They probably have the chairs in that particular conference room bolted down, glued to the floor, and then weighted with lead. 60 billion dollars won't give you the ability to lift a chair which takes 800 lbs of force to seperate from the ground.
As far as ridiculously low memory constraints go...
I was talking to a friend the other day, who had to write the code for a car door opener dealie. You know the one. A really nice, high end one with an LCD that displayed stuff (not your average 100% hardware door opener). His code had a staggering 256 bytes of RAM to work with, and even then they were potentially 7 bytes overbooked. So yes, these kinds of constraints still exist. Sadly.
Rhino is kind of small in comparison. The third Big Modeler is SoftImage|XSI, which has incidentally been gaining a lot of momentum in the game industry lately (most notably, Half Life 2/Source).
As for Blender, it just doesn't reside in the same league. Its capabilities are for the most part adequate, but the...shall we say, controversial interface is a permanent barrier to its real adoption.
As far as encryption goes, for god's sake don't rely on anything the manufacturers ship. That stuff is meant to protect you from your average luser seeing files, not anybody who is honestly interested. Use Blowfish or Twofish for proper 2 way encryption.
Recently, your colleague David Evans gave a talk at our university. He said something that resonated strongly with me: "Don't be a slave to technology; make the technology a slave to you." I am sure you agree, as this has represented the basic design principles of your games from the start. They were never about getting the oh so perfect specular highlight with the shadowing just so -- they were about making a game that was damned fun to play, first and foremost. Now, my question is this: Do you feel that in the game industry as a whole, the goal of making a game fun first and flashy second is being threatened? Especially in the next generation, where the emphasis is by and large on graphical quality rather than the gameplay?
Should I have to learn a text editor? Sure, I had to learn emacs and vim. What about nano? Nano was obvious. It listed the commands at the bottom. Sure it's not the most powerful editor around, but still. It's a freaking text editor. I should be able to open a file, type stuff in, save, and quit, without ever having seen the editor before, and without having to read the man page. None of the GUI editors really suffer from this problem, since they have menus and toolbars to fall back on. But for some reason, the DOS style alt menus in console never caught on in the Linux world, not even as an option.
It's really rather unfortunate. MS used to be THE place to work, much like Google is now. Even now, from what I've heard it's a great place, but it's becoming decadent. Personally, I suspect the business/marketing/PR/HR side of MS is to blame. Technically, they have great employees. It's just that the company itself is very much in their way.
Of course, it has little or no relevance to media and video processing, as those are related to throughput and bandwidth, not latency. Additionally, of course RTLinux does better -- as the name suggests, it's a real time OS. Normal Linux, Windows, OSX, etc. are not real time OSes, and such latencies are not necessary.
When you need a real time OS with ridiculously low latencies is when you have something mission critical. For example, a nuclear reaction being controlled. Say, interrupt 666 triggers when something goes horribly wrong, and if you enable a safety system within 10ms, nothing bad happens. It would be good to have a system that guarantees response in less than that time. That's the purpose of a real time OS like RTLinux. This is not appropriate, necessary, or indeed useful for desktop systems or workstations of any sort, or even servers.
New programming models are in order, yes. The entire industry is more or less in agreement that multiple processing cores are in order. The Pentium D and the Athlon64 X2 are the desktop side evolutions. The consoles, however, are a rather more touch issue.
See, the problem is that Sony's architecture is very powerful in numbers. The 2 TFLOPS number is real...in a very, very limited set of circumstances. Cell is designed a lot like a GPU in some aspects, and a lot like a video decoding processor in some aspects. Unfortunately, neither one is useful for game programming (remember that Cell does not participate in the rendering pipeline of PS3, that is handled by NV's RSX). Now, like some people have pointed out here, Newell is a whiny bitch who wouldn't know portability if it smacked him in the face. But that doesn't change the fact that Sony is making life difficult, and it's not yet clear to most people whether the Cell architecture is at all useful in games. Personally, I'm inclined to say no, but I'm an amateur/college student, so take that as you will. However, it's definitely solid fact that Cell is very different from anything else out there, which sucks. Add to that the problem that developers by and large are not convinced that Cell is different in a good way (and I know quite a few devs), and things are really a bit of a mess.
