Not to be the rationalist when you're clearly poking fun of Mr Nervous (Ballmer), but at the time he said that (in a press conference last Thursday in Tokyo) he was right - there really wasn't much info out there, and a lot of the speculation was wrong. Today was the first release of any hard info and SDK, but they still haven't released any performance numbers and it still doesn't run on any existing handset (at least publicly).
Google does have a strong corporate backing, however, including companies that are currently customers of Microsoft and Symbian, so from their standpoint, they need to bash it and promote their own solutions. Expect a lot more to come.
We're talking masseuse hours vs engineer hours for 5 years, then retire a multi-millionaire. I can think of much worse things I'd do for that kind of bread. Scoop pig doo with my hands? Sure, boss - as long as I meet my 5 year income goals!
On my phone all configuration is under Settings and Tools. The more recent incarnations (mine is 20.1 + something) of Symbian seem much more usable than the ones from a few years ago, judging by how much easier my new phone was to program (new phone is a Motorola, I don't remember what the old phone was - some odd brand, but it ran Symbian).
Still, I think it could be easier, and I think feature creep has added a lot of deep menu chains, so I wish it were more customizable for the features I use. I know Symbian devs spend a lot of time on memory safety (nothing can leak, ever) and I'm not sure if an open OS for mobile will enforce the stability as well, so I'm taking the wait-and-see approach. I've hard crashed my Palm T3 enough times with shoddily coded products to know how important that is in a mobile device. Obviously poorly coded programs on Symbian could do the same, but I haven't ever found one (not that I've looked hard, but I have unlocked my phone and mucked around a bit).
what the article was saying is the 8800GT appeared for $240. The cheap end of the X1950Pro is about $160 (I did a lot of price-digging to find that), so there is a $80 difference, but the price on those cards is pretty wild, and most I've seen are right around the $200 range (but one was $330).
OpenGL features have four phases, but sometimes skip some of them. The first is vendor specific - e.g. NV, ATI, Apple, SGI, etc. These are written specifically for a type of hardware and are not agreed upon by anyone but the vendor. The second phase is extensions (name has EXT in it), which are again not officially a part of OpenGL, but name and parameters have been agreed upon by most vendors. EXT extensions are NOT required and sometimes not even implemented for that version of OpenGL - for instance, the ATI 9200 line of cards had ATI's proprietary form of pixel (fragment) shader and not the EXT version approved for the 1.3 standard, mostly because the version approved was created by arch rival nVidia (and Microsoft, iirc). The next stage is ARB - this is where the feature has been approved by the majority of vendors and added to the standard, but is in an initial testing phase. Features at the ARB stage still do not have to be implemented to officially meet the standard, but generally are - unless something horrible is discovered with that feature, it will likely migrate to core, and this allows for a driver-level update to give core support for a new version of OpenGL. I'm not sure how important that is these days, but some vendors still do ship software drivers that intermixed with hardware, if configured and desired (e.g. Apple). The final phase is core, where the extension is dropped and the feature is considered a part of OpenGL - at this stage, the feature is required to be considered a part of that OpenGL version.
Yeah, and the point of the Firing Squad article was that 8800GT cards (replacing the 8400/8600 at that price point) could be had for nearly the same cost as a 1950Pro, and are DX10 and have 512MB of memory instead of DX9 and 256. If you want to go cheaper, look for the older model cards, but remember these cards are sometimes outperformed by last generation cards (but support DX10/OpenGL 2.1).
That just reminded me that OpenGL still has yet to provide their answer to DX10 - hopefully still this year, but possibly next year, according to the latest info. On the plus side, OGL3 is supposed to run on any new hardware released after Nov 6, 1996 (it's an API change on current hardware). Still, most new features (e.g. geometry shaders) will still be extensions until mid-next year at this rate - a full year-and-a-half behind Microsoft (though still usable as extensions on older OS's like XP, unlike the canned DX10 [not the Alky hack]).
remember, Japan and Europe are much more liberal than America in some respects. Both find topless women non-offensive (at least non-sexually), and some things that are abhorrent in the US are perfectly acceptable in Japan - take, for instance, the children's cartoon with 'possum that blows up his testicles and whack baddies with them. Disney woulda been crucified, beaten, stoned, burned at the stake and sexually mutilated by the President himself if he tried to make children's TV or movies with material like that.
DX10 compatibility is only officially Vista only - the Alky project is working on XP compatibility.
