What I last heard was that the PSP had region coding abilities, but that Sony didn't intend to use them. Whatever the case, I'm sure that the region coding can be changed via internal software. I doubt a manufacturer would make it difficult to change since that would require more effort at the factory.
Why is there no (more?) hardware raytracing hardware?
They exist. The problem is that it's expensive as fuck (upwards of $2k per board).
Rendering those images can take better than an hour and I'd think that any increase in speed would be usefull to someone who does this sort of work on regular occasion.
Yes, but that speed comes at a price. Either more render nodes, or dedicated boards like I mentioned above.
Why must I start rendering before I leave for work just to come home 9 hours later and find that the light I added didn't make a damn bit of difference 'cause it was set to 0!?
Because raytracing is SLOW. Very slow. Especially if you use some kind of global illumination. Radiosity rendering actually simulates the way light works. This is NOT a simple process. If you want fast rendering, use a scanline renderer like the ones found in Blender or 3ds max.
I thought the free market was supposed to work better than this. Where's my hardware?
How about non-tesselated geometry? You can have high detail curved surfaces without turning everything into a dense polygon mesh.That in turn lowers the memory and rendering requirements so you can apply those resources to proper detail instead.
It doesn't work that way. Everything rendered becomes polys at some point, even mathematically defined shapes such as NURBS.
imagine being able to just tag the sky as an emmisive surface and have the entire level lit up and shadowed accordingly without having to painstakingly add bounce lights everywhere and tune them till they looked correct.
You can do this, to an extent. If you can bake textures all you have to do is light your level in your rendering package then bake the textures. This will add the lighting effects to the textures directly, saving memory and computational overhead.
According to a friend of mine that works at Gamestop they're taking a large portion of the PSP's that were bound for Europe and bringing them here instead. Retailers were told by Sony to go ahead and up their preorder limits because of the Euro delay.
I honestly do not have one. If they can keep the bullshit to a minimum (no revert wars or anything of that nature) then it could be a useful, just like any other news site.
This does NOT make the contributors journalists though. Writing something down does not make you a journalist.
You're making your point using a technique called "straw man", where you present a contrast so obvious that it leads to an equally 'obvious' conclusion. When BTK was caught after 20 years, people who'd known him in church were shocked. The line between "creepy guy capable of terrible things" and "nice guy who holds the church collection plate" didn't seem quite so obvious for two decades there.
You miss the point. In all of the examples I cited the difference is the exact same, no matter how extreme (I notice you leave out the other two examples. Not enough straw for you?). One is a qualified expert in their field, the other is just some guy with an interest in that field. He may have the knowledge to do the job, but without the proper credentials he will never have the validity that a person with a degree or even some schooling in that field will have.
That's what the party-controlled media tell folks in places like China.
We're not in China (I'm not, anyway) and my comments have nothing to do with China. The fact is, a journalist's job is to write down facts. of course those facts will be filtered through personal bias, but if that bias is so blatant that it would keep you from getting a job then you simple are not a journalist. You are opinions page material at best.
The future is coming, and it's going to include a vastly more decentralized notion of trust and authority than we were used to ten years ago.
I agree completely. However, this does not mean that everyone who writes a blog is worth listening to, or that everyone with a blog is a journalist. The notion of trust is based on a person's qualifications, and those qualifications are based largely on schooling and experience. A man that quits his job of 40 years at a newspaper and starts his own blog is still a journalist. I, with absolutely no training as a journalist and absolutely no clue about the ethics of journalism, am not. Sorry dude, the line is quite clear.
where is the dividing line between journalists and non-journalists?
It's the same line as between a weatherman and a meteorologist. The same as the line between a creepy old man and a gynecologist. The same as the line between not knowing a fucking thing about the basic tenets of your supposed profession and being fully trained to do the job in the field you have chosen. The line is quite plain. One is a half-assed wannabe, the other actually knows what the hell they're doing.
Someone who wanted to work at a paper but was rejected because of their political views?
Someone so biased they can't get a job as a reporter has no business calling themselves a journalist.
Someone who would never work for a paper because they believe conglomerate ownership stifles journalistic integrity?
We call those people 'college students'. Then they grow up and become adults.
There are laws that protect people that expose illegal activities in the company they work for. There are no protections for revealing completely legal trade secrets. Get your head out of your ass.
These kind of tactics? You mean the horribly unethical practice of offering the kind of tools developers need at price they don't mind paying? Dude, wake the fuck up. MS isn't doing a goddamned thing the fucking SDL developers aren't doing. They're providing a framework. Why should MS do a damn thing that benefits anyone else? THEY ARE A FUCKING BUSINESS. If people don't want to use XNA, get this, THEY DON'T HAVE TO. I don't see Carmack being forced to use D3D, DO YOU?
