I suggest writing a game. Even if you're not a gamer, cloning Tetris or Pac Man on modern hardware isn't trivial and can help you learn the ins and outs of multiple different aspects of the system, from graphics to sound to file IO. Also, if your plan is to target phones then I highly recommend the Corona SDK. It's in beta right now, so there are still odd issues with it from time to time, but it's a simple API with enough power for most small projects and you'd be able to target multiple phones in the end. Lua is an interesting language, but protects you from a lot of the more tricky bits of languages like C++.
There's also PyGame. Python is (for me, someone in the animation industry), the most important language to learn, and it's powerful enough that I can't remember the last time I had to write C++ code.
Someone already mentioned that Azure means blue... Anyone else find it funny that Microsoft named their new OS by the color of the old OS's crash screen?
I guess Microsoft Cloud BSOD wasn't as catchy to the ad department.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by globals exactly, but I'd assume you're speaking about game state changes (big things, like You Got the Red Key or You Finished the Ninja King and Therefore Now Have the Sword of Green Fire).
I don't know how proper this is, but I accomplish this in a variety of ways depending on the complexity of what I have in mind.
Inside my main game object I always have a gamestate object, which is something like this:
class cGameState {
long int statelist[MAX_STATELIST_SIZE]; public:
cGameState();// memset the whole thing to 0
int getState(int which);// returns value from statelist
void setState(int which);// sets a value in the statelist };
Depending on whether or not speed is an issue I assign enumerated values as state names or I use strings loaded from disk at runtime. When I need a value then, I can talk to the gamestate object. When I need to write it out, I add a gamestate::save(FILE *fp) function. (No, I don't use iostreams. Never liked them.)
When it comes time to save a game I usually give every object that would need to be saved its own saving function, something like: entity->save(FILE *fp). A few people would say that this is bad, but in practice I find it quite a nice way of going about things regardless of object bloat. I then have the main game object step through its lists of objects, telling each to write in turn, bracketed by counts of objects or section headers or tags or the like. So for example, the game state would write, in order:
- Magic indicator number (in my games usually 0xD00D) - save file version, program version - save file player name - gamestate array (sizeof(whatever I chose for the array) * MAX_STATELIST_SIZE)
If I need to save entities: - entity count - entities as so assuming an open FILE *fp:
for (i = 0; i numTotalEnts; i++, entities[i].save(fp));
I haven't coded in a while, so the above is rightfully suspect.
I'd say that 3D acceleration is a Good Thing. After using QuartzExtreme on multiple macs, I have to say it makes a massive difference in most apps. It *does* speed up even moderately easy 2D things, like word processing apps. Also, where you notice the most difference is when switching between programs. Basically you've already got the images loaded in video ram, so a lot of stuff is instantaneous. And yeah, iChat AV wouldn't be quite as pretty on Win XP.
But the real question is: why are pixel shaders needed? Unless you're doing strange reflections or simulating bumps or playing around with reflectivity in realtime, I can't imagine a use for them. I certainly can't see why you'd need anything more than simple textured quads or triangles. Oh, and some sort of alpha support for shadows. All of that sounds like a TNT2-era card, like the one I used to use to do Quake II.
What this really feels like is Microsoft pushing hardware adoption again. Ever notice how new motherboards don't come with USB drivers for Windows XP? How you have to upgrade to the latest service pack to get USB support? Partly piracy curbing, and partly I think to keep a hold by forcing people to use approved hardware.
I'm wondering how this is going to effect other industries. If this ruling ends up standing through the other courts, could it have an impact on, say, BitTorrent file sharing sites? I mean, suprnova was just a conduit, too, providing an information passing service somewhat like an ISP does. If an ISP can't be held liable for the packets it sends, and can't be subpoenaed for the names of the people sending and receiving those packets...
I think the real question about the DCMA that nobody is asking is this: what made RealNetworks think that, in an age where companies are using the DCMA left and right to sue people / stop the proliferation of DRM breaking code, that a company as large and as well-known as Real could publically admit to reverse-engineering the DRM from the iTMS? As this is a direct violation of the DCMA (technically, some software, somewhere at Real, is a tool for circumventing copy protection; you would have had to break it to make it, unless you used code from DVDJon, in which case you should be releasing your software under the GPL), what legal barriers are Real able to hide behind? If Real had been a small startup trying to offer a store in competition to the iTMS, don't you think Apple would have crushed it?
More importantly, why do you think it seems like Apple hasn't really had much to say about this other than, "Oh, that makes us mad." ? When will the real backlash happen?
You ought to have stopped after the first sentence. There is no monetary advantage to opening source or revealing trade secrets: the software industry isn't high school. If Janie (i.e. ATI) is smoking the marijuana (opens the source to its drivers), it doesn't mean it's okay for Bobby (nVidia) to do the same; it just means Janie (ATI) is foolish.
Actually, the opposite is quickly becoming true.
It all depends on what kind of systems you're using your hardware with. True, I can't see a Fortune 500 company hiring programmers to fix bugs in webcam or wireless keyboard drivers, but studios like Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks, who run a lot of their software on Linux machines, might lean towards hardware accelerated cards for modeling which offer the drivers because it would mean less turnaround time from bug finding to bug squashing, as the debugging could be done in-house. You're probably thinking, "Yeah, but that's only for the software, and not the render farms -- a few errors during preview don't matter." However, as we move from software raytracing to hardware accelerated raytracing (which is the next obvious step after what we have now in the current generation of cards), render farms will be able to use 3D cards to to render photo-quality images at high resolution in a fraction of the time.
