When IE development stopped it really hampered new development. It's now clear that longhorn will be introducing a whole pile of new proprietary offerings with its new browser to facilitate the much needed improvement in web apps. But with details locked up, presumably until release, I'm very glad that other browsers are now looking ahead in their own direction. With any luck Microsoft will be pressured into supporting XForms. Heck, I'd settle for a 3rd party plugin. But anything to give developers a solid full-featured cross-platform solution. We can't let ourselves continue to be locked into microsoft products. It's unhealthy:)
Phew.. I was starting to get really scared that the web would be developing at the speed of Macromedia and Sun for the next while. This really is something big and new we can look forward to as well.
I wonder what kind of working timeline they have. With those big corporate spenders helping out, I'd like to think they are really pushing forward at a good pace.
Anyways yea, most of it is in a scripting language. But no, it's not compiled into native code. It's compiled into bytecode in the same way as Java is.
What makes it fast is that the programmers are very aware of the limitations of UnrealScript (code executes apx 40x slower then native compiled c++ and assembly). The trick is to write event-driven code. Take a grenade explosion for example, how often does that happen? Compare it to something like rendering and you'll see what I mean. Only a small portion of these engines really eat up the bulk of your CPU cycles. Optimize that core engine stuff well and the odd bit of game code that are very intensive. The rest should be left in a nice scripting language that takes care of tricky issues like networking for you.
The other nice thing about all this is that Epic can (and does) let you view the source for all the game code. This doesn't leak out any of their big trade secrets and really helps when you're modding.
UT2004 introduced a way for modders to contain their entire mods within their own directories, using a -mod switch to launch into the mod. You can switch between mods once you've loaded the game too, of course. There's a listing of these TC-type mods in the community section of the game.
Small mods or maps, etc tend to clog up your directories as they're treated no differently from the retail content. That integration is nice in its own way but I probably still agree with you.
Air Buccaneers was considered a NON-FPS mod. That's a separate category from FPS, where Red Orchestra resides. AB took 2nd place to Alien Swarm, which probably won out based on the incredible amount of polish put into it. You could be fooled into thinking Alien Swarm was a retail product the way it looks.
I've got to disagree with you on a few points here. While I'm a huge fan of the Q2/3 physics (rocket-jumping, strafe-jumping, plasma climbing...), that's not to say the feel to your movement in the Unreal camp is lacking its own advantages (dodging, lift-jumping, higher air-control). There's a vastly different feel and strong players in one camp really have a tough time jumping back and forth between the two. I think I'm one of the rare people (honestly) who's used to both sets of physics. I can strafe-jump my way around a huge RA3 map and then happily move to 2003/4 and lift jump from the bottom to top of DM-compressed without even thinking about it.
I mention air control as a plus for the Unreal camp. I say that because there's more air control for Unreal games. Unreal 1 had air control. I'm not entirely sure but I doubt that Q3 was the first id game to have air control. I thought Q2 and maybe even Q1 had air control. Maybe someone could clarify this for me. U1 came out (slightly) before Quake 2 though so Q3 was certainly not the first game with air control.
The feel of the weapons is more in the hands of the artists and designers than the engine coders. There's some interaction with the physics but if they say to add this much momentum in some direction, it doesn't really have anything to do with the physics engine. Maybe because you slide more in Quake you prefer that feel. Everyone loves the railgun though. It'd be hard not to:)
As for poor netcode. Sorry but it's just not true. There is a slightly different feel to the two games' netcode, eg I find leading more helpful in Quake though I might just be insane. But when you say the good UT players can't use a hit-trace weapon consistently, you're just wrong. Drop by Cached.net and download some recordings of pro players. I think you'll find that if they're playing Q3 or UT, they're making their shots with deadly accuracy.
And one last point about the mouse... UT seems just as configurable to me. Finding UT too sensitive for small movements would seem to imply mouse acceleration in Quake, not UT. But that aside, UT has a bunch of options for you too. Pitch, yaw, and master sensitivities, obviously those are there. There are a bunch of options to configure the mouse smoothing as well. You can set it to whatever level of sensitivity you want. There's also some mouse accel, separate menu-only settings, and force-feedback you can toy with if you're interested.
I really believe that these days it comes down to knowing your game, rather than who does what better. Differences exist for good reason. Maps in Quake are designed to accommodate their physics. They know you can strafe-jump and rocket-jump. In UT, they know you can lift-jump and dodge-jump. I think these differences make for different games and add to the variety we all get to enjoy. I'd hate to lose any of that because people start believing that one physics implementation becomes considered the best.
