I've debunked it several times now, and got bored of doing so, and instead just posted an article to my company website about it (because my company does iPhone development, and therefore would be directly affected were this true).
If you're too lazy to click through, the Cliff's Notes version is:
There is no change to the contract clause. They made that bit up entirely.
Apple do not take back 100% of the purchase price as the article claimed - and I have the spreadsheets that prove it.
...they offer the Bleep Music Store. All files are high-quality (VBR with the settings cranked up) MP3s, unprotected -- they *gasp* treat you like a customer instead of a serf. Also you can preview tracks -- not just 30 seconds of a track, but all of it (albeit in 30 second chunks, so you can't just rip the whole track to a.wav file before buying). Also there's Magnatune (tagline: "We are not evil";-} ). Warp have the advantage of 'famous names' though, like Aphex Twin or LFO.
They bandy the DMCA about a lot, but it's not an official DMCA 'takedown' notice. If it were, it'd be a whole lot more interesting: A 'takedown' notice requires you to make a declaration under penalty of perjury.
Whatever the terms of the ATI/Valve deal, it's irrelevant: As a videogame developer (not for Valve -- not even on the same continent as them -- and with no such deal with anyone) I can assure you that NVidia's chips have serious problems.
Here's Valve's problem: They make moddable games. That's at the core of their business. They didn't just make HalfLife as a game (although they did that, and very well) -- they made it as a platform upon which anyone was free to develop their own FPS games: CounterStrike being the most famous, but there are many others, such as Natural Selection or Day of Defeat.
Likewise, they are not just making HalfLife 2, but a platform upon which mods will be made. But why is this relevant to the videocard debate? Here's where we get back to the drivers.
The drivers -- the mythological r50 drivers that noone's actually gotten their hands on yet -- might well provide a speed boost to HL2 as it stands. Maybe. But if they do, it is because they have hand-tuned those drivers for HL2. See Mr Burke's quote:
[...] we had been working closely with Valve to ensure that Release 50 (Rel. 50) provides the best experience possible on NVIDIA hardware.
What he omits is, the best experience possible for the specific subset of vidoecard functionality currently present in HL2 at this time.
A little background for those of you who haven't kept up on recent videocard technology: Modern videocards have Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders. These are essentially short programs written in assembler (and now a variant on C) that the driver compiles and executes on the videocard, not the CPU (taking load off of it) that customise rendering in various ways. Vertex shaders typically perform lighting, animation or mesh deformation effects, while pixel shaders provide surface material effects, such as water distortion or bump mapping.
ATI's cards appear to be able to handle any pixel shader program you throw at them. Whether this is because the cards are just that fast and general they can cope with it, or whether the compiler in their driver cunningly optimises any GPU program you throw at it (the same way a C compiler optimises CPU code, by reordering instructions to avoid stalls, factoring out loop invariants, etc) we don't know. Frankly, we don't care: The important thing is, we write code, and it works.
NVidia's cards do not work this way. NVidia's cards are fast, but only if you hand-tune your assembler to precisely match their architecture. Except we don't know enough about their rules to do this (proprietary NVidia technology blah blah).
When Valve have written shaders, found them to be fast on ATI cards and slow on NVidia's cards, NVidia have released new drivers and, lo... it's fast on NVidia's cards. NVidia go "hey, uh, our bad... driver bug... fixed now...". But make even a tiny, trivial change to the shader, and bam: it's slow again. With a little more experimentation along these lines, it's easy to come to the conclusion that there was no bug, there is no fix, NVidia simply have a lookup table of shaders they 'recognise', and when one of those comes along, they replace it with one they wrote themselves, hand-tuned for their card.
There's a problem with this, of course. For a start, if you're not as big as Valve, NVidia aren't going to set aside an engineer to go around optimising shaders for your game or release new drivers. Secondly, if you make any changes you're back to square one and need to resubmit your shader to them and get it fixed up. Thirdly, if like Valve you care about modders, you're not going to be happy with this "solution" -- because even once your game is complete and on store shelves, and NVidia have stopped making new driver releases to 'fix' it, modders can make new shaders. And suddenly find their game runs like ass. You think NVidia are going to go chasing after modders? Bwahaha.
I suspect this is why Valve were careful about the benchmarks they let be
Anyone considered that the recent rash of virii(1) is designed to lead a push towards greater regulation by the government?
Yes, yes, just for fun, think about it:
SoBig.F appears to be the first virus specifically designed to affect public opinion.
SoBig.F harvests email addresses from web pages that the infected machine has visited recently (via the browser cache). So the higher the probability your email address is in someone's disk cache, the more SoBig spam you get. Lots of people have email addresses on their web pages,
but only a few people read them regularly enough that there's a strong chance of it being in the disk cache.
Whose email addresses are in LOTS of people's caches? Journalists, bloggers, software authors, maintainers of major websites, ISP tech
support -- in other words, the people with the power to change the way email works, and the people with the voice to suggest that the way
email works be changed, and have lots of people hear them. If you have articles on CNN, if you run major mailing lists like interesting-people, or run sites like slashdot, you're going to get swamped.
In effect,
SoBig.F is optimised to annoy the people who are in the best position to complain about it.
(not a strong Darwinian survival trait...)
So while lots of people have been inconvenienced by this thing, it's not actually a big deal for most people: Here at work, we got a few thousand over the weekend it was at its most virulent. Nasty, but survivable, and that was for the whole company. But individual journos and bloggers were
getting megabytes per minute of SoBig.F and have been writing up a storm about it, understandably.
So it looks bigger than it is, and causes a disproportionate amount of angry column inches. According to interviews with internet backbone admins, the traffic was "negligable", worldwide. I'm sure for some of you it doesn't feel that way, but then perhaps that was the point...
Note also that it's version F, the 6th generation in a series of carefully planned test iterations. It "times out", like a lot of commercial beta software, ready for the next update (which is predicted for mid-September... what happened to "When It's Done"?;-P ). This thing seems to have a plan behind it...
And judging from the news reports, it seems to be working!;-)
So who has a vested interest in getting people to make email and usenet less anonymous, more accountable...? And maybe doesn't mind scaring
people away from porn newsgroups while they're at it? And knows they have an uphill struggle, and could use a nice big mess to point to, to
persuade people to their POV? A noisy, ugly one that doesn't actually cause much damage(2), but plenty of annoyance, and gets people good and
emotional?
