We need an OpenPL to sort this out. Something very much like OpenGL, but for physics.
Imagine defining (for example) a feather. You create a simple model and a nice texture with an alpha map. You define a few OpenGL parameters and that'll render nicely on any GPU.
Then you assign it some physics parameters - mass, air resistance, shape, density - and that feather can then be instantiated with all the parameters needed to control it.
Now think of a chicken panicking and running away. A bunch of feathers fall out as the chicken starts moving, and they * without any CPU interaction * float naturally to the ground. Dust swirls as the chicken kicks up little footprints, again * without any CPU interaction *.
Suddenly we've got a system that can both draw and manage objects in the game. The game code would need to be able to read back properties of some objects, but most of the actual object management could be done on the card without any CPU input. The CPU's now free for AI and world management.
I think we'll see a move towards physics-based realism that requires cards like this one. I really hope that we see a parallel move towards an open physics language.
Apple changed the OS away from ROMs about six or seven years ago. Or was it mid-90s? Any Mac with a ROM is so old that it's probably best recycled anyway.
Clearly you do care. Otherwise you wouldn't bother posting anything.
So your post is really a jab at Halo because it didn't meet your standards. That's fine - there was a lot to criticise (the never ending library being one, playing all the levels back through in reverse is my point of contention). but there was a lot of fun in the game as well. Just don't pretend you don't care.
Yeah - it was terrible the way those Bungie guys would actually stand over you in your own home, making you play the game. Those bastards! Being forced against your will to do something that you don't enjoy is just wrong.
Re:This happens all the time...
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No... this kind of thing almost never happens.
Usually fakers just do what you said - use the name. They don't set up an entire outsourced manufacturing base with a global distribution arm reaching as far as Africa and the EU.
I'd really hope it's not something as indiscriminate as Metal Storm. You wouldn't want a million rounds being fired from tanks halfway back in the column. The guys in the following tanks would be a mite irritated when they're horrifically killed by friendly fire.
I just returned last week from my honeymoon in Vietnam, where I saw a number of swastikas. It's a very old symbol - I think a good luck symbol - that the Nazi party appropriated for their own ends. I saw it carved into things, on building frescoes and in patterns on seats (although that was probably just a random thing).
They also make a lot of the Communist imagery, and are still run by the Communist Party. I can't see what difference it makes these days though - apart from a few state-run businesses, it's Capitalism as usual.
Anyway - swastika still in evidence around the world.
You're spot on, and that's why so many people rolled their eyes at Microsoft's obviously false reasoning for dropping IE for OS X. It's not that anything was kept from them - they've got access to the same APIs that Safari has. It's just that they can't compete with Safari and Firefox, and without the massive head start of pre-installation, IE just can't make a blip on the OS X radar.
Wasn't that the time of the Zilog Z80 chip as well? I recall a good number of CP/M machines around that time, as well as a lot of home microcomputers (ZX Spectrum, for example) that used it.
There is no discernable difference between setting up concentration camps all over the world to torture people and giving people social security. They are both flavors of the same of the same thing.
You're kidding, right?
No-one could seriously equate the two of those. Whether you believe neither should be done, or both should be done or do one but not the other, you cannot seriously make the point that killing people is the same as giving them money.
Command-Tab cycles through applications Command-Tilde cycles through windows in the current application Command O opens a file Command W closes the active window Command S saves a file Command P prints the file Command Q quits the application Command C copies the selected item Command X cuts the selected item Command V pastes the clipboard in Command ? activates application help
These are standard. I don't know what you're on about, but these are standards laid out in Apples guidelines and they're used across the majority of document-based applications.
On top of that, you've got Exposé to jump rapidly from any window to any other window.
Keyboard navigation in OS X is not as fluid as in Windows, but you don't need to make up a complaint like "the lack of standard keyboard shortcuts for things like closing windows, etc" to get a point across. Stick to the actual situation that exists.
MS is slower to release things, but they don't charge for service packs.
Luckily, neither do Apple.
Security patches come out for just about all relevant OS X versions, regardless of which version is the latest one.
