Assuming they have found something here, at some point you need to accept that one in a bazillion flights is going to crash because of interference and let me play my Nintendo DS on the plane. We already accept that a lot more than one in a bazillion crash because of mechanical failure.
Let's say I'm willing to pay $10 to play my DS, I'm willing to wager those $10 spend on extra maintenance will prevent more accidents than the fact that I'm playing my DS.
This reminds me of the 6th grader who wins the science fair with a working quantum computer. His father, a quantum physics, assured everyone his son did it all by himself.
I agree with you. I don't care who wins now, but I would like to point out that without competition between these two standards neither one would have been as good as it is now. While most people are complaining that we have two standards for a year or two until one wins, I'm happy to live with that since it gave us a better cheaper product. Competition is good.
They have created a formula that allows gravity to change continuously over various distance scales and, most importantly, fits the data for observations of galaxies. To fit galaxy data equally well in the rival Dark Matter paradigm would be as challenging as balancing a ball on a needle, which motivated the two astronomers to look at an alternative gravity idea.
Difficult? Sounds like they needed to find the slope between two points to me:)
I just set a book under the corner of my keyboard tried some quick gaming on my desk with the mouse under my keyboard like their picture showed. For gaming it was actually fairly comfortable as long as you use the awsd left hand setup like many do.
Now we just have to wait and see if this is vapor ware. The picture of it looked like CG to me so maybe this is also just vaporware.
I find it amusing how nearly everyone only focuses on the places where limiting your speed might cause an accident. I wonder why this discussion on slashdot is such a one sided debate? Probably be nobody wants one of these devices in our own car because we like to speed. However ignoring the other side of the argument does not strengthen your debate (why hasn't Bush realized this yet...).
Although I don't have any statistics handy, I suspect that having such a device in a car would make it safer to drive, and I am sure if everyone had them driving would be safer overall. Do I support or want these devices in my car? No way, but I can't blame organizations whose duty it is to make the roads safer for looking into these sorts of tools.
I've talked to some of my friends who would are not part of the/. crowd. None of them had any idea that Sony cds have a security flaw that can affect their computers. One of them actually had the rootkit on their computer from when they put their CD into iTunes.
So while Mr. Sherman may praise Sony for doing such a much more than software companies I think Sony needs to do even more. A higher percentage of people using software expect to need to download updates for their computer than percentage of people using CDs. Then there is the whole debate going on in court of whether Sony distributed illegal software...
I can remember when people said cable tv channels would never have advertising because you have to pay for those. Then came the advertising in the movie theater. Even TiVo is now forcing extra advertising on some people. Could this lead to forced advertising on Windows even for paying customers?
I am a big fan of having a standard coding style. By this I do mean having developers follow a fairly strict set of rules on comment style, where spaces belong, spaces vs tabs, indentation rules, naming conventions, ect. There are many different ways you can do each one of these points, but the important thing isn't which way you choose, but that your code is consistent. That said I would apply these rules only to new projects and leave the old projects as they are. Cleaning up active projects makes diffing for differences in files nearly impossible.
Our news crew watched first hand a real world David vs. Goliath battle today. In a spectacular display of heroism a lone little firefighter took on a might Oak in order to rescue a helpless kitten from its treacherous branches.
Obviously, it's somewhat unclear that the majority of China's workforce would be able to afford such a console - the average wage of an urban worker in China in 2004 was 9,422 yuan ($1,164), and a rural worker made just 2,936 yuan ($363) on average.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft would be happy to have just 1% of a market place with well over a billion people. Now if they could somehow get up to 5% they'd have sold more xbox 360s than Sony has sold PS2s so far.
To a first order approximation this seems like a simultaneous release to me. When comparing this to how long Nintendo and Sony consoles and handhelds usually take to get released around the world this seems to be pretty quick to me. Waiting 3 weeks is much better than waiting 9 months. I'm curious if this will force Nintendo and Sony to try and release their next gen consoles in a more timely manner.
