Bah - why do you always have to demonstrate when I'm not in Brussels?;-)
Despite doing a lot of distantly EU and Commission-related work, I honestly haven't a clue what's going on with this patents thing. I do know that the Commission is very pro-Open Source and pro-small-business, and I think half the reason I'm working on various EU-funded projects is because I'm definitely not the expensive, proprietary route.
I just hope that the higher-ups all realise what impact patents could have on software development. At the kick-off meeting for a big project for which I'm programming some web stuff, the Commission bloke described how partners wanting to pay big licensing fees for software and similar would be distinctly frowned upon. Thus, in my subsequent demonstration of my all-singing, all-dancing, all-me document collaboration system (as tailored to the project in the first half of the meeting) I may have somewhat played up its Open Source basis.
I don't think they realised how small a business I was, however - one person, me!
I'd mention the risks of patents to various people I'm working for, but they know far more about the inner workings of the EU than I do, so I'd rather know more about what's going on. Is there some relatively concise document summarising the history of the issue, and how it should develop? From what I've heard so far, 'labyrinthine' would be an understatement...
I'm always a bit concerned about how much electricity these big computers use. I know that, say, 300W is the maximum output, but what's a typical input?
In terms of being friendly to the environment, I think this machine wins. The power supply says '45W' on it.;-)
The moon would be a good place for a prototype space elevator.
No, it wouldn't be. Basic space elevator is essentially just a tower to geostationary orbit. Earth, rotating just over once every day (!), that's an orbit radius of 42,000 km. The Moon's equivalent orbit with it rotating once a month (albeit with lower gravity) is about 90 million km, assuming this back-of-the-envelope calculation is right.
The best place for a prototype space elevator would be a small asteroid with a fairly high rotation rate - you could probably get away with a few tens of kilometres if chosen carefully...
Irrelevant factoid - when I enter 'Soviet' into a text message on my mobile phone, the predictive text thingy suggests 'Rouge' just before I press the final button.
I think "overhyped" is not the only thing that got HL2 up there ; In the end, in its genre, they delivered a great game, ifnot a great sandbox for some new mods.
Plus the amazing art direction as well - Valve well deserved the award for that.
And I still really like the plot and the manner in which it was presented - what other games have the player (perhaps) freeing the world from alien domination but only show fleeting glimpses of the aliens in question?
Ever peered at one of the monitors on one of IKEA's store computers? Even now, they seem to be running some weird amalgamation of X and Windows. One I saw seemed to have some Windows terminal program running in an exported window on X, and the Windows terminal program was connected to some mainframe-type system. Weird combination, but it appears to work...;-)
I do think some of the negative aspects in HL2 are the result of extensive playtesting with non-FPS-expert players. The linearity makes it much harder to get lost, AI is fairly forgiving of mistakes and it's rare that you'll get in an impossible-to-recover-from situation thanks to the large amount of health and ammo lying around.
What the game could really do with is a Halo-style 'Legendary' mode, giving the enemies faster reactions and removing a few of the many health-packs. The AI is actually pretty decent, it's just that enemies pause to let the player have a shot at them before running for cover. Unfortunately, this does mean that a decent player will have eliminated an enemy before it has a chance to show off the AI.
The other night, I deliberately limited myself to just the sub-machinegun on the first half of Sandtraps, and it was like a whole new game - the Combine soldiers were a decent threat, and I had to think far more tactically to bring them down. I'm going to have a poke round in the GCF files to see if there are any difficulty constants I can tweak - reducing the AI pauses and boosting the enemy health levels could work wonders...:-)
They've moved their back collection onto steam and they spent alot of money into getting steam to work, so i doubt they will dump it for a few people that don't have an internet connection.
The offline mode for Steam certainly needs a lot of work, but I think overall the system is probably a positive move for the somewhat fickle PC games industry. I bought HL2 over Steam, and it's worked absolutely fine (beyond a corrupted GCF in the original download, which was the subject of a FAQ and easily fixed) - I can fully imagine buying further Valve stuff using the system. They'd better come up with some further single-player content soon, though!
I'm going to have great fun designing stuff with the SDK, too - I'm still learning my way round...;-)
Ropes/cables, machines, constraint systems, ragdoll physics, vehicles, kinmetic-animated bones, and a materials system make the Source Engine the undisputed champion of physics gameplay.
Ever wanted to see Havok physics used to an extreme? Got a copy of Half-Life 2? Well, there's the incredible Garry's Mod for you! It's utterly ridiculous, and the eponymous Garry has a sick sense of humour.
