""" The position is in our Fremont, California headquarters, but we are open to applicants in the United States who are willing to travel frequently. So if you want to work in a flexible, creative environment and know how to do things well, this position might just be right for you. """
A lot of the superstar programmers I know would choose a job in downtown San Francisco or even downtown Mountain View over Fremont, and there are definitely lots of jobs in those two areas out there right now.
I believe Jobs is mostly correct. Objective C is a pretty nice language for what it is; you get a lot of very nice message passing features and notification passing in the base ("foundation") library that is pretty far ahead of most C++/Java frameworks I've seen.
Cocoa GUI apps require very little anonymous class/callback cruft compared to most C++/C#/Java apps I have seen. Also, most hacked together Cocoa apps appear to be significantly better than most hacked together C#/Java apps (better dnd support, better saving/import/url support, highly responsive).
Apple would do well for itself to offer first class support for other language bindings and to move from XCode to Eclipse (and figure out a way to keep Interface Builder around). The KDE/Qt people are able to provide good bindings to Python, Perl and Ruby with very little resources. C/C++, Python, Perl and Ruby are much better known to most of the devs I know than Obj C. The PyObjC (Python) bridge is good, but it could use better documentation and treatment from Apple.
I recommend checking out pitchfork and their reviews. They are a pretty good crap filter, and have introduced me to some of the best music I have ever heard.
There are actually pretty good Debian packages already (they work well on my system, at least).
Red Carpet is a distro band-aid:)
Re:Nintendo is obviously worried....
on
XBox Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
The problem for Nintendo is that they don't want to make or deal with new technology.
Even if this isn't a bona fide Nintendo memo, much of the rhetoric in the letter matches what Nintendo has done and said in the past. That is, at the very least, this is a really good satire. This company is much more evil than Microsoft and less subtle.
On the hardware side, their agenda has been lock users into one platform (the nintendo one, of course!) with dated, decade old graphics systems, stone age media capabilities (they were willing to barricade their users into a quaint, expensive cartridge system to protect their bottom line from piracy) and declare everyone else (sony, sega and now MS) charlatans and looters.
Instead of releasing new systems, they've chosen lame gimmick tactics like releasing Pokemon and clear color cases.
I'm not sure exactly when either N64 or Gameboy was released, but it seems like the N64 is at least 5 years old, and the Gameboy is at least 10 years old. I don't know about the rest of you (and perhaps this is just a mental disorder plaguing the computer world), but it's really hard for me to use even a two or three year old machine without considering it to be a dinosaur. The idea that Nintendo expects to keep customers choosing their hardware over competitors' is completely insane.
On the software side, they've been happy to beat every character they've had to death. There are very few new games or characters that come out of the Nintendo house. Most of the games recently released for the Nintendo platform are variation or sequels on previous sales successes (pikachu, mario, zelda). I can't think of too many game genres (sport, adventure, party, puzzle, etc) in which they haven't made a Mario or Pikachu version.
In addition, they have had extremely poor licensing relations with third party development houses. Look at how many well established game companies were happy to flee Nintendo for Sony when the Playstation was released. Only a handful of game companies still regularly release games for the N64. Of those that do (like EA for instance), much of time it's only because it's an already released game that they can easily port from another platform like the PSX or PC. As a result, most of the non-Nintendo games for the N64 are available on other platforms.
Even though Microsoft and Sony aren't the most benevolent corps in the world, I would strongly urge anyone who cares about game design and game technology to not buy Nintendo products. It should be woefully apparent that Nintendo retired anyone designing or engineering a long time ago.
Also, consider picking up a Dreamcast. Sega is liquidating them right now, and available for it are a number of great, inexpensive games that have equal or better graphics and gameplay than any of the current PS2 games. For instance, Phantasy Star Online is a pretty solid multiplayer rpg (imagine a Diablo II that doesn't suck) and Samba de Amigo is easily the craziest party game I've ever played.
Re:Affect hardware sales?