Hmm...
(1) well, I have SoBig in mind here, rather than any others
(2) sure, the press can quote a big dollar value, but that's distributed worldwide amongst many companies who individually bear a much smaller load, and anyway, I mentally take at least one zero of the end of any estimate of corporate damages quoted in a newspaper article...;-)
Look, this is Pac-Man... for many of us, the emblem of our spiritual heritage... has anyone contacted Namco and asked them what they think? After all, they own Pac-Man, but didn't send the letter -- this "Entertainment Software Association" did. How do Namco feel about this American organisation generating bad-will amongst their core market? It's no use us complaining to ESA about their abysmal behaviour, but if Namco were to exert pressure downwards from the top, maybe we could at least get them to insert a human between webspider and spambot. I doubt they want to alienate us...
Actually, we game developers care. We want to make use of new features of graphics cards to increase performance and/or visual quality. But also, we want our games to run on all (relatively-recent) cards, without having to write complex hacks to work around the bugs of each one.
It's no use benchmarking on the latest and greatest games -- because, as developers, we try and avoid releasing games that run horribly (slowly or with obvious bugs) on certain cards. Sometimes we can persuade the manufacturers to fix their bugs, but the timescales can be tight and soemtimes they're quite happy to not fix the bugs, especially if they know their competition runs the codepath you're looking at faster than them, and we get forced to drop the feature. So instead of games pushing up hardware quality, games are held back by shoddy hardware or (more usually) drivers. You're just benchmarking on what the manufacturers already know works. Zzzz. Futuremark's job is to stress-test in advance what's coming up.
And even if Futuremark does things that aren't always what you'd do in games, they are trying to push the cards to the limits to see if they do what the manufacturers claim, or whether they only achieve their claimed performance "in controlled tests".
So some of us talk to the Futuremark guys and say things like, "We're looking into using [technology X] in our next game, but the drivers on cards [A and B] are screwed, works on [C] though. Could you put a section into 3DMark 2004 that uses [X]?". Then, when their card performs miserably at [X] (even though the card's hardware can handle it -- it's just that they've been slack on the drivers) they get shamed into improving their quality at those features. A bit like WHQL for games.
Once the driver bugs for the features are fixed, we can write code that uses them.
Except NVidia decided to stop playing nice when it turned out the latest tests make their cards look quite poor, and noticeably slower than ATI's. So they took their ball and went home (dropped out of Futuremark's beta programme). This is why they didn't know their cheating would be discovered.
And of course, this problem is compounded by people like yourself, Mr Sonic, who see big numbers in Quake benchmarks (you do realise 3D card mfgs "optimise" those too, right?), pop wood, and rush off to buy the latest hovercraft no matter if it's not really "all that".
Incidentally, ATI's optimisations were exactly that: optimisations. Essentially, they were reordering instructions in a shader -- exactly like a compiler optimising instruction order for Intel or AMD processors' particular quirks. The meaning and, more importantly, on-screen output of the code was not altered.
Whereas it's clear to see from the screenshots in the original expose article, that NVidia were not optimising, but actually not running code, causing the onscreen output to look wrong. As developers, we don't want gamers returning our games to the shops "because it goes wrong when you do X". Nor do we want to sweat blood trying to invent ways to avoid their driver bugs.
Oh... someone else who cares about 3DMarks? OEMs. When it comes around to picking what cards to put inside big-name off-the-shelf PCs or, eventually, which chips to surface-mount on the all-in-one motherboard, they're looking for price-performance, and 3DMark is a part of that equation.
I pay £20/month for cable here the UK. BT is being extortionate. As usual.
TBQH, I think the article is correct in saying that commercial WiFi hotspots are unlikely to stick around for the long haul. A few specialist "captive audience" spots might work out, and in the short term the novelty factor might support coffee-shop spots for a while; but long term they're screwed when 3G rolls out. Right now though, WiFi is still at the top of my shopping list...
WiFi itself will carry on. The fast roll-out for corporate networking, the convenience for home networking, and the opportunities for community networks all count for a lot with me. Much more so than (yuk) Bluetooth. I think 802.11a/b formats have a rich future ahead of them.
Me, I want to play with 802.15.4 aka ZigBee. Sure, it doesn't have the ethernet-sized bandwidth but it's really cheap, low-power, and thinking about the possibilities of swarms of tiny ZigBee-enabled devices makes by brain hum. In a good way.:}
...I just didn't like 18 as much as Play. So whereas I bought Play on CD, I didn't by 18. Funny that. And no, I don't have mpegs of any of the tracks either.
Interestingly, over here we have DAB, a terrestrial (not satellite) digital radio format based on MPEG 1 Layer 2, and it was on a local DAB station that I heard the album (and decided not to buy it) -- they played every track over the course of an hour or two (extra time for station breaks, adverts, and little snippets of interview with Moby to introduce each track). I find it odd that this kind of digital audio broadcast (of complete albums, no less) is "good" while internet digital audio broadcast is "bad" (to the RIAA & co).
Quite a few people on this thread have mentioned doing some kind of checksum or moderation system. Strangely though, noone seems to have mentioned Bitzi which does exactly this -- an open source, open content database of "bitprints" (dual hashes, one SHA1, the other tree-based so that you can check partial files) along with moderations.
The moderations don't comment on the content ("this song sucks") but rather on the accuracy and reliability and so on ("good quality" or "corrupt data" or "incomplete" or "claimed to be a music video but was actually an advert for a pr0n site" or, I guess, "first 20 seconds over and over").
It has quite a lot of potential, as a way of location (legitimate) data, as P2P clients integrate Bitzi (plus you can do a website lookup). So you can Bitzi lookup a distro (or the Bitzi Bitprint for the distro might be on the distro's home page) and then use that to locate it on P2P networks -- and be able to verify its integrity -- thus reducing the bandwidth hit on host sites. A bit like some of the moves towards "swarm distribution" but without requiring a specific client or server setup -- it piggybacks on existing P2P services like Gnutella.