So far, DX10 has been less than satisfying for me, however - it doesn't look that much better than DX9, tends to be crash prone (I crash about every 20 minutes in The Witcher and about 30 minutes in Hellgate even with the MS hotfix and latest drivers, but that's better than every 2 minutes without the hotfix). The Crysis demo has not crashed on me in DX10 after the hotfix, however, and gets good performance on higher settings than either Hellgate or The Witcher, so I think it does a better job of resource management. Note that I didn't have much of a chance to play Hellgate over the weekend and the latest patch lists some memory management issues being resolved, which I hope that translates to "less crash happy."
The reason the PC market is heavily into MMORPGs is because of several factors - a) it's almost impossible to pirate, b) successful games are lucrative cash-cows, and c) it's easy to convince a corporate entity to invest in them because of a and b. The PC is also still a premiere platform for shooters, as can be seen with the recent and upcoming Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, etc (many are PC first or simultaneous releases). "Exclusive" games are a bit of a joke - if MS wants a (non-owned) studio to make a game exclusively for, say, XBox 360, they will pay a fee to the developing studio to make up for income they would lose by not releasing on the competing platform. Also, it is very easy to port between PC and XBox due to them both having the DirectX API, so it's a bit of a no-brainer. The PC, Mac and PS3 using the OpenGL API is generally a fairly easy port, as well, though there are some minor issues such as endian-ness.
having a marathon on Turkey day makes me wonder if it's as much a tribute to the first airing of the show on T-D 1988 at dinner time, UHF channel 23 in MSP as much because the movies are all turkeys. I remember that first airing because I was sick in my room with a horrible case of strep (not to mention couldn't get in to a doctor since it was Thanksgiving and they took emergencies only) rather than at dinner with my family and "Mystery Science Theater" sounded more interesting than the news. Laughing my ass off with strep was not fun, and I admit I didn't really get the show at first - why is this guy blocking my view of this movie?. I didn't make the connection between the riffing and the silhouette right away.
The picture makes Joel looks more sober (and bald) than the last time I saw him, which was doing stand-up comedy not long after he left the show. I also saw him on TV (Comedy Central maybe) doing stand-up, and both times he seemed very wasted and wasn't very funny. I hope he's back to the sharp wit days from the show and not the muddy comedy he did shortly thereafter.
I seriously doubt you could buy a rating from GI or most other serious gaming magazine. Reiner is one of the editors, so he probably has to at least do a partial review of content and offer his opinion, but he probably doesn't get as in-depth as the reviewer. These guys spend a lot of time playing games, so I can see how independents have a hard time finding reviewer time.
And no, I'm not saying that just because I know the other editor Andy (McNamara) from his band years. I've never subscribed to GI and only really read a couple of issues despite that - heck, I've bought more issues of PCGamer and EGM than GI.
Ah, and he's wrong, as well - somebody CAN in fact, enforce the ratings, and it has nothing to do with who buys the product - this type of person called a "parent."
This reminds me far too much of the movie rating system, though. For many years it was essentially voluntary to enforce PG or R ratings, then some crazies took issue to it and pushed enforcement. To me it was always more of a guideline, and there are plenty of movies out there with entirely broken ratings - Whale Rider, for instance - a G movie or MAYBE PG movie with a bong as a scenery piece that bumps it to PG-13. I watched this with my 4 and 5 year old niece and nephew and never even worried about it - they're too young to catch a reference like that, nor was it focused on at any time, so they have no reason to focus on it. Its not like someone was cutting and snorting a line of coke in the movie.
the reason #4 is true is because someone may go in and add something like bowings, tempos, cadenza's, etc. and then re-copyright the work. For instance, Haydn Concerto (#1) for Cello in C Major is by a composer that died in 1809 and written in the 1760s. The concerto was rediscovered in the 1960s in Prague and Cadenzas were added by Milos Sadlo, who died in 2003. This piece is probably copyrighted in Canada until 2053 and in the US until 2073 because of this, however, there's more - the US version is copyrighted under both Sadlo and Rostropovich, who died in 2007, so it may be copyrighted in the US until 2077 with an option to extend the copyright to 2097 under the Mickey Mouse law (yes, that's what I'm calling the copyright extension act from now on).