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
You don't think companies would be willing to recompile their code so that 90% of the computer market (x86 pc's) could run it? Talk about boosting sales...Anyway, most older Mac Apps have to be rewritten for OS X to run well in OS X anyway.
This is tragic, considering the fact that the Dreamcast is at least as good, if not a better system than the Playstation 2. I hope Slashdot readers will take a serious look at what's happened here: Sony has effectively killed the Dreamcast through FUD. At every point of production with the Dreamcast, Sega has executed perfectly, providing a well-stocked system with lots of innovative, great games (even good launch ones).
If you've never spent a fair amount of time with this system, ignore these so-called game magazines FUD for a moment, and spend a weekend with one playing Shenmue, Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio or Samba De Amigo (friends & maracas are a necessity). These are easily some of the most fun, innovative games I've ever played, and marginally better than anything Sony or Nintendo or anyone else is offering at the moment.
Now try to contrast your Dreamcast experiences with the PS2: even if you can get your hands on a PS2 (months after the ps2 "launch", most people still can't buy them through regular retail channels due to Sony's "parts shortages"), you'll find that the PS2 is nothing more than a upgraded PS1 with a crappy dvd player. Sony has beaten Sega not through producing a solid product, but through press releases and media control (something with which Slashdot readers are familiar).
If Sega really is leaving the console business, I would strongly recommend buying one of these Dreamcast systems while they're still in stores. It is an extremely quality product with some of the greatest games on the planet.
1. Visual Quality is highly subjective, obviously, but from what I've seen (and what most reviews say), the Matrox and Nvidia cards tend to look better. (anti-aliasing aside, obviously)
2. The reason glide seems to be so wonderful on your voodoo3 is because (from what I've been told) glide almost directly translates into the register commands on the 3dfx chip. Also, Glide was fine for earlier generation cards, but it really isn't up to snuff featurewise with OpenGL or DirectX. In addition, before 3dfx decided to open source glide, they had a nasty habit of trying to sue people who wrote glide->OpenGL/DirectX wrappers.
3. At least in MS Windows land, 3dfx was one of the last consumer card companies to get decent OpenGL drivers. Nvidia has had some pretty good OpenGL drivers since the TNT (2 years ago).
There are a few other major issues 3dfx hasn't resolved (or only resolved recently)
-lack of a geometry engine
-no 32 bit color
-lack of a stencil buffer
Here is my list of why I think Quake 3 didn't sell well for linux, and why I personally didn't buy the linux version:
1. At the time of launch (last christmas) there wasn't a whole lot of consumer 3d support for linux. XFree4.0 wasn't out. Aside from a few unstable snapshots of XFree 4.0 (3.9.17 or something like that), only a few cards actully had performance capability marginally adequate for Quake3 (some 3dfx and Matrox using the utah-glx drivers, I believe). Nvidia cards didn't get functional 3d driver support till the end of spring, and they represent at least half of the hardcore gamer 3d card market. In addition, most gamers at the time who cared about 3d performance had a Nvidia Geforce256 or Nvidia TNT2, which at the time were essentially unsupported in linux. Tell me id, now why would people buy your game if they couldn't it play well on their machine? Did you ever consider that? Do you think linux zealotry extends far enough to buy non-functional products just to support an o/s?
2. Quake 3 wasn't exactly the holy grail of gameplay, either. Quite frankly, it looked like id must have given all of it's game designers vacation while they put it together. And I'm not just talking about the first player missions sucking. That is excusable: obviously the game was made almost solely for multiplayer play. The problem was that the multiplayer game was crappy, too, and what it tried to do a number of other games were already doing a whole lot better (e.g. Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Tribes). By the time most savvy linux gamers had the ability to even play Quake 3 in linux with the 3d drivers released later, they had already sampled it under Windows 9x and been bored with it. This was the experience for me and most of my friends, at least. Most everyone in my dorm stopped playing it extensively and went back to other games after a month. Contrast this with Starcraft or Diablo II, for instance, which would probably sell pretty well right now if blizzard bothered to release a linux port.
