Don't get me wrong, I think that's total crap. But I think it's total crap for a different reason then you. I think it's crap because I don't think the goverment should have the right to regulate speech on the airwaves through the back door--which is exaclty what they did in the 70's with the "Seven Dirty Words".
(As a teensy bit of history about myself, I worked for EA a few years ago (and shipped a title with them). Then, along with 90% of my coworkers, I left EA. I went to a third party developer, where I worked for several other publishers, and shipped two more titles. I've now left game development, although I'm technically still in the game industry.)
You seem to think it's different other places in the industry. That's quite naive.
It's not. EA is the biggest, but they're not the ones that started the trend of crunch time. Pretty much every game company does it at some point. The few that don't are the exception. EA's behavior is the rule.
Even if EA were the trendsetter, the fact is that they are responsible for nearly 1/4 of the total game industry revenue. Odds are pretty good that if you decided to go into the game industry, at some point you'd wind up working for them (either as directly or third party developer).
I realize that it's hip to bash on Americans these days--especially if one is an American. Hell, I've done it. But in this case, it's not America that has the problem, it's one asshole lawyer from Florida: Jack Thompson
Jack isn't just against nudity, mind you. He's out to convince everyone that video games are a direct product of satan himself. He deplores pretty much every aspect of video games, and isn't afraid to link pretty much anything to them. It won't be long now, and he'll be telling us that games cause cancer and explosive diarrhea.
I can't believe it, but for once, I'm actually rooting for the evil empire.
...before, at least for the IT field. The rulings have basically said that a year-long hiatus in the IT field might as well be infinitely long, due to the pacing of the business. Another ruling (which I cannot find now) basically said that if an employer wants to enforce a non-compete ruling, then they needed to be willing to compensate the employee for the duration. It's important for businesses to realize that non-competes are not a form of punishment for employees who decide to leave, but rather a means to keep trade secrets or competetive edges for a short amount of time.
There have been several rulings on this, the most significant being the Earthweb v Schlack case a few years ago (1999). In California, it's also important to recognize that non-compete agreements are all but illegal, which is probably why Google is interested in bringing up the suit there.
Of course, these rulings do not apply throughout the US yet, because none of the suits have had enough merit to even make it to the Supreme Court, and have been overturned at the local, state or circuit level. (None of the employers have had the wherewithal to take the suits all the way to the top, most likely for fear of a non-favorable ruling).
Personally, I think non-competes are a sign of what employers really think of their employees. If employees are thought of as the most valuable asset the company has, and are treated as such, there is no need for non-compete agreements. My current employer, which is a very succesful, publicly traded company does not require non-compete agreements for the majority of employees. But they treat us so well that no one leaves to start a competing firm or to join the competition. We have very low turnover, and the turnover we do have is generally people who leave to start their own companies in unrelated fields.
I disagree that overgeneralizations are a precursor to racism. Overgeneralizations are a useful way for the human brain to avoid exploding with information. And their a way for you to improve your interpersonal skills. More on this in a minute though.
People these days are really sensitive about race. Overly sensitive. The problem isn't racism. The problem is intolerance and fanaticism. Any form of intolerance (be it based on race, religion (or lack thereof), color, creed, sexual preference, or differing viewpoints) is bad. Combine that with fanaticism, and you have somereally scarypeople.
Now why did I say that overgeneralizations can be a good thing? Because they make it easier for you to relate to someone whom you've just met, or for you to appropriately modify your behavior for a given situation. As an example, you meet someone who is dressed like a priest. You might avoid topics like the recent incidents of priest pedophilia, or your particular views on religion. At least until you get to know that person.
The important thing is to realize is that people can be (and generally are) deeper than the one most immediately recognizable aspect of themselves, whether that aspect is their race, their beauty (or their ugliness), their religion or anything else about them. Likewise, it's important not to allow a single character trait to define who your are.
I don't really get what you're seeing. On my server, I never hear anyone use any derogatory term to refer to Chinese people.
People do refer to farmers in a derogatory way, and a lot of time, they refer to them as Chinese Gold Farmers. But in all fairness, a lot of the farming shops are Chinese shops. That's not to say that there aren't white, black, hispanic, German, French, Korean, Japanese and Inuit farmers as well. It's simply a numbers game.
When something happens one way 99% of the time, people get lazy. For example, "the San Jose Earthquakes win all the time." Well, they don't win *all* the time. Just 98% of their games.
