$400 is a steal assuming Bluray Discs become the defacto HD format. Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI). The XBOX 360 does not have support for HDMI or DVI currently - Microsoft will have to make revisions to future models in order to play HD video. The PS3, however, does have HDMI output (in fact, it has TWO HDMI outputs) and ships with a Bluray drive already. I'd pay the $400 for the HD video player alone.
I think that Visual Studio can be a bad thing when used too heavily. It is great for browsing code and/or debugging, but I still prefer to write most of my code with vim because there are no clunky menus to perform common tasks. The code looks cleaner when restricted to 80 characters per line and because I can customize the syntax highlighting any way I like. That is a great point though, Visual Studio tends to offer solutions to common problems without the user ever having to learn the crux of the problem or how to solve it on their own. That said, it also has a lot going for it - especially version control integration.
I always get a kick out of new C++ programmers starting with Visual C++; using MFC classes like CFile or CTime without realizing that the stdlib provides the same functionality without cripling portability. If that same programmer never looked beyond MFC they might never learn how the underlying Win32 API works. While some might argue that is a good thing, the programmer would not learn about the "Chain of Responsibility" design pattern, which is the basis for most event driven operations in Win32. And then there is "printf (...)" vs. "cout", the latter may seem simpler (and for the most part is), but a curious programmer might wonder how "printf (...)" works and discover variable argument lists. I do not, however, feel that using Visual Studio "rots the brain"; it merely stunts a coder's growth, in the same way MFC does.
Well, first of all the XBOX 360 at launch is manufactured with a standard DVD drive. In truth, it makes no difference which format Microsoft ultimately choses, since they will have to manufacture new units using the new drive. Furthermore, the XBOX 360 does not have HDMI/DVI output, so it will be impossible to play high definition video to begin with (since the proposed HD disc formats all use HDCP). The impact will be minor, since the consumer will have to pay a premium for an HDMI/DVI compatible unit with the appropriate drive and who knows when that'll happen. People interested in the XBOX 360 for HD playback will just have to wait, while gamers will likely buy the launch unit and never buy a new unit just because it supports HD video playback.
When you use a terminal-based browser more often than a graphical browser, there's no need to block ads. If I were more motivated to block ads, it'd be because they stand between me and the information I'm looking for -- wasting valuable time.
TV ads, I just fast forward through -- I still have to watch them though, even if it is at 4x normal speed. Magazine ads, flip the page. Radio ads, change the station. Billboards, continue driving. Spam, SpamAssassin kills most of it. Junk mail, recycle. Phone solicitors, hang up. Door to door salesmen, shut the door. (Though... with this stupid new law in Florida, I could legally point a gun at them and that'd probably keep them from coming back for a LONG time)
Video game ads are about the only form of advertising I am FORCED to view. Even so, I don't mind -- it's usually done so humorously and doesn't interfere with gameplay.
If advertisers are trying to sell me something, they're mostly going about it the wrong way:P
What they don't realize is that by doing this, they will lose a lot of their audience. I for one rarely ever watch live TV anymore (unless the program is in HD). Time slots are of lesser importance as DVRs become more mainstream, television stations ought to embrace the opportunity rather than killing it! Online music stores have not made me any less likely to steal music (since I never did it in the first place); likewise, this flag only hurts the honest consumer -- pirates will always figure out ways to circumvent such measures.
I can see where Linus is coming from; on the other hand, I can see where the statement is fundamentally flawed. The best example I can give is a 3D engine. I have worked on an OpenGL engine for almost 4 years now, and certain aspects of the engine development (namely shader architecture) were purposely left without a formal 'spec'. 3D Hardware changes more rapidly than one can build a 3D engine from scratch. If the entire engine followed a 'spec' from day one, it would be obsolete by the time it were finished. If you had asked someone four years ago what NVIDIA and ATI would be working on right now, they could never guess that vertex and pixel shaders were beginning to merge (both on the hardware (shared pipelines) and in functionality (pixel shaders have front/back face information and vertex shaders can perform texture lookups)). They could have made assumptions that caused them to code themselves into a wall so to speak and which prevents them from ever utilizing the features of Shader Model 3.0.
On the other hand, there are other teams who work on gameplay and network development. For the most part the network developers can develop a 'spec' and reasonably follow it. The gameplay mechanics follow a constantly revised 'spec', and probably the only one the consumers who play the game are ever familiar with. In this aspect of development, a 'spec' is _required_ to complete the project in a reasonable timeframe.
I have mild hearing damage in my left ear, unrelated to headphones. In my case, it has to do with years of practicing the violin without an earplug in my left ear (which is most vulnerable to damage in violinists).