I agree: I'm twenty now, and never smoked weed or drank until I got to university. From my perspective (and from the perspective of my peers), the D.A.R.E. program and its cohorts represent an incredibly naive view of the drug situation. It tries to scare teenagers to adopt the silly view that alcohol and weed are as dangerous, or even more dangerous than crack, heroine or other obviously more illicit, nasty stuff.
Rather than try to establish simple moral reason and judgment in children, the DARE system propagandizes
fear ("Don't want me to have to arrest do you?"),
ignorance ("All of this stuff will kill you!"),
and social ineptitude ("You shouldn't hang out with these 'bad' people!").
Until the program realises that preaching fear and lies doesn't work, it will continue to be a failure. In addition, sending out wanky cops to scare little kids ought to be a crime. Kids are already disillusioned enough.
If you want to read more about ONDCP corruption/craziness and their so-called "war on drugs" (and American culture!), you should comb through salon.com. They have published a number of insightful articles on the ONDCP over the past year.
You are either a troll or misinformed. Most modern video/3d cards are all on one card. Only one model so far that I know of (3dfx's voodoo2) has been a separate add-on 3d card. Also, you can gain a robust 3d solution through the use a medium priced card such as a tnt2 or voodoo3 and one of these can be obtained for ~$70. You can pickup a GeForce for ~$100 if you shop around. In addition, 3d graphics requires a whole lot of number crunching for even the most basic game scenes. Certainly everything's not as optimized as it could be right now, but for the most part, linux 3d support is actually doing pretty well, considering that most of the 3d graphics infrastructure that now exists didn't exist at this time last year.
I haven't used "that clone of Warcraft 2" and I don't know what emulator you're talking about, but most games/emulators take just as much memory in linux (or less) as they do in windows, although X does tend to be a hog.
Do you work for the man? This is FUD. I've never written anything with Direct3d, so I can't get into specifics about the distinctive difference between the new Direct3d features vs. the current OpenGL features/extensions, but you seem to have a pretty myopic, narrow view of the graphics world. A few points: 1. The moral issue: Direct3d is a closed Microsoft technology. Unless you're sitting in front of a WinX box or using some of the nifty Wine emulation, you probably won't be able to use Direct3d. This means, effectively, that Direct3d at this point can't be used by anyone seriously developing software (like CAD/3d design apps or even games) that hopes to be cross-platform. Writing Direct3d apps means you're aiding and working for the man. Do you only want to develop for Microsoft products? 2. OpenGL can always add features/extensions from competing API's. Maybe the standards process isn't as fast as it should be (look at all those GL_NV extensions), but there is clearly an open, active industry wide process to add new functionality to the API. Just as Direct3d has cloned OpenGL over the past few years, OpenGL can always effectively clone Direct3d. 3. Some of the new Direct3d features that I've seen (like shaders and skinning) are pretty highlevel. Shouldn't these be done in a higher level API? Even if these new features are germaine to a fairly low-level 3d api, by the time these extensions are adapted well enough by 3d cards to actually be usable in a mainstream graphics engine, the OpenGL standards body will probably have added them.
"look at the Microsoft/Bungie combo"
4. Bungie is a really good company, and it's a smart move of Microsoft's to pick them up, and I'm anticipating Halo just as much as the next guy, but I really don't see what this has to do with a graphics API.
"look at what the X-Box provides compared to OpenGL"
5. The X-Box is a console. OpenGL is a graphics API. This is comparable to saying, "look at what Linux provides compared to C." Also, the X-Box, according to the specifications, will support OpenGL (as does the PS2 and Dreamcast) and probably plenty of other API's, so I don't really see what your point is here. Simply because OpenGL finally has some real competition (unlike glide *cough* *cough*), I fail to see how it's going to die.
Uhm, silly, Glide is 3dfx's proprietary product. Considering the point that it's a dead API (do new games even offer support for it?), and that 3dfx has turned it into AbandonWare (is that the term now?) and opensourced it, I don't see why any video card company would be interested in supporting it.
