I'd posit that the Wii U sacrificed a significant amount of hardware in their console for the sake of that fancy gamepad. Even with this new console generation's modest hardware barely being able to render at HD resolutions, the Wii U is still a generation behind. That's not necessarily a criticism, mind you... it's a choice that you have to make about the realities of pricing and hardware specs. Nintendo obviously isn't trying to compete in the high-specs console market, and that's fine. They choose to innovate in other ways.
Valve has to make the same choices regarding price and hardware tradeoffs. Keep in mind that it might not only be about price - it could be that the touchscreen wasn't living up to their expectations in terms of performance. As such, why not go with a tried and true (and cheaper) alternative. After all, the big three have kept their analog sticks and D-pads all this time. There's surely a reason for this other than history or momentum.
A while back I caught a local story about a company making tsunami survival pods that are being sold in Japan now. After that disaster, I guess it doesn't seem like such a far-fetched thing to be prepared for one of these if possible. It would be nice if the price could come down to the point that ordinary people could actually afford them. Unfortunately, there's just no way to run far enough with so little warning like they had back then.
Here's hoping the people affected by this tragedy are starting to put their lives back together. I can't do much more than wish them well, unfortunately.
For phones and tablets, since the device's RAM is fixed and "disc space" doesn't make much sense, the generic term "memory" for long term storage is often applied and definitely makes sense. I'd still say that the term "memory" is fairly synonymous with RAM on PCs at the moment, but with smart devices on the rise and the inevitable decline of PC use among the general populace, it's probably trending in the direction you've indicated, and I'll have to concede your point that my dad is now correct in his choice of terms.:-)
The whole point of my post was that your dad did was not actually incorrect to call a hard drive memory.
I got your point just fine. While hard drive space IS technically long term memory of course, when most people hear "I just upgraded my computer memory", they assume you're talking about RAM, not a bigger hard drive. My Dad is not computer literate enough to understand that there's a difference between the two, and so uses them interchangeably.
Arguing against common colloquial usage of common terms is a fruitless exercise. It's sort of like insisting that only white or grey hats deserve the moniker "hackers", and everyone else is supposed to be called "crackers", or other such nonsense. It's just not gonna happen, and refusing to concede against the tide of common language usage seems a bit pointless to me.
Feel free to disagree, but we'll just have to agree to disagree beyond this point.
I would expect that they're either keying off certain words, or that they're going off phonology (the sounds that are used in a language). It might be a good follow-up study to figure out what method they use to make this distinction (TFA does not say, and the paper is paywalled).
I also wonder how fine a distinction between languages they can make. How close are the Kamba and Maasai languages? If they're relatively distant (like, say, English and Maasai), how do they deal with closer languages (like English and German, or even Spanish and Portuguese)? Are they able to distinguish accents?
Probably the same distinction all sorts of co-habitating animals of different species make when distinguishing between, say, the chattering of harmless monkeys or jungle birds versus the growl of a predatory animal. It makes sense to me, since it seems like the ability to distinguish between animal languages (or even different types of sounds within the same species language) would be a valuable evolutionary trait.
I'd be surprised if they could distinguish fine accents. If you gauge your own ability, you can typically tell when people are speaking different *major* languages, but not between regional differences of the same language, for instance. Or, very closely-related languages are also hard to distinguish for most people. I'd be surprised if elephants were able to distinguish any better than us.
The hard drive *is* memory. It's non-volatile memory (as opposed to volatile memory, like RAM). It's also a hard disk (as opposed to floppy disks). It's also magnetic storage (as opposed to optical, etc). It's also electro-mechanical storage (as opposed to solid-state).
It actually bugs me more that RAM is referred to as "memory" which is and should be a very generic term.
If anything the harddisk is probably a better candidate for the term "memory" than RAM is. A harddisk is what ultimately must store the data permanently and recall it. RAM exists to make certain frequently used data quicker to access, and it "forgets" when the computer is powered off. Granted this is basically equivalent to short-term memory, but I think long-term memory is more what people think of when they think of the generic term "memory".
Thank you for demonstrating exactly why I choose not be pedantic and correct him. It would get me nowhere, and simply annoy my dad.;-)
For my dad, the hard drive is "memory". It bugs me when I hear that, but I'm not going to be pedantic and try to correct him either. I figure he's doing pretty good with computers for a 75 year old, and I can interpret what he means.
Strange how people treat cars so differently. Going onto the road with no understanding of how to operate a vehicle or what the rules of the road are would be seen as unacceptable, but if you do something similar (though I think less extreme) with a computer, it's just normal.
Computers require a significant amount of training in order to use them, plus whatever sort of domain-specific knowledge is required for the business at hand. That's never going to change, and it's fine, because it's the cost for the increase efficiency, similar to the increased efficiency of the automobile. Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of "insider" knowledge required in order to use it safely. This is NOT true of the automobile, which only really requires "user-level" knowledge. For instance, I need to know absolutely nothing about how my automatic transmission works in order to use my car correctly. All I need to know is a) rules of the road, b) how to operate a vehicle in general (since they're largely standardized), and c) take it in regularly to have experts maintain it. That's it.
Try explaining to a user why certain documents can or can't be safely opened from an e-mail attachment. Try explaining why they can't trust the computer when it tells them the e-mail is from a specific person that they know and should be able to trust. They might even know enough not to launch executables, and they'd still be wrong. You simply can't do it without delving into computer minutia they should NEVER HAVE TO KNOW (which you might argue were "basic facts", were the systems built correctly and securely. That's all I'm saying - that we as developers need to take responsibility for making things easier and safer for users, the same as been happening for cars over the last century. Think about how more user-friendly cars are now than they used to be. Compare that to the almost impossible standards we require for password management in order to stay safe online (long passwords with lots of impossible to remember characters, different for every site, oh, and don't write them down anywhere). Blaming users for their lack of understanding may be cathartic, but is ultimately unhelpful and impractical.
