Erm, yeah, except the situation is more complex since the tape was originally called 'duck tape' during WW2, and only later in civilian use became 'duct tape'.
You must be easily amused then. What's so funny about it? It does what is says it does. It's an ActiveX control that scans your system. It's downloaded and run on your machine.
I think 'It' referred to the Stirling engine Dean Kamen has developed, which could really cause some social change among people in third world countries, as it would offer them a cheap and easy way of generating electricity.
Auch, that's so wrong it hurts me to read that. Donkey Kong was Shigeru Miyamoto's first game at Nintendo - and quite an heroic feat. Read this rather nice history of Donkey Kong.
So, when 1980 rolled around, Nintendo had one crappy game and a staff artist with a bit of free time on his hands. Yamauchi called Shigeru into his office, told him that he was going to be responsible for saving Radarscope, and then sent him on his way. At that point, 27-year-old Shigeru had never created a video game and didn't know how to program. In perhaps the boldest move in early game development, Shigeru scrapped the Radarscope game entirely. He didn't try to modify or fix it; he just threw the whole thing out. But he couldn't just make any kind of game that he wanted to, because he was limited by the capabilities of the hardware that Radarscope was running on. So Shigeru had mostly free reign, only with no programming skills, a small budget, an even smaller team of Nintendo developers, and a blank screen.
The Colecovision console came packaged with Donkey Kong, which ensured its success. But that was the year after the arcade version. How Coleco got the license is a whole story in itself...
Re:In response to others...
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 1
Wow, this is really silly. How can the spacecraft act as a control sample if it's being lit in the same way as the rest of the landscape?
To have a control sample, you'd need to take a picture with the camera of some known colours, under controlled lighting conditions.
I'm happy to say I live in Antwerp, on the edge between what one might call the Jewish and North-African quarters. Antwerp being the Belgian city renowned for its high number of extreme right-wing voters.
I just take objection to PyRoNeRd's black-and-white statement. A judge won't interpret the anti-racism laws as he does. It should be obvious that the real situation is slightly more complex...
...except that Juice has been 'on ice' for a few years now. They're no longer developing it and when I mailed one of the authors, I was told that 'Juice is dead'. What I understood from it was that they don't see the point developing it further because Java has basically won that war, even though they see it as inferior technology.
Working/residency: sort of free. As long as you've got a job it's easy enough. See this page for a short overview of the issues, from a UK perspective.
What the author probably meant is that the DC graphics libraries are smart enough to not do texturing for polygons which are completely occluded by other polygons, but that is a software function, not a hardware function.
Wrong. It's certainly possible the DC libraries don't pass completely occluded polygons to the graphics hardware, but that's not what deferred rendering is about. First of all, the Imagination Technologies chip uses tile based rendering (or perhaps more clearly 'defered texturing'). What this means is that it's got a small z-buffer on chip, and renders the scene in small tiles the size of this z-buffer. Defered rendering refers to the fact that only those pixels that are visible as determined by the z-buffer are textured and shaded. In a traditional architecture (e.g. Nvidia) the whole polygon is textured & shaded.
Z-buffer algorithms have been doing that in 3d graphics systems for years as well.
Software z-buffer algorithms certainly. Although, of course, you don't need a z-buffer to determine if a polygon is completely occluding another one.
What is being done and what can be done to counter the results: Clearly invalid patents are recognised as such. Their existence is an embarrassment to the system but is hardly a significant barrier to software developers. The invalidity of patents in these and, the more important, less clear cases is increasingly been brought to public notice by internet exchanges e.g. by the open-source community. Backing this up is the reality that the Courts will not allow invalid patents to be enforced. Knowledge of that makes weak patents a very weak negotiating weapon. But there is a learning curve whilst the computer program developer community becomes aware of these factors.
The Quake engine is gratis - including for use in commercial products. The whole source code has been released under the GPL by id. Or, you can get a non-GPL license for $10,000.
I just thought I'd mention that, since I think it's quite possible to make a pretty nice commercial game using the Quake engine.
Q2 is $125,000 and Q3 is max($300,000 , 8% royalty).
As a matter of fact, when my mother was living in Germany, she was pregnant and was given a test for Downs Syndrome - she was told that if the test came back positive, they would FORCE her to have an abortion (something she would never even consider in the U.S.)
I assume this was not something that happened recently? Something from the Nazi period, perhaps?
Belgian AC, you mean. Dutch-speaking, or even Flemish-speaking, as they're from Flanders. Flanders being roughly northern Belgium.
Dutch people, OTOH, are from Holland, aka the Netherlands, which is to the north of Belgium, and an other country altogether.
Questions? Refer to 'Belgium doesn't exist!'
You need to ask?
To quote from the Textmode Quake page, another seminal Quake achievement:
BUT WHY, DAMMIT? WHY?