Here's an example BitTicket:
linux-2.4.0.tar.bz2
Yup, there's plenty of emulators available to get started with and if you want to see stuff running on actual hardware, all you need is a multiboot cable (you can get them from Lik-Sang). Because the GBA allows multiplayer games to run with only one cartridge, it already has a protocol in place for transmitting programs from one GBA to another -- the MB cable simulates this from a PC, allowing you to upload your software to the GBA, which is pretty damn cool.
Later, you may wish to get a flash-cart writer which allows you to dump your software into flash RAM in a GBA-compatible cartridge, which gives you more space to work with and you can take it with you instead of being tethered to the PC... however you may want to watch that DMCA if you're in the USA as this may be classed as a 'circumvention device' (sigh).
Another interesting handheld console to check out is the GP32 (Note: site's mostly in Korean). I think it's been mentioned on/. before. Very similar layout to GBA, but where the GBA runs at ~16mhz, the GP32's ARM processor can have its clockspeed set by software up to 133mhz (though obviously this drains batteries faster). It doesn't have any custom graphics hardware, you just write 16-bit RGB colour values to a linear frame buffer, but even at the more-usual 60mhz clock speed, it runs Doom very nicely. Oh yes, and the screen is 320x240 as opposed to the GBA's 240x160.
Of course, it's not a Nintendo, so it's almost guaranteed to fail, as Ninty have that market pretty sewn up. Still, if you just want to write something for your own entertainment, the GP32's sweet.
Morpheus Preview Edition is basically just Gnucleus, which is a GPL'd Gnutella client for Windows. So you might as well just use Gnucleus -- it's got all the same features (plus some Morpheus PE doesn't appear to have yet -- I guess they must've forked off an earlier version).
Better still, Gnuclues doesn't have banner adverts, let alone (ick) popups.
I am a big fan of "voting with your wallet"; there are certain multinationals I've avoided buying products from for many years now.
The problem in this particular case is that, even if we get significant enough numbers boycotting them that their profits dip, they're not going to accept this. Either through denial ("how can they not like us?") or outright mendacity, they're simply going to turn around and lie through their teeth. They're going to say, "Look how much money piracy is costing us! We need a tax on blank media to make up for it!" -- as has been implemented in several countries already; and then you end up paying for what you didn't get.
Maybe we need some kind of web site where you can register your boycott, and perhaps even fill in how much you used to spend before the boycott, so the site can add it all up and see how much the companies are losing as a result of political action not piracy.
Pessimistically, I feel it probably wouldn't work but it'd be a gesture in the right direction.
It might not (directly) hinder free speech, but it will certainly hinder fair usage, including education and (thus indirectly affecting speech) quoting for the purposes of review or comment.
Take a look at this quote from the decision. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the precise legal implications. In fact, I'd quite happily have my mind set at rest about it -- because the way I'm reading it at the moment, I'm quite flabberghasted by what it says:
First, they contend that subsection 1201(c)(1), which provides that "[n]othing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title," can be read to allow the circumvention of encryption technology protecting copyrighted material when the material will be put to "fair uses" exempt from copyright liability.13 We disagree that subsection 1201(c)(1) permits such a reading. Instead, it clearly and simply clarifies that the DMCA targets the circumvention of digital walls guarding copyrighted material (and trafficking in circumvention tools), but does not concern itself with the use of those materials after circumvention has occurred. Subsection 1201(c)(1) ensures that the DMCA is not read to prohibit the "fair use" of information just because that information was obtained in a manner made illegal by the DMCA.
If I understand this correctly, it's saying "You're not allowed to access protected material by circumventing an access control mechanism; but if you do (but you mustn't because it's illegal) you would hypothetically be allowed your fair use rights."
Does the judge really think this is right or even the intention of Congress? Remember that access control is not limited to "only letting you use what you've paid for", it can be any arbitrary controls the copyright owner can find a technical way to enforce.
To draw a parallel: Imagine if polling stations were allowed to turn people away at the door based on any arbitrary prejudice they liked; "We're not letting you in to vote because you're [white / black / male / female / gay / straight / republican / democrat / libertarian / whatever]."
If this decision was applied to that situation, it would seem to be saying, "It's illegal for you to force your way into the polling station and vote. Should you do so, however, you'd be allowed to actually vote before we throw you in prison; since your right to vote is still available to you, this is perfectly fair and constitutional. Have a nice day."
Am I reading this right? Have I missed something? And am I the only one who thinks this is obscene?
"Be A Government Informer!
Betray Your Family And Friends!
Fabulous Prizes To Be Won!"
- poster seen in an episode of Red Dwarf
Of course, I remember when FAST (Federation Against Software Theft) first started up, and the back of computer games mags had adverts placed by them in the form of a comic, showing two kids grassing up their maths teacher simply because they didn't like him, telling FAST's hotline (number printed at bottom of comic) "he lets people copy software in his class". Doubleplusgood!
Except that it covers the sale of such devices, not just their manufacture; so yes, they could be made in Canada (although I'd recommend somewhere further afield; Canada is frequently not far-enough away to escape US law...) and shipped into the US, but they'd have to be smuggled in as contraband and sold on the black market.
Just what everyone wants, I'm sure: Demand remains high, supply is cut dramatically, prices soar, youths mug people or hold up liquor stores to raise the cash, all the jackals move in to the black-market cash-opportunity they see gathering, and pretty soon gangs are slaughtering each other on the streets over non-Compliant hard drives. Customs officials sieze 400 gigs of Class A disk space (est. street value: $500,000).
The Government then runs Public Service announcements: "PIRACY KILLS" "MP3: JUST SAY NO" "WINNERS DON'T USE NONCOMPLIANT HARDWARE DEVICES" "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS COPY MOVIES". They also offer tax rebates and other cash benefits to television shows and movies who include significantly pro-Digital Rights Management plotlines in their work.
In the summer movie, "Gone at 60kb/s", Nick Cage has to pirate an unprecedented number of other summer movies in one night in order to save his brother's life; in the more thoughtful "TCP/IP Traffic", Michael Douglas finds himself sucked into the seedy world of P2P after his teenage daughter is involved in a DVD-related incident, the story expertly interwoven with that of Open Source programmers working across the border, trying to stay true to their goals despite their lack of Compliance, trying to maintain their idealism in the face of a lead programmer who secretly is working for a reverse-engineering cartel.