Now, what if a company like Dreamworks, which has hundreds of identical machines in its render farm, find that there's a driver-level bug which generates errors on some of its frames? They could switch back to software rendering (which would take longer), or they could fix the driver bug with their in-house programmers using the open source drivers and release a patch (which, incidentally, benefits everyone).
This is a highly theorhetical example (and absurd for now, but not 5 or 10 years from now), but I think it illustrates that open source drivers could, in fact, be a deciding factor for product purchases in companies using Linux.
You know, with all the recent game developments and my newly-purchased computer, I have to admit that better graphics does, at times, produce a better game. I've been absolutely loving Beyond Good and Evil, and that's in great part due to how immersive and overly-detailed the world is in the game. How you can walk around the orphanage and see little child drawings of the pig-man on the walls -- these are things that most games miss, these little details.
However, as a game it succeeds as a whole; without the story and the gameplay, as many other people have been saying, it would have been a failure despite the beautiful graphics engine. (This is the reason I hated the new Prince of Persia: the fights just weren't all that well-thought-out.) Anyone else here remember being drawn into FF6 (FF3 US) for extended periods of time? Or how ultimately playable FF7 is even now, despite the fact that its graphics are severly outdated and it always runs at a low resolution with a low framerate?
Right now I'm living in Japan. I have Beyond Good and Evil, the new 4 Swords Zelda game, and FFXI. Wanna know what I'm playing most, though? The original Zelda on GBA, second quest. That should say something about the current state of games and immersion.
That's an old report which details how DRM was removed from Microsoft's WMA format a while back.
Here's how I see PlayFair:
As someone with fairly sensitive ears, I can hear the difference between an original AAC file at 128 and a re-ripped mp3 at 192. The high end gets a bit crinkly, especially when the music is something electronic or with a high woman's voice. This loss in quality is why, I believe, Apple was allowed to distribute such high-quality rips on their store and still allow burning: it's like taping a CD-- you're not getting a perfect copy.
The real issue with PlayFair is that it allows a perfect copying of the compressed data. No generation loss from a re-rip. Somehow, the RIAA sees that as a more heinous offense than the way iTunes can re-rip music, or iTunes would have added something special to CD's with purchased music burnt onto them that prevented the re-ripping in the first place.
Here's a crazy notion: DRM in any form is just a request for cracking. No matter how long the encryption key is, or whether or not it's somehow linked to a secure chip in secure memory, companies will *never* be able to fully limit the desires of intelligent individuals. So instead of punishing the intelligent for removing what amounts to a general annoyance (the inability to play music I bought on my linux box or my PS2), what companies should be doing is reevaluating their strategies for distribution. I still think that music downloads could work without DRM, but the customer would need to be treated differently.
Anyway, PlayFair has a legitimate use, just like DeCSS -- the playing of purchased items on a box chosen by the purchaser. So unless Apple ports iTunes to Linux, then PlayFair has grounds to stand on, just as DeCSS will until DVD player makers start porting their players to that platform.
Incidentally, I too purchased $20 from the iTunes store once I found out I wasn't locked into my iBook, and I'll likely buy more. I was hesitant because I knew the music wasn't portable; now that it is, I fear it's going to be a money sink of epic proportions, as I live in Japan and can't always get the latest music.
The one thing I don't understand about Microsoft's stance is that people using OOo would obviously not be pirating copies of Office. This saves everyone time (searching for the crack) and money.
That in mind, wouldn't using OOo for windows be preferable for Microsoft, when compared to someone pirating and sharing copies of their suite?
Also, anyone using OOo is likely already using Mozilla or Thunderbird, which eradicates the whole e-mail issue (mentioned above). Free software users tend to fill holes in their library with... *gasp* more free software. Hell, I'm on a Mac running OS X and I've got more programs installed through Fink than I do of any other kind, our of habit.
I'm going to say a few things that most people I know might disagree with.
1) You only live once. This is so important I want you to read it again: You only live once. Regardless of your religious affiliation and life-after-death beliefs, nobody has any concrete proof that there is anything but limbo after we're gone. That said, there's no reason to allow yourself to make regrets in life, because there's no do-over.
2) Follow whatever dreams you have to the best of your abilities. I'm surprised daily that so many people don't even have dreams any more. The fact that you not only have one, but have the chance to make it a reality, is the confluence of a number of very rare events. This confluence should not be wasted.
3) With no wife or kids, you have no one to disappoint but yourself, and from the tone of your message it sounds to me as if you'd be very disappointed to miss this opportunity.
4) Even if you can't find an IT job when you get back, you could probably parlay your experience from the tour into, at least, gigs back home. It's a lot more work than an IT job, but you could be self-employed as a "bard" of sorts if you wanted, playing bars and festivals.
I'm on my second iBook since my switch from windows, and while I love them, I'm also on my *fourth* logic board.