The IMPSL work was copied from the Prague, but the copied piece had the Sadlo cadenzas, making it likely still under copyright in the EU since it was not the original. There was a large notice stating that the piece was likely under copyright in the US, Canada, and the EU, but an investigation was underway because no copyright was listed on the piece archived at the Prague, where the copy was made. I personally own the copy credited to Sadlo and Rostropovich, however, and was unable to find one of the insert pages, so I made a copy from IMPSL (I've since rediscovered the original and destroyed the copy), and I'm not exactly sure where that stands, especially since I didn't know the versions were different until after I downloaded it, but I would think it's the same as recordings - if I own a copy of the work, I should have some fair use rights. It's also possible I violated copyright law even though the version I own is a superset of the Sadlo version (it contains notational differences like fingerings, but is otherwise identical).
Note that that was the exception, not the rule - every other piece I downloaded off of IMPSL was completely legal with no exception in the US (and everywhere else), most being 100+ years old. It was a wonderful source of solo material, especially since I rarely find cello solo sheet music without special ordering it and have no idea of the complexity of the piece (I am pretty good, but Haydn in C pushes my limits - especially the third movement).
While I agree this is a silly patent, I also agree - it doesn't quite work the same as wiki or cgi-bin searches, but it isn't exactly doing an additional step, it's really avoiding a step and assuming search, unless a token is present. It checks the URL string during string URL parsing and if a token is *not present*, it searches for whatever is specified by stripping off the website location instead of following the string - the default action is search, not go to the URL specified as per a normal web action. To me this seems obvious for a store, since most of the time you're not going to have an exact URL to an item anyway, and if you do, you will likely have the entire link.
In layman's terms, here's the idea A URL http://www.amazon.com/Van Helsing means search for "Van Helsing"
if the user entered the page indicator (in this case,/-), e.g. "http://www.amazon.com/-Van Helsing" means go to the literal page http://www.amazon.com/-Van%20Helsing (even if one doesn't exist) - note that I've added %20, which is an automatic character translation for space in a URL, and retaining that character is essential for a URL to be valid).
NOTE: this does not currently work on Amazon's site, so don't bother trying it.
basically, it's like cgi-bin based search engine in reverse - if you don't get a '?' equivalent, then you automatically search. Yes, it seems incredibly obvious, and I (and many others) have written code that does something similar (if a page doesn't exist, pass the chunk of the URI after the ? into a search), but that isn't exactly the same.
My understanding is this funds the (free) multiplayer servers, similar to how Battle*Net funded with advertisements on the connect/find party screen (but yes, you still get the ads in single player). The game will also have subscription servers for ~$10/mo for an "elite" membership that gives you access to other areas. Obviously, being a business, they hope this makes additional income after cost.
Last date I heard was "end of September, 2007" for OpenGL 3.0. I've heard no new dates, and it still isn't ratified.
As was said in a previous post, CAD is more bandwidth dependent than games, which is why the OpenGL cards on the market are optimized for bandwidth. There is no good way to do CSG in hardware at the moment (thus the rumored tessellation shaders in next gen cards), so it's done in software.
I don't see why loading 100 parts on a consumer level card would be a problem, either, but it depends on part size and available memory. Remember, CAD is more dependent on CPU, main memory, and bandwidth than GPU. I also don't know of any CAD software that runs in fullscreen mode by default, so if the poster is running Vista Aero he/she will get a 10% or more speed hit due to compositing (actually Aero on or off doesn't seem to matter on my laptop, suggesting the custom drivers are always compositing over a DX9 context - Linux on my laptop does not have a speed hit in either mode and performs roughly the same as fullscreen OpenGL on Windows).
CAD passes more data because it still processes tessellation (converting a geometry to a polygon mesh) type features in CPU, then passes them to GPU (say CSG). Geometry Shaders don't handle tessellation well, but rumor (or speculation due to research and rumors) has it the next type of shader will be specifically for tessellation (so you'll have vertex, fragment/pixel, geometry, and tessellation shader) and you will be able to pass a set of primitives into the shader and perform CSG on them.
Anything that doesn't define a fragment shader uses the default Phong illumination model by default in OpenGL (or technically Phong-Blinn or something like that). CAD uses that for design, but uses software ray tracing for a final render. Ray tracing parallelizes well, but doesn't scale well to memory since in true form it requires every object in the scene to be in memory. Fast ray tracing techniques usually order objects in KD-trees to find reflections in the scene faster and are attaining decent speeds on CPUs (Intel estimates within a few years, GPUs will even be obsolete). Yes, people have done ray tracing in shaders, but this is still approximated and often without full scene data, or on a limited subset of data.