UnrealScript is hardly a "very basic" language. It's responsible for the entirety of the entire game code (with a few things written in c++ for performance). That means that the vehicles, weapons, networking, player movement, menus, HUD, console, bot AI, and pretty well everything is written with this language. If what you can do is "very limited" I'm thinking it might not be the language.
As a side-note to those who're curious, UnrealScript is a bit of a cross between Java and c++. It also has replication (networking), states, and time built right into the language. This, IMHO, makes it an extremely powerful language for game design.
(and yes, I have created server-side mods before:)
The difference between UT/Q3 and UT2003/2004 in vehicle support is that the latter has Karma physics built in. When you're modding, the physics engine is just one of those things that makes a huge impact on the end result. Physics is *NOT* trivial in the least.
For example, some friends and I built some big walking mechs as UT2004 vehicles. The coding, while tricky and a little finicky, is actually pretty simple to understand. We're able to subclass an existing vehicle to get all the player/vehicle interactions. Over-ride one or two things and change the DefaultProperties (part of the UnrealScript language) to get rid of the few aspects that didn't work. Then we'd just set things up with karma so that the feet "repulsed" the ground (no floating feet on hills). The repulsors are attached to the animation's bones. Time the animation to the speed and add in the weapons and you've got something very new without too much work. And in this case, you don't even have to worry about networking; it just works.
I'm really just trying to say that there's a big difference between possible and practical. Vehicles are not in the least bit trivial. I think with all the modders currently working away at UT2004, the question to ask might be what will be the big new modding draw offered by Doom 3 or Half-Life 2? I know UnrealScript and UnrealED.. what can Doom 3 or Half-Life do that I can't do in UT2004?
I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as Doom 3 goes. For a start, it doesn't use DX9. It uses OpenGL. While I completely agree that the lighting is revolutionary, I don't think we're going to see a revival of Dark Match (remember in Unreal 1, all those years back, the dark levels with flashlights? Yes, in Unreal 1. It has been done again and again in the Unreal engine but has never taken off.) The gameplay wasn't there then and I'm not sure how it'll pan out now that proper lighting is truly available. In any case, Doom 3's modding is crippled by a 4-player multiplayer limit and lack of vehicles (afaik). I'm not sure how that will evolve or if it's not applicable to interested modders but it has me worried.
Half-life 2 looks promising for modding. Valve is a strong supporter of modding, the engine seems solid (nVidia issues asside) and sufficiently advanced, and there's an existing mod community that's thriving. But perhaps most importantly, people love realistic mods. Why does that make a difference? Well, when you're starting off you can pull content from the game. It helps tremendously when you can just use an existing explosion effect with your own grenade model. Existing content is a HUGE draw to modders and perhaps one of the most important considerations. The only downside to half-life 2 is that we really don't know how it'll run on older hardware. Counter-strike, for example, is insanely popular because it combines attractive gameplay and low system requirements. I don't know about you, but I've seen a whole lot of LAN parties degenerate to counter-strike because it's the only (popular...) game that EVERYONE can play.
I think what's happening is the vast majority of new bands that get picked up by labels have a couple good songs which get a lot of polish in the studio to sell the CD. But in the more 'nitch' markets (death metal, trance, etc) you find far more consistent offerings. Since it's harder to sell a disc in those genres I don't think they get the same kind of money invested. With less money, the artists need to be a little more dedicated to doing the best they can so the music speaks for itself. They're not going to be living off a hit single. Maybe the "no good music" argument comes from the overly saturated pop music markets. Ah well, just my take..
The only thing that really caught my eye was how the character with the mechanical arms moved. He walked as if they weren't there, turning around easily with them spread wide. They didn't seem light enough to just spin like that.
It was just a conflicting feel to them that threw me. On one hand they seem like big strong arms slamming through stone without any sign of slowing down. On the other hand they're being carried around without a care in the odd scene.
But while it did stand out, I was very happy with how they handled the arms overall. I think they went to noticable efforts to obey the laws of physics as much as possible without sacrificing other aspects of the film. Often one arm braces while another pushes out, for example.
I also liked the arcing on some of their heavy high-powered wiring when it was being pulled out. I don't think it'd look like that, arcing outwards but they're still trying to visualise real-world effects.
