The registry would not be as bad as it is if it was better documented. I know I know....if you subscribe to MSDN or some other microsoft money scheme, you can read the documentation. Well, users should have access to that if they so want.
Alternatively, use the MSDN CD that comes with Visual Studio. Microsoft also provided the ISOs for the April '03 edition of MSDN for free, although I've since misplaced the link.
MSDN provides excellent documentation. Given that you clearly haven't found it, I would say you're not in a position to comment.
Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library.
Actually, it's a hell of a lot easier to program for a library with well written docs than having to delve into the source code. If you have to read the source, it usually isn't a time-saver. And call this flamebait if you will, but in my experience, MS APIs have some of the best documentation out there; I've never come across a situation where I would need to see the source code after reading the relevant pages on MSDN.
Of course, if there was a bug in the library itself rather than the application using it, it would be another matter.
The lighting is the same, they're just different sizes. I think the differences are pretty obvious though: the scanline-rendered image has no ray-traced reflections, and the shadows all have soft edges (presumably because they're shadow mapped).
I don't see how this is news. Most people who write science papers are well aware of the problems with citing web pages, and we'll try to cite books and published papers wherever possible. Generally, people with something important to say will publish it properly, so this is not usually a problem.
The only people who exclusively cite web pages are likely to be the same people who write bad papers anyway, so I can't see the issue here.
Most spams I get are trying to convince me to click on a link rather than reply by email. Perhaps we should all just click the links to confuse the spammers instead?
ATi's unstable drivers have become a bit of an urban legend. Yes, we all know that ATi's drivers were piss-poor back in the Rage 128 days. But if you've used ATi cards recently you'll probably notice an improvement. Their drivers have been steadily improving ever since they moved to an integrated architecture, and they're now pretty solid.
I've been using ATi cards since the Catylist 3.2 drivers and and they've been very stable for me. I only get lockups when I do something stupid, like try to render a vertex array from unassigned memory, or bind a texture which doesn't exist; which I think is probably fair enough.
That's the windows drivers anyway. The Linux drivers are another thing entirely.
Hardly. Most people actually want 3D features such as, for example, OpenGL support. Integrated chipsets are notoriously bad. If you actually want to play any 3D games, forget it. A TNT2 for $10 would give better 3D support.
Excuse my ranting, but I'm sick of whiney integrated chipset users complaining to me that my games don't work on their crappy systems which don't even attempt to support 3D standards. Fortunately, they're in the minority.
This console will fail. One key ingredient they're missing is games, and I can't see developers rushing to support a system which nobody has heard of. I also think it's telling that they manage to misspell nVIDIA in the intro animation.
>Tidal power obviously affects currents and erosion.
>Even solar and wind power on large scale will >affect weather patterns and climate in addition to >the effects of their sheer size.
What are you smoking? Tidal power makes no difference to erosion, since these things are miles out to sea. And how do you figure solar and wind power affect weather patterns? Perhaps you mean the weather under a solar panel will be drier?
That's exactly how the system works without patents. If it's difficult to implement, it's difficult to copy. A difficult algorithm will take years for anyone to reproduce unless they have the source code.
No need to patent anything.
Red Hat 9.0 is a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows. Try SuSE (or the free Red Hat) for a better mix of price and features. link
You bought a radeon 9000 - ATi's most low budget card - and were surprised when the performance wasn't great? I have even less sympathy for you than all the people who bought geforce 4 mxes only to discover they were just Geforce 2s. In future, read a review or two before you pay for a video card.
Oh, and a final issue, purely to play Devil's Advocate, I understand Half Life 2 uses DirectX and some might suggest that it is the reason why HL2 apparently is more scalable and achieves more effects more easily across many performance levels. Could HL2's apparent conquering of Doom 3 at the moment be the defining moment of DirectX's conquering of OpenGL?
No. OpenGL is just as functional as D3D where it counts, although until recently it was a pain to implement vertex or pixel shaders due to the fact you had to program them differently for each card.
But now OpenGL 1.4 includes vertex buffer objects, (equivilant to D3D vertex buffers), ARB_fragment_program, and ARB_vertex_program, equivilant to D3D's pixel and vertex shaders.
Further, Nvidia's Cg provides a high level (c like) shader language which is equivilant to D3D 9.0's HLSL. OpenGL 2.0's HLSL will provide even better functionality when it's released.
The Canon i850 is a nice printer. It doesn't use much ink, the ink tanks are separate and cheaply priced, and it has excellent photo reproduction and print speed.
I was genuinely interested in this story, as I'm an indie game programmer, and any easy way to generate 3D art is welcome. However, what this guy has created is not a 3D scanner. It's a 2D cylindrical scanner. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I can't see any way to convert the resulting image into a 3D mesh, at least not without some very clever software which the inventor has neglected to write.
Because reliability is inversely proportional to complexity. Systems these days are generally a lot more complex than those of 10 years ago, and in complex systems, bugs are much harder to find. The fact that you say stability hasn't changed is in fact a pretty impressive achievement if you consider how much more complex hardware and software is nowadays.