Generally the backlight issue is solved by repairing the connector between the screen and the board -- a lot of times, the opening and closing of the lid kind of makes the wires bend back and forth, if you're unlucky, and like a piece of plastic they can snap or grow weak. Pulling it apart yourself is... difficult. I've done it a few times, and I don't recommend it. You can probably find the actual apple repair manuals on some sites (*cough*) if you want to do that yourself.
However:
I'd say a higher percentage of the time *any* problem you have on an iBook, particularly the recent ones, is due to logic board failure. The problem is that *everything* is on the logic board, and if one thing goes wrong (IE, the modem shorts out, or a chip on one side of the board gets too hot, etc) the whole thing can have a cascade failure. I've had discussions about this with trained apple repair men, and they've all hated the iBooks because of this issue (which, incidentally, is shared by the Powerbook 12", but those machines fail at a lower rate due to higher quality parts).
So despite whatever you end up doing to fix your machine, you may still need to replace the logic board anyways. If you replace the connector between screen and board and your backlight doesn't come back on, I'd recommend you looking into the logic board replacement, as having one thing go bad on it can lead your machine down a dark path.
Well, it may be weird to you people not in Japan right now, but as someone currently living outside Tokyo, where *every* car I've been in or seen in showrooms has an MD Player and a DVD navigation system, it seems kind of natural to me.
The only reason I *don't* use Vorbis is because of the lack of player support (and the fact that, on the Mac, I've had too many issues with the Vorbis quicktime plugin that allows iTunes to play the files). Slashdot is about choice, right? If people choose WMA, that's *their* choice. I like AAC at 160; that's *my* choice. If you want to use Oggs, you should be able to excercise that choice and shouldn't be hampered by the wants of the majority.
That said, if you choose a non-standard format (and yes, OGG is non-standard, unless you're one of the, what is it, 2% of total computer users running Linux as a desktop OS?) you're essentially giving up a lot of the freedoms you'd enjoy if you went with the standard. It's a double-edged sword.
Also, while Apple might add WMA support to iPods (thus enabling Windows users who don't know better about ripping CD's to transfer their music collections), Apple will sell more iPods. Period. However, I'm pessimistic that such support will be seen on any but the HP iPod-a-likes. I'm still waiting for someone to reverse-engineer the firmware and add unofficial OGG support...
In Japan, it's not 110 for emergencies -- it's 119. Since I'm living in Tokyo right now (actually Saitama, but most people don't know where that is), and I have a page on my wall with a picture of people calling for a fire or a medical emergency, I think I can be trusted.
Let's not forget the Pokemon games with the internal timer. It was really cool that catching some pokemon forced you to play at night. Also, there's Smash Bros Melee, which requires a certain number of matches / hours played to unlock certain secrets.
However, this can also be a pain in the ass. It took me forever to do certain things in Animal Crossing because I ended up having time to play only at night. I missed a lot of great events. I set the clock forward in another game and then somehow only had free time during the day... I like it better when time's not an option, when I can play at my own pace.
Personally I'd love to see an antialiased-font cartridge for the Gameboy Advance SP which accepts SD cards. I know most of you think the GBA has too small a screen for book reading, but I think it'd be perfect, and the battery problem would already be solved.
Unlike most of the people above, I can appreciate the need to collect, and to have a perfect collection, so I won't chastise you for having so much media. (Although, I do prune my mp3/mp4 collection often now, as my 30gb laptop HD just can't handle me.)
Something I've been doing lately: I buy cheap hard drives (I'm seeing 200gb for about 100$ US , though I'm living in Tokyo currently), and external firewire cases. Any case is fine, as long as you've got two plugs on the back for daisy chaining. This way you can build and add to your media array as needed. Also, I don't know about how windows handles firewire drives (or if it even has software RAID support -- I use Linux on my PC), but Mac OS X has the ability to treat a bunch of drives as one using Software Raid. I haven't played with it too much, but over one firewire connection it should be plenty fast. You'll likely only be streaming one movie at a time, anyway.
Of course, the bitch is when it's time to back up the collection. >_< Personally, I have stacks of CD's, usually one TV show in MPEG format on each, sorted by season and show, with labels on them. I burn as soon as I've watched to keep space on my drive free. The people above are right -- it's not often that I go back and rewatch an episode -- but there's also a sick geek power in being able to inflict the pain of Max Headroom on the unsuspecting. But VCD quality is fine for TV (I mean, VCD is nearly identical to VHS to me), and the time it takes to recompress episodes, even on a fast machine, isn't really worth it.
Actually, it's been moved here. Also, Allegro's recently gotten a Mac OS X port. If you're only really interested in 2D game creation, Allegro is King in my book. However, its 3D routines are all software-based, and getting OpenGL working with it is a bit of a pain (google for Allegro GL). This will change, I think, as there's been a lot of talk about massive changes in the lib for version 5.
There's also OpenPTC (don't feel like looking for the link right now), which IIRC is massively cross-platform.
... Duke Nukem! The sound bite in DN2, "I'm... Back." Back in the days when Adlib sound was still the norm and speech in a shareware game was unheard of. (Am I the only one who remembers this?) Or in Duke3D, my favorite line was, "Hmm... those alien bastards sabotaged the sub." (Don't bust me on direct quotes.)
A close second would be another Build engine game: "Whooo want-a some Wang?" Still funny on so many levels. Or maybe I'm just an adolescent twenty-something.