Feature upgrades are the ones you pay for, and Apple roll up any security patches in the same pack. Every time they do a major OS release, they tout the 100-200 new or improved features over the previous OS.
Contrast that to a service pack, which adds no new features but improves security or fixes a big.
It's the same sort of jump you see between Win2K and WinXP, although Apple got the graphics in from the start.
The thing that confuses a lot of people is that Apple use their own numbering system. 10.3 is not 10 plus bug fixes like you'd expect with normal version numbering systems. You've got to go to the second decimal point for that.
Be careful how a goods and services tax (GST) is implemented.
The government here in Australia brought it in about five or six years ago, on the promise of lowered income tax and generally cheaper goods.
Some of us wondered how that could work - if the government gets less money, how can they provide the current level of services? We were shouted down by record advertising spending promoting the tax. You couldn't turn on the TV or look at the paper without seeing how it'd 'unchain families from their tax burden'.
The result has been that many archaic taxes were abolished (there was a 22% tax on computer equipment, for example) but many items (such as food) are now taxed when previously they weren't.
This latter point hit the low-income earners hard. The income tax saving for them was either minimal or zero, and they had to pay more for food. People struggling to make ends meet had to struggle a little harder.
The rest of us saw a little more take-hom pay, but I've seen many analyses in print (and my own case agrees) showing that we pay more overall after the tax compared to before the tax.
In addition, since many business to business transactions are untaxed (they're part of a chain, with only the end-point being taxed) there's a good deal of paperwork required that small businesses must complete every month, every quarter and ever financial year.
A move to a pure GST with no income tax would probably peg the GST around 30% or more (my cursory glance at that fair-tax page didn't turn up a recommended GST rate). If it were implemented, you can expect that the tax dollars flowing to the government would not drop, only their sources would be redistributed. What tax rate would that mean?
The subsequent crippling lawsuit from Fox could be seen as an homage to an homage, and the fact that the people behind this would lose their houses is merely a courtesy of detail.
I just don't believe that they'd put documents of unknown content up for all to read. That could easily expose the US government to all sorts of scandals, assuming that paperwork was kept for many of those transactions from the days when the US had a good friend in Saddam (or at least didn't care about his murderous nature).
Imagine a document written by Hussein "Met that fool Rumsfeld today. Thanked him for the poison gas and dirty bombs. I don't know why they're illegal in the US - they're selling them to me! Shook his hand and got my picture taken."
Okay - that's completely made up (except the photo, which is a matter of record), but it's not hard to imagine a similar circumstance. Many western countries had dealings with Hussein, and they weren't just buying oil.
There's massive potential for embarrassment on the scale of Abu Ghraib if something really bad gets out.
That makes me think that these documents are already translated, in order to show the world what an evil bugger Hussein was, but show no taint of the US/EK/French involvement in his rise to power and maintenance of position.
It's great PR when people can read an internal document detailing evil acts. There's no doubt then! Not that anyone doubts now, but still.
The idea of a ringworld is similar, although Niven's version circled the star, while Bungie's version was far smaller, and orbited a planet. The mechanics behind both are very different then. Ringworlds were, I think, based on Dyson Spheres. Niven didn't create that idea.
Further, the plots are vastly different. I think any case for plagiarism would be extremely difficult to make except at the most superficial level.
The Dan Brown case relies upon the extreme similarity between the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and his book. The concepts from the earlier book seem to have been moved right into Brown's book without much or any modification.
I read Niven's books, and found them to be that sort of stuff thrown out by a lot of authors in the 60s and 70s - a long, rambling quest which doesn't seem to have any consistency in the way the world works. Deus ex machinas are common and often used to get out of sticky situations. I think I gave them to a second-hand store in the end. A lot of early SciFi was like that, although thankfully we've moved on.
The 'original game' was never made. We only ever saw tech demos, and they were all single-player. The idea of a huge co-op game was put out there, but never implemented by Bungie because they changed direction.
I think you're letting the conspiracy theory get out of hand. The game that was released is all that ever will be released for Halo, and from Bungie's own people, even those who left the company it was a Bungie decision to make the game what it was. Microsoft don't control these people, so why are they sticking to their story?