Maybe you haven't worked directly with non-expert computer users before in a professional setting. People in the business world have a lot of things to occupy their attention already, such as getting their own work done. The entire point of using computers is to increase productivity - period. If people have to sink too much effort into becoming domain experts, or if too much risk is involved in using them, then there's zero point in actually using them as they're currently designed.
None of which explains why it needs executable code and data mapped into the same memory space.
Miles uses a proprietary DLL loader of some sort. I don't know the precise details, but I believe this lets them re-use their Windows DLLs for decoding and filtering on the mac and linux platforms without having to rewrite a bunch of their optimized assembly routines. I bet it's this DLL loader which is probably triggering the security warning. That's just an educated guess, as nothing else really makes sense.
Should a user have to be a computer expert in order to actually use a computer?
They don't need to be experts; they just need to not be absolutely retarded. You learn to drive (maybe) before you get your license. Learning a few basic facts before you go off and do a bunch of stupid shit with a computer is something everyone should be able to do, though I don't think there should be a license.
Modern computers essentially have the equivalent of a big red light switch placed out in the open which, if flipped, may accidentally burn your office down. No one would find that acceptable design anywhere outside the computer world. If a user accidentally double-clicks an attachment, it can bring down a corporate network. I don't consider that acceptable or sustainable, and I don't think that someone double-clicking an attachment is retarded, because that's a FEATURE that's been added. Why the hell can't we make it safe to double-click and view an attachment? That's OUR fault, not theirs!
This lady knew enough not to re-use passwords among different services and sites. Short of using a third-party password management system, and without the inherent understanding that e-mail isn't secure (which service providers don't exactly communicate openly), e-mailing password lists doesn't seem retarded to me. It sounds like someone trying their best to stay secure within a very complex environment they don't completely understand, and probably never will.
Computer-literate folks like us tend to set the bar too high without realizing how difficult we're making things for others who would just like to use computers to get work done, and not have to spend have their time just in training how not to get hacked. Calling non-experts "retarded" is not going to help anything.
It's more to do with game development culture than windows. Game developers are traditionally inclined to use every complicated hack or undocumented api for minuscule performance gains, or just to feel clever. They consider games to be a separate kind of software with its own set of rules requiring different development and packaging practices than any other software. In practice those rules amount to being a cowboy coder and feeling good about it. I think they subconsciously their work 'just a game' and thus not serious software which justifies any amount of NIH and hacks in their eyes.
There's an element of truth there (there are sloppy and terrible game programmers to be sure, just like in any other field), but if you're not a developer who writes extremely complex real-time software, it's probably hard for you to appreciate how a lot of "best practices" in software development are just not pratical for game developers. Performance HAS to be a significant priority. Yes, this often involves ugly "hacks", but it's not done to be a cowboy coder or to feel good about ourselves. It's because, on any given frame of the game, we're not allowed to exceed 16ms of execution at a time, ever, even when simulating and rendering a huge virtual world in real-time. All on an OS that is not always real-time friendly. Most developers don't have to work under those extreme constraints.
For instance, when asking about custom memory allocators on stack exchange, you might get told "what in the world do you need to do that for?" Well, game developers need to do it all the time (most game engines keep a very tight reign on memory), even moreso in the console world. Standard advice to so create lots of small, modular, reusable classes that do only one thing. Oops, that also tends to fragment the hell out of memory if you use lots of small, differently sized objects, or might involve taking too many locks in threaded code. Again, game developers have to do things a bit differently, organizing code and data to optimize performance instead of clarity.
You call it "miniscule performance gain", but I once spent an entire day figuring out how to free up 50K so our PS2 game would actually fit into memory. Sometimes that miniscule gain is the different between a working game and a broken one. And taken in aggregate, a "miniscule performance gain" multiplied hundreds of places throughout the code makes the difference between a tight, well-optimized system and a sluggish game engine.
If true, this is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
It's also complete bullshit. RAD wrote their own decoder using hand-optimized C code and inline assembly. We actually pulled it out of the source and linked it into our game directly since we didn't want to link all those external DLLs, as it would have complicated patching (the game was an MMO).
Why does a decoder need execheap? Is there some sort of optimization that causes the processing and data to be not separated? It sounds like an invitation for all kind of exploits (which is presumably why it is banned by execheap).
Also, is there a reason to use a specific MP3 decoder? Is it because of licensing, or are there technical reasons?
Videogame audio programmer here. There's a good reason to use Miles. RAD game tools is the ONLY developer to get a blanket MP3 use license. If you purchase Miles, you're completely covered on royalties through the cost of the license. It's a great deal for game developers. Later, the MP3 patent owners wised up, and every other middleware audio requires per-game licensing to use MP3.
I currently have over a dozen passwords I have to keep memorized for accessing various systems (each with their own unique login IDs and passwords), many of which are changed every 3-6 weeks and do stringent checks on previously used passwords. That's just for work, and not including the dozen or so username/passwords I use online in my personal time. Seriously, it's time to rethink passwords because if you don't like that I write all this shit down in a spreadsheet that I print out and stuff in a binder, well, it beats the other guys post-its on their monitors.
I agree, passwords are a broken paradigm without some third party support. You might want to look into Lastpass (they also have a corporate project now too), or Keepass if you don't want to rely on a third-party. I'm hoping that SQRL takes off, as it seems like the best password replacement system on the horizon right now. It's simple, elegant, and doesn't require trusting anyone else (including websites you log into) with your secret identify.