Last night, I built the incredible mattress-car - basically, just a mattress with a (powered) car wheel at each corner. It writhed and wriggled in a gloriously disgusting manner, and somewhat disturbingly started following me around. I tried shooting it but that didn't help, so I tied a fridge to it, set it on fire and chucked it into a lake...
Doom 3 might have a basic physics engine, but I'm really looking forward to what modders can do with Source's network-friendly version of Havok.
The cool thing worth mentioning for Doom 3 is it uses the CPU instead of soundcard to create the sounds. This produces great sounds for people with cheap soundcards, but your new, $200 soundcard won't be able to improve on it much.
Doom 3's sound engine is awful compared with the original Half-Life, let alone Source. I've got a below-minimum-specs PC with a cheap sound card from 1998, and in Half-Life 2 I get real-time, room-specific reverberation and sound occlusion. I once walked off while a character was talking, and his voice became muffled when I went round a corner. It sounded real. Plus, the gun and bullet sounds are physically modelled - notice how they vary with distance and surroundings? The only things I haven't noticed it simulate are the speed of sound and proper Doppler effects (which Halo does!), but still, Doom 3's sound playback just seems bland and flat in comparison.
Doom 3's graphics might be the first of a new generation of engines, but Source, while primitive in some areas, is an old-school engine taken to the logical extreme. Which is why I like it so much...;-)
Another review, picking up some unfortunate problems with multiple page layout and PDF exports on non-Apple machines. It does sound like an excellent beginning to a great package, but it's very much 1.0 at the moment. I'm not sure I'll be getting the iWork suite straight away after reading the reviews, but I'm definitely going to keep a eye on it.
Personal pet hate about many programs - rubbish WYSIWYG, which applies to so many word processors and most definitely OpenOffice and KOffice. My old Atari ST running Papyrus could get it right, providing a pixel-perfect version of how the document would print on-screen, and now with Quartz and Pages it looks like I'll be able to do some half-decent document processing without spending a fortune. Assuming, of course, Apple fixes the bugs soon.:-)
But then, if sysadmins were more paranoid about unsuccessful SQL injection attempts, lots of fine Irish people would end up being jailed innocently because of their last name...
...or is Jef[f] using the zoom like the rest of the world uses hypertext? I'm thinking specifically of the picture of Jef with his book and pipe organ, next to which is information about both, smaller. A link could do the same thing.
I think that's the point - a demonstration that you can have something roughly equivalent in capability to hypertext, but without the hypertext.
Personally, I quite liked the zoom thing, and I'd be quite interested to see a real-world implementation. There are problems, such as zooming out until stuff is invisible, or making something so small that you can't find it, but it does seem potentially a lot more easily navigable than some of today's massively complicated hierarchical monstrosities...
And are you counting the overhead of starting KDE and all those unpleasant threads that KDE starts (which make ssh -X so unpleasantly hard to log out of). Course they're not.
KDE? What?
Surprisingly, given the name, it has nothing whatsoever to do with KDE. It's a Windows program for a start.;-)
Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free
You do have to pay for a commercial use licence - only saying this because I'm one of those people who has registered!
It's a great text editor just by itself, but since nobody I work with has a Mac it's a little annoying that my copy stays offline. Still, it was well worth the registration fee anyway, and supporting other programmers financially gives one that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you only get with registering non-nagging shareware.;-)
Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.
Which is why if you put alkaline AAs in a digital camera, they might last ten shots before being completely exhausted... Why is this? I've never heard a satisfactory explanation.;-)
As for charge-in-camera Li-Ion batteries, my increasingly elderly Fuji Finepix has one (descendants of the camera all use AAs, apparently), and it's been absolutely fine. I still get 120+ shots from a single charge (and I use the preview-before-save thing a lot, so actual shots taken is probably 200+), and the camera's heading towards three years old.
Still, I think I'll buy a new battery for it, before they become completely unavailable!
I still believe Daniel Crotty's work on puzzling together those from their raw data was better.:-)
Ooh - hadn't seen those, thanks!
Definitely in take-with-large-pinch-of-salt territory, but perhaps an indication of what's officially to come. I imagine most of the real Huygens investigators are still nursing terrible hangovers, to be honest...;-)
New Titan panorama from Huygens! Complete with a worryingly Earth-like 'coastline' - I don't think anyone's decided if the dark areas actually contain any liquid or not, but still utterly intriguing.;-)
Oh, and now back to our scheduled broadcast. Satellite losses, not good. Big investment and all that, and long lead-time to launching replacements. Whatever!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, these sorts of bugs are why I don't use antivirus software... ;-)
Bah - why do you always have to demonstrate when I'm not in Brussels? ;-)
Despite doing a lot of distantly EU and Commission-related work, I honestly haven't a clue what's going on with this patents thing. I do know that the Commission is very pro-Open Source and pro-small-business, and I think half the reason I'm working on various EU-funded projects is because I'm definitely not the expensive, proprietary route.