New search-and-seizure laws are drafted to fight the War On Piracy, in order to Clean Up Our Streets And Save Our Children From Evil. All laptop computers are spot-checked at airports and potential employees are asked to undergo a hard-drive scan to ensure they are not "using".
Caffiene mints, copyleft t-shirts, and any item bearing a penguin logo are banned from COMDEX and any other gathering of software developers under Cracking House laws. These things are sure signs of illegal activity.
Far-fetched? Facetious? A little of both. But the general principles have been shown to hold true in the past, repeatedly.
Somebody mod Forkenhoppen's post up some more, it's the truth.
I'm a professional PC videogame developer. I used to use OpenGL, about 4 or 5 years ago: At that point, Direct3D was the clunky, awkward, slow, difficult thing that people have labelled it as elsewhere in this thread, and OpenGL was a lovely, simple, pure thing. And so I used OpenGL instead of Direct3D, and lots of other people did too. The most famous examples in gaming are QuakeGL/Quake2/Quake3 (Quake1 at retail was software-only).
But OpenGL stood still, and Direct3D moved on. Sure, it took then about 4 or 5 revisions (I think they were on D3D version 3 at the time, now they're on version 8.1, but there was no version 4*), screwed up quite a few things along the way, but they got there in the end. Over the years we've either used OpenGL or suffered the vagaries of Microsoft's repeatedly-changing API. But it's settled down now, matured, and become not only usable, but actually much much better than OpenGL. Sorry, but it's true.
Part of this reason might be "The Farenheit Misdirection" -- basically Microsoft said, "Yes, let's work together on a new API, neither DirectX nor OpenGL, called Farenheit, with the best parts of both, and it'll be great!". And SGI, it seemed, believed them, having not learnt the lesson from IBM and OS/2.
Course, you don't hear much about it now.:P
Another reason is the OpenGL review board, which (as I understand it from the outside only, perhaps someone else could fill in more detail and/or correct me) is not making much progress on new spec due to infighting between rival board manufacturers who obviously want the spec to match up closely with their hardware, and for preference, match up as badly as possible with their rival's hardware.
A few people have mentioned the X-Box thing. Certainly, I doubt anyone will use OpenGL on the X-Box, and any game with both X-Box and PC SKUs will use DirectX too, but I think that's a bridge which is only now being crossed; whereas OpenGL has slacked off for about 2 or 3 years now.
*which is a different Ask Slashdot: why is there no version 4 of so many things? No DX4, No Palm 4, no Voodoo 4, no Borland C++ Builder 4... all skipped straight to 5... go figure
If you're in the UK, or somewhere else that gets the UK version of the SciFi channel (no longer related to the US one) this film is being shown tonight at midnight.
No, there's some confusion here. The law discussed in that article (and in the one RMS wrote about last year, the same one a few other people have mentioned) is NOT the same as the one we are currently fighting.
That law dealt with regulating "e-commerce" and was, I gather, abandoned due to the complete negative response to it from both industry and pressure groups.
This law was originally (and still is, to an extent) about regulating Police Informants and how they should be treated. However, the Government took 90% of the rejected "e-commerce" bill and just pasted it into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, the one we are fighting today.
This "new" bill was only first revealed about a month ago, so any articles prior to the beginning of February are probably discussing the previous bill (in fact, one of several previous, abandoned bills).
It is, most likely, precisely because those previous bills were rejected, that they have "integrated" it (yes, in the Microsoft sense) with the regulations on Police Informants, and, placed it on a "fast-track" which means they are rushing it through parliament as quickly as possible with no period of consultation, and (from today) less than ten days for Members of Parliament to propose amendments. That is why this is so urgent.
But the point is, this law is the worst of both worlds.
Say you are a child molester. You just go, "Oh! whoops! I lost my key!" and the worst that happens is you go to jail for 2 years for a "soft" crime, and maybe even only 6 months. A lot better option than going down for 10 years for molesting a kid (which is going to be pretty hard time).
On the other hand, under this proposed law, the police can request your key even if you are not under suspicion of any criminal act. Maybe someone you know is. Or maybe it is just (and I am quoting from the Bill here) "likely to be of value for purposes connected with the exercise or performance by any public authority of any statutory power or statutory duty."
That's pretty damn overbroad. And then you could go to prison for 2 years simply for having lost your key. The law would also forbid you from telling someone else the police asked for it (for instance, to get help trying to recover the key from a crashed hard drive).
These are just a couple of the flaws. Go read the site, there are many, many more.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to please, please request that people using the fax gateway are polite and thoughtful in their messages. "Hahayousuck!" messages are NOT HELPFUL. This is a SERIOUS issue which genuinely threatens civil liberties in the UK in a chilling manner; please be constructive. We are not trying to piss off the Members of Parliament, we need their help to head off this law. I'm sure they don't want to be the victims of this law any more than we do; we just need to explain this to them (especially the finer technical points), politely.
At the risk of just being a "me too" I have to throw my 2p in here. I've got an Aureal card in this machine and my one at home and I'm very pleased with them both as a user and as a developer.
These days, as well as being the first to do "true" 3D positional audio (using HRTFs, not inter-aural delays), they also do WaveTracing, which noone else does.
This means that you can pass them a simplified set of world geometry (eg a collision mesh -- rough boxes around the more complex geometry sent to the video card) and assign those polygons properties such as sound absorbtion (think "tissue paper" vs "concrete block) and reflectivity ("sound booth" vs "metal"), and it will model that acoustic environment to provide the correct echoes, reverb effects, and so on.
Currently, other 3D cards don't do this, they either have no environmental support at all, or they can perform a sort of "canned" effect that's just blanket-applied. Think of the difference between depth-of-field focussing effects automatically calculated based on depth information and geometry, and just applying a pre-defined gaussian blur to an entire image in photoshop, and you'll get the difference.
You can also supply parameters such as atmospheric absorbtion, which gives you that "foggy day" damp quality (if you want it, of course). Oh yeah, and doppler shift on moving objects. And yet I get to deal with people who buy more expensive, less powerful cards because they're "made by Creative Labs so I know they're going to work with anything". Heh. It's not even true -- read the small print on a SoundBlaster Live box and it says "almost 100% compatible with..." -- I found that kinda shocking myself, surely they should be able to be 100% compatible with their own cards? Oh well.