The simplest answer is that the story is true. It was Bungie driving the development of Halo.
And poor quality of the PC version? The X-Box uses 640x480 graphics, doesn't it? The PC version can easily scale to 1600x1200 on good hardware, and the image quality far exceeds the wildest dreams of anything on the X-Box. The game seemed to rely heavily on the shader model used in the X-Box, and the ports reflected that.
Maybe you're comparing the actual released software against something once rumoured. That's not a valid comparison.
Occam's razor tends toward the simpler explanation. You're inventing complex reasons for something simple.
Bungie stated out time and again that Microsoft didn't affect Halo's development, but somehow the message never seems to get through.
Halo started life as a new map renderer for Myth, and then Bungie decided that they could try large-scale cooperative games. After developing down that path for a while, they shifted focus to a single-player game with online matches similar to Marathon. The reasons I recall from that time were around development and game focus. Bungie was strapped for cash, so they looked around for a buyer. Microsoft came to the table, and it went from there.
If Halo would have been such an amazing game, why didn't Microsoft go with that? The original Halo model would have brought more people to X-Box Live and would have encompassed what Halo became for non-Live users. Sounds like a good strategic move for Microsoft to let Bungie develop that.
But hey! This is Microsoft, so bring out the tinfoil hats and bizarre conspiracy theories! Microsoft crippled Halo to irritate some PC users! It's so clear now, so obvious. They made it a lesser game because they didn't want it to sell. Clearly Microsoft is a company that doesn't know how to make money.
Halo/PC saw the light of day a few years back, and it's all it was ever going to be. You need to move on.
The users have suffered in the past, through security holes in IE. There's a reason the Firefox takeup has been so good, and why it's not confined to tech people.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting...
I'll look at this when I come to writing the physics for my (eternally in development) game.
Thanks!
We need an OpenPL to sort this out. Something very much like OpenGL, but for physics.
Imagine defining (for example) a feather. You create a simple model and a nice texture with an alpha map. You define a few OpenGL parameters and that'll render nicely on any GPU.
Then you assign it some physics parameters - mass, air resistance, shape, density - and that feather can then be instantiated with all the parameters needed to control it.
Now think of a chicken panicking and running away. A bunch of feathers fall out as the chicken starts moving, and they * without any CPU interaction * float naturally to the ground. Dust swirls as the chicken kicks up little footprints, again * without any CPU interaction *.
Suddenly we've got a system that can both draw and manage objects in the game. The game code would need to be able to read back properties of some objects, but most of the actual object management could be done on the card without any CPU input. The CPU's now free for AI and world management.
I think we'll see a move towards physics-based realism that requires cards like this one. I really hope that we see a parallel move towards an open physics language.
ROMs? What ROMs?
Apple changed the OS away from ROMs about six or seven years ago. Or was it mid-90s? Any Mac with a ROM is so old that it's probably best recycled anyway.
Clearly you do care. Otherwise you wouldn't bother posting anything.
So your post is really a jab at Halo because it didn't meet your standards. That's fine - there was a lot to criticise (the never ending library being one, playing all the levels back through in reverse is my point of contention). but there was a lot of fun in the game as well. Just don't pretend you don't care.
Yeah - it was terrible the way those Bungie guys would actually stand over you in your own home, making you play the game. Those bastards! Being forced against your will to do something that you don't enjoy is just wrong.
No... this kind of thing almost never happens.
Usually fakers just do what you said - use the name. They don't set up an entire outsourced manufacturing base with a global distribution arm reaching as far as Africa and the EU.
I saw both symbols, one the mirror image of the other.
And while I didn't know about the crossed fasces, there's no need to be a jerk about it.
I'd really hope it's not something as indiscriminate as Metal Storm. You wouldn't want a million rounds being fired from tanks halfway back in the column. The guys in the following tanks would be a mite irritated when they're horrifically killed by friendly fire.
I just returned last week from my honeymoon in Vietnam, where I saw a number of swastikas. It's a very old symbol - I think a good luck symbol - that the Nazi party appropriated for their own ends. I saw it carved into things, on building frescoes and in patterns on seats (although that was probably just a random thing).