Although it runs super fast on 3dfx cards since it apparently almost matches the register level opcodes, if you bothered going down the feature lists and comparing it with the latest Direct3D or OpenGL implementation, it has about half the features of either (since Direct3d has essentially cloned every openGL feature). If you're worried about legacy game support, there are already a number of glide->openGL wrappers out, and now that 3dfx has opensourced everything someone will probably have glide drivers for all the different cards out eventually. For instance, Creative was working on a glide driver for TNT's/2's called "Unified," but I'm not sure if they're still developing that.
After reading Ender's Game in highschool, I plodded through Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide and one his short story anthologies, and I was completely unimpressed and bored out of my mind. I don't think the problem is that Ender's Game fans only like exterminating alien races, so much that Orson Scott Card can't write anything else well.
All of his attempts at depicting serious relationships and social situations outside of childhood-angst-fighting-space-aliens are muted and bland, and illustrate how he is a socially backward jerk (has anyone ever read an interview with this nutbar?).
Of course they will want to ban it. From what I can see in the specs list, the bandwidth shaping feature isn't an administrator control, but a user control. Something like this is very simple. A number of file transfer clients have them.
All of this anti-administrator rhetoric is only going to hurt the product and the whole mp3 situation more than it will help it. What can the authors hope to gain by alienating those holding reins? I'm certainly all for the proliferation of net media, and the death of the RIAA and DMCA. But folks, isn't this a misstep? That is, this is drawing the line against the wrong set of people. We want to be hurting the RIAA not network admins. This is only going to result in huge negative reprecussions for dorm network users like myself.
Look what just happened at UC Berkeley, for example. One of the admins yanked ethernet access down to modem speeds. Is this what we want to happen everywhere?
Slashdot Mirror
"""
The position is in our Fremont, California headquarters, but we are open to applicants in the United States who are willing to travel frequently. So if you want to work in a flexible, creative environment and know how to do things well, this position might just be right for you.
"""
A lot of the superstar programmers I know would choose a job in downtown San Francisco or even downtown Mountain View over Fremont, and there are definitely lots of jobs in those two areas out there right now.
You know, the guys who write inflammatory articles that have little grounding in reality simply to boost traffic/clicks.
I believe Jobs is mostly correct. Objective C is a pretty nice language for what it is; you get a lot of very nice message passing features and notification passing in the base ("foundation") library that is pretty far ahead of most C++/Java frameworks I've seen.
Cocoa GUI apps require very little anonymous class/callback cruft compared to most C++/C#/Java apps I have seen. Also, most hacked together Cocoa apps appear to be significantly better than most hacked together C#/Java apps (better dnd support, better saving/import/url support, highly responsive).
Apple would do well for itself to offer first class support for other language bindings and to move from XCode to Eclipse (and figure out a way to keep Interface Builder around). The KDE/Qt people are able to provide good bindings to Python, Perl and Ruby with very little resources. C/C++, Python, Perl and Ruby are much better known to most of the devs I know than Obj C. The PyObjC (Python) bridge is good, but it could use better documentation and treatment from Apple.
Brandon
also, in my experience svn is slow with large files.
(if you're going to switch)
debian is very nice maintenance and security wise. there's very little like it.
Doesn't 802.11a operate at a different frequency (5.5ghz)?
I recommend checking out pitchfork and their reviews. They are a pretty good crap filter, and have introduced me to some of the best music I have ever heard.
There are actually pretty good Debian packages already (they work well on my system, at least).
:)
Red Carpet is a distro band-aid
The problem for Nintendo is that they don't want to make or deal with new technology.
Even if this isn't a bona fide Nintendo memo, much of the rhetoric in the letter matches what Nintendo has done and said in the past. That is, at the very least, this is a really good satire. This company is much more evil than Microsoft and less subtle.