Don't mistake laziness for racism. At the same time, using derogatory terms for people of any race is clearly racist, so...
The worst thing you can really do about racism is overreact to it. I disagree fundamentally with racism. But I respect that in the country I'm from, they have the right to say what they want. (Although not necessarily on private property or private game servers, etc, etc).
Your comment betrays your lack of understanding about the complexity of their problem.
For one thing, it's *extremely* unlikely that Blizzard's IT staff is unskilled (based on their other employees, which are extremely talented. Blizzard, like several other companies I've interacted with seems to believe very strongly in having talented individuals in all aspects of business).
Which actually is a problem for them in this situation. It's not that their staff is untalented, it's that they're short-handed and the bar is high for recruiting new staff. This makes hiring a lot of staff (which they are in desparate need of) a very slow process. Frankly, it's just not that often that someone who is truly talented shops their resume around. (It happens from time to time, but it's really rare).
Truly talented people are never wanting for job offers.
You apparently do not have any inkling how the game industry works. Allow me to enlighten you, young padawan. (Either you don't work in the game industry, or you're very new if you do. Or you don't keep up with the industry rags, at least).
In the game industry, there are two (basic) types of developers. First party developers (that would be, developers who are actually just a branch within the publisher) and third party developers (who are working with a publisher via a contract).
I've worked for both--including the evil empire. The bottom line is that in the end, the publisher is law. Regardless of whether you are a first or third party developer, the publisher's QA department has to sign off on a title before it is released. When a product is realeased before it is ready, it is the publisher's fault--and was most likely the publisher's decision. In the case of PCs, there is at least some forgiveness for releasing games that have various bugs; due to the nature of PC hardware (and the nearly infinite combinations of video cards, sound cards, motherboards, RAM, drivers for all of the aforementioned, etc, etc, etc), it is almost certain that there will be at least one person whose machine is incapable of playing your title. However, a console is a fixed target. There is no excuse for all but the rarest of hangs. The memory allocations should even always shake out the same way, for chrissake. The thread switches--should your title use threads at all--are deterministic for the same sets of user inputs.
And incidentally, in the case of the three titles mentioned above, both NFSU and BF2 where developed first party by EA. (DICe was purchased by EA after the success of BF1942). The publisher was the developer in this case.
As far as the topic at hand, I'm neither here nor there. On the one hand, it saddens me that yet another talented studio has signed with the evil empire. (I imagine in 5-10 years that the other publishers will be gone or will form together to sue EA for monopolistic practices). On the other hand, I haven't played HL2 because I disagree fundamentally with a copy protection scheme that phones home even when I play single player.
Both are almost as bad as spending effort thinking about continuity/script errors/mistakes/bad calls in the first place. (Unless they're really glaring)
Re:What a sad week for gamers
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Not directed to you specifically, but the response to all of the EA bullshit is obvious.
You vote with your dollars. Don't buy their games. Take a stance against the evil empire.
I have yet to play BF2. I won't be purchasing it--and I'm unwilling to pirate games.
Likewise, I will not be purchasing any sports titles from EA for the forseeable future. Although I will make it a point to purchase games from ESPN (who really does make a great hockey game).
Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products?
Because they are different markets? It is not illegal for a company to do what you describe, however deplorable. Unless you are a monopoly. Then, you are using your monopoly in one area to help gain a monopoly in another area. This is known as Vertical Tying.
Which is, per antitrust legislation in the US, illegal.
No offense, but unless you've met a statistically significant sampling of Americans, your "evidence" is anecdotal at best.
For example, we haven't met. I'm an atheist. I'm socially liberal (I believe that those of us that are more fortunate should help take care of those that are less fortunate), but I am economically and politically conservative (Small government is good. [Generally] staying out of businesses way is good.) I also have a strong dislike for lieing, cheating or doing anything that wouldn't pass "the light of day" test.
Despite my firm stance that there is no god, I won't get upset with anything you do or say regarding religion. I won't even get upset if you try to convert me to whatever religion you are, as long as we can eventually move past this to be friends.
There are definitely people everywhere that get really steamed when religion is talked about--in fact there were some people I met in Sydney who couldn't let it go that I didn't believe in their god. We don't have a monopoly on them here in the States.
I didn't see the article the first time it went around, so it was news to me.
Bowler misses the point of Doom 3 though. Doom was a game, not an engine. Doom 2 was as well.