BTW, if you use a secure password, I can't think of a security-related reason to change passwords like that. What's the point of changing passwords so often, if I might ask?
Ok, we're going to snicker at someone e-mailing password lists, because we all probably understand that e-mail, by default, is sent in the clear, and is therefore not secure. It's hard for tech geeks to properly empathize with "normals" who just want to get some work done, or surf around on the net and not worry about getting their computer taken over by some malware.
Honestly, though, it's hard to blame normal users for this. Should a user have to be a computer expert in order to actually use a computer? Some might argue yes, but that doesn't seem too realistic. The fault lies with software developers who blindly rushed features out the door without giving proper thought to the security implications. Microsoft had a really bad habit of this until they made security a significant corporate priority - it's time for Apple to catch up now, as proven by the recent "goto fail" fiasco. The focus has since shifted to softer targets, first Javascript and browser exploits, and then third party plugins as those closed up, such as Adobe products or browser-based Java exploits, and the good time for hackers (no, I'm not going to call them "crackers") is still rolling on.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is: Probably most casual users should actually move away from fully-powered computers and move toward safer, more locked-down systems like tablets and phones (like they have been). For people not doing serious work or creating actual content, these are more than capable, and are certain safer systems in general. Alternatively, getting set up as a limited account in an operating system with a smaller attack surface like Linux would be fine too. BTW, I don't buy the notion that Linux is inherently safer than Windows (granted, that definitely used to be true) - it's a combination of fewer threats (because it's a less rich target) and configuration options - Windows is also very safe as a limited user account). We've seen plenty of serious security holes in very popular FOSS software, even recently. But people buy computers because they actually want to do computer-like things with them, including running popular software. Limited accounts / locked-down systems are not always feasible.
One thing I'd love to see is the death of standard login-password mechanisms. It's too much of a burden for both a normal user to both create and remember a secure password, and for the website to keep that valuable user information secret. We've demonstrated again and again and again that eventually a crack will be found and the info will leak. That's why I'm hoping that something like SQRL will eventually see widespread adoption. It's biggest strength is that it doesn't require trusting ANY second or third party with secrets of any sort in order to keep your identify secure (granted, associated data can still be compromised, but your identify can't be stolen at least). It's a very promising system, but we'll see if it catches on - it's sort of a long shot. But for the time being, something like LastPass is the next best thing. Someone needs to tell the author of this article about it so she can stop e-mailing herself password lists.
I loved Vista, but I also beefed up my machine before it launched with an extra 4GB's of RAM and a better video card (brought me up to 8GB's).
Mostly the people who hated Vista had 4GB's or less of RAM and shitty video cards, toss in some off brand sound card with no driver support and no Direct Sound (MS removed it from Direct X for some odd reason. I have heard rumors it was some sort of feud with Creative?)
At launch with Vista you needed 8GB's to fully enjoy it, and if you did have 8GB's it was a buttery smooth OS. One of the features I do miss when I moved on to 7 was the animated desktop wall papers (I have heard you can "hack" them back into 7 but I don't haven't tried it.)
I'm sure Vista was not too bad if you had a pretty beefy machine to run it, but there's no denying it was poorly optimized. Disk activity caused significant stalls, and it was not well optimized to run well on multi-core machines, as there were a lot of contention problems in the kernel which prevented good multi-core performance. And like you said, it was a memory and GPU intensive OS as well. Keep in mind that was a pretty ridiculous amount of RAM at the time for any sort of business machine. I'm a game developer, and I'm pretty sure my machine at the time wasn't even up to par with those requirements (probably 4GB, if I had to guess). I didn't have a shitty video card - it was the constant hitching due to the poorly optimized kernel locking up on disk access that drove me nuts (which the constant on-by-default disk indexing didn't help), as well as the infuriating design inconsistencies in Windows Explorer, which MS has subsequently improved.
As far as the audio goes, MS simply removed audio hardware acceleration in Vista, as it makes much more sense to perform all audio mixing in software nowadays (the CPU impact is negligible), and hardware support would likely have complicated their new audio mixing stack. The reality of the market is that few people have actual accelerated audio nowadays, so it was a smart move for them. Buying an expensive audio card nowadays doesn't make sense, as all you're paying for is a better digital-to-analog converter, nothing more - other than a bunch of third-party crapware.
That will be a while though as they will have to pry Windows 7 from my cold dead hands.
It's pretty sad, I do love me some Windows and I have been using it for a long long time since the 3.11 days, I even liked Windows ME. But I just can't love Windows 8 and it's abomination of a UI. I can't count how many times I have installed Classic Shell in Windows 8 machines because the owners couldn't stand Metro.
I am sure it is fantastic on a tablet though? I have an Android tablet so yeah.... I am already in the process of ditching Windows:( If my PC didn't function as my home server and general PC work, I would probably be trying to figure out some way to go Android PC right now.
Yeah, I could have written this. I've heard arguments that "oh, you W8 haters just don't like change". True, people are generally resistant to change, but I don't think I necessarily reject all change out of hand. I liked the Vista-style Aero visual improvements (never cared for XP's look), although the OS performed poorly and had lots of small problems. I did like the improvements to the task bar in Windows 7 as well. I thought the Ribbon interface in Office was a necessary and fairly bold step in UI innovation. Power users tended to dislike it because it was such a radical change, which is understandable, but I think the products are more accessible and much easier to learn now.
But Windows 8 feels so utterly broken to me. I don't even hate the idea of metro apps - I think they could have been pretty cool if they had been more seamless integrated with the more classic desktop (leaving the full screen mode for the devices where it makes sense). There was no need to foist a full screen app launcher on the desktop user, especially since it has such a hard time figuring out what even the relevant "apps" to launch are (pulling in uninstall icons, documentation links, dozens of small and rarely used utilities, etc), and the usefulness of an actual hierarchy to keep things organized and tidy was completely smashed in favor of a paradigm designed to favor the simplistic requirements of tablets and smartphones.