I wanted to try this game but Nintendogs was sold out at all the local stores I tried. I was told that they don't expect any more until the end of September. I easly found a major online retailer that had it in stock and ordered it from them.
The article said both companies did try to come to a settlement. That means Google tried to pay them what they thought was a fair price for the infringement, but the company wanted more. It is the courts job to settle disputes like this.
If a company pays out to everyone who asks so they don't "tarnish" their name they probably won't be in business very long. I'm not saying Google is being exploited here. I'm just saying it's a possibility.
I'm wondering how and to who this list is distributed? Hopefully it isn't possible for a businesses/political parties/charities to use this list to get phone numbers and people to call. But since it was originally meant as a list of people not to call I can foresee where such safety mechanisms where not put in place.
I knew that the L1 icache on the P4 was a trace cache, but I didn't ever think about it being pre-translated micro-ops. Makes sense, but it's still one of those neat ideas I need to store away until a variation is useful for something I'm working on.
Your last statement isn't quite correct. It's true web reviewers don't get excited about low and mid range cards, but OEMs buy way more of these cards than they buy of the ultra high end cards.
I work for one of the major two major players in this market so I am probably a little biased.
The way I read this is yet another small player wants to run with the big boys. What makes this one different? Well they admit up front that they can't compete in the high end so they will target the low end. Is this going to make a difference? I highly doubt it. I predict a flop.
I'm not trying to be too harsh. I'm just stating it like I see it. Personally I'd like to see another player in this market, but I doubt it will ever happen unless someone like Intel decides to make high end graphics cards. Both ATI and NVIDIA spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D to make their high end cards and all that R&D is applicable to the lower end discrete cards. The lower end cards now days use most of the great ideas we've come up with for the high end cards, but we just do fewer pixels in parallel thus using fewer transistors. Our lower end cards are also fairly power effience even though this article didn't mention it (almost like want people to assume our low end cards use 100W just like our high end cards do). Unless another company spends that kind of money I doubt they'll compete. I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely.
I think the graphics industry is becoming less and less likely to have a major revolution (i.e. to something other than triangle based rendering); which would make it much easier for a new player to get into the market. Graphics for the PC with all its legacy software is becoming more like the irreplaceable x86 platform everyday. If we do change to something completely different it will probably come to a console first, but the longer we go on optimizing algorithms and hardware for these triangle based systems the more unlikely such a revolution will come.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design, but Intel and AMD have spent so much time/money optimizing it that nobody can seem to come up with a new general purpose CPU that is better. I think the same thing is happening with graphics. The weird coincidence is that both of these fields have 2 major players...
You do need interfaces into the other threads, but if you ran physics one frame ahead and let everything else have a frame of lag it seems like you could achive a fairly efficent design. As I said it's not as easy as a single threaded application, but it's not rocket science either. You're point about test driven development is very informative though. If that is the current software model that game developers use they will need to rethink how they design software to make this work. That may be the one of the biggest hurdles.
Carmack's other wish-list item was that some attention be paid to the problems with handling small batches of data on today's GPUs. He said the graphics companies' typical answers to these problems, large batches and instancing, don't make for great games.
John Carmack's past pleas for graphics hardware changes have led to a number of developments, including the incorporation of floating-point color formats into DirectX 9-class graphics chips. We'll have to watch and see how the graphics companies address these two problems over the next couple of years.
These are topics that the whole graphics industry acknowledges. While he is wise to focus on these as core issues, I'm not sure if I would say that the industry responded to his plea when these things get addressed.
One other thing that I'm a little confused by is why game developers always seem to think multithreading games is going to be nearly impossible to take advantage of in the near term. I admit it won't be a piece of cake and there will be evil bugs, but I don't see it as this big mystery. It will be more work, but it seems with some thought it can be handled fairly nicely on first generation games of next gen consoles. If I were to tackle the problem I would not break up the rendering into separate threads since this is just going to be trouble, but I would reduce rendering to truely only do the rendering which some developers seem to get confused. I would make one or more physics threads, one or more AI threads, a sound thread, a rendering thread, a resource managment thread, and perhaps a culling thread which assisted the VPU with geometry occlusion if the CPU is ahead of the VPU. I'd also put in a semaphore queue mechanism so some of these could get a frame or two ahead without syncing.