So they get my full support for putting in much more thought and detail into their physics than I expected going in. I'm willing to look past any physics-related errors at this point.
I'd like to see some 3rd party verification on those bugs. For example, were they actually present when this developer changed sides? When did they crop up in Google's code? Of course, the way some people define a "bug" they could be claiming there are nine similar UI concerns. We really need to see a list of exactly what these bugs are before any of us can decide on the likelihood of possible causes.
I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a SCO-style lawsuit. They'd better be careful though because if they publicize this much, Google will counter-sue for damages when their claims fall apart.
On the other hand, if code has been illegally copied than this guy AND Google should lose some real respect. I honestly don't believe no one else at the company knows what this guy is doing. They should all be in very close contact. Large chunks of copied code would probably be noticed... maybe not though. Either way, they'll both take heat.
I completely disagree. Rewriting an application from scratch is the worst thing you could possibly do. This is how Microsoft beat Netscape in the first place, remember? It's a key concept of software design. If you have something that works, build on it. You can argue all you want that IE isn't all that great. And you're right. But, it's still a whole lot better then starting from scratch.
Joel Joel Spolsky (Joel On Software) has an excellent article on this topic that I'd recommend any coder-types reading. It's from way back in 2000 but I find I just keep pointing this gem out over and over.
I live in Fairview, the only wireless residence. So I get a lot of use out of the wireless network since my desktop uses it. Before it was installed everyone had to pay for dsl. Mind you, it won't be free forever. There'll be fees included with our res fees, next year I presume. Still free for everyone else on campus... doesn't quite seem fair when it's the same network:)
Since I sleep during the day when everyone else is in class wasting bandwidth with MSN and counterstrike in their classes, I'm able to capitalize on ResWireless' greater total bandwidth then ResNet's bandwidth in the evening (65 vs 45 mbit). The 300 kb/s uploads and downloads are nice. Sadly you really can't play games on wireless. It just never seems to work smoothly.
Still, nothing really matches the insane ping times and incredible (3500kb/s) transfer rates you get when you're using the computer science computers at night. I've played a few hours of ut2004 in ciscr back before finals;)
The only problem is you can only install the demo since the retail requires a cd-key in the registry. Since we can't access the registry we can't even launch the game. Epic needs to put in a -cdkey command line param IMHO. But anyways, it's sad. I'm going to have to talk to a prof at some point about it because I want to mod for UT and the cs department should back my programming activities... 1/4 of our cs grads go to EA after all..... the labs in the evening are just a testbed unmatched by anything else I'll ever get my hands on. I need to do some begging for permissions over the summer.
Okay, that sounded like one giant ad read right off our wireless page. Obviously our wireless does not cover nearly all of the 1000 acres. It covers most of our buildings though. That would be over 150, rather then 120 as the parent quoted. Many popular outdoor hangouts (eg around our SUB) have been identified and had attention paid specifically.
The wireless network notably does not cover most of the residence buildings. Those buildings do, however, have free wired access. If I was managing the project I wouldn't have added wireless access there either. The wired students are due for an increase in bandwidth though I'd say.
I live in the one residence that is wireless so I've been using wireless the entire year (beats paying for internet!).
My experiences have varied but I must absolutely commend the effort the wireless staff is putting in. They log TONS of information about our connection quality. They noticed I had a poor connection so they got in contact with me and came to my dorm to take readings on the wireless strength. They then installed better antennas to areas of weakness. Or that was the plan, I'm not sure if that has happened yet or not. But the point is, that's serious initiative on their part to ensure the students are happy. Many of their employees also seem to be students. I'm all for giving back to the students however possible.
How did they track me? We log in to use the wireless network. There's both an insecure web authentication for an unencrypted line as well as a 128-bit encrypted VPN. We can log in as many times as we want and request guest accounts. It'd be no problem for a non-student friend to drop by my dorm and "jack in" thanks to that openness.
As for wreck beach, you'd be lucky to get cell service down there;). But if wireless ever is planned for the beach (which I doubt), it wouldn't be long before someone registers www.livewreckbeachwebcam.com:)
But overall, yea.. UBC has an incredibly solid wireless network that truely aims at consistantly ranking among the best in north america. It is a shame Intel doesn't rank non-US schools. Mind you, I doubt they do any real research anyways so I don't give it any weight or really care even care. I just wanted to give my two cents:)
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller anyways. I don't know what advantage having it on your keychain does for any kind of voyeurism. Just turn on your TV and you'll bump into one of those hidden-camera comedy shows. How long before we're getting all of those in HDTV? It's really not hard to film without being noticed.