Nevertheless, I think the iPod generation is in luck, because they are also one of the first generations where genetic therapy is not purely science fiction. In the past couple of years, researchers discovered that the production of a protein (Rb1) was responsible for the behaviour shared by the inner ear hair cells of all mammals, or more to the point... the reason the hair cells do not divide and hearing does not regenerate. Recently scientists discovered the gene that was responsible for producing this protein in mice. Given 5 to 10 years, I am optimistic the naive iPod generation, senior citizens and even I will be eligible for gene therapy to reverse the effects of hearing loss.
It is important to protect your hearing, but damage is inevitable no matter how careful you are. Luckily, for musicians and the ignorant iPod generation, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon:)
I generally tend to run the highest refresh rate supported by the monitor at the given resolution. 60 and 66 Hz are horribly painful at any resolution, but around 85 Hz or so I don't notice any improvement. The difference between 70 Hz and 85 Hz is completely indistinguishable at 2048x1536 until I've been sitting at the monitor for a couple of hours and my eyes begin to hurt:)
The tiredness some people refer to as a symptom of too low refresh rate is really your iris straining to focus on your target. Even if you can't consciously see the individual scans, your iris is trying to react. Reversing your color scheme (i.e. Visual C++ uses an abysmal black on white scheme by default) has almost as much affect as increasing the refresh rate.
And in theory, the oposite becomes true at a certain point... Increasing the refresh rate beyond X will begin to cause more eye strain.
LCDs don't have this problem, but they run at really God awful resolutions and their gamma ramp is very distorted. There's no flickering, because it often takes more than one refresh for a pixel to go completely blank. CRT flicker is replaced by LCD blur, which doesn't really matter for office productivity type apps...
This has been explained many times in the past. It's true that DELL and Gateway once offered AMD based machines. And one of the reasons they stopped is because AMD could not meet demand.
Honestly, who cares? They can buy them a dime a dozen in certain parts of the former Soviet Union. It's not a whole lot of trouble to buy an ICBM to put them on either and let's not forget the brainwashed humans who are willing to kill themselves to deliver terror.
I gave a lot of thought to this while I was in Cape Cod last Fall...
They paid a few million dollars to relocate highland lighthouse hundreds of feet because of beach erosion in 1997. Admittedly anyone who sails around highland (Cape Cod) lighthouse is well aware of that spot and GPS does a far better job than that lighthouse... But the historical significance outweighed the price.
GPS is more accurate and any vessel that uses it for navigation darn well better have a fail-safe. I don't think reliability is going to be too big a concern...
Light houses will likely stay in operation purely for the atmosphere in the future. The new bulbs are extremely high efficiency and cost of operation is minimal, it's relocating the darn things because of beach erosion that might do them in... At that point it probably becomes a publicly funded situation, with local residents pitching to save their historic landmarks rather than tax dollars.
I for one would pay to keep them in operation, you really have to experience a night in Cape Cod to understand:)
I own two TiVo series two boxes. One's an 80 Gb standalone and the other is a new Toshiba 140 hour DVD-R recorder. The REAL problem with TiVo is it uses USB. Not USB 2.0/FireWire... My new 140 hour has FireWire in for recording from external DV sources, but it's input only
The real thing that sets TiVos apart from cable/satelite co boxes is their ability to share between other boxes in the home... And the fact that you actually own the machine(s);) But their only means of transfer are 2 USB ports. USB NICs can barely handle transfering a single recording from one TiVo to another (it's full of pauses). Realistically TiVo can't ever hope to scale up to CableCard HDTV tuner(s) without at least providing USB 2.0.
Transfering and recording (to DVD) shows is more of a selling point (for me anyway) than any silly 3rd party weather plugin could ever be...
It's interesting that SONY hasn't yet sent out any developer's kits. As I understand "Cell", it sounds remarkably similar to the concept of separating video/audio processing from "central" processing.
Of course recently (on the grand scheme of real-time computer graphics), developers have had to adapt to a separation of processing at the GPU level. With vertex processors and fragment (pixel) processors. When this came to pass, it was a radically different way of thinking about your graphics workload. Now that the work of the graphics pipeline is split between several different processor units, implementing something like tangent space normal mapping requires a close coupling between two completely separate processors.
Of course tangent space lighting's a simple example. It's possible to immitate the holy grail of computer graphics now with vertex/fragment programs, using math kernels and treating textures as arrays, fragment programs as loops, etc... But it's rather clunky and still far from a general purpose graphics processor.