First off, about a year ago I happened across The Sandman books through the suggestion of a friend. After the first one (really the end and your portrayal of Death), I was hooked, and each month I'd buy myself a new one until I was done. Thanks for that -- I can't think of another author, recently, whose work was so engrossing that I had to own the entire set.
Between The Sandman and American Gods I noticed quite a few similarities (not in regards to your usage of the familiar mythic, but in other things) which has left me wondering: at the end of the day, how much of your writing is purely for the story, and how much of yourself creeps into your novels? The more I read The Sandman, the more I come to see the Endless not as seven distinct characters, but as seven facets of a single entity, not unlike how Frodo/Sam were one character in The Lord of the Rings. Were the Endless a window into your mind, into the facets of what you consider the core of yourself, or were they concocted purely for the story's sake?
A corollary: how coincidental is it that Dream looks so much like you? (Or, maybe, that you look so much like Dream?) I think the same could be asked of you and Shadow, although Shadow's a big man and I honestly have no idea how tall you are.
Something nobody else has mentioned is rendering types. We've moved from phong and goraud shading to raytracing, to radiosity (which was used to great effect in Fight Club, but which generally takes too long for renders that it's left out of movies), and now HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) are being used as global illumination maps. Essentially, this allows you to take a high-quality shot of the sky, for example, and light an outdoor scene based on the pixels in the image, giving a more natural look.
You should ignore the rest of the complaining trolls. You'd think that, considering how slashdot is an epicenter of OSS and free thought, that people would be a little more apt to give you starting points for your research.
I'm surprised the XBox hasn't had more buggy games, considering the ability of games to save patches to the hard disk. I think that was the first thing people feared when they heard that MS was putting a hard disk inside.
Unfortunately, this may be the way of the future. The PS2 has a hard disk attachment that Sony has yet to push, but you can be sure the PS3 will have one bundled in, along with some sort of subscription service to go along with it a la XBox Live. Of course, this service will provide new levels along with patches for poorly-done games, just as XBox Live will eventually do.
The unfortunate side of things is that most gamers don't finish games, and only get to see the single, linear quest the developers set out for them. Developers don't test the side quests or places out of normal reach because they rightly assume those places aren't as important. Even in the original Tomb Raider there were a number of places Lara should not have been able to hold on to, but could, and places that looked like handholds which weren't. Those weren't bugs; just design flaws.
Currently Soundtrack seems poised to fill a specific void in the mid-range audio production market on Mac OS X. Truthfully, both ACID and FruityLoops on the PC are amazing programs, both simplistic in design and powerful if you take the time to learn them, but there are no equivalent programs on Mac -- you end up paying for Ableton Live, which is strange and IMHO counter-intuitive, or Logic, which is hella expensive.
Plus, For $299 you get all those samples, royalty-free. That's the single largest free sample bundling I've ever seen with an audio package. I think ACID supplies 250 or 500 loops, and Fruity Loops is about the same.
My one qualm is that the requirements state you must have G4; I'm hoping that I can still get it to run with less audio tracks on my iBook...
I won't repeat the things others have said about laptops from both Apple and IBM, although I will give you a few anecdotes:
1) I'm an IT guy for a small medical company. Every so often we pick up used laptops for cheap -- we're an NGO, so that counts as an in-kind donation -- and usually, they're IBM's. Crazier still, these laptops that were build sometimes close to a DECADE ago still work fine, and their screens have no burned-out pixels. I hate Windows at this point (having made the switch to Mac OSX and Linux, and never looked back), but if you have no choice about using an intel-based laptop, go with IBM. Also, IBM is one of the few laptop makers that put the OS in some kind of internal rom, so that if the system crashes on one of the laptops without a CD Rom drive, you can use the bios to reinstall the OS without external media.
2) iBooks rock. I own two. I bought the first one after watching a friend accidentally knock his out a second story window and onto pavement. The battery shot out, but when he put the battery back in and dusted it off the only problem it had was a number of new scratches on the outside. Yes, they're really that durable. However, my new iBook 800 just had its modem port die, and it's just over 6 months old.
Also, using Virtual PC is a perfect way of having a sturdy laptop and a decent OS (I installed it specifically for KazAa...), but I don't recommend running it on any iBook, period, regardless of what the docs say. You absolutely need a G4. Period. If you're doing development, the slowness of VPC on a G3 under OS X will amaze you.
Lastly, Apple has worldwide coverage on their laptops if you opt for the extra 250$ AppleCare plan (3 years). Myself, I bought both iBooks in the states and am moving to Japan in a month, which happens to have apple stores in Tokyo, so I'm very excited about this. I don't know what IBM has in the way of warranties, but I've been to their office in Makuhari in Japan and I know they're pretty much established worldwide as well.
I'm wondering the obvious: have you been approached by any Big Corporationtm-type groups to pull the BitTorrent source and binaries from your site? What about scare tactics? Have you spoken with a lawyer yet to determine just how much liability you'd have were someone to attempt to sue you?
(Incidentally, I'd assume your liability to be zero, but the way the world's running right now, scapegoating has become a popular hobby.)