On the hardware side, their agenda has been lock users into one platform (the nintendo one, of course!) with dated, decade old graphics systems, stone age media capabilities (they were willing to barricade their users into a quaint, expensive cartridge system to protect their bottom line from piracy) and declare everyone else (sony, sega and now MS) charlatans and looters. Instead of releasing new systems, they've chosen lame gimmick tactics like releasing Pokemon and clear color cases.
I'm not sure exactly when either N64 or Gameboy was released, but it seems like the N64 is at least 5 years old, and the Gameboy is at least 10 years old. I don't know about the rest of you (and perhaps this is just a mental disorder plaguing the computer world), but it's really hard for me to use even a two or three year old machine without considering it to be a dinosaur. The idea that Nintendo expects to keep customers choosing their hardware over competitors' is completely insane.
On the software side, they've been happy to beat every character they've had to death. There are very few new games or characters that come out of the Nintendo house. Most of the games recently released for the Nintendo platform are variation or sequels on previous sales successes (pikachu, mario, zelda). I can't think of too many game genres (sport, adventure, party, puzzle, etc) in which they haven't made a Mario or Pikachu version.
In addition, they have had extremely poor licensing relations with third party development houses. Look at how many well established game companies were happy to flee Nintendo for Sony when the Playstation was released. Only a handful of game companies still regularly release games for the N64. Of those that do (like EA for instance), much of time it's only because it's an already released game that they can easily port from another platform like the PSX or PC. As a result, most of the non-Nintendo games for the N64 are available on other platforms.
Even though Microsoft and Sony aren't the most benevolent corps in the world, I would strongly urge anyone who cares about game design and game technology to not buy Nintendo products. It should be woefully apparent that Nintendo retired anyone designing or engineering a long time ago.
Also, consider picking up a Dreamcast. Sega is liquidating them right now, and available for it are a number of great, inexpensive games that have equal or better graphics and gameplay than any of the current PS2 games. For instance, Phantasy Star Online is a pretty solid multiplayer rpg (imagine a Diablo II that doesn't suck) and Samba de Amigo is easily the craziest party game I've ever played.
You don't think companies would be willing to recompile their code so that 90% of the computer market (x86 pc's) could run it? Talk about boosting sales...Anyway, most older Mac Apps have to be rewritten for OS X to run well in OS X anyway.
This is tragic, considering the fact that the Dreamcast is at least as good, if not a better system than the Playstation 2. I hope Slashdot readers will take a serious look at what's happened here: Sony has effectively killed the Dreamcast through FUD. At every point of production with the Dreamcast, Sega has executed perfectly, providing a well-stocked system with lots of innovative, great games (even good launch ones).
If you've never spent a fair amount of time with this system, ignore these so-called game magazines FUD for a moment, and spend a weekend with one playing Shenmue, Soul Calibur, Jet Grind Radio or Samba De Amigo (friends & maracas are a necessity). These are easily some of the most fun, innovative games I've ever played, and marginally better than anything Sony or Nintendo or anyone else is offering at the moment.
Now try to contrast your Dreamcast experiences with the PS2: even if you can get your hands on a PS2 (months after the ps2 "launch", most people still can't buy them through regular retail channels due to Sony's "parts shortages"), you'll find that the PS2 is nothing more than a upgraded PS1 with a crappy dvd player. Sony has beaten Sega not through producing a solid product, but through press releases and media control (something with which Slashdot readers are familiar).
If Sega really is leaving the console business, I would strongly recommend buying one of these Dreamcast systems while they're still in stores. It is an extremely quality product with some of the greatest games on the planet.
Did I mention it boots linux?
Brandon
ACtually, all of these are FUD.
1. Visual Quality is highly subjective, obviously, but from what I've seen (and what most reviews say), the Matrox and Nvidia cards tend to look better. (anti-aliasing aside, obviously)
2. The reason glide seems to be so wonderful on your voodoo3 is because (from what I've been told) glide almost directly translates into the register commands on the 3dfx chip. Also, Glide was fine for earlier generation cards, but it really isn't up to snuff featurewise with OpenGL or DirectX. In addition, before 3dfx decided to open source glide, they had a nasty habit of trying to sue people who wrote glide->OpenGL/DirectX wrappers.