It's not completely unmanagable this way, but it gives a general idea. And it even seems the hardware manufacturers are beginning to doubt the solution of having specialized vertex/fragment processors (ATI saying they want to unify the shader units, and the Shader Model 3.0 specs, allowing vertex ops to be done in fragment progs and fragment ops (i.e. texture lookups) in vertex progs).
Multiply the situation times 5 and you've got the PS3 Cell... SONY better start handing PS3 Developer Kits out fast, because the architecture looks to 5 times more complicated than when real-time hardware graphics introduced Vertex/Fragment separation.
I'm not saying it's going to be impossible or even difficult to write games for the PS3. But "Cell" won't be a selling point of the console unless they thoroughly drill their licensed developers how to utilize it by console launch...
Microsoft on the other hand, is said to be using something similar to DirectX 9.0c (with Shader Model 3.0). Developers have had access to Shader Model 3.0 hardware for over a year now, and the XDK2's already out.
Microsoft has the clear advantage there... Especially since launch titles could potentially include ports of highly successful DirectX 9 PC titles.
And Nintendo's, well Nintendo:P
The only time they had a stationary console that was the most capable and had the largest library of games was the Famicom (NES) during the 80s.
It's clear Nintendo will release a new console, and it WILL have a sizable library of 1st party games featuring the Nintendo characters we've all known and loved for the past 20 years. But the rest is shaky...
It's always been that way. SEGA was the same way (developer relations and hardware design wise) with their 32X (SEGA's version of the Virtual Boy disaster =P) Saturn and Dreamcast and now they're software only.
In summary, no big surprise that Microsoft has developers kits available already... They're adapting the DirectX architecture, working with a Shader Model 3.0 spec. But SONY is a bit of a surprise. And Nintendo's just being Nintendo:)
I've tried Firefox 2 or 3 times now. And STILL at 1.0, it is missing a lot of the functionality of Mozilla plus new annoying quirks all its own. I'm glad Mozilla is a separate and still active code base, because Firefox has a lot of work to do before it's truly usable or a threat to Mozilla, much less IE.
RedHat may be a frontend for Linux, but on the backend commercial companies such as IBM and SGI have started focusing less on their own *UX implementations and more on Linux... JFS, XFS, NUMA, etc... All contributed by IBM and SGI. And IBM and SGI both offer workstations and servers that ship with Linux AND technical support.
I think Sun is one of the only reputable companies left who're actively trying to fight Linux (obviously SCO and Microsoft, but they don't count as reputable companies:P)? And what of the Sun Linux PC announcement made a while back on Slashdot? How could they one minute try to discourage Linux sales and the next begin selling products that use Linux?:)
If anything, I'd say you're MORE likely to be supported on Linux than Solaris. RedHat is merely one distribution of the GNU/Linux environment. Solaris on the other hand ONLY HAS ONE distribution, thus you can't shop around to find the vendor who offers you the best support.
IMHO, the best support are smart sys. admins and Debian:)
At any rate, Sun's got their work cut out for them:P
I'd love to see some product utilize real-time DTS ES encoding. I'll be damned if I'm going to have 8 cables from the back of my computer to my receiver for 7.1. I'd rather use 1 S/PDIF cable and either Dolby Digital EX (worst case) or DTS-ES Discrete and sacrafice 1 channel, and I'm sure I'm not alone:)
The rear center channel in Dolby Digital EX isn't even discrete (it's matrix, like the way the rear channel is extrapolated from a stereo source in Pro Logic I)... I don't see what the big push on real-time Dolby Digital encoding is, if the current trend is to move toward 7.1 for PC sound cards? DTS is easier to encode in real-time too... The PS2 isn't capable of real-time Dolby Digital but some games utilize real-time DTS encoding.
I wish more sound card mfg.'s (especially Creative) would start to move away from on-board Dolby Digital/DTS decoding and move to encoding! Given the choice between a multi-function A/V receiver for $500 and a PC sound card for $300 (that only does 1 thing and only when your noisy computer's on), the receiver wins hands down! The only thing real-time decoding is promoting is the lack of decoder hardware on "computer" 5.1/7.1 speaker systems and an ever growing tangle of wires behind your computer:)
It sounds nice in theory that you can download a "DVD" to your TiVo and watch it, but there are some serious cons to such a system (on TiVo hardware)...
For one thing, TiVo doesn't have component outputs, so you're stuck with SVIDEO. The DVD video will be compressed even more than normal so you lose picture quality even before the picture goes over SVIDEO.
TiVo doesn't have S/PDIF out, so you can say goodbye to Dolby Digital or DTS sound (most importantly a discrete LFE channel). The audio too, will be compressed more than normal. So even without Dolby Digital or DTS you're still getting much lower quality than the actual DVD.
