"Faster than Microsoft's reference rasterizer" isn't saying a whole lot - even if it's 50 times faster. It's called a reference rasterizer for a reason - it's not meant to actually be used in final products, it's just so you can see everything that DX supports. It's unusably slow.
I honestly don't see the use for a pure software renderer. We have DirectX and OpenGL, which make compatibility with different video cards pretty easy. I don't think there are a lot of video cards out there at this point that don't support VS 1.1 and PS 1.4, and that will be especially true once Vista becomes commonplace and suddenly you need modern graphics hardware just to run your operating system. The intiative over the past several years has been to get graphics off the CPU, so this seems a little backwards to me.
With formats, one's neighbor having it makes it better. The more people I can exchange data with on some platform, the more useful that platform is to me.
...or synthesize it......or, even if that wasn't possible, take advantage of the fact that you can draw a lot of blood from an animal without killing it...
I'd rather have gimmicks than ultra-high-quality graphics. Nintendo's past gimmicks have pleased me pretty well - Everyone said Kirby Tilt and Tumble's tilt sensor was a dumb gimmick, I had a good time. They said the same about GBA connectivity, I thought Four Swords was a great game and couldn't have worked otherwise.
It's a matter of personal taste. I'm sure the maturing of the new handhelds and the next generation of consoles will bear plenty of new iterations of classic games, and they'll be tons of fun and great looking and everything. No doubt Halo 3 will make a substantial contribution to my academic ruin. I don't think there's anything wrong with inmproving on existing formulas, a lot of people say the industry doesn't innovate enough but I'm certainly not bored of video games yet. Still, variety is fun too, and I like that there are people working on finding new ways to entertain me - shallow as the mechanisms they come up with may seem to you.
1. Set off bomb in an unpopulated area where it will be seen but not kill so many people.
2. Explain to emperor hirohito that he has to cut this shit out or the next one is dropping on a city.
I don't understand why it was necessary to actually kill all those civilians. The whole point was to make a show of force, wasn't it? I think a warning shot would've been enough.
DirectX is free (as in beer! as in beer! don't yell at me richard stallman!), because it increases the value of the Windows platform. DX's network API, DirectPlay, is depreciated anyway.
IANAL, but as I understand, trademarks are for a specific class of item. For example, some company could make a brand of gum called "It" and have that as their trademark, which means nobody else can make "It" brand gum or some product named "It" that could confuse consumers. From the article:
Mr. Stoller said that he also held and administered as many as two dozen other "stealth" trademarks, and insisted that his close association with the word gave him special rights.
I'd like to see the law that says if you have X trademarks for a word, you own it in every use. I have a feeling if someone stood up to this guy in court, this wouldn't stand, but from a big corporation's perspective it's cheaper to remove the words or settle for several thousand dollars than pay the lawyers' fees.
Because running is a very human thing, and reciting pi is not. Because we have an obsession with the human form, and because biological competition is what evolved us into what we are. Because it is fascinating to see people push physical limitations, and listening to thirteen hours of numbers which, on a visceral level, mean nothing to us, is not.
...because it's not about science. Science fiction offers authors a chance to pose a massive what-if question and attempt to reveal something about humans by showing how they would behave in an impossible situation. There's a lot of scifi that is like "cool aliens and monsters and space lasers," I don't really like that stuff, but the best of it uses the construction of unreal settings to do basically the same things all good literature does.
We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district
I wouldn't exactly call this sensitive information. It should be protected, but it's not like it's a huge deal if it gets out. Nobody'll give a shit, corporations already buy all the stats on what kids eat anyway.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
Doesn't this system -help- parents take responsibility? When I was a kid, I liked sugar, like most kids. If my parents weren't telling me exactly what I should be eating, I would end up eating the worst food available to me. This system allows parents to keep an eye on what their kids eat in the lunch room, where they previously could not, and force them to develop good eating habits like you yourself just said they should.
So, explain to me again how this is representative of parental irresponsibility?
I don't think you get it: what Spector means by Hollywoodization is that there won't be original concepts because, as with mainstream movies, big companies will invest loads of money in graphics and lock small innovators out of the market. So, if you like original game concepts, then you probably won't like the shallow, annualized titles he forsees.]