So, no, I'm not resistant to change. I'm just resistant to change for the worse. And yeah, I'm going to be sticking with Windows 7 for while unless MS figures out a way to make some pretty significant improvements for the desktop user.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but it's probably good advice to physically block your web cam's vision if you want to guarantee privacy nowadays. Oh, and if you actually use that webcam and transmit those images or video to someone over the net, expect big brother to be watching as well.
It used to sound like tin-foil hat nonsense, but the government is making fools of those of us who didn't think they'd go to those lengths. In this Snowden-era surveilance state, anyone who dismisses privacy issues out of hand looks like the bigger fool.
As far as I've seen, most developers in the game industry use Maya. A few that I've seen used Max years ago, but that seems to have been in rapid decline as well. Honestly, it makes sense to focus development efforts on your top products.
Definitely a plus. Seeing some sort of coding project through to completion is important, at least in my opinion, and the more the better. There are simply things you can't really learn any other way except through experience. If you've completed projects, then you know what I'm talking about - all those little details that can potentially swamp an elegant theoretical design with all-too-inconvenient reality.
DX12. Microsoft is the sole definer. Implemented for only ONE Operating Environment, according to the defining body. May be implemented for two OSs at Microsofts leisure.
May or may not be upward or downward compatible with itself or anything else.
So PLEASE. STOP calling DX ANYTHING a standard. You may call it a library or an API.
PHIGS is the standard. OpenGL has pretty much supplanted PHIGS but is still not a standard. OpenGL is also an API but with broader support.
Microsoft works with hardware vendors to release software that's compatible with the current capabilities of that hardware. Said hardware is also branded to be DX 'some-version' compliant. May or may not be upward or downward compatible? Nonsense, it will be compatible with a large set of the more recent hardware (or hardware ready to be reased), or the vendors would have told MS to go jump in Lake Washington. And so far, every version of DX has been forward compatible with all existing MS consumer operating systems, which is a pretty decent track record to bet on for compatibility. You can argue semantics about whether it's a "standard" or not (I'd lean 'not' if we're being pedantic), but ultimately it will be broadly recognized by the gaming public as a defacto 'standard' at the very least.
Microsoft does plenty of stupid things (see Windows 8), but let's not start making up imaginary issues.
These sorts of announcements have the effect of freezing developers and keeping them from moving to superior technology.
Which developers are you talking about? I'd wager that the biggest money makers and users of these APIs (AAA game developers) already have good enough relationships with Microsoft, Sony, etc where under NDA they are able to offer feedback on existing and proposed API/platform directions and allow themselves to be in sync with where it is going.
Correct. It always depended a bit on the company, but the engine teams graphics programmers generally talked both with MS as well as hardware vendors about upcoming technologies on a semi-regular basis. A number of years ago a programming team I was on visited MS to give some feedback on upcoming features (I think it was maybe for DX8? So yeah, a while ago). We'd also get the latest and greatest reference hardware to test with too, which was always fun. Now that I've gone indie I have to buy my own hardware like everyone else again...:-(
If you're a developer out there, please, don't let Microsoft get away with this.
Developer here. Get away with what? No one is going to put their game on hold waiting for a new version of DirectX. You're barely starting to see DirectX 11 required games finally emerge, now that XP and the 360 are rapidly diminishing platforms of importance, and you're worried about MS creating a new version of DX? It's been four years since DX11 was released, you know.
Besides, with it's relatively new policy of tying new versions of DX to OS upgrades, you won't have to worry about games supporting DX 12 exclusively until relatively few people are left on Windows 7 (assuming they don't back port it). The only way you'd see a rush to adoption of DX12 is if:
* A reasonable percentage of modern graphics cards already meet the minimal DX 12 requirements * DX 12 was made available on Vista and better OSes * DX 12 became the XBone's preferred API
If not, we're going to see exactly what we saw with DX 10 and 11, which was a slow trickle of adoption as older technologies are slowly phased out. What really hurt was that both XP and the 360 ended up hanging around a lot longer than folks expected. This time around, it could very well be Window 7 that ends up creating a long-term lock-in at DX 11.0 as a minimum requirement.
XBOne can't use DX12. Reason being, the hardware in XBOne is not DX12 compatible. I can't see how a GPU manufactured atleast 9 months earlier than DX12 release will ever be compatible with DX12.
Firstly, it's not necessarily the case that DX12 will require brand new hardware features. It will probably, in fact, simply require some minimal baseline set of hardware in order to be "compliant", and it's highly likely that relatively recent mid-to-high-end cards will support that minimal set. Don't forget that MS doesn't create these DirectX standards in isolation. They're naturally working very closely with the three major videocard manufacturers to ensure proper hardware and driver support, or the whole thing is completely pointless.
Secondly, Microsoft created both XBone and DX12, so it's likely the teams have talked to each other and ensured future compatibility. It seems highly unlikely that MS's flagship console would be missing critical features required for DX12. That would essentially cripple it out of the gate, stalling mass adoption for years like what happened with DX10/11 because of Windows XP and the Xbox 360 minimum requirements. It would be a monumentally stupid and shortsighted thing for them to do.
Then again, we have Windows 8, so I guess anything is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
What does this say about the Wii U GamePad?
I'd posit that the Wii U sacrificed a significant amount of hardware in their console for the sake of that fancy gamepad. Even with this new console generation's modest hardware barely being able to render at HD resolutions, the Wii U is still a generation behind. That's not necessarily a criticism, mind you... it's a choice that you have to make about the realities of pricing and hardware specs. Nintendo obviously isn't trying to compete in the high-specs console market, and that's fine. They choose to innovate in other ways.