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest writing a game. Even if you're not a gamer, cloning Tetris or Pac Man on modern hardware isn't trivial and can help you learn the ins and outs of multiple different aspects of the system, from graphics to sound to file IO. Also, if your plan is to target phones then I highly recommend the Corona SDK. It's in beta right now, so there are still odd issues with it from time to time, but it's a simple API with enough power for most small projects and you'd be able to target multiple phones in the end. Lua is an interesting language, but protects you from a lot of the more tricky bits of languages like C++. There's also PyGame. Python is (for me, someone in the animation industry), the most important language to learn, and it's powerful enough that I can't remember the last time I had to write C++ code.
Someone already mentioned that Azure means blue... Anyone else find it funny that Microsoft named their new OS by the color of the old OS's crash screen? I guess Microsoft Cloud BSOD wasn't as catchy to the ad department.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by globals exactly, but I'd assume you're speaking about game state changes (big things, like You Got the Red Key or You Finished the Ninja King and Therefore Now Have the Sword of Green Fire).
// memset the whole thing to 0
// returns value from statelist // sets a value in the statelist
I don't know how proper this is, but I accomplish this in a variety of ways depending on the complexity of what I have in mind.
Inside my main game object I always have a gamestate object, which is something like this:
class cGameState
{
long int statelist[MAX_STATELIST_SIZE];
public:
cGameState();
int getState(int which);
void setState(int which);
};
Depending on whether or not speed is an issue I assign enumerated values as state names or I use strings loaded from disk at runtime. When I need a value then, I can talk to the gamestate object. When I need to write it out, I add a gamestate::save(FILE *fp) function. (No, I don't use iostreams. Never liked them.)
When it comes time to save a game I usually give every object that would need to be saved its own saving function, something like: entity->save(FILE *fp). A few people would say that this is bad, but in practice I find it quite a nice way of going about things regardless of object bloat. I then have the main game object step through its lists of objects, telling each to write in turn, bracketed by counts of objects or section headers or tags or the like. So for example, the game state would write, in order:
- Magic indicator number (in my games usually 0xD00D)
- save file version, program version
- save file player name
- gamestate array (sizeof(whatever I chose for the array) * MAX_STATELIST_SIZE)
If I need to save entities:
- entity count
- entities as so assuming an open FILE *fp:
for (i = 0; i numTotalEnts; i++, entities[i].save(fp));
I haven't coded in a while, so the above is rightfully suspect.
I'd say that 3D acceleration is a Good Thing. After using QuartzExtreme on multiple macs, I have to say it makes a massive difference in most apps. It *does* speed up even moderately easy 2D things, like word processing apps. Also, where you notice the most difference is when switching between programs. Basically you've already got the images loaded in video ram, so a lot of stuff is instantaneous. And yeah, iChat AV wouldn't be quite as pretty on Win XP.
But the real question is: why are pixel shaders needed? Unless you're doing strange reflections or simulating bumps or playing around with reflectivity in realtime, I can't imagine a use for them. I certainly can't see why you'd need anything more than simple textured quads or triangles. Oh, and some sort of alpha support for shadows. All of that sounds like a TNT2-era card, like the one I used to use to do Quake II.
What this really feels like is Microsoft pushing hardware adoption again. Ever notice how new motherboards don't come with USB drivers for Windows XP? How you have to upgrade to the latest service pack to get USB support? Partly piracy curbing, and partly I think to keep a hold by forcing people to use approved hardware.
I'm wondering how this is going to effect other industries. If this ruling ends up standing through the other courts, could it have an impact on, say, BitTorrent file sharing sites? I mean, suprnova was just a conduit, too, providing an information passing service somewhat like an ISP does. If an ISP can't be held liable for the packets it sends, and can't be subpoenaed for the names of the people sending and receiving those packets...
I think the real question about the DCMA that nobody is asking is this: what made RealNetworks think that, in an age where companies are using the DCMA left and right to sue people / stop the proliferation of DRM breaking code, that a company as large and as well-known as Real could publically admit to reverse-engineering the DRM from the iTMS? As this is a direct violation of the DCMA (technically, some software, somewhere at Real, is a tool for circumventing copy protection; you would have had to break it to make it, unless you used code from DVDJon, in which case you should be releasing your software under the GPL), what legal barriers are Real able to hide behind? If Real had been a small startup trying to offer a store in competition to the iTMS, don't you think Apple would have crushed it?
More importantly, why do you think it seems like Apple hasn't really had much to say about this other than, "Oh, that makes us mad." ? When will the real backlash happen?
You ought to have stopped after the first sentence. There is no monetary advantage to opening source or revealing trade secrets: the software industry isn't high school. If Janie (i.e. ATI) is smoking the marijuana (opens the source to its drivers), it doesn't mean it's okay for Bobby (nVidia) to do the same; it just means Janie (ATI) is foolish.
Actually, the opposite is quickly becoming true.
It all depends on what kind of systems you're using your hardware with. True, I can't see a Fortune 500 company hiring programmers to fix bugs in webcam or wireless keyboard drivers, but studios like Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks, who run a lot of their software on Linux machines, might lean towards hardware accelerated cards for modeling which offer the drivers because it would mean less turnaround time from bug finding to bug squashing, as the debugging could be done in-house. You're probably thinking, "Yeah, but that's only for the software, and not the render farms -- a few errors during preview don't matter." However, as we move from software raytracing to hardware accelerated raytracing (which is the next obvious step after what we have now in the current generation of cards), render farms will be able to use 3D cards to to render photo-quality images at high resolution in a fraction of the time.