I really don't think things will get as bad as some predict. Yeah, you have giants like EA and VU dominating the market and mostly putting out crap, but I think long term gameplay will prove most important. Graphics can only get so good, so realistic, and after that you have to be better than realistic: you have to develop interesting content and modes of presentation. It reminds me of fine art a little: there have been painters who could reproduce scenes so realistically you'd think it was a photograph. But who are the ones society has remembered most fondly? Not the ones with the most technical skill, but the ones who were more than rendering machines. I think the same will hold for games.
You're right, that is a mistake. This isn't a news site, it's a site where entertaining tech-related stories get posted for people to read when they feel like taking a break for a few minutes.
People post constantly about how slashdot isn't exactly what they think it should be. If someone posted about SETI, then you'd get a bunch of folks complaining that SETI is not important to them personally and therefore shouldn't be on Slashdot. There's filtering tools if you don't like ask/. stories, and if that's not satisfactory and you really can't deal with scrolling past stories you aren't intersted in then this (and the internet, and the entire un-filterable world) is not for you.
Their idea of simplicity was in my case just deleting my entire thunderbird mail archive because there was a viral attachment in some piece of mail it had junked. This was after I told it -not- to look at my mail because I was sick of getting notified about the 50 or so of those I receive daily. After that incident, I just uninstalled the damn thing - I've yet to catch any virii as far as I know.
Ok, fine, so show me where all the cool BHO extensions are. Oh wait, every time I look at browser BHOs (which it seems I can only do with a tool like HijackThis), I see a few legit plugins and some adware that the user installed without knowing it. In fact, if you search for "BHOs" on google, you mostly find references to spyware. So, let's get this straight: there aren't a lot of particularly nice BHOs (certainly not as many as FF), there's no obvious tool for managing them, and they have access to my OS. Good.
My original point was that IE won't ever have the rich feature set that FF does because it lacks the community of extension developers, and I'm still sticking with it.
I won't deny that they have the capability to add those kinds of features, but I do think that there isn't any way to get the same potential feature set Firefox has without bloat/constant updates specific to what a given user wants without an extension system. I don't think MS will add one, and if they do it won't get the support that Firefox's has, for the same reason there isn't the abundance of skins for WMP that exists for Winamp.
In any case, there's a lot of features that I think Microsoft won't implement rather than can't. I'd be surprised to see them add anything like AdBlocker, since they run websites like hotmail that make their money from ads. And can you really see them integrating BugMeNot into their browser? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Even if IE implements everything that the basic Firefox installation has and then some, they still won't have the strong community of extension developers that Mozilla does. Will the next IE have anything like AdBlock, the web developer toolbar, or any of the countless little tweak extensions I like? Will I be able to easily change detailed settings like I can with about:config? I doubt it.
Natural language parsing is not yet mature enough for an application like this, which is why most of the time that little green squiggly line shows up in my documents, it's wrong. The only reason grammar checking is in MS Word is because it sounds like a nice feature (and it would be, if it worked). If you really want your documents to be grammatically correct, you'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way and read them out loud to yourself and have a friend proofread them.
Don't want to totally diss this idea, but I wanted to point out a couple of problems I see with it:
Unions have the potential to stifle creativity. If union rules require that everything gets made with union workers, suddenly it becomes a lot harder for low-budget, independent studios to operate.
There's also the fact that unions tend to enforce seniority a little too much. I realize it might seem silly to talk about at a time when people are quitting before they get old enough to be fired for being paid too much, but if that were to change, you suddenly have the issue of age being weighted over merit in company hierarchies.
Slashdot Mirror
"Faster than Microsoft's reference rasterizer" isn't saying a whole lot - even if it's 50 times faster. It's called a reference rasterizer for a reason - it's not meant to actually be used in final products, it's just so you can see everything that DX supports. It's unusably slow.