1) they already support linkup cables (basically null modem cables) and next gen machines are slated to include 56k modems
2) my previous flatmate used to stay up all hours of the night playing Command & Conquer on his playstation, it's not as convenient with a pad as with a mouse, but it doesn't stop anyone, plus, nothing's preventing manufacturers from bringing out mice for consoles, and, tho they're not very popular, some are already available
3) will be downloadable via the modem or insertable memory cards 4) map designing can be fun, and isn't likely to be a feature of consoles any time soon, but nothing's to stop people using their PC to design a map then download it to the console to play. why have both? well cos if the latest 3d accelerator card costs more than a console which is more powerful, why not?:}
remember, the article isn't saying "PC's are dead" -- people aren't gonna be installing nintendos in offices to do their accounts on -- just that PC games sales are going to go down. here in the UK there are already 10x as many console games sold as PC games. we see the weekly charts come in and a console game might ship 100,000 units or more in it's first week while the PC games struggly in at around 8,000-10,000.
(disclaimer: i write games - for PC and PSX - for a living, but i don't speak for my employer)
I think the dividing line, where people get confused, is that what you don't own is the copyright on the music. That resides with the artist (hopefully... although depressingly it's often owned by music industry monoliths).
But by my understanding, once you buy the CD (or tape, record, minidisc...) you have paid them to permanently own a copy of that music, and as long as you don't violate that copyright (generally by trying to sell it on to others, which is the exclusive right of the copyright holder or their agents), it's yours to do with as you see fit.
At least, that's how I understand it. Reread the disclaimer.:}
Slashdot Mirror
...it's been reposted to more websites.
I've debunked it several times now, and got bored of doing so, and instead just posted an article to my company website about it (because my company does iPhone development, and therefore would be directly affected were this true).
If you're too lazy to click through, the Cliff's Notes version is:
...they offer the Bleep Music Store. All files are high-quality (VBR with the settings cranked up) MP3s, unprotected -- they *gasp* treat you like a customer instead of a serf. Also you can preview tracks -- not just 30 seconds of a track, but all of it (albeit in 30 second chunks, so you can't just rip the whole track to a .wav file before buying). Also there's Magnatune (tagline: "We are not evil" ;-} ). Warp have the advantage of 'famous names' though, like Aphex Twin or LFO.
They bandy the DMCA about a lot, but it's not an official DMCA 'takedown' notice. If it were, it'd be a whole lot more interesting: A 'takedown' notice requires you to make a declaration under penalty of perjury.
Here's Valve's problem: They make moddable games. That's at the core of their business. They didn't just make HalfLife as a game (although they did that, and very well) -- they made it as a platform upon which anyone was free to develop their own FPS games: CounterStrike being the most famous, but there are many others, such as Natural Selection or Day of Defeat.
Likewise, they are not just making HalfLife 2, but a platform upon which mods will be made. But why is this relevant to the videocard debate? Here's where we get back to the drivers.
The drivers -- the mythological r50 drivers that noone's actually gotten their hands on yet -- might well provide a speed boost to HL2 as it stands. Maybe. But if they do, it is because they have hand-tuned those drivers for HL2. See Mr Burke's quote:
What he omits is, the best experience possible for the specific subset of vidoecard functionality currently present in HL2 at this time. A little background for those of you who haven't kept up on recent videocard technology: Modern videocards have Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders. These are essentially short programs written in assembler (and now a variant on C) that the driver compiles and executes on the videocard, not the CPU (taking load off of it) that customise rendering in various ways. Vertex shaders typically perform lighting, animation or mesh deformation effects, while pixel shaders provide surface material effects, such as water distortion or bump mapping.
ATI's cards appear to be able to handle any pixel shader program you throw at them. Whether this is because the cards are just that fast and general they can cope with it, or whether the compiler in their driver cunningly optimises any GPU program you throw at it (the same way a C compiler optimises CPU code, by reordering instructions to avoid stalls, factoring out loop invariants, etc) we don't know. Frankly, we don't care: The important thing is, we write code, and it works.
NVidia's cards do not work this way. NVidia's cards are fast, but only if you hand-tune your assembler to precisely match their architecture. Except we don't know enough about their rules to do this (proprietary NVidia technology blah blah).
When Valve have written shaders, found them to be fast on ATI cards and slow on NVidia's cards, NVidia have released new drivers and, lo... it's fast on NVidia's cards. NVidia go "hey, uh, our bad... driver bug... fixed now...". But make even a tiny, trivial change to the shader, and bam: it's slow again. With a little more experimentation along these lines, it's easy to come to the conclusion that there was no bug, there is no fix, NVidia simply have a lookup table of shaders they 'recognise', and when one of those comes along, they replace it with one they wrote themselves, hand-tuned for their card.
There's a problem with this, of course. For a start, if you're not as big as Valve, NVidia aren't going to set aside an engineer to go around optimising shaders for your game or release new drivers. Secondly, if you make any changes you're back to square one and need to resubmit your shader to them and get it fixed up. Thirdly, if like Valve you care about modders, you're not going to be happy with this "solution" -- because even once your game is complete and on store shelves, and NVidia have stopped making new driver releases to 'fix' it, modders can make new shaders. And suddenly find their game runs like ass. You think NVidia are going to go chasing after modders? Bwahaha.
I suspect this is why Valve were careful about the benchmarks they let be
Yes, yes, just for fun, think about it:
SoBig.F appears to be the first virus specifically designed to affect public opinion.
SoBig.F harvests email addresses from web pages that the infected machine has visited recently (via the browser cache). So the higher the probability your email address is in someone's disk cache, the more SoBig spam you get. Lots of people have email addresses on their web pages, but only a few people read them regularly enough that there's a strong chance of it being in the disk cache.
Whose email addresses are in LOTS of people's caches? Journalists, bloggers, software authors, maintainers of major websites, ISP tech support -- in other words, the people with the power to change the way email works, and the people with the voice to suggest that the way email works be changed, and have lots of people hear them. If you have articles on CNN, if you run major mailing lists like interesting-people, or run sites like slashdot, you're going to get swamped.
