Thay knew very clearly where the line was. They were told over and opver. They thought they could ignore it, as they did in the US.
Where was the line again? Is it a browser that they're not allowed to bundle? Or is Microsoft supposed to publish UML models and manuals for all of their "protocols"?
It seems to me MS is doing the right thing by waiting until all the ISO 900X bureaucrats in the EU spell out exactly what MS can and can not include in their OS.
You're right, you can't patent a format or an interface. But Fraunhauffer & Thompson (sp?) have patented so many different areas of MP3 decoding and encoding that it's impossible to decode an MP3 without violating the patents.
I've done a good bit of MP3 encoder development, both in hardware and software, in the past, so I'm pretty familiar with the algorithms involved. If I recall correctly, the hybrid polyphase filter, the MDCT, the use of short block MDCT (and short block FFT in the psychoacoustic model), and the use of fixed Huffman code pages in the bitstream coder are all patented. There are probably other patented algorithms that I'm forgetting about.
The part of the MP3 encodeing and decoding that I don't think can be worked around with a different algorithm is the bitstream coding. MP3 uses a fixed set of Huffman code tables (31 different tables if I recall correctly, it's been a while). The id of the code table used for a frame is put into the frame header, and the samples in that frame are encoded/decoded using that code table. I don't see how you could decode the bitstream without using the specific code table used to encode it. I believe both the use of fixed code tables in an encoder, and the use of the specific code tables in MP3 are patented.
OpenGL works just fine on Windows. At the end of the day, OpenGL draws triangles and DirectX draws triangles, and they both do it pretty well.
What sort of support will DirectX win your apps? I develop with OpenGL and with DirectX (my renderer has a backend for both), and I get about the same amount and quality of support for both APIs.
My preference is DirectX, but that's just a matter of taste. Like I said, OGL and DX both draw triangles pretty well.
You need a serious sense of humor adjustment. As clever as your flawed breakdown of what makes comedy may be, it's clearly dead wrong. Stephen Colbert is seriously funny, and the video of him at the White House Correspondant's Dinner is the proof.
The biggest tell is your statement that "Dogma" was pants-wettingly funny. It was about as funny as every Molly Shannon bit on SNL; that is to say not at all. Dogma was Kevin Smith's worst movie by far.
Cutting and pasting DirectX code? You better step back little boy. I've got chunks of programmers like you in my stool.
I'm sure your nipples get hard at the thought of setting register bits with fancy macros so all the little children with their PS2 toys will see your name in the credits.
You are smoking crack if you think any of the titles you mentioned look better than Doom 3, Half Life 2, or Chronicles of Riddick.
For the record, this reply is not out of ignorance. I am a game engine developer with experience with PS2 and XBox development, at a low and high level. The PS2 is in every measure completely outclassed by Xbox. I'll address some of the big limitations of the GS here, but I can go on about the EE and VUs if you like.
The GS is a POS. The biggest limitation of the GS, of course, is the memory. There's just not enough to do anything interesting. But there are many other significant limitations, including a severe lack of useful ALU operations, low precision interpolators, and a lack of speed compared to the NV2A GPU on the Xbox. The NV2A kicks the living crap out of the GS.
There is no built in support for dot products, which are required for per pixel lighting. I have gotten dot products to work through clever (read: extremely hacky and slow) blit operations. Because of the high overhead involved with getting a dot product operation working, the only practical way of doing per pixel lighting is with a deferred illumination model. But you run into the lack of GS memory which makes deferred illumination impractical. If you could get past these two barriers, there is no practical way of normalizing interpolated vectors on the GS.
There is no support for stencil buffers, so stenciled shadowing is impractical. Sure, you can emulate stencil buffer functionality using wrapped additive alpha operations (use 1 for a stencil increment, 255 for a stencil decrement), but if you want to do do z-fail shadows (which are required to remove artefacts when the shadow volume intersects the near plane), you have to invert the Z buffer. This can be done on the GS, but it is extremely slow unless you are using a 24 bit z-buffer (you can use an alpha blit, essentially a 1-z of the relevant area of the z-buffer in 24 bit mode). And again, you run into the low GS memory limitation.
And don't get me started on the crappy interpolators. Big triangles just look like ass. The solution? Tessellate. Joy.
The EE and the VUs arent much better. And if you want to do anything useful with the VUs, the EE is going to be damn busy assembling DMA packets for the DMAC, so you can lose all hope of even getting close to the combination of graphics + audio + sim fidelity + gameplay that you get on the Xbox.
The PS2 is no formula 1 racer. It's a souped up Yugo with a blower.
Yeah it is a bad idea to get programs to worry about total cache usage, or to even detect and optimize usage for hyperthreading.
But I thought that hyperthreading was actually created as a band-aid for Intel's broken NetBurst architecture. The deeply pipelined architecture had so many pipeline bubbles and stalls that Intel decided to fill those bubbles and stalls (i.e. use the idle hardware) by adding support for an additional thread.