Now, what if a company like Dreamworks, which has hundreds of identical machines in its render farm, find that there's a driver-level bug which generates errors on some of its frames? They could switch back to software rendering (which would take longer), or they could fix the driver bug with their in-house programmers using the open source drivers and release a patch (which, incidentally, benefits everyone).
This is a highly theorhetical example (and absurd for now, but not 5 or 10 years from now), but I think it illustrates that open source drivers could, in fact, be a deciding factor for product purchases in companies using Linux.
You know, with all the recent game developments and my newly-purchased computer, I have to admit that better graphics does, at times, produce a better game. I've been absolutely loving Beyond Good and Evil, and that's in great part due to how immersive and overly-detailed the world is in the game. How you can walk around the orphanage and see little child drawings of the pig-man on the walls -- these are things that most games miss, these little details. However, as a game it succeeds as a whole; without the story and the gameplay, as many other people have been saying, it would have been a failure despite the beautiful graphics engine. (This is the reason I hated the new Prince of Persia: the fights just weren't all that well-thought-out.) Anyone else here remember being drawn into FF6 (FF3 US) for extended periods of time? Or how ultimately playable FF7 is even now, despite the fact that its graphics are severly outdated and it always runs at a low resolution with a low framerate? Right now I'm living in Japan. I have Beyond Good and Evil, the new 4 Swords Zelda game, and FFXI. Wanna know what I'm playing most, though? The original Zelda on GBA, second quest. That should say something about the current state of games and immersion.
http://www.seyboldreports.com/ebooks/news/011023 -windows.html
That's an old report which details how DRM was removed from Microsoft's WMA format a while back.
Here's how I see PlayFair:As someone with fairly sensitive ears, I can hear the difference between an original AAC file at 128 and a re-ripped mp3 at 192. The high end gets a bit crinkly, especially when the music is something electronic or with a high woman's voice. This loss in quality is why, I believe, Apple was allowed to distribute such high-quality rips on their store and still allow burning: it's like taping a CD-- you're not getting a perfect copy.
The real issue with PlayFair is that it allows a perfect copying of the compressed data. No generation loss from a re-rip. Somehow, the RIAA sees that as a more heinous offense than the way iTunes can re-rip music, or iTunes would have added something special to CD's with purchased music burnt onto them that prevented the re-ripping in the first place.
Here's a crazy notion: DRM in any form is just a request for cracking. No matter how long the encryption key is, or whether or not it's somehow linked to a secure chip in secure memory, companies will *never* be able to fully limit the desires of intelligent individuals. So instead of punishing the intelligent for removing what amounts to a general annoyance (the inability to play music I bought on my linux box or my PS2), what companies should be doing is reevaluating their strategies for distribution. I still think that music downloads could work without DRM, but the customer would need to be treated differently.
Anyway, PlayFair has a legitimate use, just like DeCSS -- the playing of purchased items on a box chosen by the purchaser. So unless Apple ports iTunes to Linux, then PlayFair has grounds to stand on, just as DeCSS will until DVD player makers start porting their players to that platform.
Incidentally, I too purchased $20 from the iTunes store once I found out I wasn't locked into my iBook, and I'll likely buy more. I was hesitant because I knew the music wasn't portable; now that it is, I fear it's going to be a money sink of epic proportions, as I live in Japan and can't always get the latest music.
The one thing I don't understand about Microsoft's stance is that people using OOo would obviously not be pirating copies of Office. This saves everyone time (searching for the crack) and money.
That in mind, wouldn't using OOo for windows be preferable for Microsoft, when compared to someone pirating and sharing copies of their suite?
Also, anyone using OOo is likely already using Mozilla or Thunderbird, which eradicates the whole e-mail issue (mentioned above). Free software users tend to fill holes in their library with... *gasp* more free software. Hell, I'm on a Mac running OS X and I've got more programs installed through Fink than I do of any other kind, our of habit.I'm going to say a few things that most people I know might disagree with.
1) You only live once. This is so important I want you to read it again: You only live once. Regardless of your religious affiliation and life-after-death beliefs, nobody has any concrete proof that there is anything but limbo after we're gone. That said, there's no reason to allow yourself to make regrets in life, because there's no do-over.
2) Follow whatever dreams you have to the best of your abilities. I'm surprised daily that so many people don't even have dreams any more. The fact that you not only have one, but have the chance to make it a reality, is the confluence of a number of very rare events. This confluence should not be wasted.
3) With no wife or kids, you have no one to disappoint but yourself, and from the tone of your message it sounds to me as if you'd be very disappointed to miss this opportunity.
4) Even if you can't find an IT job when you get back, you could probably parlay your experience from the tour into, at least, gigs back home. It's a lot more work than an IT job, but you could be self-employed as a "bard" of sorts if you wanted, playing bars and festivals.
I'm on my second iBook since my switch from windows, and while I love them, I'm also on my *fourth* logic board.