Doom 3 is an engine. One that's available now (unlike UE3, which is what I believe he meant when referring to Unreal Tournament III). Is it as tech as UE3? No. However, it will be two years OLDER than UE3 when UE3 is available as in in-your-hands game.
Yes, but that seems like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.
Sony has already eloquently solved the problem of bringing together multiple gaming units and wanting to play games together.
The PSP has wireless. Ad hoc doesn't even require any setup. Don't give me 3 gigabit ports on the back. Give me one (if you must) and wireless access.
And anyone who tells you that there is any appreciable lag in wireless connections is full of crap. This is the pingout from my linux box back to my desktop, which is connected across an 802.11g connection:
PING 192.168.1.2 (192.168.1.2) from 192.168.1.1 : 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=1 ttl=128 time=0.877 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=2 ttl=128 time=1.00 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=3 ttl=128 time=0.855 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=4 ttl=128 time=0.858 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=5 ttl=128 time=0.845 ms 64 bytes from 192.168.1.2: icmp_seq=6 ttl=128 time=0.874 ms
--- 192.168.1.2 ping statistics --- 6 packets transmitted, 6 received, 0% loss, time 5006ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.845/0.885/1.003/0.058 ms
Well, if by liberal you mean someone who favors small government that stays out of my personal affairs...
Then I would be a/. liberal. And as far as I'm concerned, the feds are welcome to interrupt my internet access on a plane or sniff my packets that go across the internet (whilst coming from a plane). So long as they get a court order to do so (which the article indicates they will). Except for the fact that I think this is just something that makes people "feel better," not something that will actually save one single life.
Now, a bit of insight into why other measures the government has taken in the past four years...
The bottom line is that none of them work. For example, the rainbow of terror. When is the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Low? For that matter, when's the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Guarded? And what's with the colors, anyways?
And what's with the government being able to sniff out what kind of books I read? Am I the only one who realizes that in order to have a free press, you have to have a populace with the freedom to read what the "free" press writes?
What about the increased "security" at airports? Am I the only one who realizes that the increase in security at airports is unnecessary because passengers are unwilling to be used as a giant bomb against their fellow citizens of the planet Earth? The reason that 9/11 was successful (from a terrorist point of view) was because people expected that the plane had been hijacked, they would sit complacent and would be taken to Abu Dabi, at which point they would deplane. But as the plane that went down in PA shows, people aren't idiots. And they're not willing to sit there and be used as cannon fodder against their fellow humans.
A real killer app would be a cell phone that actually works, and doesn't sound like the two tin-cans with string that I used to talk to my next door neighbor over.
No, you need to relook at your dictionary. As I said in my original post (and in the link to the dictionary entry), innovate means "to introduce as or as if new." Something can be innovative but still have been done before. Execution is key. Open/GL is innovative because it has extensions to deal with it's slow time from rev to rev. D3D is innovative because it solves the same problem without the need for extensions.
In fact, it solves the problem without the programmer even needing to know what kind of hardware he's running on. That's innovative.
As far as the extensions go, that definitely happens for some of them (for example, vertex texture fetch, which was included in VS3 after it was supported in NVIDIA hardware). But for quite a lot of them (especially the ones in the OGL extension registry I pointed at earlier that have MS listed as owning IP), MS comes up with them, champions them and "asks kindly" for support in the hardware. A prime example of this is pretty much all of the Shader Model 2 features.
Did it ever seem odd to you that Dx9 class hardware wasn't available at the time of Dx9's release? Why would that be, if the hardware had already supported the functionality, and MS was just patching it into the spec?
Why does it matter that you are a D3D programmer? Neither of your arguments have anything to do with programming in D3D, rather they have to do with the history of D3D.
Which is irrelevant. The fact that MS bought D3D is irrelevant to whether or not D3D now is innovative. Innovation is not the same thing as invention (or patentability). Prior art does not negate innovation. The fact that someone did something before you doesn't mean that you cannot be innovative. Google hasn't done anything that hasn't been done before, they just do it better. Execution matters. And the execution of D3D continues to get better and better. Meanwhile, OGL stagnates. The extensions are not part of OGL until they are approved.
As far as never doing anything first... You only think that because you don't realize how extensions in OGL are added. Do you think that someone dreams up an extension first? Not a chance. Look at the extensions registry. The majority of proposed extensions (and pretty much all of the interesting ones) come from NVIDIA, 3DFX (still haven't been approved, huh?), ATI and the older 3D HW manufacturers.
