, and weight, and your cost of development will go up if you try to make them look and act correct.
Don't want to spend the extra time and money to get it right? Fine -- then you'll get short haired, masculine women, overly shiny or plastic looking skin tones, and overweight people who walk like they're only supporting half their weight. And this is usually what happens in most games that try
So most games choose to put more time into perfecting gameplay than providing diversity of characters, and try to hide the flaws by using minorities less often.
Agreed - I recently got a chance to try out a 360 on a standard-def screen. I don't think any of the ~5 games I tried had a UI that worked well on it. If the text wasn't downright unreadable, it required an extra second to process because of how little detail it had. If over half the Gears 2 players are on SD, you'd think it would make a little sense to have it looking good for them.
First -- Is "modern" C++ (with STL and possibly boost) a larger beast than "modern" Java? Haven't they both been inflated to the point that 50%+ of the language is deprecated, and whenever you bring one of them up you have to "be more specific" about "which C++" or "which Java" you're referring to?
Modern C++, even C++0x, does not have many deprecated features. pair, bind1st, etc. are the only things I can think of off the top of my head that will be entirely replaceable in C++0x (by tuples and bind/lambdas). C++'s mantra of "don't pay for what you don't use" makes a lot of deprecation unlikely -- for instance, a Java developer may see std::function as a sensible replacement for function pointers, but it can still have higher overhead so function pointers are here to stay.
I don't know Java, I can't directly compare the two. I do know C# which I understand is very similar, so I would guess that C++ has many more unique patterns than Java. Run-time code is only part of it, in C++ -- once you learn that, you've got a very different compile-time feature set to master. And then you've got even crazier things like Fusion, which blur the line between run-time and compile-time. Most C++ devs, 10 years into learning it and using it for big real-world projects, will still acknowledge that they don't know it completely and be amazed at some new technique they see.
Second -- I use both C and C++ for different needs, and while it's true that C can be "kept simple" in some environments, any project of meaningful scale will become a nightmare to maintain/debug. Whenever I have a choice to skip-to-C++ (usually in embedded programming, where speed and program size are still a big issue) I do so just to I can use containers and avoid throwing pointers around. While it maybe possible to argue that C is simpler, it's also one of the languages that makes it the easiest thing in the world to shoot yourself in the foot with a 12-gauge. I'll use C when there's no other choice (again, embedded systems), but I'll switch to C++ as soon as the architecture is large/fast enough to support it.
I usually skip straight to C++ too. I think it can usually accomplish the same thing C can, but more easily and/or more efficiently. But I also think it doesn't make much difference in management and maintainability of large-scale projects. When you get to that level, it's more about how you organize your code than how you implement it.
Did what I said really come off as criticism or antagonistic? It certainly wasn't meant that way. Is anything I said *wrong*?
I do nearly all my coding in C and C++. There are plenty of things to criticize them on, but having a standard is not one of them. Clearly there are Open Source stacks for C, and clearly Open Source development is possible in C. Nobody is debating that. My only point was that there is no "official" implementation of it.
I can understand them not including C++, because it is a complex beast that not many have the patience or time to get good with. But C is easy -- I doubt they would have had trouble finding someone competent to represent it. So there must be some other reason. That reason is all I was trying to think of.
Maybe they meant languages where the whole stack is Open Source. All the standard software and libraries for those languages is Open Source. There is no standard C compiler, runtime, or library -- only a specification (which is not Open Source or Free) with which to build your own implementation of them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure they sell the Corn Syrup version in the US because we've got a huge tariff on importing sugar, not because of some sort of regional taste.
An OpenCL implementation of Bullet physics is coming. It's Open Source and is already being used in commercial games -- once it gets GPU acceleration there will probably be little demand for PhysX.
The feature I look forward to most is how easy it is to have multiple people in one conversation.
I have to deal with people pretty often, who are older and somewhere between "complete technophobe" and "AOL mom". I usually end up in a two hour long conference call that could have been done faster, clearer, and unscheduled via email. If only they could grasp the concept of not top replying that the Open Source and newsgroup community has used so well. A forum is too heavyweight and met with just as much resistance.