We all just have to get used to it. We're going to be recorded everywhere we go in public and our friends are going to get thousands of horrible photos of us.
I just have a regular 3 megapixel camera and already have something like 10,000 photos saved. My friends have cameras too and take just as many photos. I know there must be bad / 'compromising' (lol) photos of me I haven't seen but really it's no big deal. We all just finally need to get used to it and stop being so fricken camera shy!
The point of using google as your email client is their search engine. If I want a GB of storage I have my own computer. In fact, I have hundreds and hundreds of GBs of storage. Using any encryption would completely ruin the usefulness of this service.
Privacy over the Internet is only ever going to happen among closed groups. Do you think Microsoft couldn't build encryption into MSN Messenger like phone companies encrypt your calls over the airwaves? They could but they don't. The big companies have nothing to gain by making information less accessible to themselves. Because of that, there's not going to be any big breakthrough in privacy for the average joe on the Internet any time soon.
Arming yourself with any kind of specialized tool means you're suddenly going against the grain. Anyone you interact with over the Internet is going to need to be taught those security practices. Is my privacy worth the hasle? No, not really.
Besides, anything google gains by 'reading' my mail will likely be through their statistical information gathering. They really just want another way to deliver ads and harvest current up-to-the-minute trends.
Re:GNOME catching up to Windows...
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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They can be very annoying on wireless connections under non-ideal conditions, especially when it's popping on and off when you don't even care.
These balloon tips will be removed in longhorn I believe. So we won't have to deal with them for too many more years. Registry tweaks can also disable specific balloons (eg low disk space on drive d) as well.
Overall, I like the balloon tips but I think longhorn's sidebar will really step things up another notch.
It is a dramatic increase. Just remember that every 0.1 increment in mozilla isn't some huge major revision. It's an evolution. 5-9% is a dramatic increase for a +0.1 release. It's all relative to the time spent since the last release.
We don't expect a 50% cut in speed every few months after all. It all adds up over time though.
The improvements are mostly in the algorithms, not the code-optimization. So yes, it affects both debug and production builds. But that being said, we're not downloading debug builds so it's a non-issue.
Don't download cracked games, download cracks for your games. Sites like game copy world exist for this purpose. Obviously the name is questionable but there's nothing clearly illegal about what they do. Or perhaps the DMCA in the states makes it illegal for circumventing copyright protection? I don't know US law very well at all; I live in Canada:).
But in this particular case with Epic, I know they're not big fans of annoying copy protection. Like any group of normal people, they understand that annoyances suck.
They've historically been forced into copy-protection schemes by publishers. Before Unreal 1, Tim Sweeney said there would be no copy protection because they trust their customers. GT quickly had a talk and reversed that statement. I also distinctly remember Tim saying that using cracks for UT were not illegal in a discussion about the annoyances of cdkey checks. Also keep in mind Epic has removed the cd check in patches after a while in both UT and UT2003.
I'd imagine they support cd-key protection these days though. Keys aren't very intrusive and make for a very strong anti-piracy feature.
I also like how these keys can be used to perma-ban users. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy every time I hear about a cheater being banned from online play. It's great!
I'm sure they are very careful as far as pirated music and software is concerned. But wouldn't you love to know what's written in all their email? See if you can't find the slightest lack of sincerity here or there? It'd be interesting.
Re:this could become a huge failure for MS...
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Google v. Microsoft
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· Score: 1
Hotmail works. I don't want to get into any uptime wars but for the masses, it's good enough. These days if a microsoft service doesn't work, they blame themselves or their computers and just try it again later. And sadly, microsoft probably should be directing all their warnings at the users...
If you think about how internet "applications" are becoming embedded into programs and other web services, there's a whole new area Microsoft could be fighting for ground on.
The free Google API isn't really as good as it could be. It works but I suspect if Microsoft incorporated their search engine into Visual Studio, or even just through the existing lists of available.net services, they'd have a solid start there. Microsoft does excel at documentation and ease of use for programmers. They know there if something isn't ready, their audience will know and avoid.
Google doesn't use windows servers. That would certainly limit their ability to compete in the.net arena. I'm not sure what the current status is of the open.net compilers but Windows has the head start.