OpenGL is still slow compared to DX for most rendering due to legacy support, however. This was supposed to be addressed in OpenGL 3.0 (i.e. the "Lean and Mean" profile which streamlines OpenGL but makes fundamental non-backward compatible changes to OpenGL, similar to DX10, but also retains backwards compatibility with an compatible profile [which will be "frozen," which may be the hang-up]), due in September, but ratification didn't happen yet and nobody seems to know what the status is or when we'll see it or cards with it. OpenGL 3.1 is due about 3-5 months after 3.0 is ratified and is meant to bring new features such as geometry shaders into core (rather than extensions).
Since when is the King James Version more accurate than NIV or even, say the Revised Standard? Just because Jack Chick and Jack Thompson say so (at least for King James)? All 3 are based on the Textus Receptus, which is a 16th century Latin translation based on 12th century Greek text. Calling any one of them more or less accurate is inane, as all are different and yet based on the same source.
I agree that the ASV (and updates) should be more accurate since they go back to the oldest available documents and try to keep as close to the text as possible unless the meaning has changed, but unless you have an annotated ASV (though some are in the footnotes of mine, as I recall), you can miss some of the literal translations - for instance, as I understand it, there is no distinction between words like virgin and young woman in (ancient) Greek, so saying one person translated it wrong because they say the young woman Mary instead of the virgin Mary is entirely a matter of opinion. Many of the oldest available documents are damaged and a "best guess" approach was taken, as well - for instance, in Revelation the number of the beast is likely 666, but since that page is damaged in the available scrolls it could possibly be 667 (or another number - I believe it was 665) depending on whether a small mark is at the end of the number on the damaged page or not.
The old testament is dicey, too - the English version is a translation from the Greek Septuagint, which is a translation itself from the Hebrew Tanakh/Tanach. Whenever you talk about a translation from a translation (or worse), you're bound to find translation errors - unless you believe that God would not allow errors, which I'll leave between you and your beliefs.
this is half correct - Led Zeppelin was initially published by Atlantic records (a US record company) before forming Swan Song in the UK and using Atlantic only for distribution.
As you mention, US law reserves individual copyright for 70 years after the author's death + can be extended another 20 years under the Mickey Mouse law - er, Copyright Term Extension Act. IANAL, but I believe this is tied to the credited author of the song (not the band), so any songs written by John Bonham exclusively will become public domain before other songs (at earliest, 2050, 70 years after his death in 1980). Note that some songs partially fall under previous copyright law, such as "When the Levee Breaks" because it was originally a Memphis Minnie recording and that song's copyright has since expired, but that just means you can record it without paying royalties, not that you can steal it - the Zep version is credited to Page/Plant/Jones/Bonham/Memphis Minnie.
The UK Swan Song label music, which is as I understand it, bound by 50 year copyright from publication, and will likely go public domain long before the earlier Atlantic recordings, which are tied to US copyright law because they were published in the United States. The performance clause appears to be for if the performance is, say, broadcast but not officially published, which I believe was something added to end the perpetual copyright of non-published works in England.
I definitely agree with you - the first time I took a vectors and matrices course, I didn't know the use for it and ended up having to drop it before completion as I didn't see any use for it and that killed my motivation. At that time I was also taking a computer graphics course and about a week after dropping that course we started working in 3D using GL (no, not OpenGL, the SGI IRIX predecessor GL - this was a while ago;) which uses matrices heavily. Suddenly that class was relevant and when I retook it (along with Graphics II) that class was a breeze.
My main problem with math is terminology. Mathematicians have a nasty habit of naming every concept, so it involves a lot of memorization and retention, which is not always something humans are good at. Take, for instance, one that bit me reading a research paper recently - a "degenerate polygon" - that means the polygon has simplified itself geometrically - say a quadrilateral with one vertex on a line between two other vertices, which makes it a triangle geometrically. The concept is simple, but the name is not obvious to the concept. That paper was riddled with such terms which made it a hard first read, but once I "rewrote" it by learning the terminology, it turned out to be a very simple concept (and, unfortunately, useless to my needs).
My wife loved South Park for about 2 years, then it got old, and used to like the Simpsons, too, so it's not entirely an aversion to animation - she just wouldn't pick it and doesn't get many of the in-jokes to other cartoons or just general Americana. I'm a sponge for Americana references and have found myself laughing at jokes when nobody else gets them. My wife would never find stuff in, say, the Fallout 2 game very funny, while I fell off my chair laughing multiple times (literally, at least once).
