Another thing I forgot was that particle effects were also used heavily by Valve in The Orange Box, when they moved away from using sprites for smoke and explosions.
With particle effects, does that mitigate the need for alpha blending effects?
While working at my undergrad school for their IT department, I once encountered a kid who put his magnet that the Health Services department on the side of his case so he could find it easily. I told him he should probably move it, and he said "Oh wow, I had no idea that was an issue!"
I think this is fixed nowadays, with most developers no longer using sprites for steam, explosions, etc.
Example: Valve, as recently as Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (June 2006), was still using sprites for fire and explosions. However, by the time The Orange Box (October 2007) was released, they were using full 3D models for those entities.
I imagine any game made in the past year or so will be full-3D, with no sprites.
When I worked at a summer camp a few years ago, all of the staff carried flashlights, but rarely used them, because they were able to walk the trails at night with nothing but ambient light from the sky, even on the darker nights where there was cloud cover and a new moon. About the only time they would get used is when walking with the campers, as a courtesy.
I use Surefire flashlights now, but at the time I carried a Mini-Maglite, with the regular incandescent bulb. I put a pair of AAs in there at the beginning of the summer, and 10 weeks later I went home with the same pair of batteries running that light, and they were just starting to die.
Wouldn't it just be able to blur from the previous frame? I agree it adds some overhead, but intuitively it seems like a machine capable of 60fps would get about 50 with motion blur, not 30.
Last time I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), in order to encode MP3s with LAME's gapless playback headers, you had to encode the entire album (or at the very least, the two songs you want to be gapless) in one shot from the command line. So with an encoding scheme like those of Exact Audio Copy or FlacSquisher (my program), where encoding is done with one process per track, the MP3s will have space to fill in the last packet, and will fill it with empty samples, leading to gaps, no matter what player you use.
Correct me if I'm wrong, please. If I am wrong, then that's an extra feature that I can include in FlacSquisher's list!:)
I remember an episode of Law and Order: SVU from last year where Richard Belzer's character requests his own file under FOIA. He's telling them where they can park the trucks to deliver it, but he's sorely disappointed when he gets his file and it only contains a single sheet of paper. The writers of the show must be Douglas Adams fans, cause the paper said something fairly equivalent to "Mostly harmless." Belzer's character complained about this, along the lines of "But I was a violent revolutionary!"
It's up to app designers to make the default bitrate more towards the "transparent" region.
I've been trying to get my friends (the more technically-oriented ones, anyway) to rip to FLACs to keep on their primary machine, and to use my program (see my sig) to convert to decent-quality Oggs or MP3s for portable use.
I convert to Oggs mainly because MP3s aren't designed for gapless playback, and they work with Rockbox. "-q 6" gives VBR at around 192kbps -- more than enough for a portable player going over a pair of earbuds, and I have the FLACs for when I'm sitting at home, with my good headphones.
I like open-source software as much as the next/. user, but there are some areas in which OSS has not caught up with the proprietary market. ClamAV is a good solution for Linux, and they have a windows port, but neither one has built-in real-time protection. You can implement it with a hack, but some people like their computer to be free of duct tape.
Oh right, sorry. I'm so used to fake viral marketing, like from Sony et al, that I forgot that real viral marketing isn't supported by the company benefited by the marketing.
It was a bit off-topic, but it's not viral marketing, I'm an actual customer of theirs. I bought their cheapest model (the G2) about 3 years ago, and bought an LED bulb for it about 2 years ago. Their flashlights are definitely expensive, and some of their products make me shake my head (the Surefire Pen, for instance), but I think their flashlights are worth the money.
One of the big things I love about Surefire is the amount of engineering that goes into their products to make them as good, and as tough, as possible.
They even point out that while other flashlights have a higher candlepower rating, that candlepower is a flawed system of measurement and they're higher on the lumen scale (looking at intensity vs frequency, candlepower is proportional to the max value, and the lumen rating is related to the area under the curve). I love any company that's that committed to actual engineering of their products.
Actually, about a year ago at my undergrad university, my girlfriend was working at the part of the library responsible for lending out laptops, and the employee next to her had the following conversation:
Student: I was working with this laptop, and it just DIED for NO REASON!
Employee:...Did you have it plugged in?
Student: I don't NEED to have it plugged in; it's WIRELESS.
Why? Before PCs became popular, people wrote with a pen on paper placed parallel to the desk. How hard did centuries of that strain people's necks?
Anyone who used paper for a living (newspaper reporters, drafters, artists) got those special desks that inclined to a more comfortable position. Many touch devices are like this, but as stated before, it would be annoying, and not too ergonomically-sound.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing I forgot was that particle effects were also used heavily by Valve in The Orange Box, when they moved away from using sprites for smoke and explosions.
With particle effects, does that mitigate the need for alpha blending effects?
While working at my undergrad school for their IT department, I once encountered a kid who put his magnet that the Health Services department on the side of his case so he could find it easily. I told him he should probably move it, and he said "Oh wow, I had no idea that was an issue!"
I think this is fixed nowadays, with most developers no longer using sprites for steam, explosions, etc.
Example: Valve, as recently as Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (June 2006), was still using sprites for fire and explosions. However, by the time The Orange Box (October 2007) was released, they were using full 3D models for those entities.
I imagine any game made in the past year or so will be full-3D, with no sprites.