3. At least in MS Windows land, 3dfx was one of the last consumer card companies to get decent OpenGL drivers. Nvidia has had some pretty good OpenGL drivers since the TNT (2 years ago).
There are a few other major issues 3dfx hasn't resolved (or only resolved recently)
-lack of a geometry engine
-no 32 bit color
-lack of a stencil buffer
well trolled.
Here is my list of why I think Quake 3 didn't sell well for linux, and why I personally didn't buy the linux version:
1. At the time of launch (last christmas) there wasn't a whole lot of consumer 3d support for linux. XFree4.0 wasn't out. Aside from a few unstable snapshots of XFree 4.0 (3.9.17 or something like that), only a few cards actully had performance capability marginally adequate for Quake3 (some 3dfx and Matrox using the utah-glx drivers, I believe). Nvidia cards didn't get functional 3d driver support till the end of spring, and they represent at least half of the hardcore gamer 3d card market. In addition, most gamers at the time who cared about 3d performance had a Nvidia Geforce256 or Nvidia TNT2, which at the time were essentially unsupported in linux. Tell me id, now why would people buy your game if they couldn't it play well on their machine? Did you ever consider that? Do you think linux zealotry extends far enough to buy non-functional products just to support an o/s?
2. Quake 3 wasn't exactly the holy grail of gameplay, either. Quite frankly, it looked like id must have given all of it's game designers vacation while they put it together. And I'm not just talking about the first player missions sucking. That is excusable: obviously the game was made almost solely for multiplayer play. The problem was that the multiplayer game was crappy, too, and what it tried to do a number of other games were already doing a whole lot better (e.g. Counterstrike, Unreal Tournament, Tribes). By the time most savvy linux gamers had the ability to even play Quake 3 in linux with the 3d drivers released later, they had already sampled it under Windows 9x and been bored with it. This was the experience for me and most of my friends, at least. Most everyone in my dorm stopped playing it extensively and went back to other games after a month. Contrast this with Starcraft or Diablo II, for instance, which would probably sell pretty well right now if blizzard bothered to release a linux port.
Some people value just staying alive on Highway 17 :)
I agree: I'm twenty now, and never smoked weed or drank until I got to university. From my perspective (and from the perspective of my peers), the D.A.R.E. program and its cohorts represent an incredibly naive view of the drug situation. It tries to scare teenagers to adopt the silly view that alcohol and weed are as dangerous, or even more dangerous than crack, heroine or other obviously more illicit, nasty stuff.
Rather than try to establish simple moral reason and judgment in children, the DARE system propagandizes
- fear ("Don't want me to have to arrest do you?"),
- ignorance ("All of this stuff will kill you!"),
- and social ineptitude ("You shouldn't hang out with these 'bad' people!").
Until the program realises that preaching fear and lies doesn't work, it will continue to be a failure. In addition, sending out wanky cops to scare little kids ought to be a crime. Kids are already disillusioned enough.If you want to read more about ONDCP corruption/craziness and their so-called "war on drugs" (and American culture!), you should comb through salon.com. They have published a number of insightful articles on the ONDCP over the past year.
Connectix's VGS emulator is not Bleem (made by Bleem Inc.). IIRC, Bleem didn't use the bios at all and Sony couldn't sue them over that.
Glide is dead.
You are either a troll or misinformed. Most modern video/3d cards are all on one card. Only one model so far that I know of (3dfx's voodoo2) has been a separate add-on 3d card. Also, you can gain a robust 3d solution through the use a medium priced card such as a tnt2 or voodoo3 and one of these can be obtained for ~$70. You can pickup a GeForce for ~$100 if you shop around. In addition, 3d graphics requires a whole lot of number crunching for even the most basic game scenes. Certainly everything's not as optimized as it could be right now, but for the most part, linux 3d support is actually doing pretty well, considering that most of the 3d graphics infrastructure that now exists didn't exist at this time last year.