Valve has to make the same choices regarding price and hardware tradeoffs. Keep in mind that it might not only be about price - it could be that the touchscreen wasn't living up to their expectations in terms of performance. As such, why not go with a tried and true (and cheaper) alternative. After all, the big three have kept their analog sticks and D-pads all this time. There's surely a reason for this other than history or momentum.
A while back I caught a local story about a company making tsunami survival pods that are being sold in Japan now. After that disaster, I guess it doesn't seem like such a far-fetched thing to be prepared for one of these if possible. It would be nice if the price could come down to the point that ordinary people could actually afford them. Unfortunately, there's just no way to run far enough with so little warning like they had back then.
http://mynorthwest.com/11/2297725/Mukilteos-tsunami-survival-capsules-are-selling-in-Japan
Here's hoping the people affected by this tragedy are starting to put their lives back together. I can't do much more than wish them well, unfortunately.
For phones and tablets, since the device's RAM is fixed and "disc space" doesn't make much sense, the generic term "memory" for long term storage is often applied and definitely makes sense. I'd still say that the term "memory" is fairly synonymous with RAM on PCs at the moment, but with smart devices on the rise and the inevitable decline of PC use among the general populace, it's probably trending in the direction you've indicated, and I'll have to concede your point that my dad is now correct in his choice of terms. :-)
The whole point of my post was that your dad did was not actually incorrect to call a hard drive memory.
I got your point just fine. While hard drive space IS technically long term memory of course, when most people hear "I just upgraded my computer memory", they assume you're talking about RAM, not a bigger hard drive. My Dad is not computer literate enough to understand that there's a difference between the two, and so uses them interchangeably.
Arguing against common colloquial usage of common terms is a fruitless exercise. It's sort of like insisting that only white or grey hats deserve the moniker "hackers", and everyone else is supposed to be called "crackers", or other such nonsense. It's just not gonna happen, and refusing to concede against the tide of common language usage seems a bit pointless to me.
Feel free to disagree, but we'll just have to agree to disagree beyond this point.
I would expect that they're either keying off certain words, or that they're going off phonology (the sounds that are used in a language). It might be a good follow-up study to figure out what method they use to make this distinction (TFA does not say, and the paper is paywalled).
I also wonder how fine a distinction between languages they can make. How close are the Kamba and Maasai languages? If they're relatively distant (like, say, English and Maasai), how do they deal with closer languages (like English and German, or even Spanish and Portuguese)? Are they able to distinguish accents?
Probably the same distinction all sorts of co-habitating animals of different species make when distinguishing between, say, the chattering of harmless monkeys or jungle birds versus the growl of a predatory animal. It makes sense to me, since it seems like the ability to distinguish between animal languages (or even different types of sounds within the same species language) would be a valuable evolutionary trait.
I'd be surprised if they could distinguish fine accents. If you gauge your own ability, you can typically tell when people are speaking different *major* languages, but not between regional differences of the same language, for instance. Or, very closely-related languages are also hard to distinguish for most people. I'd be surprised if elephants were able to distinguish any better than us.
The hard drive *is* memory. It's non-volatile memory (as opposed to volatile memory, like RAM). It's also a hard disk (as opposed to floppy disks). It's also magnetic storage (as opposed to optical, etc). It's also electro-mechanical storage (as opposed to solid-state).
It actually bugs me more that RAM is referred to as "memory" which is and should be a very generic term.
If anything the harddisk is probably a better candidate for the term "memory" than RAM is. A harddisk is what ultimately must store the data permanently and recall it. RAM exists to make certain frequently used data quicker to access, and it "forgets" when the computer is powered off. Granted this is basically equivalent to short-term memory, but I think long-term memory is more what people think of when they think of the generic term "memory".
Thank you for demonstrating exactly why I choose not be pedantic and correct him. It would get me nowhere, and simply annoy my dad. ;-)
The hard drive *IS* known as gigabytes
For my dad, the hard drive is "memory". It bugs me when I hear that, but I'm not going to be pedantic and try to correct him either. I figure he's doing pretty good with computers for a 75 year old, and I can interpret what he means.
Strange how people treat cars so differently. Going onto the road with no understanding of how to operate a vehicle or what the rules of the road are would be seen as unacceptable, but if you do something similar (though I think less extreme) with a computer, it's just normal.
Computers require a significant amount of training in order to use them, plus whatever sort of domain-specific knowledge is required for the business at hand. That's never going to change, and it's fine, because it's the cost for the increase efficiency, similar to the increased efficiency of the automobile. Unfortunately, there is a significant amount of "insider" knowledge required in order to use it safely. This is NOT true of the automobile, which only really requires "user-level" knowledge. For instance, I need to know absolutely nothing about how my automatic transmission works in order to use my car correctly. All I need to know is a) rules of the road, b) how to operate a vehicle in general (since they're largely standardized), and c) take it in regularly to have experts maintain it. That's it.
Try explaining to a user why certain documents can or can't be safely opened from an e-mail attachment. Try explaining why they can't trust the computer when it tells them the e-mail is from a specific person that they know and should be able to trust. They might even know enough not to launch executables, and they'd still be wrong. You simply can't do it without delving into computer minutia they should NEVER HAVE TO KNOW (which you might argue were "basic facts", were the systems built correctly and securely. That's all I'm saying - that we as developers need to take responsibility for making things easier and safer for users, the same as been happening for cars over the last century. Think about how more user-friendly cars are now than they used to be. Compare that to the almost impossible standards we require for password management in order to stay safe online (long passwords with lots of impossible to remember characters, different for every site, oh, and don't write them down anywhere). Blaming users for their lack of understanding may be cathartic, but is ultimately unhelpful and impractical.