I feel that firefox has got a bit of elitism in their top level. Maybe those developers should take a look back into where THEY came from.
Dude, that's nothing but grade-school whiny pussy bullshit. If you don't have elitism, if you don't have some form of control, EVERYTHING GOES TO SHIT. PERIOD.
IP is a broad term that encompasses several completely different things.
Would you please quit dragging this lame little line out every time someone uses the term IP? IP encompasses several things, but they are NOT completely different. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks exist only on an intellectual (not physical) level, hence the term INTELLECTUAL property. The only people that are confused by the term are people that want to seem intelligent by trotting out the tired "IP sucks!" bitchfest.
This would be like ford voiding my warranty for putting non-ford sparkplugs in my car.
No, this is more like a Ford dealer refusing to service my Honda that I put a Ford engine in. I can bitch and moan like a little girl all I want, but Ford will not touch my car because it's not their damn problem.
It's NOT true, you're just a dumbass that doesn't know how proxy bidding actually works. Why don't you try reading the information listed on the eBay website? Or, better yet, get the fuck off eBay so people like myself that actually know what the hell they're doing don't have to listen to whiny dumbasses bitch because they don't understand something as simple as a proxy bid.
But my question is, why isn't the industry going with the backwards-compatible solution?
It is technically inferior, and at some point you have to let go of the past. I know that's a terribly hard thing for Slashdotters (*COUGH vi *COUGH*) to do, but sometimes the best thing to do is just pave over the area and get on with your lives.
And if you get THAT reference, I'll give you a dollar.
This is kinda a given - you cant go out and patent (or TM) the word Dirt, for example.
You can't trademark it as a reference to soil but you sure as hell can trademark it as your new celebrity gossip magazine. The 'common use' provisions only apply to the areas that the use is common in. For example, I doubt anyone could trademark the term 'processor', start a chip manufacturer, then sue Intel and AMD. However, they could call their chip "Cologne" or "Pliers" (thanks to my desk for the suggestions) and get a trademark since those aren't normally associated with computing.
The news media, with the help of the Mozilla Foundation, have done a good job of painting Microsoft Internet Explorer as broken lately, specifically because of spyware and worms that spread through various vectors within IE.
True, but you make a mistake that I see a lot of people around here make. Broken technically doesn't mean it's broken FUNCTIONALLY. You and I know that IE is borked beyond hope, but to someone that doesn't do anything beyond typical end-user tasks (web browsing, online bill paying, playing Solitaire) it works just fine.
Of course, Firefox and Opera are better from a functional standpoint as well, but that's another thread.
Slashdot Mirror
The terms 'charity' and 'non-profit' are usually interchangeable in this sort of example.
What I last heard was that the PSP had region coding abilities, but that Sony didn't intend to use them. Whatever the case, I'm sure that the region coding can be changed via internal software. I doubt a manufacturer would make it difficult to change since that would require more effort at the factory.
Most DVD players can change regions through a simple internal menu. I doubt the PSP is much different. What was your point again?
According to a friend of mine that works at Gamestop they're taking a large portion of the PSP's that were bound for Europe and bringing them here instead. Retailers were told by Sony to go ahead and up their preorder limits because of the Euro delay.
I honestly do not have one. If they can keep the bullshit to a minimum (no revert wars or anything of that nature) then it could be a useful, just like any other news site.
This does NOT make the contributors journalists though. Writing something down does not make you a journalist.
These kind of tactics? You mean the horribly unethical practice of offering the kind of tools developers need at price they don't mind paying? Dude, wake the fuck up. MS isn't doing a goddamned thing the fucking SDL developers aren't doing. They're providing a framework. Why should MS do a damn thing that benefits anyone else? THEY ARE A FUCKING BUSINESS. If people don't want to use XNA, get this, THEY DON'T HAVE TO. I don't see Carmack being forced to use D3D, DO YOU?
If you were any more retarded you could memorize pi to 22,000 digits...
Tasteless joke, I know. But admit it, you DID laugh.
That loud explosion sound is the point flying over your head at mach speed.
It's NOT true, you're just a dumbass that doesn't know how proxy bidding actually works. Why don't you try reading the information listed on the eBay website? Or, better yet, get the fuck off eBay so people like myself that actually know what the hell they're doing don't have to listen to whiny dumbasses bitch because they don't understand something as simple as a proxy bid.
Doppler shift. Look it up.
And if you get THAT reference, I'll give you a dollar.
Offer void everywhere.
Because they had a fucking BACKUP GENERATOR, nitwit. It just so happens that this outage was so severe it took the generator with it.
So does yours.
You'll have to borrow a sign, I'm fresh out.
Of course, Firefox and Opera are better from a functional standpoint as well, but that's another thread.