And finally, nobody (I know anyway) has enough free space on their TiVo to store these movies... We're all too busy hoarding episodes of shows we've been meaning to burn to DVD for months:)
ReplayTV's more suited to address the first two issues (since they have S/PDIF and Component Video outputs). Certain TiVo models have built-in DVD burners, which only solves the 3rd problem...
Personally, if I wanted something on demand, I'd use my cable company's VOD service. (Which DOES have Dolby Digital soundtracks, but no DTS:-\) and my cable box has component out. And there's also HD VOD (something renting or owning the actual DVD can't even offer:P)...
I'm equally surprised at the success of iTunes. The music you download is noticably lossy, and they don't offer lossless copies of anything you buy (40+ Mb would be perfectly acceptable for this audiophile:)).
I suppose there are those who will always like their thrills cheap and easy, making up the majority of the customer base for online music services right now. It remains unclear what will happen to these service's customer bases once HDTV sets and Dolby Digital / DTS home theatre equipment becomes more mainstream.
TiVo would do much better if it were to upgrade its "Home Media" option to allow PC -> TiVo video x'fers and other services that ReplayTV offers. I understand why they're hesitant to implement 1st party video extraction. But injection of external MPEG2 files would make a lot of people happy, especially those folks with the DVD burner models. I'd more willingly fork over a few extra bucks a month for that than renting a DVD over TiVo.
Most interesting of all is that this new planet discovered optically was done by a ground based telescope. With the distortion from our atmosphere I'd have thought ground based optical exploration to be impractical.
Most planets discovered outside of our solar system have been done with Spectroscopy and Interferometry. Hubble's had only limited success finding a planet optically.
To find a planet with such a relatively inexpensive ground based optical telescope must be a major blow to NASA's ego;)
There's a big difference between transparent and translucent. Those pictures clearly show the color of light passing through the matrial being changed.
I've only had 2 issues with ATI drivers to date. And they were both resolved within a week.
I've had more NVIDIA problems than I can count on all my fingers and toes. And admitedly they have fixed a few of the problems, somehow I think my bug reports ignored.
If you can't speak from the developers stand point, then don't respond to this post. And certainly don't mark my post down. It was quite valid and did raise a concern when purchasing NVIDIA hardware.
No matter how inexpensive or how well an NVIDIA product performs it'd be a cold day in hell before I willingly purchased it.
Their driver development team is absolutely AWFUL. I've sent numerous OpenGL driver bugs to them and I never got a single reply. At the very least they should say "We got your bug report, we'll look into it in a couple of years..."
I think ATI's really got the right idea. They're not focusing so much on revolutionary new hardware architectures. Instead, they're focusing on really exposing game developers to all sorts of techniques for EXISTING hardware.
This month's Game Developer Magazine comes with a CD filled with all of ATI's OpenGL, DirectX, Advanced Shader, etc... GDC 2004 presentations. They didn't have to do that, as the presentations are all available online, but it shows they really care about the developers.
Every time I've had to deal with ATI's developer relations communication has been top notch. For my bug reports I've always had a reply within 2-3 days and a followup when it's fixed. Having to write an app that demos the bug can be a little bit convenient, but it really speeds up their fixing the bug. And they certainly are speedy fixing those bugs, it's rather impressive:)
And 40% hardware discounts for registered developers is AWESOME! It makes testing new backend/codepaths for new generation hardware much more affordable.
Overall, I think NVIDIA's got the wrong idea. Shader Model 3.0 is cool in theory with dynamic branching, etc... However, all of that stuff can already be done to some extent using Shader Model 2.x (ATI continues to introduce revisions with every DirectX release that're supported across the board on their Radeon 9500+ hardware).
3.0 doesn't completely address the bottlenecks in modern per-fragment (pixel if you wish) lighting. One of the biggest issues is fillrate (memory bandwidth limited). Normally (no pun intended) compressing normal maps is a bad idea; You can use hacks like palettized compression or ATI's suggestion for swapping the red and alpha channels. But ATI has a much more elegant new solution, called 3Dc. I personally find 3Dc more valuable than Shader Model 3.0 for my work. Not to mention writing and maintaining yet *another* backend for Shader Model 3.0 is a major pain in the butt:)
I'd say buy ATI hardware, and help support us engine developers!:)
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$400 is a steal assuming Bluray Discs become the defacto HD format. Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI). The XBOX 360 does not have support for HDMI or DVI currently - Microsoft will have to make revisions to future models in order to play HD video. The PS3, however, does have HDMI output (in fact, it has TWO HDMI outputs) and ships with a Bluray drive already. I'd pay the $400 for the HD video player alone.