That said I'm not a game developer so perhaps I'm just missing something. If that's the case please enlighten me.
I saw the source for Quake 3 long ago since I work for an IHV. I think the biggest benefit it will have over its predecessors is that it is much cleaner and easier to understand/modify (at least from my brief examination it seemed this way to me). It should be very straight forward to add in VBOs which numerous licensees have done. It will be a little more work to cleanly add fragment programs, but still not bad. Again licensees have already done this proving it's doable. Adding in stencil shadows really shouldn't be too much work. I'm sure adding FBO wouldn't be much work either, but depending on the effects you want to use this for they could take some effort. While I'm not as well versed in physics I imagine someone should be able to expand the physics engine of Q3 to the now popular rigid based per triangle collisions.
At this point for tons less work than writing a game engine from scratch you'd have a very nice modern engine for whatever you want as long as you release the source with it.
Thank you id Software.
I recently filed for a patent through my company. It wasn't an overly complex invention and I thought I described it very well with a one page email. By the time the lawyers where done with it that one page had turned into 45 pages of text that I hardly understand. There is something wrong with the system when the inventer has a difficult time understanding the invention that is being submitted to the patent office. After seeing how much the company lawyers obfuscated the facts I'm not surprised that the patent office sometimes lets bogus patents through.
I thought some of his ideas on the future were interesting, but mostly agree with the people here that say he isn't qualified to make these predictions. What I enjoyed most about his article was the history of the internet and some of the editorial he threw in during these sections. I'd say the article was worth reading just for that.
What I dislike most about slashdot is how the majority of posts on this sort of article are criticisms, and this isn't constructive criticism. Perhaps instead of making me wade through your text you could just type it up locally and then delete it so you get it off your chest, but don't bog down the internet. God if the internet ever becomes self aware it's going to be one cynical bastard.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming they have found something here, at some point you need to accept that one in a bazillion flights is going to crash because of interference and let me play my Nintendo DS on the plane. We already accept that a lot more than one in a bazillion crash because of mechanical failure.
Let's say I'm willing to pay $10 to play my DS, I'm willing to wager those $10 spend on extra maintenance will prevent more accidents than the fact that I'm playing my DS.
This reminds me of the 6th grader who wins the science fair with a working quantum computer. His father, a quantum physics, assured everyone his son did it all by himself.
I agree with you. I don't care who wins now, but I would like to point out that without competition between these two standards neither one would have been as good as it is now. While most people are complaining that we have two standards for a year or two until one wins, I'm happy to live with that since it gave us a better cheaper product. Competition is good.
They have created a formula that allows gravity to change continuously over various distance scales and, most importantly, fits the data for observations of galaxies. To fit galaxy data equally well in the rival Dark Matter paradigm would be as challenging as balancing a ball on a needle, which motivated the two astronomers to look at an alternative gravity idea.
:)
Difficult? Sounds like they needed to find the slope between two points to me
Why go to the bookstore when they could just google for it?
I just set a book under the corner of my keyboard tried some quick gaming on my desk with the mouse under my keyboard like their picture showed. For gaming it was actually fairly comfortable as long as you use the awsd left hand setup like many do.
Now we just have to wait and see if this is vapor ware. The picture of it looked like CG to me so maybe this is also just vaporware.
Wife: Where did you park honey?
Husband: Um, I think over there some where. Can you check your thermometer so we know what color the car is today?
I find it amusing how nearly everyone only focuses on the places where limiting your speed might cause an accident. I wonder why this discussion on slashdot is such a one sided debate? Probably be nobody wants one of these devices in our own car because we like to speed. However ignoring the other side of the argument does not strengthen your debate (why hasn't Bush realized this yet...).
Although I don't have any statistics handy, I suspect that having such a device in a car would make it safer to drive, and I am sure if everyone had them driving would be safer overall. Do I support or want these devices in my car? No way, but I can't blame organizations whose duty it is to make the roads safer for looking into these sorts of tools.