A lot of the extensions that are proposed to OGL are a direct result of requirements for new versions of D3D.
But as a few examples of things that D3D did first... Multitexturing. Shader support. Caps bits. MRTs.
That's not to say the D3D is always the latest and greatest. For example, percent-closer-filtering (used in HW soft-shadow mapping) has had an extension available in OGL for what now, 4 years? And it still hasn't made it into D3D.
The bottom line is that MS is still innovative in that the things that are available in D3D, are available on all 3D accelerated hardware. (Which is actually why PCF is not included in D3D. ATI has yet to add support for it.)
v : bring something new to an environment; "A new word processor was introduced" [syn: introduce] -
At any rate, they've done tons of stuff in my area as well as the guy who mentioned all the stuff they brought to the compiler/IDE arena. I work in graphics.
As an example to my point, find a PC game developer who uses Open/GL. Got one? Good. Now, if that developer is iD, go ahead and drop that and find another. Got another? Good. If that's Blizzard (for WoW), go ahead and drop that and find another. Got one? No?
Direct3D is innovative. It revs regularly, and it keeps up with technology. It provides a unified API to deal directly with multiple types of underlying hardware and architecture. It incorporates new hardware functionality directly into that API. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
They also publish a fairly impressive collection of algorithms. For example, Spherical Harmonic Lighting came out of MS. Blinn works there (of the Blinn shading model fame). In fact, odds are pretty good that if your favorite famous 3-D innovator doesn't work at NVIDIA (Molnar, Tarolli, Everitt, Cebenoyan, etc), they probably work at Microsoft (Blinn, Smith, etc).
To discount MS as an innvator because you dislike their business practices is ludicrous.
The reason I generally pass on PhDs when looking to hire. At several companies I've worked at, the SOP is to send candidates a programming test (filled with questions that are very relevant to what we do, not BS C++ idioms and quirks).
More times than not, a PhD who has applied at the company will get the test and complain loudly that they don't have time to fill the test out. Which is simply code for arrogance on their part or a lack of understanding of what is important in "the real world."
As far as quizzing onsite, the fact of the matter is that if you are good at what you do and are in it because you like it, pop quizzes are fun, not a reason to think of your employers as arrogant. When I was grilled for 7 hours at my current place of employment, the thought that was going through my head wasn't "wow, these assholes are arrogant." It was "wow, these guys are all totally brilliant. I definitely want to be surrounded by coworkers that are as smart as them." When the offer letter came, I accepted in a heartbeat.
Several presidents have won by a true majority. George Washington was voted in unanimously. I wasn't referring to a majority of people in the country, but the typical majority referred to in elections. (IE, the majority of people who voted).
In 2000, Bush didn't have the most popular votes. Al Gore did.
You misunderstand the point of the judicial branch. The point of the judicial branch is to make sure that the other branches don't abuse their powers, and that the other branches don't shred the Constitution.
The judicial branch is supposed to be above partisan politics. Judges are appointed for life at the federal level. Regardless of a judge's MORAL stance on an issue, they are to rule according to the LAW, and the Constitution. That's why abortion remains legal in this country. Regardless of whether or not you feel abortion is a sin, or morally repugnant, or whatever, abortion seems to be allowed by the Constitution.
Now, as a snide side comment, Bush wasn't elected by a majority of this country. (Although he was re-elected by a majority. Go figure).
Your comment doesn't really make sense, and seems to convey a lack of understanding of how graphics accelerators work. (This isn't a dig, they're incredibly complicated.)
First, as the GP said, there is no fixed function pipeline on modern GPUs. When you submit a primitive (or a batch of primitives) with fixed-function functionality, the driver converts the current fixed function operations into appropriate shader programs and sends it on down the pipe.
Secondly, the "fixed function pipeline" for vertex processing is ludicrously simple. There's actually really nothing that's done, save multiplying the vertices by the appropriate matrix (world * view * proj, in the usual case). The interesting work, and the work that's really done by the GPU is in the fragment processor. That's where the overwhelming majority of fixed function operations are actually performed.
However, it concerns me that you talk about writing programs that try to be as general as the fixed function pipeline. Due to the nature of fragment processors, it's phenomenally expensive to branch. And even if you were to write a general-case implementation of the fixed function pipeline that didn't branch, it would contain so many instructions as to totally hammer your performance.