I think that Visual Studio can be a bad thing when used too heavily. It is great for browsing code and/or debugging, but I still prefer to write most of my code with vim because there are no clunky menus to perform common tasks. The code looks cleaner when restricted to 80 characters per line and because I can customize the syntax highlighting any way I like. That is a great point though, Visual Studio tends to offer solutions to common problems without the user ever having to learn the crux of the problem or how to solve it on their own. That said, it also has a lot going for it - especially version control integration.
I always get a kick out of new C++ programmers starting with Visual C++; using MFC classes like CFile or CTime without realizing that the stdlib provides the same functionality without cripling portability. If that same programmer never looked beyond MFC they might never learn how the underlying Win32 API works. While some might argue that is a good thing, the programmer would not learn about the "Chain of Responsibility" design pattern, which is the basis for most event driven operations in Win32. And then there is "printf (...)" vs. "cout", the latter may seem simpler (and for the most part is), but a curious programmer might wonder how "printf (...)" works and discover variable argument lists. I do not, however, feel that using Visual Studio "rots the brain"; it merely stunts a coder's growth, in the same way MFC does.
Well, first of all the XBOX 360 at launch is manufactured with a standard DVD drive. In truth, it makes no difference which format Microsoft ultimately choses, since they will have to manufacture new units using the new drive. Furthermore, the XBOX 360 does not have HDMI/DVI output, so it will be impossible to play high definition video to begin with (since the proposed HD disc formats all use HDCP). The impact will be minor, since the consumer will have to pay a premium for an HDMI/DVI compatible unit with the appropriate drive and who knows when that'll happen. People interested in the XBOX 360 for HD playback will just have to wait, while gamers will likely buy the launch unit and never buy a new unit just because it supports HD video playback.
When you use a terminal-based browser more often than a graphical browser, there's no need to block ads. If I were more motivated to block ads, it'd be because they stand between me and the information I'm looking for -- wasting valuable time.
:P
TV ads, I just fast forward through -- I still have to watch them though, even if it is at 4x normal speed.
Magazine ads, flip the page.
Radio ads, change the station.
Billboards, continue driving.
Spam, SpamAssassin kills most of it.
Junk mail, recycle.
Phone solicitors, hang up.
Door to door salesmen, shut the door. (Though... with this stupid new law in Florida, I could legally point a gun at them and that'd probably keep them from coming back for a LONG time)
Video game ads are about the only form of advertising I am FORCED to view. Even so, I don't mind -- it's usually done so humorously and doesn't interfere with gameplay.
If advertisers are trying to sell me something, they're mostly going about it the wrong way
What they don't realize is that by doing this, they will lose a lot of their audience. I for one rarely ever watch live TV anymore (unless the program is in HD). Time slots are of lesser importance as DVRs become more mainstream, television stations ought to embrace the opportunity rather than killing it! Online music stores have not made me any less likely to steal music (since I never did it in the first place); likewise, this flag only hurts the honest consumer -- pirates will always figure out ways to circumvent such measures.
I can see where Linus is coming from; on the other hand, I can see where the statement is fundamentally flawed. The best example I can give is a 3D engine. I have worked on an OpenGL engine for almost 4 years now, and certain aspects of the engine development (namely shader architecture) were purposely left without a formal 'spec'. 3D Hardware changes more rapidly than one can build a 3D engine from scratch. If the entire engine followed a 'spec' from day one, it would be obsolete by the time it were finished. If you had asked someone four years ago what NVIDIA and ATI would be working on right now, they could never guess that vertex and pixel shaders were beginning to merge (both on the hardware (shared pipelines) and in functionality (pixel shaders have front/back face information and vertex shaders can perform texture lookups)). They could have made assumptions that caused them to code themselves into a wall so to speak and which prevents them from ever utilizing the features of Shader Model 3.0.
On the other hand, there are other teams who work on gameplay and network development. For the most part the network developers can develop a 'spec' and reasonably follow it. The gameplay mechanics follow a constantly revised 'spec', and probably the only one the consumers who play the game are ever familiar with. In this aspect of development, a 'spec' is _required_ to complete the project in a reasonable timeframe.
I have mild hearing damage in my left ear, unrelated to headphones. In my case, it has to do with years of practicing the violin without an earplug in my left ear (which is most vulnerable to damage in violinists).
:)
Nevertheless, I think the iPod generation is in luck, because they are also one of the first generations where genetic therapy is not purely science fiction. In the past couple of years, researchers discovered that the production of a protein (Rb1) was responsible for the behaviour shared by the inner ear hair cells of all mammals, or more to the point... the reason the hair cells do not divide and hearing does not regenerate. Recently scientists discovered the gene that was responsible for producing this protein in mice. Given 5 to 10 years, I am optimistic the naive iPod generation, senior citizens and even I will be eligible for gene therapy to reverse the effects of hearing loss.