Wave seems like the perfect middle ground, the ease of email with a sprinkle of organization. And a lot of extra power if needed, but given the typical Google polish to keep the interface clean and easy to use.
I don't know anything about the new one, but the old one was definitely crap.
Windows Mobile uses almost exactly the same APIs we're used to on the desktop. Anyone that knows how to code a Windows GUI app should have no trouble coding one for Mobile. Hell you can even use .NET if you want, so there is a whole other class of developers who can do it too. In short, the possible developer pool is *huge*.
The problem is, apps tend to look and feel too much like they should be running on a desktop. In their rush to make the development experience so similar, they didn't think to make the UI actually work on a phone. They completely missed the touch window. Even now, I have yet to see a really intuitive touch interface for Windows Mobile that isn't a completely custom third-party shell.
If they want to attract users, they need an intuitive UI and a single place to find apps. If they want to attract developers, they need easy tools to make intuitive UIs and a single place to sell apps. It's not a hard concept, but they're failing pretty spectacularly at it.
If the Gizmodo article's title ("250-Foot Long Hybrid Airship Will Spy Over Afghanistan Battlefields in 2011") is any indication, it should be "...in 2011".
They're just looking for an easy way out, to make Microsoft pay for the state's own economic blunders. Surely Washington has known about this for a while but chose to ignore it. They can close the "loophole" now, but I don't see why it is fair for them to make it retroactively illegal. I actually thought such ex-post-facto laws were illegal themselves.
Twitter: GOOD
Did I miss the announcement? I thought we were all still supposed to be shaking our canes and yelling at those damn kids to get off our lawns.
802.11g is a little under 7MB/s maximum, with a lot less in most cases. I've never used an iphone or ipod touch, but I'd be surprised if it couldn't use more than 7MB/s. Single-stream 802.11n is about 20MB/s maximum, which doesn't seem too impossible either.
Is there Open Source software around to replace their product? I know I've seen enough developers on here discussing how easy of a problem it is to solve. What about a backing company who is able and ready to sell a complete package using it (hardware, support, training, etc.), who can be liable and responsible if anything goes wrong? With the low quality crap these Diebold people keep bringing out, you'd think there would be 100 other companies in line to take their place.
You can usually spot them if you mention a cool new game and the first words out of their mouth ask how the graphics are or comment on how bad they looked in a youtube video. I know people who _despite reading terrible reviews_ will acquire games hoping the graphics make up for bad gameplay. I'm not certain if that is the majority market segment, but it's probably pretty high up there and it makes sense to market heavily to them.
The majority of this marketing isn't meant for the average gaming slashdotter who still plays 10 year old games just because they were fun as hell.
Some people speculate that console DLC madness is the reason Left 4 Dead 2 is being released as a new game instead of as DLC for the original.
Google is what happens when developers and IT talk to each other correctly. Normally there is a brick wall separating the two, with IT guys being at the mercy of whatever the well-meaning but typically oblivious (to IT problems) devs cook up.
Intel's netbook Atoms run at 2.5W/11.8W right now -- already beating them out for power usage. Because of how important battery life is to netbook users, I don't think this has much hope of competing there. Intel does have other higher-power Atom CPUs that aren't meant for netbooks, so maybe that's the market AMD is going for. I'd be curious to see how large that market is, though.
Indeed. GPL doesn't stop you from releasing your code under another license. It just requires that any code linked to GPL and redistributed must be additionally available under the GPL.
I would like to see the GPL get clarified, too. Some companies play pretty loose with the GPL's definition -- like MySQL saying their protocol documentation is under GPL, and interpreting that to mean any code you write using that documentation must be under the GPL too.
FSF has done part of what you mention, though -- see the AGPL. It explicitly closes the SaaS hole.
I wonder how different that picture would be if you could install and sell OSX, without any legal ambiguity, on any PC you want.