A rule of thumb in the fragment processor is that you should have no more than ~40 instructions per fragment for a full screen fill. (For pre-7800 hardware).
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You really should check the facts. Our system of laws is based as heavily on precedent as it is on the letter of the law, and the precedent in this case is pretty clear: the FCC has the power to govern the airwaves in all 50 states, and several other places.
Don't get me wrong, I think that's total crap. But I think it's total crap for a different reason then you. I think it's crap because I don't think the goverment should have the right to regulate speech on the airwaves through the back door--which is exaclty what they did in the 70's with the "Seven Dirty Words".
(As a teensy bit of history about myself, I worked for EA a few years ago (and shipped a title with them). Then, along with 90% of my coworkers, I left EA. I went to a third party developer, where I worked for several other publishers, and shipped two more titles. I've now left game development, although I'm technically still in the game industry.)
You seem to think it's different other places in the industry. That's quite naive.
It's not. EA is the biggest, but they're not the ones that started the trend of crunch time. Pretty much every game company does it at some point. The few that don't are the exception. EA's behavior is the rule.
Even if EA were the trendsetter, the fact is that they are responsible for nearly 1/4 of the total game industry revenue. Odds are pretty good that if you decided to go into the game industry, at some point you'd wind up working for them (either as directly or third party developer).
I realize that it's hip to bash on Americans these days--especially if one is an American. Hell, I've done it. But in this case, it's not America that has the problem, it's one asshole lawyer from Florida: Jack Thompson
Do a google search for him.
Jack isn't just against nudity, mind you. He's out to convince everyone that video games are a direct product of satan himself. He deplores pretty much every aspect of video games, and isn't afraid to link pretty much anything to them. It won't be long now, and he'll be telling us that games cause cancer and explosive diarrhea.
I can't believe it, but for once, I'm actually rooting for the evil empire.
...before, at least for the IT field. The rulings have basically said that a year-long hiatus in the IT field might as well be infinitely long, due to the pacing of the business. Another ruling (which I cannot find now) basically said that if an employer wants to enforce a non-compete ruling, then they needed to be willing to compensate the employee for the duration. It's important for businesses to realize that non-competes are not a form of punishment for employees who decide to leave, but rather a means to keep trade secrets or competetive edges for a short amount of time.
There have been several rulings on this, the most significant being the Earthweb v Schlack case a few years ago (1999). In California, it's also important to recognize that non-compete agreements are all but illegal, which is probably why Google is interested in bringing up the suit there.
Of course, these rulings do not apply throughout the US yet, because none of the suits have had enough merit to even make it to the Supreme Court, and have been overturned at the local, state or circuit level. (None of the employers have had the wherewithal to take the suits all the way to the top, most likely for fear of a non-favorable ruling).
Personally, I think non-competes are a sign of what employers really think of their employees. If employees are thought of as the most valuable asset the company has, and are treated as such, there is no need for non-compete agreements. My current employer, which is a very succesful, publicly traded company does not require non-compete agreements for the majority of employees. But they treat us so well that no one leaves to start a competing firm or to join the competition. We have very low turnover, and the turnover we do have is generally people who leave to start their own companies in unrelated fields.
I disagree that overgeneralizations are a precursor to racism. Overgeneralizations are a useful way for the human brain to avoid exploding with information. And their a way for you to improve your interpersonal skills. More on this in a minute though.
People these days are really sensitive about race. Overly sensitive. The problem isn't racism. The problem is intolerance and fanaticism. Any form of intolerance (be it based on race, religion (or lack thereof), color, creed, sexual preference, or differing viewpoints) is bad. Combine that with fanaticism, and you have some really scary people.
Now why did I say that overgeneralizations can be a good thing? Because they make it easier for you to relate to someone whom you've just met, or for you to appropriately modify your behavior for a given situation. As an example, you meet someone who is dressed like a priest. You might avoid topics like the recent incidents of priest pedophilia, or your particular views on religion. At least until you get to know that person.
The important thing is to realize is that people can be (and generally are) deeper than the one most immediately recognizable aspect of themselves, whether that aspect is their race, their beauty (or their ugliness), their religion or anything else about them. Likewise, it's important not to allow a single character trait to define who your are.
I don't really get what you're seeing. On my server, I never hear anyone use any derogatory term to refer to Chinese people.