It is important to protect your hearing, but damage is inevitable no matter how careful you are. Luckily, for musicians and the ignorant iPod generation, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon
I generally tend to run the highest refresh rate supported by the monitor at the given resolution. 60 and 66 Hz are horribly painful at any resolution, but around 85 Hz or so I don't notice any improvement. The difference between 70 Hz and 85 Hz is completely indistinguishable at 2048x1536 until I've been sitting at the monitor for a couple of hours and my eyes begin to hurt :)
The tiredness some people refer to as a symptom of too low refresh rate is really your iris straining to focus on your target. Even if you can't consciously see the individual scans, your iris is trying to react. Reversing your color scheme (i.e. Visual C++ uses an abysmal black on white scheme by default) has almost as much affect as increasing the refresh rate.
And in theory, the oposite becomes true at a certain point... Increasing the refresh rate beyond X will begin to cause more eye strain.
LCDs don't have this problem, but they run at really God awful resolutions and their gamma ramp is very distorted. There's no flickering, because it often takes more than one refresh for a pixel to go completely blank. CRT flicker is replaced by LCD blur, which doesn't really matter for office productivity type apps...
This has been explained many times in the past. It's true that DELL and Gateway once offered AMD based machines. And one of the reasons they stopped is because AMD could not meet demand.
Say Hungry Howies or something? I feel sorry for people who don't know about Hungry Howies... Great prices and the best pizza money can buy.
Honestly, who cares? They can buy them a dime a dozen in certain parts of the former Soviet Union. It's not a whole lot of trouble to buy an ICBM to put them on either and let's not forget the brainwashed humans who are willing to kill themselves to deliver terror.
I gave a lot of thought to this while I was in Cape Cod last Fall...
:)
They paid a few million dollars to relocate highland lighthouse hundreds of feet because of beach erosion in 1997. Admittedly anyone who sails around highland (Cape Cod) lighthouse is well aware of that spot and GPS does a far better job than that lighthouse... But the historical significance outweighed the price.
GPS is more accurate and any vessel that uses it for navigation darn well better have a fail-safe. I don't think reliability is going to be too big a concern...
Light houses will likely stay in operation purely for the atmosphere in the future. The new bulbs are extremely high efficiency and cost of operation is minimal, it's relocating the darn things because of beach erosion that might do them in... At that point it probably becomes a publicly funded situation, with local residents pitching to save their historic landmarks rather than tax dollars.
I for one would pay to keep them in operation, you really have to experience a night in Cape Cod to understand
I own two TiVo series two boxes. One's an 80 Gb standalone and the other is a new Toshiba 140 hour DVD-R recorder. The REAL problem with TiVo is it uses USB. Not USB 2.0/FireWire... My new 140 hour has FireWire in for recording from external DV sources, but it's input only The real thing that sets TiVos apart from cable/satelite co boxes is their ability to share between other boxes in the home... And the fact that you actually own the machine(s) ;) But their only means of transfer are 2 USB ports. USB NICs can barely handle transfering a single recording from one TiVo to another (it's full of pauses). Realistically TiVo can't ever hope to scale up to CableCard HDTV tuner(s) without at least providing USB 2.0.
Transfering and recording (to DVD) shows is more of a selling point (for me anyway) than any silly 3rd party weather plugin could ever be...
It's interesting that SONY hasn't yet sent out any developer's kits. As I understand "Cell", it sounds remarkably similar to the concept of separating video/audio processing from "central" processing.
:P
:)
Of course recently (on the grand scheme of real-time computer graphics), developers have had to adapt to a separation of processing at the GPU level. With vertex processors and fragment (pixel) processors. When this came to pass, it was a radically different way of thinking about your graphics workload. Now that the work of the graphics pipeline is split between several different processor units, implementing something like tangent space normal mapping requires a close coupling between two completely separate processors.
Of course tangent space lighting's a simple example. It's possible to immitate the holy grail of computer graphics now with vertex/fragment programs, using math kernels and treating textures as arrays, fragment programs as loops, etc... But it's rather clunky and still far from a general purpose graphics processor.
It's not completely unmanagable this way, but it gives a general idea. And it even seems the hardware manufacturers are beginning to doubt the solution of having specialized vertex/fragment processors (ATI saying they want to unify the shader units, and the Shader Model 3.0 specs, allowing vertex ops to be done in fragment progs and fragment ops (i.e. texture lookups) in vertex progs).