Except that passports aren't necessary in order to use the MSN web search, only the usual registration services (web mail, etc). And Google could very well do the exact same thing with gmail accounts. You know what I say? They recognize that google has done a clever thing, and have copied them while throwing their own, innocuous twist on things. That's it. That's what MS has done for 20 years (albeit, not always innocuously).
Just to give some background on what this is all about, here's an article on their predecessors, carbon nanotubes. Remember diamond is just a carbon matrix in a particular arrangement. Carbon nanotubes form sp2 bonds; presumably these diamond nanotubes form sp3 bonds, although it's not clear to me how you'd create a tube with that geometry.
So basically, he's like Boba Fett. He seems really awesome and works for important people, but when it comes down to it he accidentally gets his jet pack button hit and flies into the belly of a monster.
Right, but there are rules about this sort of thing. In Japan, for example, Intel was found guilty of (or admitted to?) giving rebates on Intel processors based on how many AMD processors the OEM was buying. More AMD processors meant the Intel chips cost more. These are precisely the same tactics that MS was sued for, remember, and that slashdotters everywhere bemoan as being the cause of Linux's lack of adoption (whether that is true is a different discussion).
In other news, the MPAA, RIAA, and similar organizations are still stumbling around like friggin morons, trying to kill all file sharing because it is fundamentally evil. God fobrbid they change their business model to avoid becoming obsolete.
Here's the thing that bothers me. I have MSN Desktop Search right here, which is constructed on top of Windows Indexing Service and does a marvelous job of finding files based on metadata and contents (as good or better than GDS, I think). The only drawback I see is the indexing process, which in MSN is very efficient, both in terms of time taken as well as hard drive space consumed. My question is, what does the WinFS offer me that MSN Desktop Search doesn't already?
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Why don't you ask Sun Microsystems? They seem to have a few good reasons.
They probably have the chairs in that particular conference room bolted down, glued to the floor, and then weighted with lead. 60 billion dollars won't give you the ability to lift a chair which takes 800 lbs of force to seperate from the ground.
As far as ridiculously low memory constraints go...
I was talking to a friend the other day, who had to write the code for a car door opener dealie. You know the one. A really nice, high end one with an LCD that displayed stuff (not your average 100% hardware door opener). His code had a staggering 256 bytes of RAM to work with, and even then they were potentially 7 bytes overbooked. So yes, these kinds of constraints still exist. Sadly.
Rhino is kind of small in comparison. The third Big Modeler is SoftImage|XSI, which has incidentally been gaining a lot of momentum in the game industry lately (most notably, Half Life 2/Source).
As for Blender, it just doesn't reside in the same league. Its capabilities are for the most part adequate, but the...shall we say, controversial interface is a permanent barrier to its real adoption.
As far as encryption goes, for god's sake don't rely on anything the manufacturers ship. That stuff is meant to protect you from your average luser seeing files, not anybody who is honestly interested. Use Blowfish or Twofish for proper 2 way encryption.
Recently, your colleague David Evans gave a talk at our university. He said something that resonated strongly with me: "Don't be a slave to technology; make the technology a slave to you." I am sure you agree, as this has represented the basic design principles of your games from the start. They were never about getting the oh so perfect specular highlight with the shadowing just so -- they were about making a game that was damned fun to play, first and foremost. Now, my question is this: Do you feel that in the game industry as a whole, the goal of making a game fun first and flashy second is being threatened? Especially in the next generation, where the emphasis is by and large on graphical quality rather than the gameplay?
How many text editors have you had to learn?
Should I have to learn a text editor? Sure, I had to learn emacs and vim. What about nano? Nano was obvious. It listed the commands at the bottom. Sure it's not the most powerful editor around, but still. It's a freaking text editor. I should be able to open a file, type stuff in, save, and quit, without ever having seen the editor before, and without having to read the man page. None of the GUI editors really suffer from this problem, since they have menus and toolbars to fall back on. But for some reason, the DOS style alt menus in console never caught on in the Linux world, not even as an option.
Sorry, just had to get that one out.
It's really rather unfortunate. MS used to be THE place to work, much like Google is now. Even now, from what I've heard it's a great place, but it's becoming decadent. Personally, I suspect the business/marketing/PR/HR side of MS is to blame. Technically, they have great employees. It's just that the company itself is very much in their way.