When I worked at a summer camp a few years ago, all of the staff carried flashlights, but rarely used them, because they were able to walk the trails at night with nothing but ambient light from the sky, even on the darker nights where there was cloud cover and a new moon. About the only time they would get used is when walking with the campers, as a courtesy.
I use Surefire flashlights now, but at the time I carried a Mini-Maglite, with the regular incandescent bulb. I put a pair of AAs in there at the beginning of the summer, and 10 weeks later I went home with the same pair of batteries running that light, and they were just starting to die.
I have my Sourceforge and Blogger accounts linked up with OpenID; those are pretty mainstream sites...
Wouldn't it just be able to blur from the previous frame? I agree it adds some overhead, but intuitively it seems like a machine capable of 60fps would get about 50 with motion blur, not 30.
Last time I checked (admittedly, over a year ago), in order to encode MP3s with LAME's gapless playback headers, you had to encode the entire album (or at the very least, the two songs you want to be gapless) in one shot from the command line. So with an encoding scheme like those of Exact Audio Copy or FlacSquisher (my program), where encoding is done with one process per track, the MP3s will have space to fill in the last packet, and will fill it with empty samples, leading to gaps, no matter what player you use.
:)
Correct me if I'm wrong, please. If I am wrong, then that's an extra feature that I can include in FlacSquisher's list!
I remember an episode of Law and Order: SVU from last year where Richard Belzer's character requests his own file under FOIA. He's telling them where they can park the trucks to deliver it, but he's sorely disappointed when he gets his file and it only contains a single sheet of paper. The writers of the show must be Douglas Adams fans, cause the paper said something fairly equivalent to "Mostly harmless." Belzer's character complained about this, along the lines of "But I was a violent revolutionary!"
Wait, too soon.
It's up to app designers to make the default bitrate more towards the "transparent" region.
I've been trying to get my friends (the more technically-oriented ones, anyway) to rip to FLACs to keep on their primary machine, and to use my program (see my sig) to convert to decent-quality Oggs or MP3s for portable use.
I convert to Oggs mainly because MP3s aren't designed for gapless playback, and they work with Rockbox. "-q 6" gives VBR at around 192kbps -- more than enough for a portable player going over a pair of earbuds, and I have the FLACs for when I'm sitting at home, with my good headphones.
I know how to make a lock that can't be unlocked except by brute force: weld two pieces of steel together to make a solid ring.
If it can't even be opened with a key, you can't use a lock pick, can you?
I like open-source software as much as the next /. user, but there are some areas in which OSS has not caught up with the proprietary market. ClamAV is a good solution for Linux, and they have a windows port, but neither one has built-in real-time protection. You can implement it with a hack, but some people like their computer to be free of duct tape.
Most people DO run AV software, and every machine I fixed that was infected with this malware had AV software installed and updated.
Using adblock, it was merely "one paragraph per screen" -- I didn't even know that the site was ad-laden.
I was tasked with getting this thing off my mom's laptop. That was tougher than any other piece of malware I've ever dealt with.
I also had to convince my dad that there was no easy way to sue the "manufacturer" of this program.
The ability to withstand an explosion.
No, but you can carry a Surefire and a nightstick, then you can see who you're hitting while you're hitting them.
Otherwise you get the "Doom 3" effect. :)
Oh right, sorry. I'm so used to fake viral marketing, like from Sony et al, that I forgot that real viral marketing isn't supported by the company benefited by the marketing.
It was a bit off-topic, but it's not viral marketing, I'm an actual customer of theirs. I bought their cheapest model (the G2) about 3 years ago, and bought an LED bulb for it about 2 years ago. Their flashlights are definitely expensive, and some of their products make me shake my head (the Surefire Pen, for instance), but I think their flashlights are worth the money.
Better than MagLite:
http://www.surefire.com/
One of the big things I love about Surefire is the amount of engineering that goes into their products to make them as good, and as tough, as possible.
They even point out that while other flashlights have a higher candlepower rating, that candlepower is a flawed system of measurement and they're higher on the lumen scale (looking at intensity vs frequency, candlepower is proportional to the max value, and the lumen rating is related to the area under the curve). I love any company that's that committed to actual engineering of their products.
Possibly my favorite things that Microsoft has ever produced are their new User Interface Guidelines, especially the Warning Messages page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511263.aspx
This page also provides a good summary of the other Interface Guidelines:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070301/updated-vista-ux-guide/
Microsoft's programmers aren't innocent, but I think quite a few of the inane warning messages are from third-party software vendors.
Actually, about a year ago at my undergrad university, my girlfriend was working at the part of the library responsible for lending out laptops, and the employee next to her had the following conversation:
...Did you have it plugged in?
Student: I was working with this laptop, and it just DIED for NO REASON!
Employee:
Student: I don't NEED to have it plugged in; it's WIRELESS.
Why? Before PCs became popular, people wrote with a pen on paper placed parallel to the desk. How hard did centuries of that strain people's necks?
Anyone who used paper for a living (newspaper reporters, drafters, artists) got those special desks that inclined to a more comfortable position. Many touch devices are like this, but as stated before, it would be annoying, and not too ergonomically-sound.
You're assuming we all have 20/20 vision, which is a poor assumption. I'm 20/10, myself.
http://trial.p2p-next.org/ Streaming P2P is real.