In effect, SoBig.F is optimised to annoy the people who are in the best position to complain about it.
(not a strong Darwinian survival trait...)
So while lots of people have been inconvenienced by this thing, it's not actually a big deal for most people: Here at work, we got a few thousand over the weekend it was at its most virulent. Nasty, but survivable, and that was for the whole company. But individual journos and bloggers were getting megabytes per minute of SoBig.F and have been writing up a storm about it, understandably.
So it looks bigger than it is, and causes a disproportionate amount of angry column inches. According to interviews with internet backbone admins, the traffic was "negligable", worldwide. I'm sure for some of you it doesn't feel that way, but then perhaps that was the point...
Note also that it's version F, the 6th generation in a series of carefully planned test iterations. It "times out", like a lot of commercial beta software, ready for the next update (which is predicted for mid-September... what happened to "When It's Done"? ;-P ). This thing seems to have a plan behind it...
And judging from the news reports, it seems to be working! ;-)
So who has a vested interest in getting people to make email and usenet less anonymous, more accountable...? And maybe doesn't mind scaring people away from porn newsgroups while they're at it? And knows they have an uphill struggle, and could use a nice big mess to point to, to persuade people to their POV? A noisy, ugly one that doesn't actually cause much damage(2), but plenty of annoyance, and gets people good and emotional?
Hmm... (1) well, I have SoBig in mind here, rather than any others
(2) sure, the press can quote a big dollar value, but that's distributed worldwide amongst many companies who individually bear a much smaller load, and anyway, I mentally take at least one zero of the end of any estimate of corporate damages quoted in a newspaper article... ;-)
Look, this is Pac-Man... for many of us, the emblem of our spiritual heritage... has anyone contacted Namco and asked them what they think? After all, they own Pac-Man, but didn't send the letter -- this "Entertainment Software Association" did. How do Namco feel about this American organisation generating bad-will amongst their core market? It's no use us complaining to ESA about their abysmal behaviour, but if Namco were to exert pressure downwards from the top, maybe we could at least get them to insert a human between webspider and spambot. I doubt they want to alienate us...
Actually, we game developers care. We want to make use of new features of graphics cards to increase performance and/or visual quality. But also, we want our games to run on all (relatively-recent) cards, without having to write complex hacks to work around the bugs of each one.
It's no use benchmarking on the latest and greatest games -- because, as developers, we try and avoid releasing games that run horribly (slowly or with obvious bugs) on certain cards. Sometimes we can persuade the manufacturers to fix their bugs, but the timescales can be tight and soemtimes they're quite happy to not fix the bugs, especially if they know their competition runs the codepath you're looking at faster than them, and we get forced to drop the feature. So instead of games pushing up hardware quality, games are held back by shoddy hardware or (more usually) drivers. You're just benchmarking on what the manufacturers already know works. Zzzz. Futuremark's job is to stress-test in advance what's coming up.
And even if Futuremark does things that aren't always what you'd do in games, they are trying to push the cards to the limits to see if they do what the manufacturers claim, or whether they only achieve their claimed performance "in controlled tests".
So some of us talk to the Futuremark guys and say things like, "We're looking into using [technology X] in our next game, but the drivers on cards [A and B] are screwed, works on [C] though. Could you put a section into 3DMark 2004 that uses [X]?". Then, when their card performs miserably at [X] (even though the card's hardware can handle it -- it's just that they've been slack on the drivers) they get shamed into improving their quality at those features. A bit like WHQL for games.
Once the driver bugs for the features are fixed, we can write code that uses them.
Except NVidia decided to stop playing nice when it turned out the latest tests make their cards look quite poor, and noticeably slower than ATI's. So they took their ball and went home (dropped out of Futuremark's beta programme). This is why they didn't know their cheating would be discovered.
And of course, this problem is compounded by people like yourself, Mr Sonic, who see big numbers in Quake benchmarks (you do realise 3D card mfgs "optimise" those too, right?), pop wood, and rush off to buy the latest hovercraft no matter if it's not really "all that".
Incidentally, ATI's optimisations were exactly that: optimisations. Essentially, they were reordering instructions in a shader -- exactly like a compiler optimising instruction order for Intel or AMD processors' particular quirks. The meaning and, more importantly, on-screen output of the code was not altered.
Whereas it's clear to see from the screenshots in the original expose article, that NVidia were not optimising, but actually not running code, causing the onscreen output to look wrong. As developers, we don't want gamers returning our games to the shops "because it goes wrong when you do X". Nor do we want to sweat blood trying to invent ways to avoid their driver bugs.
Oh... someone else who cares about 3DMarks? OEMs. When it comes around to picking what cards to put inside big-name off-the-shelf PCs or, eventually, which chips to surface-mount on the all-in-one motherboard, they're looking for price-performance, and 3DMark is a part of that equation.
OBEY!
CONSUME!
MARRY AND REPRODUCE!
(also, remember to stock up on bubblegum)
TBQH, I think the article is correct in saying that commercial WiFi hotspots are unlikely to stick around for the long haul. A few specialist "captive audience" spots might work out, and in the short term the novelty factor might support coffee-shop spots for a while; but long term they're screwed when 3G rolls out. Right now though, WiFi is still at the top of my shopping list...
WiFi itself will carry on. The fast roll-out for corporate networking, the convenience for home networking, and the opportunities for community networks all count for a lot with me. Much more so than (yuk) Bluetooth. I think 802.11a/b formats have a rich future ahead of them.
Me, I want to play with 802.15.4 aka ZigBee. Sure, it doesn't have the ethernet-sized bandwidth but it's really cheap, low-power, and thinking about the possibilities of swarms of tiny ZigBee-enabled devices makes by brain hum. In a good way. :}
Interestingly, over here we have DAB, a terrestrial (not satellite) digital radio format based on MPEG 1 Layer 2, and it was on a local DAB station that I heard the album (and decided not to buy it) -- they played every track over the course of an hour or two (extra time for station breaks, adverts, and little snippets of interview with Moby to introduce each track). I find it odd that this kind of digital audio broadcast (of complete albums, no less) is "good" while internet digital audio broadcast is "bad" (to the RIAA & co).