People do refer to farmers in a derogatory way, and a lot of time, they refer to them as Chinese Gold Farmers. But in all fairness, a lot of the farming shops are Chinese shops. That's not to say that there aren't white, black, hispanic, German, French, Korean, Japanese and Inuit farmers as well. It's simply a numbers game.
When something happens one way 99% of the time, people get lazy. For example, "the San Jose Earthquakes win all the time." Well, they don't win *all* the time. Just 98% of their games.
Don't mistake laziness for racism. At the same time, using derogatory terms for people of any race is clearly racist, so...
The worst thing you can really do about racism is overreact to it. I disagree fundamentally with racism. But I respect that in the country I'm from, they have the right to say what they want. (Although not necessarily on private property or private game servers, etc, etc).
Your comment betrays your lack of understanding about the complexity of their problem.
For one thing, it's *extremely* unlikely that Blizzard's IT staff is unskilled (based on their other employees, which are extremely talented. Blizzard, like several other companies I've interacted with seems to believe very strongly in having talented individuals in all aspects of business).
Which actually is a problem for them in this situation. It's not that their staff is untalented, it's that they're short-handed and the bar is high for recruiting new staff. This makes hiring a lot of staff (which they are in desparate need of) a very slow process. Frankly, it's just not that often that someone who is truly talented shops their resume around. (It happens from time to time, but it's really rare).
Truly talented people are never wanting for job offers.
You apparently do not have any inkling how the game industry works. Allow me to enlighten you, young padawan. (Either you don't work in the game industry, or you're very new if you do. Or you don't keep up with the industry rags, at least).
In the game industry, there are two (basic) types of developers. First party developers (that would be, developers who are actually just a branch within the publisher) and third party developers (who are working with a publisher via a contract).
I've worked for both--including the evil empire. The bottom line is that in the end, the publisher is law. Regardless of whether you are a first or third party developer, the publisher's QA department has to sign off on a title before it is released. When a product is realeased before it is ready, it is the publisher's fault--and was most likely the publisher's decision. In the case of PCs, there is at least some forgiveness for releasing games that have various bugs; due to the nature of PC hardware (and the nearly infinite combinations of video cards, sound cards, motherboards, RAM, drivers for all of the aforementioned, etc, etc, etc), it is almost certain that there will be at least one person whose machine is incapable of playing your title. However, a console is a fixed target. There is no excuse for all but the rarest of hangs. The memory allocations should even always shake out the same way, for chrissake. The thread switches--should your title use threads at all--are deterministic for the same sets of user inputs.
And incidentally, in the case of the three titles mentioned above, both NFSU and BF2 where developed first party by EA. (DICe was purchased by EA after the success of BF1942). The publisher was the developer in this case.
As far as the topic at hand, I'm neither here nor there. On the one hand, it saddens me that yet another talented studio has signed with the evil empire. (I imagine in 5-10 years that the other publishers will be gone or will form together to sue EA for monopolistic practices). On the other hand, I haven't played HL2 because I disagree fundamentally with a copy protection scheme that phones home even when I play single player.
Whoo. Definitely.
Both are almost as bad as spending effort thinking about continuity/script errors/mistakes/bad calls in the first place. (Unless they're really glaring)
Not directed to you specifically, but the response to all of the EA bullshit is obvious.
You vote with your dollars. Don't buy their games. Take a stance against the evil empire.
I have yet to play BF2. I won't be purchasing it--and I'm unwilling to pirate games.
Likewise, I will not be purchasing any sports titles from EA for the forseeable future. Although I will make it a point to purchase games from ESPN (who really does make a great hockey game).
Hey, people are complaining, but .mobi beats what they were considering before:
.mobiledevicetopleveldomain
Which is, per antitrust legislation in the US, illegal.
No offense, but unless you've met a statistically significant sampling of Americans, your "evidence" is anecdotal at best.
For example, we haven't met. I'm an atheist. I'm socially liberal (I believe that those of us that are more fortunate should help take care of those that are less fortunate), but I am economically and politically conservative (Small government is good. [Generally] staying out of businesses way is good.) I also have a strong dislike for lieing, cheating or doing anything that wouldn't pass "the light of day" test.
Despite my firm stance that there is no god, I won't get upset with anything you do or say regarding religion. I won't even get upset if you try to convert me to whatever religion you are, as long as we can eventually move past this to be friends.
There are definitely people everywhere that get really steamed when religion is talked about--in fact there were some people I met in Sydney who couldn't let it go that I didn't believe in their god. We don't have a monopoly on them here in the States.