I've talked to some of my friends who would are not part of the /. crowd. None of them had any idea that Sony cds have a security flaw that can affect their computers. One of them actually had the rootkit on their computer from when they put their CD into iTunes.
So while Mr. Sherman may praise Sony for doing such a much more than software companies I think Sony needs to do even more. A higher percentage of people using software expect to need to download updates for their computer than percentage of people using CDs. Then there is the whole debate going on in court of whether Sony distributed illegal software...
I can remember when people said cable tv channels would never have advertising because you have to pay for those. Then came the advertising in the movie theater. Even TiVo is now forcing extra advertising on some people. Could this lead to forced advertising on Windows even for paying customers?
I am a big fan of having a standard coding style. By this I do mean having developers follow a fairly strict set of rules on comment style, where spaces belong, spaces vs tabs, indentation rules, naming conventions, ect. There are many different ways you can do each one of these points, but the important thing isn't which way you choose, but that your code is consistent. That said I would apply these rules only to new projects and leave the old projects as they are. Cleaning up active projects makes diffing for differences in files nearly impossible.
Let me try...
Our news crew watched first hand a real world David vs. Goliath battle today. In a spectacular display of heroism a lone little firefighter took on a might Oak in order to rescue a helpless kitten from its treacherous branches.
Obviously, it's somewhat unclear that the majority of China's workforce would be able to afford such a console - the average wage of an urban worker in China in 2004 was 9,422 yuan ($1,164), and a rural worker made just 2,936 yuan ($363) on average.
I'm pretty sure Microsoft would be happy to have just 1% of a market place with well over a billion people. Now if they could somehow get up to 5% they'd have sold more xbox 360s than Sony has sold PS2s so far.
Two words: Nuclear Winter
To a first order approximation this seems like a simultaneous release to me. When comparing this to how long Nintendo and Sony consoles and handhelds usually take to get released around the world this seems to be pretty quick to me. Waiting 3 weeks is much better than waiting 9 months. I'm curious if this will force Nintendo and Sony to try and release their next gen consoles in a more timely manner.
I wanted to try this game but Nintendogs was sold out at all the local stores I tried. I was told that they don't expect any more until the end of September. I easly found a major online retailer that had it in stock and ordered it from them.
The article said both companies did try to come to a settlement. That means Google tried to pay them what they thought was a fair price for the infringement, but the company wanted more. It is the courts job to settle disputes like this.
If a company pays out to everyone who asks so they don't "tarnish" their name they probably won't be in business very long. I'm not saying Google is being exploited here. I'm just saying it's a possibility.
I'm wondering how and to who this list is distributed? Hopefully it isn't possible for a businesses/political parties/charities to use this list to get phone numbers and people to call. But since it was originally meant as a list of people not to call I can foresee where such safety mechanisms where not put in place.
Nice summary.
I knew that the L1 icache on the P4 was a trace cache, but I didn't ever think about it being pre-translated micro-ops. Makes sense, but it's still one of those neat ideas I need to store away until a variation is useful for something I'm working on.
Your last statement isn't quite correct. It's true web reviewers don't get excited about low and mid range cards, but OEMs buy way more of these cards than they buy of the ultra high end cards.
I work for one of the major two major players in this market so I am probably a little biased.
The way I read this is yet another small player wants to run with the big boys. What makes this one different? Well they admit up front that they can't compete in the high end so they will target the low end. Is this going to make a difference? I highly doubt it. I predict a flop.
I'm not trying to be too harsh. I'm just stating it like I see it. Personally I'd like to see another player in this market, but I doubt it will ever happen unless someone like Intel decides to make high end graphics cards. Both ATI and NVIDIA spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D to make their high end cards and all that R&D is applicable to the lower end discrete cards. The lower end cards now days use most of the great ideas we've come up with for the high end cards, but we just do fewer pixels in parallel thus using fewer transistors. Our lower end cards are also fairly power effience even though this article didn't mention it (almost like want people to assume our low end cards use 100W just like our high end cards do). Unless another company spends that kind of money I doubt they'll compete. I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely.