Maybe you haven't worked directly with non-expert computer users before in a professional setting. People in the business world have a lot of things to occupy their attention already, such as getting their own work done. The entire point of using computers is to increase productivity - period. If people have to sink too much effort into becoming domain experts, or if too much risk is involved in using them, then there's zero point in actually using them as they're currently designed.
None of which explains why it needs executable code and data mapped into the same memory space.
Miles uses a proprietary DLL loader of some sort. I don't know the precise details, but I believe this lets them re-use their Windows DLLs for decoding and filtering on the mac and linux platforms without having to rewrite a bunch of their optimized assembly routines. I bet it's this DLL loader which is probably triggering the security warning. That's just an educated guess, as nothing else really makes sense.
Should a user have to be a computer expert in order to actually use a computer?
They don't need to be experts; they just need to not be absolutely retarded. You learn to drive (maybe) before you get your license. Learning a few basic facts before you go off and do a bunch of stupid shit with a computer is something everyone should be able to do, though I don't think there should be a license.
Modern computers essentially have the equivalent of a big red light switch placed out in the open which, if flipped, may accidentally burn your office down. No one would find that acceptable design anywhere outside the computer world. If a user accidentally double-clicks an attachment, it can bring down a corporate network. I don't consider that acceptable or sustainable, and I don't think that someone double-clicking an attachment is retarded, because that's a FEATURE that's been added. Why the hell can't we make it safe to double-click and view an attachment? That's OUR fault, not theirs!
This lady knew enough not to re-use passwords among different services and sites. Short of using a third-party password management system, and without the inherent understanding that e-mail isn't secure (which service providers don't exactly communicate openly), e-mailing password lists doesn't seem retarded to me. It sounds like someone trying their best to stay secure within a very complex environment they don't completely understand, and probably never will.
Computer-literate folks like us tend to set the bar too high without realizing how difficult we're making things for others who would just like to use computers to get work done, and not have to spend have their time just in training how not to get hacked. Calling non-experts "retarded" is not going to help anything.
It's more to do with game development culture than windows. Game developers are traditionally inclined to use every complicated hack or undocumented api for minuscule performance gains, or just to feel clever. They consider games to be a separate kind of software with its own set of rules requiring different development and packaging practices than any other software. In practice those rules amount to being a cowboy coder and feeling good about it. I think they subconsciously their work 'just a game' and thus not serious software which justifies any amount of NIH and hacks in their eyes.
There's an element of truth there (there are sloppy and terrible game programmers to be sure, just like in any other field), but if you're not a developer who writes extremely complex real-time software, it's probably hard for you to appreciate how a lot of "best practices" in software development are just not pratical for game developers. Performance HAS to be a significant priority. Yes, this often involves ugly "hacks", but it's not done to be a cowboy coder or to feel good about ourselves. It's because, on any given frame of the game, we're not allowed to exceed 16ms of execution at a time, ever, even when simulating and rendering a huge virtual world in real-time. All on an OS that is not always real-time friendly. Most developers don't have to work under those extreme constraints.
For instance, when asking about custom memory allocators on stack exchange, you might get told "what in the world do you need to do that for?" Well, game developers need to do it all the time (most game engines keep a very tight reign on memory), even moreso in the console world. Standard advice to so create lots of small, modular, reusable classes that do only one thing. Oops, that also tends to fragment the hell out of memory if you use lots of small, differently sized objects, or might involve taking too many locks in threaded code. Again, game developers have to do things a bit differently, organizing code and data to optimize performance instead of clarity.
You call it "miniscule performance gain", but I once spent an entire day figuring out how to free up 50K so our PS2 game would actually fit into memory. Sometimes that miniscule gain is the different between a working game and a broken one. And taken in aggregate, a "miniscule performance gain" multiplied hundreds of places throughout the code makes the difference between a tight, well-optimized system and a sluggish game engine.
If true, this is the most idiotic thing I've ever heard.
It's also complete bullshit. RAD wrote their own decoder using hand-optimized C code and inline assembly. We actually pulled it out of the source and linked it into our game directly since we didn't want to link all those external DLLs, as it would have complicated patching (the game was an MMO).
Why does a decoder need execheap? Is there some sort of optimization that causes the processing and data to be not separated? It sounds like an invitation for all kind of exploits (which is presumably why it is banned by execheap).
Also, is there a reason to use a specific MP3 decoder? Is it because of licensing, or are there technical reasons?
Videogame audio programmer here. There's a good reason to use Miles. RAD game tools is the ONLY developer to get a blanket MP3 use license. If you purchase Miles, you're completely covered on royalties through the cost of the license. It's a great deal for game developers. Later, the MP3 patent owners wised up, and every other middleware audio requires per-game licensing to use MP3.
I currently have over a dozen passwords I have to keep memorized for accessing various systems (each with their own unique login IDs and passwords), many of which are changed every 3-6 weeks and do stringent checks on previously used passwords. That's just for work, and not including the dozen or so username/passwords I use online in my personal time. Seriously, it's time to rethink passwords because if you don't like that I write all this shit down in a spreadsheet that I print out and stuff in a binder, well, it beats the other guys post-its on their monitors.
I agree, passwords are a broken paradigm without some third party support. You might want to look into Lastpass (they also have a corporate project now too), or Keepass if you don't want to rely on a third-party. I'm hoping that SQRL takes off, as it seems like the best password replacement system on the horizon right now. It's simple, elegant, and doesn't require trusting anyone else (including websites you log into) with your secret identify.