This will probably be an excellent campaign -- hopefully designed with all the experience and flaws of the previous ones in mind -- and I'm really happy about it being released. But I can't help feeling what this really says is "we made a conscious decision to spend as little as possible on Left 4 Dead when we have a sequel coming out, so we made this much smaller map to end our obligation to past promises of content."
Being able to somewhat believably portray an average white guy is hard enough. Add in females, skin tones, age, and weight, and your cost of development will go up if you try to make them look and act correct.
Don't want to spend the extra time and money to get it right? Fine -- then you'll get short haired, masculine women, overly shiny or plastic looking skin tones, and overweight people who walk like they're only supporting half their weight. And this is usually what happens in most games that try
So most games choose to put more time into perfecting gameplay than providing diversity of characters, and try to hide the flaws by using minorities less often.
Your hardware better be Open Source if I'm going to help you make it.
Agreed - I recently got a chance to try out a 360 on a standard-def screen. I don't think any of the ~5 games I tried had a UI that worked well on it. If the text wasn't downright unreadable, it required an extra second to process because of how little detail it had. If over half the Gears 2 players are on SD, you'd think it would make a little sense to have it looking good for them.
It is some supercomputer software to simulate a brain. Still cool!
First -- Is "modern" C++ (with STL and possibly boost) a larger beast than "modern" Java? Haven't they both been inflated to the point that 50%+ of the language is deprecated, and whenever you bring one of them up you have to "be more specific" about "which C++" or "which Java" you're referring to?
Modern C++, even C++0x, does not have many deprecated features. pair, bind1st, etc. are the only things I can think of off the top of my head that will be entirely replaceable in C++0x (by tuples and bind/lambdas). C++'s mantra of "don't pay for what you don't use" makes a lot of deprecation unlikely -- for instance, a Java developer may see std::function as a sensible replacement for function pointers, but it can still have higher overhead so function pointers are here to stay.
I don't know Java, I can't directly compare the two. I do know C# which I understand is very similar, so I would guess that C++ has many more unique patterns than Java. Run-time code is only part of it, in C++ -- once you learn that, you've got a very different compile-time feature set to master. And then you've got even crazier things like Fusion, which blur the line between run-time and compile-time. Most C++ devs, 10 years into learning it and using it for big real-world projects, will still acknowledge that they don't know it completely and be amazed at some new technique they see.
Second -- I use both C and C++ for different needs, and while it's true that C can be "kept simple" in some environments, any project of meaningful scale will become a nightmare to maintain/debug. Whenever I have a choice to skip-to-C++ (usually in embedded programming, where speed and program size are still a big issue) I do so just to I can use containers and avoid throwing pointers around. While it maybe possible to argue that C is simpler, it's also one of the languages that makes it the easiest thing in the world to shoot yourself in the foot with a 12-gauge. I'll use C when there's no other choice (again, embedded systems), but I'll switch to C++ as soon as the architecture is large/fast enough to support it.
I usually skip straight to C++ too. I think it can usually accomplish the same thing C can, but more easily and/or more efficiently. But I also think it doesn't make much difference in management and maintainability of large-scale projects. When you get to that level, it's more about how you organize your code than how you implement it.
Did what I said really come off as criticism or antagonistic? It certainly wasn't meant that way. Is anything I said *wrong*?
I do nearly all my coding in C and C++. There are plenty of things to criticize them on, but having a standard is not one of them. Clearly there are Open Source stacks for C, and clearly Open Source development is possible in C. Nobody is debating that. My only point was that there is no "official" implementation of it.
I can understand them not including C++, because it is a complex beast that not many have the patience or time to get good with. But C is easy -- I doubt they would have had trouble finding someone competent to represent it. So there must be some other reason. That reason is all I was trying to think of.
Maybe they meant languages where the whole stack is Open Source. All the standard software and libraries for those languages is Open Source. There is no standard C compiler, runtime, or library -- only a specification (which is not Open Source or Free) with which to build your own implementation of them.