I think the graphics industry is becoming less and less likely to have a major revolution (i.e. to something other than triangle based rendering); which would make it much easier for a new player to get into the market. Graphics for the PC with all its legacy software is becoming more like the irreplaceable x86 platform everyday. If we do change to something completely different it will probably come to a console first, but the longer we go on optimizing algorithms and hardware for these triangle based systems the more unlikely such a revolution will come.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design, but Intel and AMD have spent so much time/money optimizing it that nobody can seem to come up with a new general purpose CPU that is better. I think the same thing is happening with graphics. The weird coincidence is that both of these fields have 2 major players...
You do need interfaces into the other threads, but if you ran physics one frame ahead and let everything else have a frame of lag it seems like you could achive a fairly efficent design. As I said it's not as easy as a single threaded application, but it's not rocket science either. You're point about test driven development is very informative though. If that is the current software model that game developers use they will need to rethink how they design software to make this work. That may be the one of the biggest hurdles.
Carmack's other wish-list item was that some attention be paid to the problems with handling small batches of data on today's GPUs. He said the graphics companies' typical answers to these problems, large batches and instancing, don't make for great games.
John Carmack's past pleas for graphics hardware changes have led to a number of developments, including the incorporation of floating-point color formats into DirectX 9-class graphics chips. We'll have to watch and see how the graphics companies address these two problems over the next couple of years.
These are topics that the whole graphics industry acknowledges. While he is wise to focus on these as core issues, I'm not sure if I would say that the industry responded to his plea when these things get addressed.
One other thing that I'm a little confused by is why game developers always seem to think multithreading games is going to be nearly impossible to take advantage of in the near term. I admit it won't be a piece of cake and there will be evil bugs, but I don't see it as this big mystery. It will be more work, but it seems with some thought it can be handled fairly nicely on first generation games of next gen consoles. If I were to tackle the problem I would not break up the rendering into separate threads since this is just going to be trouble, but I would reduce rendering to truely only do the rendering which some developers seem to get confused. I would make one or more physics threads, one or more AI threads, a sound thread, a rendering thread, a resource managment thread, and perhaps a culling thread which assisted the VPU with geometry occlusion if the CPU is ahead of the VPU. I'd also put in a semaphore queue mechanism so some of these could get a frame or two ahead without syncing.
That said I'm not a game developer so perhaps I'm just missing something. If that's the case please enlighten me.
I saw the source for Quake 3 long ago since I work for an IHV. I think the biggest benefit it will have over its predecessors is that it is much cleaner and easier to understand/modify (at least from my brief examination it seemed this way to me). It should be very straight forward to add in VBOs which numerous licensees have done. It will be a little more work to cleanly add fragment programs, but still not bad. Again licensees have already done this proving it's doable. Adding in stencil shadows really shouldn't be too much work. I'm sure adding FBO wouldn't be much work either, but depending on the effects you want to use this for they could take some effort. While I'm not as well versed in physics I imagine someone should be able to expand the physics engine of Q3 to the now popular rigid based per triangle collisions.
At this point for tons less work than writing a game engine from scratch you'd have a very nice modern engine for whatever you want as long as you release the source with it.
Thank you id Software.
I recently filed for a patent through my company. It wasn't an overly complex invention and I thought I described it very well with a one page email. By the time the lawyers where done with it that one page had turned into 45 pages of text that I hardly understand. There is something wrong with the system when the inventer has a difficult time understanding the invention that is being submitted to the patent office. After seeing how much the company lawyers obfuscated the facts I'm not surprised that the patent office sometimes lets bogus patents through.
What I dislike most about slashdot is how the majority of posts on this sort of article are criticisms, and this isn't constructive criticism. Perhaps instead of making me wade through your text you could just type it up locally and then delete it so you get it off your chest, but don't bog down the internet. God if the internet ever becomes self aware it's going to be one cynical bastard.