I'm not sure about the Geforce FX, but almost all GPUs previously (including ATi's R300) had very limited program size, so it was impossible to run a program of any complexity on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, use the MSDN CD that comes with Visual Studio. Microsoft also provided the ISOs for the April '03 edition of MSDN for free, although I've since misplaced the link.
MSDN provides excellent documentation. Given that you clearly haven't found it, I would say you're not in a position to comment.
Of course, if there was a bug in the library itself rather than the application using it, it would be another matter.
Tell that to Pixar. Renderman is raster-based and they were doing just fine last time I checked.
Shadow-mapped shadows are fake soft shadows. They have soft edges due to the low resolution of the shadow map.
The lighting is the same, they're just different sizes. I think the differences are pretty obvious though: the scanline-rendered image has no ray-traced reflections, and the shadows all have soft edges (presumably because they're shadow mapped).
I don't see how this is news. Most people who write science papers are well aware of the problems with citing web pages, and we'll try to cite books and published papers wherever possible. Generally, people with something important to say will publish it properly, so this is not usually a problem.
The only people who exclusively cite web pages are likely to be the same people who write bad papers anyway, so I can't see the issue here.
>The FSF primary goal is *not* to create good software
But I've been successfully doing this for years. Send your vouchers to me!
Most spams I get are trying to convince me to click on a link rather than reply by email. Perhaps we should all just click the links to confuse the spammers instead?
ATi's unstable drivers have become a bit of an urban legend. Yes, we all know that ATi's drivers were piss-poor back in the Rage 128 days. But if you've used ATi cards recently you'll probably notice an improvement. Their drivers have been steadily improving ever since they moved to an integrated architecture, and they're now pretty solid.
I've been using ATi cards since the Catylist 3.2 drivers and and they've been very stable for me. I only get lockups when I do something stupid, like try to render a vertex array from unassigned memory, or bind a texture which doesn't exist; which I think is probably fair enough.
That's the windows drivers anyway. The Linux drivers are another thing entirely.
Hardly. Most people actually want 3D features such as, for example, OpenGL support. Integrated chipsets are notoriously bad. If you actually want to play any 3D games, forget it. A TNT2 for $10 would give better 3D support.
Excuse my ranting, but I'm sick of whiney integrated chipset users complaining to me that my games don't work on their crappy systems which don't even attempt to support 3D standards. Fortunately, they're in the minority.
I only meant in particularly severe cases. Like, for example, if they email me.
Bah, it's not my fault the article submission form ignores pound signs.
This console will fail. One key ingredient they're missing is games, and I can't see developers rushing to support a system which nobody has heard of. I also think it's telling that they manage to misspell nVIDIA in the intro animation.
>Tidal power obviously affects currents and erosion.
>Even solar and wind power on large scale will
>affect weather patterns and climate in addition to
>the effects of their sheer size.
What are you smoking? Tidal power makes no difference to erosion, since these things are miles out to sea. And how do you figure solar and wind power affect weather patterns? Perhaps you mean the weather under a solar panel will be drier?
That's exactly how the system works without patents. If it's difficult to implement, it's difficult to copy. A difficult algorithm will take years for anyone to reproduce unless they have the source code. No need to patent anything.
Red Hat 9.0 is a boon for those who already use it, but it's too expensive to warrant a switch from Windows. Try SuSE (or the free Red Hat) for a better mix of price and features.
link
How very odd.
clicky
You bought a radeon 9000 - ATi's most low budget card - and were surprised when the performance wasn't great? I have even less sympathy for you than all the people who bought geforce 4 mxes only to discover they were just Geforce 2s. In future, read a review or two before you pay for a video card.
Further, Nvidia's Cg provides a high level (c like) shader language which is equivilant to D3D 9.0's HLSL. OpenGL 2.0's HLSL will provide even better functionality when it's released.
The Canon i850 is a nice printer. It doesn't use much ink, the ink tanks are separate and cheaply priced, and it has excellent photo reproduction and print speed.
It wiped the floor with prety much everything else in the Tom's Hardware end of year printer lineup, so I bought one, and have been impressed.
Sheep are quadrapeds
I was genuinely interested in this story, as I'm an indie game programmer, and any easy way to generate 3D art is welcome. However, what this guy has created is not a 3D scanner. It's a 2D cylindrical scanner. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but I can't see any way to convert the resulting image into a 3D mesh, at least not without some very clever software which the inventor has neglected to write.
If anyone wants it, I've mirrored the OpenGL wrapper here (78k).
You can get the dawn demo from here
Because reliability is inversely proportional to complexity. Systems these days are generally a lot more complex than those of 10 years ago, and in complex systems, bugs are much harder to find. The fact that you say stability hasn't changed is in fact a pretty impressive achievement if you consider how much more complex hardware and software is nowadays.
I'm not sure about the Geforce FX, but almost all GPUs previously (including ATi's R300) had very limited program size, so it was impossible to run a program of any complexity on them.