The moderations don't comment on the content ("this song sucks") but rather on the accuracy and reliability and so on ("good quality" or "corrupt data" or "incomplete" or "claimed to be a music video but was actually an advert for a pr0n site" or, I guess, "first 20 seconds over and over").
It has quite a lot of potential, as a way of location (legitimate) data, as P2P clients integrate Bitzi (plus you can do a website lookup). So you can Bitzi lookup a distro (or the Bitzi Bitprint for the distro might be on the distro's home page) and then use that to locate it on P2P networks -- and be able to verify its integrity -- thus reducing the bandwidth hit on host sites. A bit like some of the moves towards "swarm distribution" but without requiring a specific client or server setup -- it piggybacks on existing P2P services like Gnutella. Here's an example BitTicket: linux-2.4.0.tar.bz2
Another interesting handheld console to check out is the GP32 (Note: site's mostly in Korean). I think it's been mentioned on /. before. Very similar layout to GBA, but where the GBA runs at ~16mhz, the GP32's ARM processor can have its clockspeed set by software up to 133mhz (though obviously this drains batteries faster). It doesn't have any custom graphics hardware, you just write 16-bit RGB colour values to a linear frame buffer, but even at the more-usual 60mhz clock speed, it runs Doom very nicely. Oh yes, and the screen is 320x240 as opposed to the GBA's 240x160.
Of course, it's not a Nintendo, so it's almost guaranteed to fail, as Ninty have that market pretty sewn up. Still, if you just want to write something for your own entertainment, the GP32's sweet.
Better still, Gnuclues doesn't have banner adverts, let alone (ick) popups.
The problem in this particular case is that, even if we get significant enough numbers boycotting them that their profits dip, they're not going to accept this. Either through denial ("how can they not like us?") or outright mendacity, they're simply going to turn around and lie through their teeth. They're going to say, "Look how much money piracy is costing us! We need a tax on blank media to make up for it!" -- as has been implemented in several countries already; and then you end up paying for what you didn't get.
Maybe we need some kind of web site where you can register your boycott, and perhaps even fill in how much you used to spend before the boycott, so the site can add it all up and see how much the companies are losing as a result of political action not piracy.
Pessimistically, I feel it probably wouldn't work but it'd be a gesture in the right direction.
Take a look at this quote from the decision. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the precise legal implications. In fact, I'd quite happily have my mind set at rest about it -- because the way I'm reading it at the moment, I'm quite flabberghasted by what it says:
If I understand this correctly, it's saying "You're not allowed to access protected material by circumventing an access control mechanism; but if you do (but you mustn't because it's illegal) you would hypothetically be allowed your fair use rights."
Does the judge really think this is right or even the intention of Congress? Remember that access control is not limited to "only letting you use what you've paid for", it can be any arbitrary controls the copyright owner can find a technical way to enforce.
To draw a parallel: Imagine if polling stations were allowed to turn people away at the door based on any arbitrary prejudice they liked; "We're not letting you in to vote because you're [white / black / male / female / gay / straight / republican / democrat / libertarian / whatever]."
If this decision was applied to that situation, it would seem to be saying, "It's illegal for you to force your way into the polling station and vote. Should you do so, however, you'd be allowed to actually vote before we throw you in prison; since your right to vote is still available to you, this is perfectly fair and constitutional. Have a nice day."
Am I reading this right? Have I missed something? And am I the only one who thinks this is obscene?
Betray Your Family And Friends!
Fabulous Prizes To Be Won!"
- poster seen in an episode of Red Dwarf
Of course, I remember when FAST (Federation Against Software Theft) first started up, and the back of computer games mags had adverts placed by them in the form of a comic, showing two kids grassing up their maths teacher simply because they didn't like him, telling FAST's hotline (number printed at bottom of comic) "he lets people copy software in his class". Doubleplusgood!
Just what everyone wants, I'm sure: Demand remains high, supply is cut dramatically, prices soar, youths mug people or hold up liquor stores to raise the cash, all the jackals move in to the black-market cash-opportunity they see gathering, and pretty soon gangs are slaughtering each other on the streets over non-Compliant hard drives. Customs officials sieze 400 gigs of Class A disk space (est. street value: $500,000).
The Government then runs Public Service announcements: "PIRACY KILLS" "MP3: JUST SAY NO" "WINNERS DON'T USE NONCOMPLIANT HARDWARE DEVICES" "FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS COPY MOVIES". They also offer tax rebates and other cash benefits to television shows and movies who include significantly pro-Digital Rights Management plotlines in their work.
In the summer movie, "Gone at 60kb/s", Nick Cage has to pirate an unprecedented number of other summer movies in one night in order to save his brother's life; in the more thoughtful "TCP/IP Traffic", Michael Douglas finds himself sucked into the seedy world of P2P after his teenage daughter is involved in a DVD-related incident, the story expertly interwoven with that of Open Source programmers working across the border, trying to stay true to their goals despite their lack of Compliance, trying to maintain their idealism in the face of a lead programmer who secretly is working for a reverse-engineering cartel.
New search-and-seizure laws are drafted to fight the War On Piracy, in order to Clean Up Our Streets And Save Our Children From Evil. All laptop computers are spot-checked at airports and potential employees are asked to undergo a hard-drive scan to ensure they are not "using".
Caffiene mints, copyleft t-shirts, and any item bearing a penguin logo are banned from COMDEX and any other gathering of software developers under Cracking House laws. These things are sure signs of illegal activity.
Far-fetched? Facetious? A little of both. But the general principles have been shown to hold true in the past, repeatedly.
Whee!
I'm a professional PC videogame developer. I used to use OpenGL, about 4 or 5 years ago: At that point, Direct3D was the clunky, awkward, slow, difficult thing that people have labelled it as elsewhere in this thread, and OpenGL was a lovely, simple, pure thing. And so I used OpenGL instead of Direct3D, and lots of other people did too. The most famous examples in gaming are QuakeGL/Quake2/Quake3 (Quake1 at retail was software-only).