I honestly don't see the use for a pure software renderer. We have DirectX and OpenGL, which make compatibility with different video cards pretty easy. I don't think there are a lot of video cards out there at this point that don't support VS 1.1 and PS 1.4, and that will be especially true once Vista becomes commonplace and suddenly you need modern graphics hardware just to run your operating system. The intiative over the past several years has been to get graphics off the CPU, so this seems a little backwards to me.
With formats, one's neighbor having it makes it better. The more people I can exchange data with on some platform, the more useful that platform is to me.
...or synthesize it... ...or, even if that wasn't possible, take advantage of the fact that you can draw a lot of blood from an animal without killing it...
About 3/4 of the spam I get is stuff with malicious attachments. Without commercial spam, I'd still be getting plenty.
I think it looks like shit. The engine? Fantastic, sure. These are the most brilliant renderings of bland, metallic scenes that I've ever seen.
I'd rather have gimmicks than ultra-high-quality graphics. Nintendo's past gimmicks have pleased me pretty well - Everyone said Kirby Tilt and Tumble's tilt sensor was a dumb gimmick, I had a good time. They said the same about GBA connectivity, I thought Four Swords was a great game and couldn't have worked otherwise.
It's a matter of personal taste. I'm sure the maturing of the new handhelds and the next generation of consoles will bear plenty of new iterations of classic games, and they'll be tons of fun and great looking and everything. No doubt Halo 3 will make a substantial contribution to my academic ruin. I don't think there's anything wrong with inmproving on existing formulas, a lot of people say the industry doesn't innovate enough but I'm certainly not bored of video games yet. Still, variety is fun too, and I like that there are people working on finding new ways to entertain me - shallow as the mechanisms they come up with may seem to you.
Fine, then you can take your bitching to boing boing too.
1. Set off bomb in an unpopulated area where it will be seen but not kill so many people.
2. Explain to emperor hirohito that he has to cut this shit out or the next one is dropping on a city.
I don't understand why it was necessary to actually kill all those civilians. The whole point was to make a show of force, wasn't it? I think a warning shot would've been enough.
DirectX is free (as in beer! as in beer! don't yell at me richard stallman!), because it increases the value of the Windows platform. DX's network API, DirectPlay, is depreciated anyway.
IANAL, but as I understand, trademarks are for a specific class of item. For example, some company could make a brand of gum called "It" and have that as their trademark, which means nobody else can make "It" brand gum or some product named "It" that could confuse consumers. From the article:
Mr. Stoller said that he also held and administered as many as two dozen other "stealth" trademarks, and insisted that his close association with the word gave him special rights.
I'd like to see the law that says if you have X trademarks for a word, you own it in every use. I have a feeling if someone stood up to this guy in court, this wouldn't stand, but from a big corporation's perspective it's cheaper to remove the words or settle for several thousand dollars than pay the lawyers' fees.
Because running is a very human thing, and reciting pi is not. Because we have an obsession with the human form, and because biological competition is what evolved us into what we are. Because it is fascinating to see people push physical limitations, and listening to thirteen hours of numbers which, on a visceral level, mean nothing to us, is not.
Indeed, alcohol is better. Last time I was playing monopoly, I traded all my property for vodka and cookies.
...because it's not about science. Science fiction offers authors a chance to pose a massive what-if question and attempt to reveal something about humans by showing how they would behave in an impossible situation. There's a lot of scifi that is like "cool aliens and monsters and space lasers," I don't really like that stuff, but the best of it uses the construction of unreal settings to do basically the same things all good literature does.
The manifesto asks, where are the lawyer and stranded-on-a-desert-island games? On the DS, evidently:
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
Lost in Blue
We all know how well things usually turn out when personal information about underage students is put online by their school district
I wouldn't exactly call this sensitive information. It should be protected, but it's not like it's a huge deal if it gets out. Nobody'll give a shit, corporations already buy all the stats on what kids eat anyway.
But hey, if parents don't want to take responsibility for it - that's all good.
Doesn't this system -help- parents take responsibility? When I was a kid, I liked sugar, like most kids. If my parents weren't telling me exactly what I should be eating, I would end up eating the worst food available to me. This system allows parents to keep an eye on what their kids eat in the lunch room, where they previously could not, and force them to develop good eating habits like you yourself just said they should.