I haven't used "that clone of Warcraft 2" and I don't know what emulator you're talking about, but most games/emulators take just as much memory in linux (or less) as they do in windows, although X does tend to be a hog.
Brandon
Do you work for the man? This is FUD. I've never written anything with Direct3d, so I can't get into specifics about the distinctive difference between the new Direct3d features vs. the current OpenGL features/extensions, but you seem to have a pretty myopic, narrow view of the graphics world. A few points:
1. The moral issue: Direct3d is a closed Microsoft technology. Unless you're sitting in front of a WinX box or using some of the nifty Wine emulation, you probably won't be able to use Direct3d. This means, effectively, that Direct3d at this point can't be used by anyone seriously developing software (like CAD/3d design apps or even games) that hopes to be cross-platform. Writing Direct3d apps means you're aiding and working for the man. Do you only want to develop for Microsoft products?
2. OpenGL can always add features/extensions from competing API's. Maybe the standards process isn't as fast as it should be (look at all those GL_NV extensions), but there is clearly an open, active industry wide process to add new functionality to the API. Just as Direct3d has cloned OpenGL over the past few years, OpenGL can always effectively clone Direct3d.
3. Some of the new Direct3d features that I've seen (like shaders and skinning) are pretty highlevel. Shouldn't these be done in a higher level API? Even if these new features are germaine to a fairly low-level 3d api, by the time these extensions are adapted well enough by 3d cards to actually be usable in a mainstream graphics engine, the OpenGL standards body will probably have added them.
"look at the Microsoft/Bungie combo"
4. Bungie is a really good company, and it's a smart move of Microsoft's to pick them up, and I'm anticipating Halo just as much as the next guy, but I really don't see what this has to do with a graphics API.
"look at what the X-Box provides compared to OpenGL"
5. The X-Box is a console. OpenGL is a graphics API. This is comparable to saying, "look at what Linux provides compared to C." Also, the X-Box, according to the specifications, will support OpenGL (as does the PS2 and Dreamcast) and probably plenty of other API's, so I don't really see what your point is here.
Simply because OpenGL finally has some real competition (unlike glide *cough* *cough*), I fail to see how it's going to die.
Uhm, silly, Glide is 3dfx's proprietary product. Considering the point that it's a dead API (do new games even offer support for it?), and that 3dfx has turned it into AbandonWare (is that the term now?) and opensourced it, I don't see why any video card company would be interested in supporting it.
Although it runs super fast on 3dfx cards since it apparently almost matches the register level opcodes, if you bothered going down the feature lists and comparing it with the latest Direct3D or OpenGL implementation, it has about half the features of either (since Direct3d has essentially cloned every openGL feature).
If you're worried about legacy game support, there are already a number of glide->openGL wrappers out, and now that 3dfx has opensourced everything someone will probably have glide drivers for all the different cards out eventually. For instance, Creative was working on a glide driver for TNT's/2's called "Unified," but I'm not sure if they're still developing that.
All of his attempts at depicting serious relationships and social situations outside of childhood-angst-fighting-space-aliens are muted and bland, and illustrate how he is a socially backward jerk (has anyone ever read an interview with this nutbar?).
Maybe we quit the free kevin thing too early...
Does anyone have it mirrored? .8k/s really sucks.
Brandon
Of course they will want to ban it. From what I can see in the specs list, the bandwidth shaping feature isn't an administrator control, but a user control. Something like this is very simple. A number of file transfer clients have them.
All of this anti-administrator rhetoric is only going to hurt the product and the whole mp3 situation more than it will help it. What can the authors hope to gain by alienating those holding reins? I'm certainly all for the proliferation of net media, and the death of the RIAA and DMCA. But folks, isn't this a misstep? That is, this is drawing the line against the wrong set of people. We want to be hurting the RIAA not network admins. This is only going to result in huge negative reprecussions for dorm network users like myself.
Look what just happened at UC Berkeley, for example. One of the admins yanked ethernet access down to modem speeds. Is this what we want to happen everywhere?