I just hope that the higher-ups all realise what impact patents could have on software development. At the kick-off meeting for a big project for which I'm programming some web stuff, the Commission bloke described how partners wanting to pay big licensing fees for software and similar would be distinctly frowned upon. Thus, in my subsequent demonstration of my all-singing, all-dancing, all-me document collaboration system (as tailored to the project in the first half of the meeting) I may have somewhat played up its Open Source basis.
I don't think they realised how small a business I was, however - one person, me!
I'd mention the risks of patents to various people I'm working for, but they know far more about the inner workings of the EU than I do, so I'd rather know more about what's going on. Is there some relatively concise document summarising the history of the issue, and how it should develop? From what I've heard so far, 'labyrinthine' would be an understatement...
I'm always a bit concerned about how much electricity these big computers use. I know that, say, 300W is the maximum output, but what's a typical input?
;-)
In terms of being friendly to the environment, I think this machine wins. The power supply says '45W' on it.
The moon would be a good place for a prototype space elevator.
No, it wouldn't be. Basic space elevator is essentially just a tower to geostationary orbit. Earth, rotating just over once every day (!), that's an orbit radius of 42,000 km. The Moon's equivalent orbit with it rotating once a month (albeit with lower gravity) is about 90 million km, assuming this back-of-the-envelope calculation is right.
The best place for a prototype space elevator would be a small asteroid with a fairly high rotation rate - you could probably get away with a few tens of kilometres if chosen carefully...
Irrelevant factoid - when I enter 'Soviet' into a text message on my mobile phone, the predictive text thingy suggests 'Rouge' just before I press the final button.
;-)
It amuses me, anyway.
I think "overhyped" is not the only thing that got HL2 up there ; In the end, in its genre, they delivered a great game, ifnot a great sandbox for some new mods.
Plus the amazing art direction as well - Valve well deserved the award for that.
And I still really like the plot and the manner in which it was presented - what other games have the player (perhaps) freeing the world from alien domination but only show fleeting glimpses of the aliens in question?
Well, msnbot.msn.com is the third biggest consumer of bandwidth on my own site. Not very much, admittedly, but I'm fourth...
Bill Gates visiting Belgium again? I'm surprised he dares!
Video, for you custard-pie-throwing Belgian anarchist wannabes...
... And, amusingly, IKEA has been a big user of Linux for years.
;-)
Ever peered at one of the monitors on one of IKEA's store computers? Even now, they seem to be running some weird amalgamation of X and Windows. One I saw seemed to have some Windows terminal program running in an exported window on X, and the Windows terminal program was connected to some mainframe-type system. Weird combination, but it appears to work...
I do think some of the negative aspects in HL2 are the result of extensive playtesting with non-FPS-expert players. The linearity makes it much harder to get lost, AI is fairly forgiving of mistakes and it's rare that you'll get in an impossible-to-recover-from situation thanks to the large amount of health and ammo lying around.
:-)
What the game could really do with is a Halo-style 'Legendary' mode, giving the enemies faster reactions and removing a few of the many health-packs. The AI is actually pretty decent, it's just that enemies pause to let the player have a shot at them before running for cover. Unfortunately, this does mean that a decent player will have eliminated an enemy before it has a chance to show off the AI.
The other night, I deliberately limited myself to just the sub-machinegun on the first half of Sandtraps, and it was like a whole new game - the Combine soldiers were a decent threat, and I had to think far more tactically to bring them down. I'm going to have a poke round in the GCF files to see if there are any difficulty constants I can tweak - reducing the AI pauses and boosting the enemy health levels could work wonders...
They've moved their back collection onto steam and they spent alot of money into getting steam to work, so i doubt they will dump it for a few people that don't have an internet connection.
;-)
The offline mode for Steam certainly needs a lot of work, but I think overall the system is probably a positive move for the somewhat fickle PC games industry. I bought HL2 over Steam, and it's worked absolutely fine (beyond a corrupted GCF in the original download, which was the subject of a FAQ and easily fixed) - I can fully imagine buying further Valve stuff using the system. They'd better come up with some further single-player content soon, though!
I'm going to have great fun designing stuff with the SDK, too - I'm still learning my way round...
You're forgetting the whole Ultra-Top-Secret Mac Designs Site that's on this new-fangled interweb thingy...
Now where is my powerbook G5 damnit!
;-)
Tuesday, duh....
Thank you.
You can, of course, use Papyrus on OS X. You can even use a current version if you speak German...
:-/
I know - and they've been taunting me with a 'available very soon' for the English version for most of the past year...