I didn't see the article the first time it went around, so it was news to me.
Bowler misses the point of Doom 3 though. Doom was a game, not an engine. Doom 2 was as well.
Doom 3 is an engine. One that's available now (unlike UE3, which is what I believe he meant when referring to Unreal Tournament III). Is it as tech as UE3? No. However, it will be two years OLDER than UE3 when UE3 is available as in in-your-hands game.
The penny-arcade guys really said it best, over three years ago.
Sony has already eloquently solved the problem of bringing together multiple gaming units and wanting to play games together.
The PSP has wireless. Ad hoc doesn't even require any setup. Don't give me 3 gigabit ports on the back. Give me one (if you must) and wireless access.
And anyone who tells you that there is any appreciable lag in wireless connections is full of crap. This is the pingout from my linux box back to my desktop, which is connected across an 802.11g connection:
Well, if by liberal you mean someone who favors small government that stays out of my personal affairs...
/. liberal. And as far as I'm concerned, the feds are welcome to interrupt my internet access on a plane or sniff my packets that go across the internet (whilst coming from a plane). So long as they get a court order to do so (which the article indicates they will). Except for the fact that I think this is just something that makes people "feel better," not something that will actually save one single life.
Then I would be a
Now, a bit of insight into why other measures the government has taken in the past four years...
The bottom line is that none of them work. For example, the rainbow of terror. When is the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Low? For that matter, when's the last time you remember the threat level dropping to Guarded? And what's with the colors, anyways?
And what's with the government being able to sniff out what kind of books I read? Am I the only one who realizes that in order to have a free press, you have to have a populace with the freedom to read what the "free" press writes?
What about the increased "security" at airports? Am I the only one who realizes that the increase in security at airports is unnecessary because passengers are unwilling to be used as a giant bomb against their fellow citizens of the planet Earth? The reason that 9/11 was successful (from a terrorist point of view) was because people expected that the plane had been hijacked, they would sit complacent and would be taken to Abu Dabi, at which point they would deplane. But as the plane that went down in PA shows, people aren't idiots. And they're not willing to sit there and be used as cannon fodder against their fellow humans.
A real killer app would be a cell phone that actually works, and doesn't sound like the two tin-cans with string that I used to talk to my next door neighbor over.
Ahh, but I digress.
No , it wasn't.
No, you need to relook at your dictionary. As I said in my original post (and in the link to the dictionary entry), innovate means "to introduce as or as if new." Something can be innovative but still have been done before. Execution is key. Open/GL is innovative because it has extensions to deal with it's slow time from rev to rev. D3D is innovative because it solves the same problem without the need for extensions.
In fact, it solves the problem without the programmer even needing to know what kind of hardware he's running on. That's innovative.
As far as the extensions go, that definitely happens for some of them (for example, vertex texture fetch, which was included in VS3 after it was supported in NVIDIA hardware). But for quite a lot of them (especially the ones in the OGL extension registry I pointed at earlier that have MS listed as owning IP), MS comes up with them, champions them and "asks kindly" for support in the hardware. A prime example of this is pretty much all of the Shader Model 2 features.
Did it ever seem odd to you that Dx9 class hardware wasn't available at the time of Dx9's release? Why would that be, if the hardware had already supported the functionality, and MS was just patching it into the spec?
Why does it matter that you are a D3D programmer? Neither of your arguments have anything to do with programming in D3D, rather they have to do with the history of D3D.
Which is irrelevant. The fact that MS bought D3D is irrelevant to whether or not D3D now is innovative. Innovation is not the same thing as invention (or patentability). Prior art does not negate innovation. The fact that someone did something before you doesn't mean that you cannot be innovative. Google hasn't done anything that hasn't been done before, they just do it better. Execution matters. And the execution of D3D continues to get better and better. Meanwhile, OGL stagnates. The extensions are not part of OGL until they are approved.
As far as never doing anything first... You only think that because you don't realize how extensions in OGL are added. Do you think that someone dreams up an extension first? Not a chance. Look at the extensions registry. The majority of proposed extensions (and pretty much all of the interesting ones) come from NVIDIA, 3DFX (still haven't been approved, huh?), ATI and the older 3D HW manufacturers.
A lot of the extensions that are proposed to OGL are a direct result of requirements for new versions of D3D.