But OpenGL stood still, and Direct3D moved on. Sure, it took then about 4 or 5 revisions (I think they were on D3D version 3 at the time, now they're on version 8.1, but there was no version 4*), screwed up quite a few things along the way, but they got there in the end. Over the years we've either used OpenGL or suffered the vagaries of Microsoft's repeatedly-changing API. But it's settled down now, matured, and become not only usable, but actually much much better than OpenGL. Sorry, but it's true.
Part of this reason might be "The Farenheit Misdirection" -- basically Microsoft said, "Yes, let's work together on a new API, neither DirectX nor OpenGL, called Farenheit, with the best parts of both, and it'll be great!". And SGI, it seemed, believed them, having not learnt the lesson from IBM and OS/2.
Course, you don't hear much about it now. :P
Another reason is the OpenGL review board, which (as I understand it from the outside only, perhaps someone else could fill in more detail and/or correct me) is not making much progress on new spec due to infighting between rival board manufacturers who obviously want the spec to match up closely with their hardware, and for preference, match up as badly as possible with their rival's hardware.
A few people have mentioned the X-Box thing. Certainly, I doubt anyone will use OpenGL on the X-Box, and any game with both X-Box and PC SKUs will use DirectX too, but I think that's a bridge which is only now being crossed; whereas OpenGL has slacked off for about 2 or 3 years now.
* which is a different Ask Slashdot: why is there no version 4 of so many things? No DX4, No Palm 4, no Voodoo 4, no Borland C++ Builder 4 ... all skipped straight to 5... go figure
If you're in the UK, or somewhere else that gets the UK version of the SciFi channel (no longer related to the US one) this film is being shown tonight at midnight.
That law dealt with regulating "e-commerce" and was, I gather, abandoned due to the complete negative response to it from both industry and pressure groups.
This law was originally (and still is, to an extent) about regulating Police Informants and how they should be treated. However, the Government took 90% of the rejected "e-commerce" bill and just pasted it into the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill, the one we are fighting today.
This "new" bill was only first revealed about a month ago, so any articles prior to the beginning of February are probably discussing the previous bill (in fact, one of several previous, abandoned bills).
It is, most likely, precisely because those previous bills were rejected, that they have "integrated" it (yes, in the Microsoft sense) with the regulations on Police Informants, and, placed it on a "fast-track" which means they are rushing it through parliament as quickly as possible with no period of consultation, and (from today) less than ten days for Members of Parliament to propose amendments. That is why this is so urgent.
Say you are a child molester. You just go, "Oh! whoops! I lost my key!" and the worst that happens is you go to jail for 2 years for a "soft" crime, and maybe even only 6 months. A lot better option than going down for 10 years for molesting a kid (which is going to be pretty hard time).
On the other hand, under this proposed law, the police can request your key even if you are not under suspicion of any criminal act. Maybe someone you know is. Or maybe it is just (and I am quoting from the Bill here) "likely to be of value for purposes connected with the exercise or performance by any public authority of any statutory power or statutory duty."
That's pretty damn overbroad. And then you could go to prison for 2 years simply for having lost your key. The law would also forbid you from telling someone else the police asked for it (for instance, to get help trying to recover the key from a crashed hard drive).
These are just a couple of the flaws. Go read the site, there are many, many more.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to please, please request that people using the fax gateway are polite and thoughtful in their messages. "Hahayousuck!" messages are NOT HELPFUL. This is a SERIOUS issue which genuinely threatens civil liberties in the UK in a chilling manner; please be constructive. We are not trying to piss off the Members of Parliament, we need their help to head off this law. I'm sure they don't want to be the victims of this law any more than we do; we just need to explain this to them (especially the finer technical points), politely.
Thankyou.
These days, as well as being the first to do "true" 3D positional audio (using HRTFs, not inter-aural delays), they also do WaveTracing, which noone else does.
This means that you can pass them a simplified set of world geometry (eg a collision mesh -- rough boxes around the more complex geometry sent to the video card) and assign those polygons properties such as sound absorbtion (think "tissue paper" vs "concrete block) and reflectivity ("sound booth" vs "metal"), and it will model that acoustic environment to provide the correct echoes, reverb effects, and so on.
Currently, other 3D cards don't do this, they either have no environmental support at all, or they can perform a sort of "canned" effect that's just blanket-applied. Think of the difference between depth-of-field focussing effects automatically calculated based on depth information and geometry, and just applying a pre-defined gaussian blur to an entire image in photoshop, and you'll get the difference.
You can also supply parameters such as atmospheric absorbtion, which gives you that "foggy day" damp quality (if you want it, of course). Oh yeah, and doppler shift on moving objects. And yet I get to deal with people who buy more expensive, less powerful cards because they're "made by Creative Labs so I know they're going to work with anything". Heh. It's not even true -- read the small print on a SoundBlaster Live box and it says "almost 100% compatible with..." -- I found that kinda shocking myself, surely they should be able to be 100% compatible with their own cards? Oh well.
2) my previous flatmate used to stay up all hours of the night playing Command & Conquer on his playstation, it's not as convenient with a pad as with a mouse, but it doesn't stop anyone, plus, nothing's preventing manufacturers from bringing out mice for consoles, and, tho they're not very popular, some are already available
3) will be downloadable via the modem or insertable memory cards 4) map designing can be fun, and isn't likely to be a feature of consoles any time soon, but nothing's to stop people using their PC to design a map then download it to the console to play. why have both? well cos if the latest 3d accelerator card costs more than a console which is more powerful, why not? :}
remember, the article isn't saying "PC's are dead" -- people aren't gonna be installing nintendos in offices to do their accounts on -- just that PC games sales are going to go down. here in the UK there are already 10x as many console games sold as PC games. we see the weekly charts come in and a console game might ship 100,000 units or more in it's first week while the PC games struggly in at around 8,000-10,000.
(disclaimer: i write games - for PC and PSX - for a living, but i don't speak for my employer)
I think the dividing line, where people get confused, is that what you don't own is the copyright on the music. That resides with the artist (hopefully... although depressingly it's often owned by music industry monoliths).
But by my understanding, once you buy the CD (or tape, record, minidisc...) you have paid them to permanently own a copy of that music, and as long as you don't violate that copyright (generally by trying to sell it on to others, which is the exclusive right of the copyright holder or their agents), it's yours to do with as you see fit.
At least, that's how I understand it. Reread the disclaimer. :}