Multiply the situation times 5 and you've got the PS3 Cell... SONY better start handing PS3 Developer Kits out fast, because the architecture looks to 5 times more complicated than when real-time hardware graphics introduced Vertex/Fragment separation.
I'm not saying it's going to be impossible or even difficult to write games for the PS3. But "Cell" won't be a selling point of the console unless they thoroughly drill their licensed developers how to utilize it by console launch...
Microsoft on the other hand, is said to be using something similar to DirectX 9.0c (with Shader Model 3.0). Developers have had access to Shader Model 3.0 hardware for over a year now, and the XDK2's already out.
Microsoft has the clear advantage there... Especially since launch titles could potentially include ports of highly successful DirectX 9 PC titles.
And Nintendo's, well Nintendo
The only time they had a stationary console that was the most capable and had the largest library of games was the Famicom (NES) during the 80s.
It's clear Nintendo will release a new console, and it WILL have a sizable library of 1st party games featuring the Nintendo characters we've all known and loved for the past 20 years. But the rest is shaky...
It's always been that way. SEGA was the same way (developer relations and hardware design wise) with their 32X (SEGA's version of the Virtual Boy disaster =P) Saturn and Dreamcast and now they're software only.
In summary, no big surprise that Microsoft has developers kits available already... They're adapting the DirectX architecture, working with a Shader Model 3.0 spec. But SONY is a bit of a surprise. And Nintendo's just being Nintendo
Hopefully Google will be more stable/functional than Mozilla -> Firefox :)
I've tried Firefox 2 or 3 times now. And STILL at 1.0, it is missing a lot of the functionality of Mozilla plus new annoying quirks all its own. I'm glad Mozilla is a separate and still active code base, because Firefox has a lot of work to do before it's truly usable or a threat to Mozilla, much less IE.
RedHat may be a frontend for Linux, but on the backend commercial companies such as IBM and SGI have started focusing less on their own *UX implementations and more on Linux... JFS, XFS, NUMA, etc... All contributed by IBM and SGI. And IBM and SGI both offer workstations and servers that ship with Linux AND technical support.
:P)? And what of the Sun Linux PC announcement made a while back on Slashdot? How could they one minute try to discourage Linux sales and the next begin selling products that use Linux? :)
:)
:P
I think Sun is one of the only reputable companies left who're actively trying to fight Linux (obviously SCO and Microsoft, but they don't count as reputable companies
If anything, I'd say you're MORE likely to be supported on Linux than Solaris. RedHat is merely one distribution of the GNU/Linux environment. Solaris on the other hand ONLY HAS ONE distribution, thus you can't shop around to find the vendor who offers you the best support.
IMHO, the best support are smart sys. admins and Debian
At any rate, Sun's got their work cut out for them
I'd love to see some product utilize real-time DTS :)
:)
ES encoding. I'll be damned if I'm going to have 8
cables from the back of my computer to my receiver
for 7.1. I'd rather use 1 S/PDIF cable and either
Dolby Digital EX (worst case) or DTS-ES Discrete
and sacrafice 1 channel, and I'm sure I'm not
alone
The rear center channel in Dolby Digital EX isn't
even discrete (it's matrix, like the way the rear
channel is extrapolated from a stereo source in
Pro Logic I)... I don't see what the big push on
real-time Dolby Digital encoding is, if the
current trend is to move toward 7.1 for PC sound
cards? DTS is easier to encode in real-time too...
The PS2 isn't capable of real-time Dolby Digital
but some games utilize real-time DTS encoding.
I wish more sound card mfg.'s (especially
Creative) would start to move away from on-board
Dolby Digital/DTS decoding and move to encoding!
Given the choice between a multi-function A/V
receiver for $500 and a PC sound card for $300
(that only does 1 thing and only when your noisy
computer's on), the receiver wins hands down! The
only thing real-time decoding is promoting is the
lack of decoder hardware on "computer" 5.1/7.1
speaker systems and an ever growing tangle of
wires behind your computer
It sounds nice in theory that you can download a
:)
:-\) :P)...
:)).
"DVD" to your TiVo and watch it, but there are
some serious cons to such a system (on TiVo
hardware)...
For one thing, TiVo doesn't have component
outputs, so you're stuck with SVIDEO. The DVD
video will be compressed even more than normal so
you lose picture quality even before the picture
goes over SVIDEO.
TiVo doesn't have S/PDIF out, so you can say
goodbye to Dolby Digital or DTS sound (most
importantly a discrete LFE channel). The audio
too, will be compressed more than normal. So even
without Dolby Digital or DTS you're still getting
much lower quality than the actual DVD.