But as a few examples of things that D3D did first... Multitexturing. Shader support. Caps bits. MRTs.
That's not to say the D3D is always the latest and greatest. For example, percent-closer-filtering (used in HW soft-shadow mapping) has had an extension available in OGL for what now, 4 years? And it still hasn't made it into D3D.
The bottom line is that MS is still innovative in that the things that are available in D3D, are available on all 3D accelerated hardware. (Which is actually why PCF is not included in D3D. ATI has yet to add support for it.)
You should always read the whole definition before using it on /.
innovate
v : bring something new to an environment; "A new word processor was introduced" [syn: introduce]
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At any rate, they've done tons of stuff in my area as well as the guy who mentioned all the stuff they brought to the compiler/IDE arena. I work in graphics.
As an example to my point, find a PC game developer who uses Open/GL. Got one? Good. Now, if that developer is iD, go ahead and drop that and find another. Got another? Good. If that's Blizzard (for WoW), go ahead and drop that and find another. Got one? No?
Direct3D is innovative. It revs regularly, and it keeps up with technology. It provides a unified API to deal directly with multiple types of underlying hardware and architecture. It incorporates new hardware functionality directly into that API. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
They also publish a fairly impressive collection of algorithms. For example, Spherical Harmonic Lighting came out of MS. Blinn works there (of the Blinn shading model fame). In fact, odds are pretty good that if your favorite famous 3-D innovator doesn't work at NVIDIA (Molnar, Tarolli, Everitt, Cebenoyan, etc), they probably work at Microsoft (Blinn, Smith, etc).
To discount MS as an innvator because you dislike their business practices is ludicrous.
The reason I generally pass on PhDs when looking to hire. At several companies I've worked at, the SOP is to send candidates a programming test (filled with questions that are very relevant to what we do, not BS C++ idioms and quirks).
More times than not, a PhD who has applied at the company will get the test and complain loudly that they don't have time to fill the test out. Which is simply code for arrogance on their part or a lack of understanding of what is important in "the real world."
As far as quizzing onsite, the fact of the matter is that if you are good at what you do and are in it because you like it, pop quizzes are fun, not a reason to think of your employers as arrogant. When I was grilled for 7 hours at my current place of employment, the thought that was going through my head wasn't "wow, these assholes are arrogant." It was "wow, these guys are all totally brilliant. I definitely want to be surrounded by coworkers that are as smart as them." When the offer letter came, I accepted in a heartbeat.
Several presidents have won by a true majority. George Washington was voted in unanimously. I wasn't referring to a majority of people in the country, but the typical majority referred to in elections. (IE, the majority of people who voted).
In 2000, Bush didn't have the most popular votes. Al Gore did.
You misunderstand the point of the judicial branch. The point of the judicial branch is to make sure that the other branches don't abuse their powers, and that the other branches don't shred the Constitution.
The judicial branch is supposed to be above partisan politics. Judges are appointed for life at the federal level. Regardless of a judge's MORAL stance on an issue, they are to rule according to the LAW, and the Constitution. That's why abortion remains legal in this country. Regardless of whether or not you feel abortion is a sin, or morally repugnant, or whatever, abortion seems to be allowed by the Constitution.
Now, as a snide side comment, Bush wasn't elected by a majority of this country. (Although he was re-elected by a majority. Go figure).
Your comment doesn't really make sense, and seems to convey a lack of understanding of how graphics accelerators work. (This isn't a dig, they're incredibly complicated.)
First, as the GP said, there is no fixed function pipeline on modern GPUs. When you submit a primitive (or a batch of primitives) with fixed-function functionality, the driver converts the current fixed function operations into appropriate shader programs and sends it on down the pipe.
Secondly, the "fixed function pipeline" for vertex processing is ludicrously simple. There's actually really nothing that's done, save multiplying the vertices by the appropriate matrix (world * view * proj, in the usual case). The interesting work, and the work that's really done by the GPU is in the fragment processor. That's where the overwhelming majority of fixed function operations are actually performed.
However, it concerns me that you talk about writing programs that try to be as general as the fixed function pipeline. Due to the nature of fragment processors, it's phenomenally expensive to branch. And even if you were to write a general-case implementation of the fixed function pipeline that didn't branch, it would contain so many instructions as to totally hammer your performance.
A rule of thumb in the fragment processor is that you should have no more than ~40 instructions per fragment for a full screen fill. (For pre-7800 hardware).