They also make a lot of the Communist imagery, and are still run by the Communist Party. I can't see what difference it makes these days though - apart from a few state-run businesses, it's Capitalism as usual.
Anyway - swastika still in evidence around the world.
You're spot on, and that's why so many people rolled their eyes at Microsoft's obviously false reasoning for dropping IE for OS X. It's not that anything was kept from them - they've got access to the same APIs that Safari has. It's just that they can't compete with Safari and Firefox, and without the massive head start of pre-installation, IE just can't make a blip on the OS X radar.
100% market share?
Wasn't that the time of the Zilog Z80 chip as well? I recall a good number of CP/M machines around that time, as well as a lot of home microcomputers (ZX Spectrum, for example) that used it.
Cool. How's Hymn keeping up with iTunes?
There is no discernable difference between setting up concentration camps all over the world to torture people and giving people social security. They are both flavors of the same of the same thing.
You're kidding, right?
No-one could seriously equate the two of those. Whether you believe neither should be done, or both should be done or do one but not the other, you cannot seriously make the point that killing people is the same as giving them money.
Maybe I've taken you out of context.
The mind boggles.
Dissolution of the what?
I'm not a US citizen, so I don't actually care about the FDA. It's just irrelevant to anyone outside the US.
I'm not sure you could define the OS X major releases as service packs in any way.
They don't just add a couple of new features, they often overhaul parts of the UI and add many new features.
They're major upgrades in any definition that makes sense to me.
Command-Tab cycles through applications
Command-Tilde cycles through windows in the current application
Command O opens a file
Command W closes the active window
Command S saves a file
Command P prints the file
Command Q quits the application
Command C copies the selected item
Command X cuts the selected item
Command V pastes the clipboard in
Command ? activates application help
These are standard. I don't know what you're on about, but these are standards laid out in Apples guidelines and they're used across the majority of document-based applications.
On top of that, you've got Exposé to jump rapidly from any window to any other window.
Keyboard navigation in OS X is not as fluid as in Windows, but you don't need to make up a complaint like "the lack of standard keyboard shortcuts for things like closing windows, etc" to get a point across. Stick to the actual situation that exists.
MS is slower to release things, but they don't charge for service packs.
Luckily, neither do Apple.
Security patches come out for just about all relevant OS X versions, regardless of which version is the latest one.
Feature upgrades are the ones you pay for, and Apple roll up any security patches in the same pack. Every time they do a major OS release, they tout the 100-200 new or improved features over the previous OS.
Contrast that to a service pack, which adds no new features but improves security or fixes a big.
It's the same sort of jump you see between Win2K and WinXP, although Apple got the graphics in from the start.
The thing that confuses a lot of people is that Apple use their own numbering system. 10.3 is not 10 plus bug fixes like you'd expect with normal version numbering systems. You've got to go to the second decimal point for that.
There you go - I'm apparently a libertarian!
Be careful how a goods and services tax (GST) is implemented.
The government here in Australia brought it in about five or six years ago, on the promise of lowered income tax and generally cheaper goods.
Some of us wondered how that could work - if the government gets less money, how can they provide the current level of services? We were shouted down by record advertising spending promoting the tax. You couldn't turn on the TV or look at the paper without seeing how it'd 'unchain families from their tax burden'.
The result has been that many archaic taxes were abolished (there was a 22% tax on computer equipment, for example) but many items (such as food) are now taxed when previously they weren't.
This latter point hit the low-income earners hard. The income tax saving for them was either minimal or zero, and they had to pay more for food. People struggling to make ends meet had to struggle a little harder.
The rest of us saw a little more take-hom pay, but I've seen many analyses in print (and my own case agrees) showing that we pay more overall after the tax compared to before the tax.
In addition, since many business to business transactions are untaxed (they're part of a chain, with only the end-point being taxed) there's a good deal of paperwork required that small businesses must complete every month, every quarter and ever financial year.
A move to a pure GST with no income tax would probably peg the GST around 30% or more (my cursory glance at that fair-tax page didn't turn up a recommended GST rate). If it were implemented, you can expect that the tax dollars flowing to the government would not drop, only their sources would be redistributed. What tax rate would that mean?