Slashdot Mirror
When IE development stopped it really hampered new development. It's now clear that longhorn will be introducing a whole pile of new proprietary offerings with its new browser to facilitate the much needed improvement in web apps. But with details locked up, presumably until release, I'm very glad that other browsers are now looking ahead in their own direction. With any luck Microsoft will be pressured into supporting XForms. Heck, I'd settle for a 3rd party plugin. But anything to give developers a solid full-featured cross-platform solution. We can't let ourselves continue to be locked into microsoft products. It's unhealthy :)
Phew.. I was starting to get really scared that the web would be developing at the speed of Macromedia and Sun for the next while. This really is something big and new we can look forward to as well.
I wonder what kind of working timeline they have. With those big corporate spenders helping out, I'd like to think they are really pushing forward at a good pace.
There is a miniature and a full-size. They perhaps don't plan on flying into space inside the miniature.
I'm having a strange flashback to Zoolander right now...
Redundancy Department indeed. Oups. haha
Anyways yea, most of it is in a scripting language. But no, it's not compiled into native code. It's compiled into bytecode in the same way as Java is.
What makes it fast is that the programmers are very aware of the limitations of UnrealScript (code executes apx 40x slower then native compiled c++ and assembly). The trick is to write event-driven code. Take a grenade explosion for example, how often does that happen? Compare it to something like rendering and you'll see what I mean. Only a small portion of these engines really eat up the bulk of your CPU cycles. Optimize that core engine stuff well and the odd bit of game code that are very intensive. The rest should be left in a nice scripting language that takes care of tricky issues like networking for you.
The other nice thing about all this is that Epic can (and does) let you view the source for all the game code. This doesn't leak out any of their big trade secrets and really helps when you're modding.
UT2004 introduced a way for modders to contain their entire mods within their own directories, using a -mod switch to launch into the mod. You can switch between mods once you've loaded the game too, of course. There's a listing of these TC-type mods in the community section of the game.
Small mods or maps, etc tend to clog up your directories as they're treated no differently from the retail content. That integration is nice in its own way but I probably still agree with you.
Air Buccaneers was considered a NON-FPS mod. That's a separate category from FPS, where Red Orchestra resides. AB took 2nd place to Alien Swarm, which probably won out based on the incredible amount of polish put into it. You could be fooled into thinking Alien Swarm was a retail product the way it looks.
I've got to disagree with you on a few points here. While I'm a huge fan of the Q2/3 physics (rocket-jumping, strafe-jumping, plasma climbing...), that's not to say the feel to your movement in the Unreal camp is lacking its own advantages (dodging, lift-jumping, higher air-control). There's a vastly different feel and strong players in one camp really have a tough time jumping back and forth between the two. I think I'm one of the rare people (honestly) who's used to both sets of physics. I can strafe-jump my way around a huge RA3 map and then happily move to 2003/4 and lift jump from the bottom to top of DM-compressed without even thinking about it.
:)
I mention air control as a plus for the Unreal camp. I say that because there's more air control for Unreal games. Unreal 1 had air control. I'm not entirely sure but I doubt that Q3 was the first id game to have air control. I thought Q2 and maybe even Q1 had air control. Maybe someone could clarify this for me. U1 came out (slightly) before Quake 2 though so Q3 was certainly not the first game with air control.
The feel of the weapons is more in the hands of the artists and designers than the engine coders. There's some interaction with the physics but if they say to add this much momentum in some direction, it doesn't really have anything to do with the physics engine. Maybe because you slide more in Quake you prefer that feel. Everyone loves the railgun though. It'd be hard not to
As for poor netcode. Sorry but it's just not true. There is a slightly different feel to the two games' netcode, eg I find leading more helpful in Quake though I might just be insane. But when you say the good UT players can't use a hit-trace weapon consistently, you're just wrong. Drop by Cached.net and download some recordings of pro players. I think you'll find that if they're playing Q3 or UT, they're making their shots with deadly accuracy.
And one last point about the mouse... UT seems just as configurable to me. Finding UT too sensitive for small movements would seem to imply mouse acceleration in Quake, not UT. But that aside, UT has a bunch of options for you too. Pitch, yaw, and master sensitivities, obviously those are there. There are a bunch of options to configure the mouse smoothing as well. You can set it to whatever level of sensitivity you want. There's also some mouse accel, separate menu-only settings, and force-feedback you can toy with if you're interested.