BTW, if you use a secure password, I can't think of a security-related reason to change passwords like that. What's the point of changing passwords so often, if I might ask?
Ok, we're going to snicker at someone e-mailing password lists, because we all probably understand that e-mail, by default, is sent in the clear, and is therefore not secure. It's hard for tech geeks to properly empathize with "normals" who just want to get some work done, or surf around on the net and not worry about getting their computer taken over by some malware.
Honestly, though, it's hard to blame normal users for this. Should a user have to be a computer expert in order to actually use a computer? Some might argue yes, but that doesn't seem too realistic. The fault lies with software developers who blindly rushed features out the door without giving proper thought to the security implications. Microsoft had a really bad habit of this until they made security a significant corporate priority - it's time for Apple to catch up now, as proven by the recent "goto fail" fiasco. The focus has since shifted to softer targets, first Javascript and browser exploits, and then third party plugins as those closed up, such as Adobe products or browser-based Java exploits, and the good time for hackers (no, I'm not going to call them "crackers") is still rolling on.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is: Probably most casual users should actually move away from fully-powered computers and move toward safer, more locked-down systems like tablets and phones (like they have been). For people not doing serious work or creating actual content, these are more than capable, and are certain safer systems in general. Alternatively, getting set up as a limited account in an operating system with a smaller attack surface like Linux would be fine too. BTW, I don't buy the notion that Linux is inherently safer than Windows (granted, that definitely used to be true) - it's a combination of fewer threats (because it's a less rich target) and configuration options - Windows is also very safe as a limited user account). We've seen plenty of serious security holes in very popular FOSS software, even recently. But people buy computers because they actually want to do computer-like things with them, including running popular software. Limited accounts / locked-down systems are not always feasible.
One thing I'd love to see is the death of standard login-password mechanisms. It's too much of a burden for both a normal user to both create and remember a secure password, and for the website to keep that valuable user information secret. We've demonstrated again and again and again that eventually a crack will be found and the info will leak. That's why I'm hoping that something like SQRL will eventually see widespread adoption. It's biggest strength is that it doesn't require trusting ANY second or third party with secrets of any sort in order to keep your identify secure (granted, associated data can still be compromised, but your identify can't be stolen at least). It's a very promising system, but we'll see if it catches on - it's sort of a long shot. But for the time being, something like LastPass is the next best thing. Someone needs to tell the author of this article about it so she can stop e-mailing herself password lists.
I loved Vista, but I also beefed up my machine before it launched with an extra 4GB's of RAM and a better video card (brought me up to 8GB's).
Mostly the people who hated Vista had 4GB's or less of RAM and shitty video cards, toss in some off brand sound card with no driver support and no Direct Sound (MS removed it from Direct X for some odd reason. I have heard rumors it was some sort of feud with Creative?)
At launch with Vista you needed 8GB's to fully enjoy it, and if you did have 8GB's it was a buttery smooth OS. One of the features I do miss when I moved on to 7 was the animated desktop wall papers (I have heard you can "hack" them back into 7 but I don't haven't tried it.)
I'm sure Vista was not too bad if you had a pretty beefy machine to run it, but there's no denying it was poorly optimized. Disk activity caused significant stalls, and it was not well optimized to run well on multi-core machines, as there were a lot of contention problems in the kernel which prevented good multi-core performance. And like you said, it was a memory and GPU intensive OS as well. Keep in mind that was a pretty ridiculous amount of RAM at the time for any sort of business machine. I'm a game developer, and I'm pretty sure my machine at the time wasn't even up to par with those requirements (probably 4GB, if I had to guess). I didn't have a shitty video card - it was the constant hitching due to the poorly optimized kernel locking up on disk access that drove me nuts (which the constant on-by-default disk indexing didn't help), as well as the infuriating design inconsistencies in Windows Explorer, which MS has subsequently improved.
As far as the audio goes, MS simply removed audio hardware acceleration in Vista, as it makes much more sense to perform all audio mixing in software nowadays (the CPU impact is negligible), and hardware support would likely have complicated their new audio mixing stack. The reality of the market is that few people have actual accelerated audio nowadays, so it was a smart move for them. Buying an expensive audio card nowadays doesn't make sense, as all you're paying for is a better digital-to-analog converter, nothing more - other than a bunch of third-party crapware.
Having used both, I can't wait for Max to die in a fire...
I can't comment about usability myself, being a programmer, but I've heard similar sentiments from a lot of my artist friends.
Honestly if Metro doesn't go away, I will... lol
Away to Linux or Android...
That will be a while though as they will have to pry Windows 7 from my cold dead hands.
It's pretty sad, I do love me some Windows and I have been using it for a long long time since the 3.11 days, I even liked Windows ME. But I just can't love Windows 8 and it's abomination of a UI. I can't count how many times I have installed Classic Shell in Windows 8 machines because the owners couldn't stand Metro.
http://www.classicshell.net/
I am sure it is fantastic on a tablet though? I have an Android tablet so yeah.... I am already in the process of ditching Windows :( If my PC didn't function as my home server and general PC work, I would probably be trying to figure out some way to go Android PC right now.
Yeah, I could have written this. I've heard arguments that "oh, you W8 haters just don't like change". True, people are generally resistant to change, but I don't think I necessarily reject all change out of hand. I liked the Vista-style Aero visual improvements (never cared for XP's look), although the OS performed poorly and had lots of small problems. I did like the improvements to the task bar in Windows 7 as well. I thought the Ribbon interface in Office was a necessary and fairly bold step in UI innovation. Power users tended to dislike it because it was such a radical change, which is understandable, but I think the products are more accessible and much easier to learn now.