The subsequent crippling lawsuit from Fox could be seen as an homage to an homage, and the fact that the people behind this would lose their houses is merely a courtesy of detail.
I just don't believe that they'd put documents of unknown content up for all to read. That could easily expose the US government to all sorts of scandals, assuming that paperwork was kept for many of those transactions from the days when the US had a good friend in Saddam (or at least didn't care about his murderous nature).
Imagine a document written by Hussein "Met that fool Rumsfeld today. Thanked him for the poison gas and dirty bombs. I don't know why they're illegal in the US - they're selling them to me! Shook his hand and got my picture taken."
Okay - that's completely made up (except the photo, which is a matter of record), but it's not hard to imagine a similar circumstance. Many western countries had dealings with Hussein, and they weren't just buying oil.
There's massive potential for embarrassment on the scale of Abu Ghraib if something really bad gets out.
That makes me think that these documents are already translated, in order to show the world what an evil bugger Hussein was, but show no taint of the US/EK/French involvement in his rise to power and maintenance of position.
It's great PR when people can read an internal document detailing evil acts. There's no doubt then! Not that anyone doubts now, but still.
The idea of a ringworld is similar, although Niven's version circled the star, while Bungie's version was far smaller, and orbited a planet. The mechanics behind both are very different then. Ringworlds were, I think, based on Dyson Spheres. Niven didn't create that idea.
Further, the plots are vastly different. I think any case for plagiarism would be extremely difficult to make except at the most superficial level.
The Dan Brown case relies upon the extreme similarity between the book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and his book. The concepts from the earlier book seem to have been moved right into Brown's book without much or any modification.
I read Niven's books, and found them to be that sort of stuff thrown out by a lot of authors in the 60s and 70s - a long, rambling quest which doesn't seem to have any consistency in the way the world works. Deus ex machinas are common and often used to get out of sticky situations. I think I gave them to a second-hand store in the end. A lot of early SciFi was like that, although thankfully we've moved on.
The 'original game' was never made. We only ever saw tech demos, and they were all single-player. The idea of a huge co-op game was put out there, but never implemented by Bungie because they changed direction.
I think you're letting the conspiracy theory get out of hand. The game that was released is all that ever will be released for Halo, and from Bungie's own people, even those who left the company it was a Bungie decision to make the game what it was. Microsoft don't control these people, so why are they sticking to their story?
The simplest answer is that the story is true. It was Bungie driving the development of Halo.
And poor quality of the PC version? The X-Box uses 640x480 graphics, doesn't it? The PC version can easily scale to 1600x1200 on good hardware, and the image quality far exceeds the wildest dreams of anything on the X-Box. The game seemed to rely heavily on the shader model used in the X-Box, and the ports reflected that.
Maybe you're comparing the actual released software against something once rumoured. That's not a valid comparison.
Occam's razor tends toward the simpler explanation. You're inventing complex reasons for something simple.
Bungie stated out time and again that Microsoft didn't affect Halo's development, but somehow the message never seems to get through.
Halo started life as a new map renderer for Myth, and then Bungie decided that they could try large-scale cooperative games. After developing down that path for a while, they shifted focus to a single-player game with online matches similar to Marathon. The reasons I recall from that time were around development and game focus. Bungie was strapped for cash, so they looked around for a buyer. Microsoft came to the table, and it went from there.
If Halo would have been such an amazing game, why didn't Microsoft go with that? The original Halo model would have brought more people to X-Box Live and would have encompassed what Halo became for non-Live users. Sounds like a good strategic move for Microsoft to let Bungie develop that.
But hey! This is Microsoft, so bring out the tinfoil hats and bizarre conspiracy theories! Microsoft crippled Halo to irritate some PC users! It's so clear now, so obvious. They made it a lesser game because they didn't want it to sell. Clearly Microsoft is a company that doesn't know how to make money.
Halo/PC saw the light of day a few years back, and it's all it was ever going to be. You need to move on.
The users have suffered in the past, through security holes in IE. There's a reason the Firefox takeup has been so good, and why it's not confined to tech people.