Of course, it has little or no relevance to media and video processing, as those are related to throughput and bandwidth, not latency. Additionally, of course RTLinux does better -- as the name suggests, it's a real time OS. Normal Linux, Windows, OSX, etc. are not real time OSes, and such latencies are not necessary.
When you need a real time OS with ridiculously low latencies is when you have something mission critical. For example, a nuclear reaction being controlled. Say, interrupt 666 triggers when something goes horribly wrong, and if you enable a safety system within 10ms, nothing bad happens. It would be good to have a system that guarantees response in less than that time. That's the purpose of a real time OS like RTLinux. This is not appropriate, necessary, or indeed useful for desktop systems or workstations of any sort, or even servers.
Just some background information on WiMax for those who aren't sure what this is all about.
Just thank god it wasn't an emacs sandwich with vim in between. The fires would burn until the end of time *shudder*.
Just so people know exactly what it is that Newell is complaining about: Cell architectural info.
New programming models are in order, yes. The entire industry is more or less in agreement that multiple processing cores are in order. The Pentium D and the Athlon64 X2 are the desktop side evolutions. The consoles, however, are a rather more touch issue.
See, the problem is that Sony's architecture is very powerful in numbers. The 2 TFLOPS number is real...in a very, very limited set of circumstances. Cell is designed a lot like a GPU in some aspects, and a lot like a video decoding processor in some aspects. Unfortunately, neither one is useful for game programming (remember that Cell does not participate in the rendering pipeline of PS3, that is handled by NV's RSX). Now, like some people have pointed out here, Newell is a whiny bitch who wouldn't know portability if it smacked him in the face. But that doesn't change the fact that Sony is making life difficult, and it's not yet clear to most people whether the Cell architecture is at all useful in games. Personally, I'm inclined to say no, but I'm an amateur/college student, so take that as you will. However, it's definitely solid fact that Cell is very different from anything else out there, which sucks. Add to that the problem that developers by and large are not convinced that Cell is different in a good way (and I know quite a few devs), and things are really a bit of a mess.
Except that passports aren't necessary in order to use the MSN web search, only the usual registration services (web mail, etc). And Google could very well do the exact same thing with gmail accounts. You know what I say? They recognize that google has done a clever thing, and have copied them while throwing their own, innocuous twist on things. That's it. That's what MS has done for 20 years (albeit, not always innocuously).
Just to give some background on what this is all about, here's an article on their predecessors, carbon nanotubes. Remember diamond is just a carbon matrix in a particular arrangement. Carbon nanotubes form sp2 bonds; presumably these diamond nanotubes form sp3 bonds, although it's not clear to me how you'd create a tube with that geometry.
Actually Zonk posted the dupe. There was a bit of a time warp inside slashdot, which kind of skewed the world lines of the two posts.
Is right here. Read on!
Good news everybody! I've just discovered an infinite source of articles for slashdot!
Interesting that you mention OSX...Linspire's site design bears a striking resemblance to Apple.com.
So basically, he's like Boba Fett. He seems really awesome and works for important people, but when it comes down to it he accidentally gets his jet pack button hit and flies into the belly of a monster.
Right, but there are rules about this sort of thing. In Japan, for example, Intel was found guilty of (or admitted to?) giving rebates on Intel processors based on how many AMD processors the OEM was buying. More AMD processors meant the Intel chips cost more. These are precisely the same tactics that MS was sued for, remember, and that slashdotters everywhere bemoan as being the cause of Linux's lack of adoption (whether that is true is a different discussion).
Remember folks, you heard it here first -- real terrorists dpn't use IE.
DSL is a linux distro.
In other news, the MPAA, RIAA, and similar organizations are still stumbling around like friggin morons, trying to kill all file sharing because it is fundamentally evil. God fobrbid they change their business model to avoid becoming obsolete.
Here's the thing that bothers me. I have MSN Desktop Search right here, which is constructed on top of Windows Indexing Service and does a marvelous job of finding files based on metadata and contents (as good or better than GDS, I think). The only drawback I see is the indexing process, which in MSN is very efficient, both in terms of time taken as well as hard drive space consumed. My question is, what does the WinFS offer me that MSN Desktop Search doesn't already?