Generally the backlight issue is solved by repairing the connector between the screen and the board -- a lot of times, the opening and closing of the lid kind of makes the wires bend back and forth, if you're unlucky, and like a piece of plastic they can snap or grow weak. Pulling it apart yourself is ... difficult. I've done it a few times, and I don't recommend it. You can probably find the actual apple repair manuals on some sites (*cough*) if you want to do that yourself.
However:
I'd say a higher percentage of the time *any* problem you have on an iBook, particularly the recent ones, is due to logic board failure. The problem is that *everything* is on the logic board, and if one thing goes wrong (IE, the modem shorts out, or a chip on one side of the board gets too hot, etc) the whole thing can have a cascade failure. I've had discussions about this with trained apple repair men, and they've all hated the iBooks because of this issue (which, incidentally, is shared by the Powerbook 12", but those machines fail at a lower rate due to higher quality parts).
So despite whatever you end up doing to fix your machine, you may still need to replace the logic board anyways. If you replace the connector between screen and board and your backlight doesn't come back on, I'd recommend you looking into the logic board replacement, as having one thing go bad on it can lead your machine down a dark path.
Well, it may be weird to you people not in Japan right now, but as someone currently living outside Tokyo, where *every* car I've been in or seen in showrooms has an MD Player and a DVD navigation system, it seems kind of natural to me.
The only reason I *don't* use Vorbis is because of the lack of player support (and the fact that, on the Mac, I've had too many issues with the Vorbis quicktime plugin that allows iTunes to play the files). Slashdot is about choice, right? If people choose WMA, that's *their* choice. I like AAC at 160; that's *my* choice. If you want to use Oggs, you should be able to excercise that choice and shouldn't be hampered by the wants of the majority.
That said, if you choose a non-standard format (and yes, OGG is non-standard, unless you're one of the, what is it, 2% of total computer users running Linux as a desktop OS?) you're essentially giving up a lot of the freedoms you'd enjoy if you went with the standard. It's a double-edged sword.
Also, while Apple might add WMA support to iPods (thus enabling Windows users who don't know better about ripping CD's to transfer their music collections), Apple will sell more iPods. Period. However, I'm pessimistic that such support will be seen on any but the HP iPod-a-likes. I'm still waiting for someone to reverse-engineer the firmware and add unofficial OGG support...
In Japan, it's not 110 for emergencies -- it's 119. Since I'm living in Tokyo right now (actually Saitama, but most people don't know where that is), and I have a page on my wall with a picture of people calling for a fire or a medical emergency, I think I can be trusted.
Or not. My mainboard doesn't have a DRM chip...
Let's not forget the Pokemon games with the internal timer. It was really cool that catching some pokemon forced you to play at night. Also, there's Smash Bros Melee, which requires a certain number of matches / hours played to unlock certain secrets.
However, this can also be a pain in the ass. It took me forever to do certain things in Animal Crossing because I ended up having time to play only at night. I missed a lot of great events. I set the clock forward in another game and then somehow only had free time during the day... I like it better when time's not an option, when I can play at my own pace.
Personally I'd love to see an antialiased-font cartridge for the Gameboy Advance SP which accepts SD cards. I know most of you think the GBA has too small a screen for book reading, but I think it'd be perfect, and the battery problem would already be solved.
Unlike most of the people above, I can appreciate the need to collect, and to have a perfect collection, so I won't chastise you for having so much media. (Although, I do prune my mp3/mp4 collection often now, as my 30gb laptop HD just can't handle me.)
Something I've been doing lately: I buy cheap hard drives (I'm seeing 200gb for about 100$ US , though I'm living in Tokyo currently), and external firewire cases. Any case is fine, as long as you've got two plugs on the back for daisy chaining. This way you can build and add to your media array as needed. Also, I don't know about how windows handles firewire drives (or if it even has software RAID support -- I use Linux on my PC), but Mac OS X has the ability to treat a bunch of drives as one using Software Raid. I haven't played with it too much, but over one firewire connection it should be plenty fast. You'll likely only be streaming one movie at a time, anyway.
Of course, the bitch is when it's time to back up the collection. >_< Personally, I have stacks of CD's, usually one TV show in MPEG format on each, sorted by season and show, with labels on them. I burn as soon as I've watched to keep space on my drive free. The people above are right -- it's not often that I go back and rewatch an episode -- but there's also a sick geek power in being able to inflict the pain of Max Headroom on the unsuspecting. But VCD quality is fine for TV (I mean, VCD is nearly identical to VHS to me), and the time it takes to recompress episodes, even on a fast machine, isn't really worth it.
Actually, it's been moved here. Also, Allegro's recently gotten a Mac OS X port. If you're only really interested in 2D game creation, Allegro is King in my book. However, its 3D routines are all software-based, and getting OpenGL working with it is a bit of a pain (google for Allegro GL). This will change, I think, as there's been a lot of talk about massive changes in the lib for version 5.
There's also OpenPTC (don't feel like looking for the link right now), which IIRC is massively cross-platform.
... Duke Nukem! The sound bite in DN2, "I'm... Back." Back in the days when Adlib sound was still the norm and speech in a shareware game was unheard of. (Am I the only one who remembers this?) Or in Duke3D, my favorite line was, "Hmm... those alien bastards sabotaged the sub." (Don't bust me on direct quotes.)