I really believe that these days it comes down to knowing your game, rather than who does what better. Differences exist for good reason. Maps in Quake are designed to accommodate their physics. They know you can strafe-jump and rocket-jump. In UT, they know you can lift-jump and dodge-jump. I think these differences make for different games and add to the variety we all get to enjoy. I'd hate to lose any of that because people start believing that one physics implementation becomes considered the best.
UnrealScript is hardly a "very basic" language. It's responsible for the entirety of the entire game code (with a few things written in c++ for performance). That means that the vehicles, weapons, networking, player movement, menus, HUD, console, bot AI, and pretty well everything is written with this language. If what you can do is "very limited" I'm thinking it might not be the language.
:)
As a side-note to those who're curious, UnrealScript is a bit of a cross between Java and c++. It also has replication (networking), states, and time built right into the language. This, IMHO, makes it an extremely powerful language for game design.
(and yes, I have created server-side mods before
The difference between UT/Q3 and UT2003/2004 in vehicle support is that the latter has Karma physics built in. When you're modding, the physics engine is just one of those things that makes a huge impact on the end result. Physics is *NOT* trivial in the least.
:)
For example, some friends and I built some big walking mechs as UT2004 vehicles. The coding, while tricky and a little finicky, is actually pretty simple to understand. We're able to subclass an existing vehicle to get all the player/vehicle interactions. Over-ride one or two things and change the DefaultProperties (part of the UnrealScript language) to get rid of the few aspects that didn't work. Then we'd just set things up with karma so that the feet "repulsed" the ground (no floating feet on hills). The repulsors are attached to the animation's bones. Time the animation to the speed and add in the weapons and you've got something very new without too much work. And in this case, you don't even have to worry about networking; it just works.
I'm really just trying to say that there's a big difference between possible and practical. Vehicles are not in the least bit trivial. I think with all the modders currently working away at UT2004, the question to ask might be what will be the big new modding draw offered by Doom 3 or Half-Life 2? I know UnrealScript and UnrealED.. what can Doom 3 or Half-Life do that I can't do in UT2004?
I'm not sure what you're talking about as far as Doom 3 goes. For a start, it doesn't use DX9. It uses OpenGL. While I completely agree that the lighting is revolutionary, I don't think we're going to see a revival of Dark Match (remember in Unreal 1, all those years back, the dark levels with flashlights? Yes, in Unreal 1. It has been done again and again in the Unreal engine but has never taken off.) The gameplay wasn't there then and I'm not sure how it'll pan out now that proper lighting is truly available. In any case, Doom 3's modding is crippled by a 4-player multiplayer limit and lack of vehicles (afaik). I'm not sure how that will evolve or if it's not applicable to interested modders but it has me worried.
Half-life 2 looks promising for modding. Valve is a strong supporter of modding, the engine seems solid (nVidia issues asside) and sufficiently advanced, and there's an existing mod community that's thriving. But perhaps most importantly, people love realistic mods. Why does that make a difference? Well, when you're starting off you can pull content from the game. It helps tremendously when you can just use an existing explosion effect with your own grenade model. Existing content is a HUGE draw to modders and perhaps one of the most important considerations. The only downside to half-life 2 is that we really don't know how it'll run on older hardware. Counter-strike, for example, is insanely popular because it combines attractive gameplay and low system requirements. I don't know about you, but I've seen a whole lot of LAN parties degenerate to counter-strike because it's the only (popular...) game that EVERYONE can play.
Anyways, that's just how I feel about it
I think what's happening is the vast majority of new bands that get picked up by labels have a couple good songs which get a lot of polish in the studio to sell the CD. But in the more 'nitch' markets (death metal, trance, etc) you find far more consistent offerings. Since it's harder to sell a disc in those genres I don't think they get the same kind of money invested. With less money, the artists need to be a little more dedicated to doing the best they can so the music speaks for itself. They're not going to be living off a hit single. Maybe the "no good music" argument comes from the overly saturated pop music markets. Ah well, just my take..
The only thing that really caught my eye was how the character with the mechanical arms moved. He walked as if they weren't there, turning around easily with them spread wide. They didn't seem light enough to just spin like that.
It was just a conflicting feel to them that threw me. On one hand they seem like big strong arms slamming through stone without any sign of slowing down. On the other hand they're being carried around without a care in the odd scene.
But while it did stand out, I was very happy with how they handled the arms overall. I think they went to noticable efforts to obey the laws of physics as much as possible without sacrificing other aspects of the film. Often one arm braces while another pushes out, for example.