So, explain to me again how this is representative of parental irresponsibility?
And why do I give a shit what you thought about Star Wars?
I don't think you get it: what Spector means by Hollywoodization is that there won't be original concepts because, as with mainstream movies, big companies will invest loads of money in graphics and lock small innovators out of the market. So, if you like original game concepts, then you probably won't like the shallow, annualized titles he forsees.]
I really don't think things will get as bad as some predict. Yeah, you have giants like EA and VU dominating the market and mostly putting out crap, but I think long term gameplay will prove most important. Graphics can only get so good, so realistic, and after that you have to be better than realistic: you have to develop interesting content and modes of presentation. It reminds me of fine art a little: there have been painters who could reproduce scenes so realistically you'd think it was a photograph. But who are the ones society has remembered most fondly? Not the ones with the most technical skill, but the ones who were more than rendering machines. I think the same will hold for games.
You're right, that is a mistake. This isn't a news site, it's a site where entertaining tech-related stories get posted for people to read when they feel like taking a break for a few minutes. People post constantly about how slashdot isn't exactly what they think it should be. If someone posted about SETI, then you'd get a bunch of folks complaining that SETI is not important to them personally and therefore shouldn't be on Slashdot. There's filtering tools if you don't like ask /. stories, and if that's not satisfactory and you really can't deal with scrolling past stories you aren't intersted in then this (and the internet, and the entire un-filterable world) is not for you.
Their idea of simplicity was in my case just deleting my entire thunderbird mail archive because there was a viral attachment in some piece of mail it had junked. This was after I told it -not- to look at my mail because I was sick of getting notified about the 50 or so of those I receive daily. After that incident, I just uninstalled the damn thing - I've yet to catch any virii as far as I know.
If you don't want your kids playing video games, just buy a Mac :p
Ok, fine, so show me where all the cool BHO extensions are. Oh wait, every time I look at browser BHOs (which it seems I can only do with a tool like HijackThis), I see a few legit plugins and some adware that the user installed without knowing it. In fact, if you search for "BHOs" on google, you mostly find references to spyware. So, let's get this straight: there aren't a lot of particularly nice BHOs (certainly not as many as FF), there's no obvious tool for managing them, and they have access to my OS. Good.
My original point was that IE won't ever have the rich feature set that FF does because it lacks the community of extension developers, and I'm still sticking with it.
I won't deny that they have the capability to add those kinds of features, but I do think that there isn't any way to get the same potential feature set Firefox has without bloat/constant updates specific to what a given user wants without an extension system. I don't think MS will add one, and if they do it won't get the support that Firefox's has, for the same reason there isn't the abundance of skins for WMP that exists for Winamp.
In any case, there's a lot of features that I think Microsoft won't implement rather than can't. I'd be surprised to see them add anything like AdBlocker, since they run websites like hotmail that make their money from ads. And can you really see them integrating BugMeNot into their browser? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Even if IE implements everything that the basic Firefox installation has and then some, they still won't have the strong community of extension developers that Mozilla does. Will the next IE have anything like AdBlock, the web developer toolbar, or any of the countless little tweak extensions I like? Will I be able to easily change detailed settings like I can with about:config? I doubt it.
Natural language parsing is not yet mature enough for an application like this, which is why most of the time that little green squiggly line shows up in my documents, it's wrong. The only reason grammar checking is in MS Word is because it sounds like a nice feature (and it would be, if it worked). If you really want your documents to be grammatically correct, you'll just have to do it the old-fashioned way and read them out loud to yourself and have a friend proofread them.
Don't want to totally diss this idea, but I wanted to point out a couple of problems I see with it: Unions have the potential to stifle creativity. If union rules require that everything gets made with union workers, suddenly it becomes a lot harder for low-budget, independent studios to operate. There's also the fact that unions tend to enforce seniority a little too much. I realize it might seem silly to talk about at a time when people are quitting before they get old enough to be fired for being paid too much, but if that were to change, you suddenly have the issue of age being weighted over merit in company hierarchies.