I wish they'd hurry up and finish translating it!
Last night, I built the incredible mattress-car - basically, just a mattress with a (powered) car wheel at each corner. It writhed and wriggled in a gloriously disgusting manner, and somewhat disturbingly started following me around. I tried shooting it but that didn't help, so I tied a fridge to it, set it on fire and chucked it into a lake...
Doom 3 might have a basic physics engine, but I'm really looking forward to what modders can do with Source's network-friendly version of Havok.
Doom 3's sound engine is awful compared with the original Half-Life, let alone Source. I've got a below-minimum-specs PC with a cheap sound card from 1998, and in Half-Life 2 I get real-time, room-specific reverberation and sound occlusion. I once walked off while a character was talking, and his voice became muffled when I went round a corner. It sounded real. Plus, the gun and bullet sounds are physically modelled - notice how they vary with distance and surroundings? The only things I haven't noticed it simulate are the speed of sound and proper Doppler effects (which Halo does!), but still, Doom 3's sound playback just seems bland and flat in comparison.
Doom 3's graphics might be the first of a new generation of engines, but Source, while primitive in some areas, is an old-school engine taken to the logical extreme. Which is why I like it so much...
Another review, picking up some unfortunate problems with multiple page layout and PDF exports on non-Apple machines. It does sound like an excellent beginning to a great package, but it's very much 1.0 at the moment. I'm not sure I'll be getting the iWork suite straight away after reading the reviews, but I'm definitely going to keep a eye on it.
:-)
Personal pet hate about many programs - rubbish WYSIWYG, which applies to so many word processors and most definitely OpenOffice and KOffice. My old Atari ST running Papyrus could get it right, providing a pixel-perfect version of how the document would print on-screen, and now with Quartz and Pages it looks like I'll be able to do some half-decent document processing without spending a fortune. Assuming, of course, Apple fixes the bugs soon.
But then, if sysadmins were more paranoid about unsuccessful SQL injection attempts, lots of fine Irish people would end up being jailed innocently because of their last name...
;-)
That's O\'Reilly, you insensitive clod!
...or is Jef[f] using the zoom like the rest of the world uses hypertext? I'm thinking specifically of the picture of Jef with his book and pipe organ, next to which is information about both, smaller. A link could do the same thing.
I think that's the point - a demonstration that you can have something roughly equivalent in capability to hypertext, but without the hypertext.
Personally, I quite liked the zoom thing, and I'd be quite interested to see a real-world implementation. There are problems, such as zooming out until stuff is invisible, or making something so small that you can't find it, but it does seem potentially a lot more easily navigable than some of today's massively complicated hierarchical monstrosities...
And are you counting the overhead of starting KDE and all those unpleasant threads that KDE starts (which make ssh -X so unpleasantly hard to log out of). Course they're not.
;-)
KDE? What?
Surprisingly, given the name, it has nothing whatsoever to do with KDE. It's a Windows program for a start.
Meanwhile, it's also just a damn nice text editor for general use, and is free
;-)
You do have to pay for a commercial use licence - only saying this because I'm one of those people who has registered!
It's a great text editor just by itself, but since nobody I work with has a Mac it's a little annoying that my copy stays offline. Still, it was well worth the registration fee anyway, and supporting other programmers financially gives one that warm-and-fuzzy feeling you only get with registering non-nagging shareware.
Alkaline batteries provice significantly more power for a given size vs. any type of rechargable battery.
;-)
Which is why if you put alkaline AAs in a digital camera, they might last ten shots before being completely exhausted... Why is this? I've never heard a satisfactory explanation.
As for charge-in-camera Li-Ion batteries, my increasingly elderly Fuji Finepix has one (descendants of the camera all use AAs, apparently), and it's been absolutely fine. I still get 120+ shots from a single charge (and I use the preview-before-save thing a lot, so actual shots taken is probably 200+), and the camera's heading towards three years old.
Still, I think I'll buy a new battery for it, before they become completely unavailable!
I still believe Daniel Crotty's work on puzzling together those from their raw data was better. :-)
;-)
Ooh - hadn't seen those, thanks!
Definitely in take-with-large-pinch-of-salt territory, but perhaps an indication of what's officially to come. I imagine most of the real Huygens investigators are still nursing terrible hangovers, to be honest...
... but still space-related:
;-)
New Titan panorama from Huygens! Complete with a worryingly Earth-like 'coastline' - I don't think anyone's decided if the dark areas actually contain any liquid or not, but still utterly intriguing.
Oh, and now back to our scheduled broadcast. Satellite losses, not good. Big investment and all that, and long lead-time to launching replacements. Whatever!
(Anyone still have that video?)
Hell, yes!