I can understand the motion sickness thing - I get it with some games, too, and it seems almost random amongst shooter type games. I used to think it was bob, but I now think it has something to do with the speed of movement more than anything (jerkiness). At one point I thought it was First Person, but I debunked that by getting violently ill within minutes of playing Darkened Skye (the Skittles game I got for $5...). I've never gotten ill playing UT02004, any Battlefield game, Morrowind, Oblivion, Descent (I-III + Freespace), Halo or the recent BioShock demo, but Doom, Quake, Half Life (I & II), Duke Nukem 3d, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex all made me sick within 10-15 minutes of play. I could play the Marathon series about 30-45 minutes.
I even know shooter fans that get sick playing Descent due to the disorienting environments (and nothing else), but that one never bothered me... it's very strange.
yeah - I was going to say the same. The Intellivision and ColecoVision both had 12 buttons in a telephone layout which accepted membrane overlays, however, making the layout of new games easier to learn. The Intellivision had 16 buttons and the ColecoVision 14, but the Coleco side buttons were the same, so technically it had 13 (In the same respect, I believe the Intellivision had 14).
Nintendo had no managed layout like an overlay, so it was a bit harder for the new user because you had to memorize the button mappings.
hmm... yeah, I'm reading into that way too much. I'm fairly certain the poster meant is the speed of light is constant for all observers (which is part of the postulate for the theory of special relativity), but in that case, the "everything is moving" part is incorrect. I think what is meant is everything is observed using the same constant speed (the speed of light in a vacuum) with relative position and velocity of observer and observee given in spacetime. Still, that isn't enough to cover the theory in a nutshell, as that misses such stuff as Einstein's famous potential energy equation E=mc^2 (which was debunked as incorrect in another Einstein theory, as I recall, but is still very popular).
Spacial Relativity was always a bit mind-bending to me anyway - if you don't have a reference (say, for instance, the observer closes his/her eyes), how do you know, say, a particle is not, in fact, going faster than light during the time it is not observed (OK, yeah, I know too much about Schroedinger)?
While I'm not as old as you, I've been playing videogames since I was 3 or 4 (on Magnavox Odyssey and Pong, later on a 2600). I don't play as many as I used to, but I still play them nonetheless.
Its not just comics (which to be quite honest, I've never seen as "just for kids" - I think that stigma was a generation before) - cartoons as well. Despite Anime and popular adult cartoons (mostly aired late at night), the genre is still seen as "for kids" by many parents in their mid-30s or later. Until Robotech in the early 80s (which I got to see thanks to mom's Betamax and being sick the week it aired at the non-schoolkid friendly time of 8:30AM Monday-Friday), most Anime that reached US shores was either kid stuff or cleaned extensively (like Gatchaman was to create "Battle of the Planets," though it was released later in a couple of other forms, e.g. G-Force). Kid friendly adult shows like the Simpsons re-emerged in the late 1980s (shows like the Flintstones pre-date it, but prime time animation mostly died in the 60s) which helped break the ice, but real adult cartoons didn't pop up until the 1990s (like Liquid Television on MTV and Phantom 2040 on network TV, followed by more prime-time adult TV that mostly died after a few episodes) and the only animation on network TV was Saturday morning cartoon fare.
Case in point - my wife (mid-30s) thinks Anime is silly and cartoons are for kids (she thought Akira was OK and didn't like Ghost in the Shell at all), but her best friend, who is still under 30, loves Anime and adult cartoons (stuff like Family Guy and Drawn Together are her favorites - I know because she has me record them for her). I grew up on the bubble between them and I think my generation is hit-or-miss. Same thing with computer games - I love them, but my wife hates them and thinks they're noisy and annoying. On the plus side, she needs 9-10 hours of sleep a night and I need 6-7, so I get a few hours to myself after she goes to sleep.
Hmm... I sorta disagree - that is a fairly close description of the postulates for Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, but it is lacking the requirement of observer(s). I think you're referring to General Relativity (see Wikipedia), however, which is more accurate, but also more confusing. I was attempting to avoid getting into this discussion with my initial post, mainly because I've had very little General Relativity (hey - I got my minor and got out;)
Odd... I remember my textbook from years ago always calling it space-time (it was italicized when used in equations), but apparently spacetime is the actual name. I suppose the real reason is not to get it mixed up with "space minus time."
yes, 4-space is essentially 3-space objects over time, which is the basis of relativity (in as best layman's terms as possible - more importantly, one 3-space object relative to others in time).
Having not read the paper (not that I'd understand it - I've had some relativity, but no string theory) their argument is saying "there is no time," but you could argue "there is no space" using relativity because the third dimension technically covers all space. Space-time is probably the best name for it - an object at a particular position at a particular point in time relative to other objects at any moment in time. I'm guessing this theory essentially allows for one object at a particular moment in time to be compared to an object at a different moment in time and thus they say time is a non-factor, but it may entirely be due to bad terminology (should be space-time).