A close second would be another Build engine game: "Whooo want-a some Wang?" Still funny on so many levels. Or maybe I'm just an adolescent twenty-something.
Hi Neil,
First off, about a year ago I happened across The Sandman books through the suggestion of a friend. After the first one (really the end and your portrayal of Death), I was hooked, and each month I'd buy myself a new one until I was done. Thanks for that -- I can't think of another author, recently, whose work was so engrossing that I had to own the entire set.
Between The Sandman and American Gods I noticed quite a few similarities (not in regards to your usage of the familiar mythic, but in other things) which has left me wondering: at the end of the day, how much of your writing is purely for the story, and how much of yourself creeps into your novels? The more I read The Sandman, the more I come to see the Endless not as seven distinct characters, but as seven facets of a single entity, not unlike how Frodo/Sam were one character in The Lord of the Rings. Were the Endless a window into your mind, into the facets of what you consider the core of yourself, or were they concocted purely for the story's sake?A corollary: how coincidental is it that Dream looks so much like you? (Or, maybe, that you look so much like Dream?) I think the same could be asked of you and Shadow, although Shadow's a big man and I honestly have no idea how tall you are.
- Charles Wardlaw
ministryofdoom.org/cloud
Something nobody else has mentioned is rendering types. We've moved from phong and goraud shading to raytracing, to radiosity (which was used to great effect in Fight Club, but which generally takes too long for renders that it's left out of movies), and now HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) are being used as global illumination maps. Essentially, this allows you to take a high-quality shot of the sky, for example, and light an outdoor scene based on the pixels in the image, giving a more natural look.
You should ignore the rest of the complaining trolls. You'd think that, considering how slashdot is an epicenter of OSS and free thought, that people would be a little more apt to give you starting points for your research.
I'm surprised the XBox hasn't had more buggy games, considering the ability of games to save patches to the hard disk. I think that was the first thing people feared when they heard that MS was putting a hard disk inside.
Unfortunately, this may be the way of the future. The PS2 has a hard disk attachment that Sony has yet to push, but you can be sure the PS3 will have one bundled in, along with some sort of subscription service to go along with it a la XBox Live. Of course, this service will provide new levels along with patches for poorly-done games, just as XBox Live will eventually do.
The unfortunate side of things is that most gamers don't finish games, and only get to see the single, linear quest the developers set out for them. Developers don't test the side quests or places out of normal reach because they rightly assume those places aren't as important. Even in the original Tomb Raider there were a number of places Lara should not have been able to hold on to, but could, and places that looked like handholds which weren't. Those weren't bugs; just design flaws.
Currently Soundtrack seems poised to fill a specific void in the mid-range audio production market on Mac OS X. Truthfully, both ACID and FruityLoops on the PC are amazing programs, both simplistic in design and powerful if you take the time to learn them, but there are no equivalent programs on Mac -- you end up paying for Ableton Live, which is strange and IMHO counter-intuitive, or Logic, which is hella expensive.
Plus, For $299 you get all those samples, royalty-free. That's the single largest free sample bundling I've ever seen with an audio package. I think ACID supplies 250 or 500 loops, and Fruity Loops is about the same.
My one qualm is that the requirements state you must have G4; I'm hoping that I can still get it to run with less audio tracks on my iBook...
I won't repeat the things others have said about laptops from both Apple and IBM, although I will give you a few anecdotes:
1) I'm an IT guy for a small medical company. Every so often we pick up used laptops for cheap -- we're an NGO, so that counts as an in-kind donation -- and usually, they're IBM's. Crazier still, these laptops that were build sometimes close to a DECADE ago still work fine, and their screens have no burned-out pixels. I hate Windows at this point (having made the switch to Mac OSX and Linux, and never looked back), but if you have no choice about using an intel-based laptop, go with IBM. Also, IBM is one of the few laptop makers that put the OS in some kind of internal rom, so that if the system crashes on one of the laptops without a CD Rom drive, you can use the bios to reinstall the OS without external media.
2) iBooks rock. I own two. I bought the first one after watching a friend accidentally knock his out a second story window and onto pavement. The battery shot out, but when he put the battery back in and dusted it off the only problem it had was a number of new scratches on the outside. Yes, they're really that durable. However, my new iBook 800 just had its modem port die, and it's just over 6 months old.
Also, using Virtual PC is a perfect way of having a sturdy laptop and a decent OS (I installed it specifically for KazAa...), but I don't recommend running it on any iBook, period, regardless of what the docs say. You absolutely need a G4. Period. If you're doing development, the slowness of VPC on a G3 under OS X will amaze you.
Lastly, Apple has worldwide coverage on their laptops if you opt for the extra 250$ AppleCare plan (3 years). Myself, I bought both iBooks in the states and am moving to Japan in a month, which happens to have apple stores in Tokyo, so I'm very excited about this. I don't know what IBM has in the way of warranties, but I've been to their office in Makuhari in Japan and I know they're pretty much established worldwide as well.
I'm wondering the obvious: have you been approached by any Big Corporationtm-type groups to pull the BitTorrent source and binaries from your site? What about scare tactics? Have you spoken with a lawyer yet to determine just how much liability you'd have were someone to attempt to sue you?
(Incidentally, I'd assume your liability to be zero, but the way the world's running right now, scapegoating has become a popular hobby.)