If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience. Please go on about your business and accept my apologies for this distraction.
If a Europa Orbiter were to fly, some thought is now being given to using a more expensive Titan 4 launcher and using leftover Cassini-era RTGs. If the plutonium were used for Europa Orbiter, that means little, if any, would remain for the Pluto-Kuiper Express, effectively spelling its doom.
So their supply of plutonium is limited, right? Why?
Slashdot Mirror
SYS 64764
Shush, silly AC. I give you The History of Duct Tape.
Erm, yeah, except the situation is more complex since the tape was originally called 'duck tape' during WW2, and only later in civilian use became 'duct tape'.
So there.
You must be easily amused then. What's so funny about it? It does what is says it does. It's an ActiveX control that scans your system. It's downloaded and run on your machine.
Perhaps you should go and read this:
Windows Update FAQ
You're joking, I've had DSL in Antwerp, Belgium for 3 years.
I think 'It' referred to the Stirling engine Dean Kamen has developed, which could really cause some social change among people in third world countries, as it would offer them a cheap and easy way of generating electricity.
If they can commercialize it.
The busses and trains are targets in themselves. Read the world news lately? Try a Google for 'bus terrorist'.
Read this rather nice history of Donkey Kong.
The Colecovision console came packaged with Donkey Kong, which ensured its success. But that was the year after the arcade version. How Coleco got the license is a whole story in itself...
Wow, this is really silly. How can the spacecraft act as a control sample if it's being lit in the same way as the rest of the landscape?
To have a control sample, you'd need to take a picture with the camera of some known colours, under controlled lighting conditions.
I'm happy to say I live in Antwerp, on the edge between what one might call the Jewish and North-African quarters. Antwerp being the Belgian city renowned for its high number of extreme right-wing voters.
I just take objection to PyRoNeRd's black-and-white statement. A judge won't interpret the anti-racism laws as he does. It should be obvious that the real situation is slightly more complex...
You, my friend, are obviously not a lawyer.
...except that Juice has been 'on ice' for a few years now. They're no longer developing it and when I mailed one of the authors, I was told that 'Juice is dead'. What I understood from it was that they don't see the point developing it further because Java has basically won that war, even though they see it as inferior technology.
Working/residency: sort of free. As long as you've got a job it's easy enough. See this page for a short overview of the issues, from a UK perspective.
I wouldn't think you'd need more than a hundred or so digits for that, even over solar-system distances.
Actually, he used his own Java program called Pixelego.
What the author probably meant is that the DC graphics libraries are smart enough to not do texturing for polygons which are completely occluded by other polygons, but that is a software function, not a hardware function.
Wrong. It's certainly possible the DC libraries don't pass completely occluded polygons to the graphics hardware, but that's not what deferred rendering is about. First of all, the Imagination Technologies chip uses tile based rendering (or perhaps more clearly 'defered texturing'). What this means is that it's got a small z-buffer on chip, and renders the scene in small tiles the size of this z-buffer. Defered rendering refers to the fact that only those pixels that are visible as determined by the z-buffer are textured and shaded. In a traditional architecture (e.g. Nvidia) the whole polygon is textured & shaded.
Z-buffer algorithms have been doing that in 3d graphics systems for years as well.
Software z-buffer algorithms certainly. Although, of course, you don't need a z-buffer to determine if a polygon is completely occluding another one.
The Quake engine is gratis - including for use in commercial products. The whole source code has been released under the GPL by id. Or, you can get a non-GPL license for $10,000.
I just thought I'd mention that, since I think it's quite possible to make a pretty nice commercial game using the Quake engine.
Q2 is $125,000 and Q3 is max($300,000 , 8% royalty).
Here's their licensing page.
As a matter of fact, when my mother was living in Germany, she was pregnant and was given a test for Downs Syndrome - she was told that if the test came back positive, they would FORCE her to have an abortion (something she would never even consider in the U.S.)
I assume this was not something that happened recently? Something from the Nazi period, perhaps?
She's got an English CV online (or résumé). Quite a busy young lady.
While that's certainly true in Dutch, I believe in English 'Holland' is often used as a synonym for 'the Netherlands' - certainly colloquiallyquick check on dictionary.com seems to corroborate this.
Sorry, not meaning to sound like a twat, just wasting some time...
Belgian AC, you mean. Dutch-speaking, or even Flemish-speaking, as they're from Flanders. Flanders being roughly northern Belgium.
Dutch people, OTOH, are from Holland, aka the Netherlands, which is to the north of Belgium, and an other country altogether.
Questions? Refer to 'Belgium doesn't exist!'
To quote from the Textmode Quake page, another seminal Quake achievement:
So their supply of plutonium is limited, right? Why?
Hello? Funny? Didn't you mean 'insightful', moderator?