Yeah but it was the U.S. that attempted to block the.xxx domain extension right?
The U.N. should not be given any control over the internet. The solution is to boot the fundamentalist puritans who are desparately trying to restrict our liberties and legislate morality out of the U.S. Then there should be no issue with the U.S. controlling the internet.
Sorry, you don't need specialized hardware for motion blur. And I'm not quite sure what you mean by "universal processing units suck". Pixel shaders are pretty damn fast these days, and they're putting a lot more of them into GPUs.
There are plenty of good motion blur algorithms that work in 3D (with extrusion in the opposite direction of velocity), 2D post processing using shaders, and accumulation buffer techniques, all of which run well on modern hardware. Dedicated motion blur hardware would be redundant, and a total waste of die space.
Here's a few examples of motion blur algorithms for modern GPUs running on "universal processing units that suck":
Modern GPU's support motion blur, and have no lack of "image processing circuts". Render to texture + programmable pixel shaders = "image processing circuits".
Motion blur has been done (and overdone) in games already. Take GTA3 and Burnout, for example. Both have motion blur.
people who believe in Creationism or ID are extremists. They are extremely ignorant. Take that however you like, with offense or with sugar on top. The ignorant religious right/fundamentalists are trying with some success to mix faith and government, and I take extreme offense to that.
That's a great idea. Seriously.
I just switched from McAfee to Norton Antivirus because McAfee update only works with IE for updates (I'm using Firefox). I was pretty unhappy with McAfee to begin with, but the "IE only for updates" feature was the last straw.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard you like to edit, so I put vim in your emacs so you can edit while you edit...
There's no better language than JavaScript for producing miserable workers and substandard code. Well done FreeCause!
Q: How do you know if a Sony BMG employee is lying?
A: His lips are moving
They don't have any more innovative ideas of their own to guard. Venture capitalists aren't innovators, they're not inventors, they're analysts.
Don't you mean perl scripter?
Thay knew very clearly where the line was. They were told over and opver. They thought they could ignore it, as they did in the US. Where was the line again? Is it a browser that they're not allowed to bundle? Or is Microsoft supposed to publish UML models and manuals for all of their "protocols"? It seems to me MS is doing the right thing by waiting until all the ISO 900X bureaucrats in the EU spell out exactly what MS can and can not include in their OS.
You're right, you can't patent a format or an interface. But Fraunhauffer & Thompson (sp?) have patented so many different areas of MP3 decoding and encoding that it's impossible to decode an MP3 without violating the patents.
I've done a good bit of MP3 encoder development, both in hardware and software, in the past, so I'm pretty familiar with the algorithms involved. If I recall correctly, the hybrid polyphase filter, the MDCT, the use of short block MDCT (and short block FFT in the psychoacoustic model), and the use of fixed Huffman code pages in the bitstream coder are all patented. There are probably other patented algorithms that I'm forgetting about.
The part of the MP3 encodeing and decoding that I don't think can be worked around with a different algorithm is the bitstream coding. MP3 uses a fixed set of Huffman code tables (31 different tables if I recall correctly, it's been a while). The id of the code table used for a frame is put into the frame header, and the samples in that frame are encoded/decoded using that code table. I don't see how you could decode the bitstream without using the specific code table used to encode it. I believe both the use of fixed code tables in an encoder, and the use of the specific code tables in MP3 are patented.
OpenGL works just fine on Windows. At the end of the day, OpenGL draws triangles and DirectX draws triangles, and they both do it pretty well.
What sort of support will DirectX win your apps? I develop with OpenGL and with DirectX (my renderer has a backend for both), and I get about the same amount and quality of support for both APIs.
My preference is DirectX, but that's just a matter of taste. Like I said, OGL and DX both draw triangles pretty well.
You need a serious sense of humor adjustment. As clever as your flawed breakdown of what makes comedy may be, it's clearly dead wrong. Stephen Colbert is seriously funny, and the video of him at the White House Correspondant's Dinner is the proof. The biggest tell is your statement that "Dogma" was pants-wettingly funny. It was about as funny as every Molly Shannon bit on SNL; that is to say not at all. Dogma was Kevin Smith's worst movie by far.
... book burning kiosks.
To be perfectly fair, you are sort of missing a CELL chip in that example.
So the visuals will be like the visuals on the PC, but the simulation will run slower on the PS3
Cutting and pasting DirectX code? You better step back little boy. I've got chunks of programmers like you in my stool. I'm sure your nipples get hard at the thought of setting register bits with fancy macros so all the little children with their PS2 toys will see your name in the credits. You are smoking crack if you think any of the titles you mentioned look better than Doom 3, Half Life 2, or Chronicles of Riddick.