And finally, nobody (I know anyway) has enough
free space on their TiVo to store these movies...
We're all too busy hoarding episodes of shows
we've been meaning to burn to DVD for months
ReplayTV's more suited to address the first two
issues (since they have S/PDIF and Component Video
outputs). Certain TiVo models have built-in DVD
burners, which only solves the 3rd problem...
Personally, if I wanted something on demand, I'd
use my cable company's VOD service. (Which DOES
have Dolby Digital soundtracks, but no DTS
and my cable box has component out. And there's
also HD VOD (something renting or owning the
actual DVD can't even offer
I'm equally surprised at the success of iTunes.
The music you download is noticably lossy, and
they don't offer lossless copies of anything you
buy (40+ Mb would be perfectly acceptable for this
audiophile
I suppose there are those who will always like
their thrills cheap and easy, making up the
majority of the customer base for online music
services right now. It remains unclear what will
happen to these service's customer bases once
HDTV sets and Dolby Digital / DTS home theatre
equipment becomes more mainstream.
TiVo would do much better if it were to upgrade
its "Home Media" option to allow PC -> TiVo video
x'fers and other services that ReplayTV offers.
I understand why they're hesitant to implement 1st
party video extraction. But injection of external
MPEG2 files would make a lot of people happy,
especially those folks with the DVD burner models.
I'd more willingly fork over a few extra bucks a
month for that than renting a DVD over TiVo.
Most interesting of all is that this new planet discovered optically was done by a ground based telescope. With the distortion from our atmosphere I'd have thought ground based optical exploration to be impractical. Most planets discovered outside of our solar system have been done with Spectroscopy and Interferometry. Hubble's had only limited success finding a planet optically. To find a planet with such a relatively inexpensive ground based optical telescope must be a major blow to NASA's ego ;)
There's a big difference between transparent and translucent. Those pictures clearly show the color of light passing through the matrial being changed.
I don't think anyone should take these patents seriously. If Nintendo tried to do anything on them prior art is a dime a dozen.
That's not the developer relations addr. And their Linux drivers are great now.
If you become a registered devleoper, they'll give you the developer relations E-Mail.
I've only had 2 issues with ATI drivers to date. And they were both resolved within a week. I've had more NVIDIA problems than I can count on all my fingers and toes. And admitedly they have fixed a few of the problems, somehow I think my bug reports ignored. If you can't speak from the developers stand point, then don't respond to this post. And certainly don't mark my post down. It was quite valid and did raise a concern when purchasing NVIDIA hardware.
No matter how inexpensive or how well an NVIDIA product performs it'd be a cold day in hell before I willingly purchased it.
:)
:)
:)
Their driver development team is absolutely AWFUL. I've sent numerous OpenGL driver bugs to them and I never got a single reply. At the very least they should say "We got your bug report, we'll look into it in a couple of years..."
I think ATI's really got the right idea. They're not focusing so much on revolutionary new hardware architectures. Instead, they're focusing on really exposing game developers to all sorts of techniques for EXISTING hardware.
This month's Game Developer Magazine comes with a CD filled with all of ATI's OpenGL, DirectX, Advanced Shader, etc... GDC 2004 presentations. They didn't have to do that, as the presentations are all available online, but it shows they really care about the developers.
Every time I've had to deal with ATI's developer relations communication has been top notch. For my bug reports I've always had a reply within 2-3 days and a followup when it's fixed. Having to write an app that demos the bug can be a little bit convenient, but it really speeds up their fixing the bug. And they certainly are speedy fixing those bugs, it's rather impressive
And 40% hardware discounts for registered developers is AWESOME! It makes testing new backend/codepaths for new generation hardware much more affordable.
Overall, I think NVIDIA's got the wrong idea. Shader Model 3.0 is cool in theory with dynamic branching, etc... However, all of that stuff can already be done to some extent using Shader Model 2.x (ATI continues to introduce revisions with every DirectX release that're supported across the board on their Radeon 9500+ hardware).
3.0 doesn't completely address the bottlenecks in modern per-fragment (pixel if you wish) lighting. One of the biggest issues is fillrate (memory bandwidth limited). Normally (no pun intended) compressing normal maps is a bad idea; You can use hacks like palettized compression or ATI's suggestion for swapping the red and alpha channels. But ATI has a much more elegant new solution, called 3Dc. I personally find 3Dc more valuable than Shader Model 3.0 for my work. Not to mention writing and maintaining yet *another* backend for Shader Model 3.0 is a major pain in the butt
I'd say buy ATI hardware, and help support us engine developers!