I also liked the arcing on some of their heavy high-powered wiring when it was being pulled out. I don't think it'd look like that, arcing outwards but they're still trying to visualise real-world effects.
So they get my full support for putting in much more thought and detail into their physics than I expected going in. I'm willing to look past any physics-related errors at this point.
I'd like to see some 3rd party verification on those bugs. For example, were they actually present when this developer changed sides? When did they crop up in Google's code? Of course, the way some people define a "bug" they could be claiming there are nine similar UI concerns. We really need to see a list of exactly what these bugs are before any of us can decide on the likelihood of possible causes.
I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a SCO-style lawsuit. They'd better be careful though because if they publicize this much, Google will counter-sue for damages when their claims fall apart.
On the other hand, if code has been illegally copied than this guy AND Google should lose some real respect. I honestly don't believe no one else at the company knows what this guy is doing. They should all be in very close contact. Large chunks of copied code would probably be noticed... maybe not though. Either way, they'll both take heat.
I completely disagree. Rewriting an application from scratch is the worst thing you could possibly do. This is how Microsoft beat Netscape in the first place, remember? It's a key concept of software design. If you have something that works, build on it. You can argue all you want that IE isn't all that great. And you're right. But, it's still a whole lot better then starting from scratch.
Joel Joel Spolsky (Joel On Software) has an excellent article on this topic that I'd recommend any coder-types reading. It's from way back in 2000 but I find I just keep pointing this gem out over and over.
Here's a link for you. Things You Should Never Do, Part I
While games may not be your area of interest, Gamasutra does put together solid salary surveys.
I live in Fairview, the only wireless residence. So I get a lot of use out of the wireless network since my desktop uses it. Before it was installed everyone had to pay for dsl. Mind you, it won't be free forever. There'll be fees included with our res fees, next year I presume. Still free for everyone else on campus... doesn't quite seem fair when it's the same network :)
;)
Since I sleep during the day when everyone else is in class wasting bandwidth with MSN and counterstrike in their classes, I'm able to capitalize on ResWireless' greater total bandwidth then ResNet's bandwidth in the evening (65 vs 45 mbit). The 300 kb/s uploads and downloads are nice. Sadly you really can't play games on wireless. It just never seems to work smoothly.
Still, nothing really matches the insane ping times and incredible (3500kb/s) transfer rates you get when you're using the computer science computers at night. I've played a few hours of ut2004 in ciscr back before finals
The only problem is you can only install the demo since the retail requires a cd-key in the registry. Since we can't access the registry we can't even launch the game. Epic needs to put in a -cdkey command line param IMHO. But anyways, it's sad. I'm going to have to talk to a prof at some point about it because I want to mod for UT and the cs department should back my programming activities... 1/4 of our cs grads go to EA after all..... the labs in the evening are just a testbed unmatched by anything else I'll ever get my hands on. I need to do some begging for permissions over the summer.
Cheers
The wireless network notably does not cover most of the residence buildings. Those buildings do, however, have free wired access. If I was managing the project I wouldn't have added wireless access there either. The wired students are due for an increase in bandwidth though I'd say.
I live in the one residence that is wireless so I've been using wireless the entire year (beats paying for internet!).
My experiences have varied but I must absolutely commend the effort the wireless staff is putting in. They log TONS of information about our connection quality. They noticed I had a poor connection so they got in contact with me and came to my dorm to take readings on the wireless strength. They then installed better antennas to areas of weakness. Or that was the plan, I'm not sure if that has happened yet or not. But the point is, that's serious initiative on their part to ensure the students are happy. Many of their employees also seem to be students. I'm all for giving back to the students however possible.
How did they track me? We log in to use the wireless network. There's both an insecure web authentication for an unencrypted line as well as a 128-bit encrypted VPN. We can log in as many times as we want and request guest accounts. It'd be no problem for a non-student friend to drop by my dorm and "jack in" thanks to that openness.
As for wreck beach, you'd be lucky to get cell service down there ;). But if wireless ever is planned for the beach (which I doubt), it wouldn't be long before someone registers www.livewreckbeachwebcam.com :)
But overall, yea.. UBC has an incredibly solid wireless network that truely aims at consistantly ranking among the best in north america. It is a shame Intel doesn't rank non-US schools. Mind you, I doubt they do any real research anyways so I don't give it any weight or really care even care. I just wanted to give my two cents :)
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller anyways. I don't know what advantage having it on your keychain does for any kind of voyeurism. Just turn on your TV and you'll bump into one of those hidden-camera comedy shows. How long before we're getting all of those in HDTV? It's really not hard to film without being noticed.