But Windows 8 feels so utterly broken to me. I don't even hate the idea of metro apps - I think they could have been pretty cool if they had been more seamless integrated with the more classic desktop (leaving the full screen mode for the devices where it makes sense). There was no need to foist a full screen app launcher on the desktop user, especially since it has such a hard time figuring out what even the relevant "apps" to launch are (pulling in uninstall icons, documentation links, dozens of small and rarely used utilities, etc), and the usefulness of an actual hierarchy to keep things organized and tidy was completely smashed in favor of a paradigm designed to favor the simplistic requirements of tablets and smartphones.
So, no, I'm not resistant to change. I'm just resistant to change for the worse. And yeah, I'm going to be sticking with Windows 7 for while unless MS figures out a way to make some pretty significant improvements for the desktop user.
...and don't use a laptop with a web cam.
I know you're trying to be snarky, but it's probably good advice to physically block your web cam's vision if you want to guarantee privacy nowadays. Oh, and if you actually use that webcam and transmit those images or video to someone over the net, expect big brother to be watching as well.
It used to sound like tin-foil hat nonsense, but the government is making fools of those of us who didn't think they'd go to those lengths. In this Snowden-era surveilance state, anyone who dismisses privacy issues out of hand looks like the bigger fool.
As far as I've seen, most developers in the game industry use Maya. A few that I've seen used Max years ago, but that seems to have been in rapid decline as well. Honestly, it makes sense to focus development efforts on your top products.
Would my completed playable games and video of a work in progress be a plus or a minus?
Definitely a plus. Seeing some sort of coding project through to completion is important, at least in my opinion, and the more the better. There are simply things you can't really learn any other way except through experience. If you've completed projects, then you know what I'm talking about - all those little details that can potentially swamp an elegant theoretical design with all-too-inconvenient reality.
DX12. Microsoft is the sole definer. Implemented for only ONE Operating Environment, according to the defining body. May be implemented for two OSs at Microsofts leisure.
May or may not be upward or downward compatible with itself or anything else.
So PLEASE. STOP calling DX ANYTHING a standard. You may call it a library or an API.
PHIGS is the standard. OpenGL has pretty much supplanted PHIGS but is still not a standard. OpenGL is also an API but with broader support.
Microsoft works with hardware vendors to release software that's compatible with the current capabilities of that hardware. Said hardware is also branded to be DX 'some-version' compliant. May or may not be upward or downward compatible? Nonsense, it will be compatible with a large set of the more recent hardware (or hardware ready to be reased), or the vendors would have told MS to go jump in Lake Washington. And so far, every version of DX has been forward compatible with all existing MS consumer operating systems, which is a pretty decent track record to bet on for compatibility. You can argue semantics about whether it's a "standard" or not (I'd lean 'not' if we're being pedantic), but ultimately it will be broadly recognized by the gaming public as a defacto 'standard' at the very least.
Microsoft does plenty of stupid things (see Windows 8), but let's not start making up imaginary issues.
Which developers are you talking about? I'd wager that the biggest money makers and users of these APIs (AAA game developers) already have good enough relationships with Microsoft, Sony, etc where under NDA they are able to offer feedback on existing and proposed API/platform directions and allow themselves to be in sync with where it is going.
Correct. It always depended a bit on the company, but the engine teams graphics programmers generally talked both with MS as well as hardware vendors about upcoming technologies on a semi-regular basis. A number of years ago a programming team I was on visited MS to give some feedback on upcoming features (I think it was maybe for DX8? So yeah, a while ago). We'd also get the latest and greatest reference hardware to test with too, which was always fun. Now that I've gone indie I have to buy my own hardware like everyone else again... :-(
If you're a developer out there, please, don't let Microsoft get away with this.
Developer here. Get away with what? No one is going to put their game on hold waiting for a new version of DirectX. You're barely starting to see DirectX 11 required games finally emerge, now that XP and the 360 are rapidly diminishing platforms of importance, and you're worried about MS creating a new version of DX? It's been four years since DX11 was released, you know.
Besides, with it's relatively new policy of tying new versions of DX to OS upgrades, you won't have to worry about games supporting DX 12 exclusively until relatively few people are left on Windows 7 (assuming they don't back port it). The only way you'd see a rush to adoption of DX12 is if:
* A reasonable percentage of modern graphics cards already meet the minimal DX 12 requirements
* DX 12 was made available on Vista and better OSes
* DX 12 became the XBone's preferred API
If not, we're going to see exactly what we saw with DX 10 and 11, which was a slow trickle of adoption as older technologies are slowly phased out. What really hurt was that both XP and the 360 ended up hanging around a lot longer than folks expected. This time around, it could very well be Window 7 that ends up creating a long-term lock-in at DX 11.0 as a minimum requirement.
XBOne can't use DX12. Reason being, the hardware in XBOne is not DX12 compatible. I can't see how a GPU manufactured atleast 9 months earlier than DX12 release will ever be compatible with DX12.
Firstly, it's not necessarily the case that DX12 will require brand new hardware features. It will probably, in fact, simply require some minimal baseline set of hardware in order to be "compliant", and it's highly likely that relatively recent mid-to-high-end cards will support that minimal set. Don't forget that MS doesn't create these DirectX standards in isolation. They're naturally working very closely with the three major videocard manufacturers to ensure proper hardware and driver support, or the whole thing is completely pointless.
Secondly, Microsoft created both XBone and DX12, so it's likely the teams have talked to each other and ensured future compatibility. It seems highly unlikely that MS's flagship console would be missing critical features required for DX12. That would essentially cripple it out of the gate, stalling mass adoption for years like what happened with DX10/11 because of Windows XP and the Xbox 360 minimum requirements. It would be a monumentally stupid and shortsighted thing for them to do.
Then again, we have Windows 8, so I guess anything is possible.