For the record, this reply is not out of ignorance. I am a game engine developer with experience with PS2 and XBox development, at a low and high level. The PS2 is in every measure completely outclassed by Xbox. I'll address some of the big limitations of the GS here, but I can go on about the EE and VUs if you like. The GS is a POS. The biggest limitation of the GS, of course, is the memory. There's just not enough to do anything interesting. But there are many other significant limitations, including a severe lack of useful ALU operations, low precision interpolators, and a lack of speed compared to the NV2A GPU on the Xbox. The NV2A kicks the living crap out of the GS. There is no built in support for dot products, which are required for per pixel lighting. I have gotten dot products to work through clever (read: extremely hacky and slow) blit operations. Because of the high overhead involved with getting a dot product operation working, the only practical way of doing per pixel lighting is with a deferred illumination model. But you run into the lack of GS memory which makes deferred illumination impractical. If you could get past these two barriers, there is no practical way of normalizing interpolated vectors on the GS. There is no support for stencil buffers, so stenciled shadowing is impractical. Sure, you can emulate stencil buffer functionality using wrapped additive alpha operations (use 1 for a stencil increment, 255 for a stencil decrement), but if you want to do do z-fail shadows (which are required to remove artefacts when the shadow volume intersects the near plane), you have to invert the Z buffer. This can be done on the GS, but it is extremely slow unless you are using a 24 bit z-buffer (you can use an alpha blit, essentially a 1-z of the relevant area of the z-buffer in 24 bit mode). And again, you run into the low GS memory limitation. And don't get me started on the crappy interpolators. Big triangles just look like ass. The solution? Tessellate. Joy. The EE and the VUs arent much better. And if you want to do anything useful with the VUs, the EE is going to be damn busy assembling DMA packets for the DMAC, so you can lose all hope of even getting close to the combination of graphics + audio + sim fidelity + gameplay that you get on the Xbox. The PS2 is no formula 1 racer. It's a souped up Yugo with a blower.
Oh I get it. You're a Scientologist, right?
> Kind of makes me nervous about renting games now.
As a game developer, I'm happy that it makes you nervous about renting games.
Magnavox was first, with the Odyssey.
Yeah I can't wait until L.A. falls into the ocean.
Yeah it is a bad idea to get programs to worry about total cache usage, or to even detect and optimize usage for hyperthreading. But I thought that hyperthreading was actually created as a band-aid for Intel's broken NetBurst architecture. The deeply pipelined architecture had so many pipeline bubbles and stalls that Intel decided to fill those bubbles and stalls (i.e. use the idle hardware) by adding support for an additional thread.
Yeah but it was the U.S. that attempted to block the .xxx domain extension right?
The U.N. should not be given any control over the internet. The solution is to boot the fundamentalist puritans who are desparately trying to restrict our liberties and legislate morality out of the U.S. Then there should be no issue with the U.S. controlling the internet.
Sorry, you don't need specialized hardware for motion blur. And I'm not quite sure what you mean by "universal processing units suck". Pixel shaders are pretty damn fast these days, and they're putting a lot more of them into GPUs.
There are plenty of good motion blur algorithms that work in 3D (with extrusion in the opposite direction of velocity), 2D post processing using shaders, and accumulation buffer techniques, all of which run well on modern hardware. Dedicated motion blur hardware would be redundant, and a total waste of die space.
Here's a few examples of motion blur algorithms for modern GPUs running on "universal processing units that suck":
http://download.developer.nvidia.com/developer/SDK /Individual_Samples/featured_effects.html
(see the spinFX demo)
http://download.developer.nvidia.com/developer/SDK /Individual_Samples/samples.html
(see "Motion Blur as a 2D Post-Processing Effect"
http://search.ati.com/nasearch.asp?Query=motion+bl ur&go.x=0&go.y=0&DefaultLanguage=16&Catalog=NASite &rdoCatalog=NASite&Start=&Total=&Stat=New
(this is a search on "motion blur" on ati's developer page, there are several papers describing motion blur techniques)
Modern GPU's support motion blur, and have no lack of "image processing circuts". Render to texture + programmable pixel shaders = "image processing circuits". Motion blur has been done (and overdone) in games already. Take GTA3 and Burnout, for example. Both have motion blur.
Blue Security would like a list of the spammers who are filling your email (or copies of the spam). That's how their system works...
people who believe in Creationism or ID are extremists. They are extremely ignorant. Take that however you like, with offense or with sugar on top. The ignorant religious right/fundamentalists are trying with some success to mix faith and government, and I take extreme offense to that.
That's a great idea. Seriously. I just switched from McAfee to Norton Antivirus because McAfee update only works with IE for updates (I'm using Firefox). I was pretty unhappy with McAfee to begin with, but the "IE only for updates" feature was the last straw.
Yeah! But you should really be advocating switching to C#, the better Java.