:)
We all just have to get used to it. We're going to be recorded everywhere we go in public and our friends are going to get thousands of horrible photos of us.
I just have a regular 3 megapixel camera and already have something like 10,000 photos saved. My friends have cameras too and take just as many photos. I know there must be bad / 'compromising' (lol) photos of me I haven't seen but really it's no big deal. We all just finally need to get used to it and stop being so fricken camera shy!
Smile
The point of using google as your email client is their search engine. If I want a GB of storage I have my own computer. In fact, I have hundreds and hundreds of GBs of storage. Using any encryption would completely ruin the usefulness of this service.
Privacy over the Internet is only ever going to happen among closed groups. Do you think Microsoft couldn't build encryption into MSN Messenger like phone companies encrypt your calls over the airwaves? They could but they don't. The big companies have nothing to gain by making information less accessible to themselves. Because of that, there's not going to be any big breakthrough in privacy for the average joe on the Internet any time soon.
Arming yourself with any kind of specialized tool means you're suddenly going against the grain. Anyone you interact with over the Internet is going to need to be taught those security practices. Is my privacy worth the hasle? No, not really.
Besides, anything google gains by 'reading' my mail will likely be through their statistical information gathering. They really just want another way to deliver ads and harvest current up-to-the-minute trends.
They can be very annoying on wireless connections under non-ideal conditions, especially when it's popping on and off when you don't even care.
These balloon tips will be removed in longhorn I believe. So we won't have to deal with them for too many more years. Registry tweaks can also disable specific balloons (eg low disk space on drive d) as well.
Overall, I like the balloon tips but I think longhorn's sidebar will really step things up another notch.
It is a dramatic increase. Just remember that every 0.1 increment in mozilla isn't some huge major revision. It's an evolution. 5-9% is a dramatic increase for a +0.1 release. It's all relative to the time spent since the last release.
We don't expect a 50% cut in speed every few months after all. It all adds up over time though.
The improvements are mostly in the algorithms, not the code-optimization. So yes, it affects both debug and production builds. But that being said, we're not downloading debug builds so it's a non-issue.
Don't download cracked games, download cracks for your games. Sites like game copy world exist for this purpose. Obviously the name is questionable but there's nothing clearly illegal about what they do. Or perhaps the DMCA in the states makes it illegal for circumventing copyright protection? I don't know US law very well at all; I live in Canada :).
But in this particular case with Epic, I know they're not big fans of annoying copy protection. Like any group of normal people, they understand that annoyances suck.
They've historically been forced into copy-protection schemes by publishers. Before Unreal 1, Tim Sweeney said there would be no copy protection because they trust their customers. GT quickly had a talk and reversed that statement. I also distinctly remember Tim saying that using cracks for UT were not illegal in a discussion about the annoyances of cdkey checks. Also keep in mind Epic has removed the cd check in patches after a while in both UT and UT2003.
I'd imagine they support cd-key protection these days though. Keys aren't very intrusive and make for a very strong anti-piracy feature.
I also like how these keys can be used to perma-ban users. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy every time I hear about a cheater being banned from online play. It's great!
They may as well ask for the moon. I doubt the even the courts read EULAs or web site agreements these days ;)
I'm sure they are very careful as far as pirated music and software is concerned. But wouldn't you love to know what's written in all their email? See if you can't find the slightest lack of sincerity here or there? It'd be interesting.
Hotmail works. I don't want to get into any uptime wars but for the masses, it's good enough. These days if a microsoft service doesn't work, they blame themselves or their computers and just try it again later. And sadly, microsoft probably should be directing all their warnings at the users...
If you think about how internet "applications" are becoming embedded into programs and other web services, there's a whole new area Microsoft could be fighting for ground on.
.net services, they'd have a solid start there. Microsoft does excel at documentation and ease of use for programmers. They know there if something isn't ready, their audience will know and avoid.
.net arena. I'm not sure what the current status is of the open .net compilers but Windows has the head start.
The free Google API isn't really as good as it could be. It works but I suspect if Microsoft incorporated their search engine into Visual Studio, or even just through the existing lists of available
Google doesn't use windows servers. That would certainly limit their ability to compete in the