Jones still apparently is involved, but more for influencing creative direction and not an active programmer or artist. I've read that he is given a "special thanks" in the credits of Halo 3 and he was a spokesperson when they split with Microsoft, so it's possible he'll be the head of the spun off studio.
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Not to be the rationalist when you're clearly poking fun of Mr Nervous (Ballmer), but at the time he said that (in a press conference last Thursday in Tokyo) he was right - there really wasn't much info out there, and a lot of the speculation was wrong. Today was the first release of any hard info and SDK, but they still haven't released any performance numbers and it still doesn't run on any existing handset (at least publicly).
Google does have a strong corporate backing, however, including companies that are currently customers of Microsoft and Symbian, so from their standpoint, they need to bash it and promote their own solutions. Expect a lot more to come.
We're talking masseuse hours vs engineer hours for 5 years, then retire a multi-millionaire. I can think of much worse things I'd do for that kind of bread. Scoop pig doo with my hands? Sure, boss - as long as I meet my 5 year income goals!
On my phone all configuration is under Settings and Tools. The more recent incarnations (mine is 20.1 + something) of Symbian seem much more usable than the ones from a few years ago, judging by how much easier my new phone was to program (new phone is a Motorola, I don't remember what the old phone was - some odd brand, but it ran Symbian).
Still, I think it could be easier, and I think feature creep has added a lot of deep menu chains, so I wish it were more customizable for the features I use. I know Symbian devs spend a lot of time on memory safety (nothing can leak, ever) and I'm not sure if an open OS for mobile will enforce the stability as well, so I'm taking the wait-and-see approach. I've hard crashed my Palm T3 enough times with shoddily coded products to know how important that is in a mobile device. Obviously poorly coded programs on Symbian could do the same, but I haven't ever found one (not that I've looked hard, but I have unlocked my phone and mucked around a bit).
what the article was saying is the 8800GT appeared for $240. The cheap end of the X1950Pro is about $160 (I did a lot of price-digging to find that), so there is a $80 difference, but the price on those cards is pretty wild, and most I've seen are right around the $200 range (but one was $330).
OpenGL features have four phases, but sometimes skip some of them. The first is vendor specific - e.g. NV, ATI, Apple, SGI, etc. These are written specifically for a type of hardware and are not agreed upon by anyone but the vendor. The second phase is extensions (name has EXT in it), which are again not officially a part of OpenGL, but name and parameters have been agreed upon by most vendors. EXT extensions are NOT required and sometimes not even implemented for that version of OpenGL - for instance, the ATI 9200 line of cards had ATI's proprietary form of pixel (fragment) shader and not the EXT version approved for the 1.3 standard, mostly because the version approved was created by arch rival nVidia (and Microsoft, iirc). The next stage is ARB - this is where the feature has been approved by the majority of vendors and added to the standard, but is in an initial testing phase. Features at the ARB stage still do not have to be implemented to officially meet the standard, but generally are - unless something horrible is discovered with that feature, it will likely migrate to core, and this allows for a driver-level update to give core support for a new version of OpenGL. I'm not sure how important that is these days, but some vendors still do ship software drivers that intermixed with hardware, if configured and desired (e.g. Apple). The final phase is core, where the extension is dropped and the feature is considered a part of OpenGL - at this stage, the feature is required to be considered a part of that OpenGL version.
Yeah, and the point of the Firing Squad article was that 8800GT cards (replacing the 8400/8600 at that price point) could be had for nearly the same cost as a 1950Pro, and are DX10 and have 512MB of memory instead of DX9 and 256. If you want to go cheaper, look for the older model cards, but remember these cards are sometimes outperformed by last generation cards (but support DX10/OpenGL 2.1).
That just reminded me that OpenGL still has yet to provide their answer to DX10 - hopefully still this year, but possibly next year, according to the latest info. On the plus side, OGL3 is supposed to run on any new hardware released after Nov 6, 1996 (it's an API change on current hardware). Still, most new features (e.g. geometry shaders) will still be extensions until mid-next year at this rate - a full year-and-a-half behind Microsoft (though still usable as extensions on older OS's like XP, unlike the canned DX10 [not the Alky hack]).
remember, Japan and Europe are much more liberal than America in some respects. Both find topless women non-offensive (at least non-sexually), and some things that are abhorrent in the US are perfectly acceptable in Japan - take, for instance, the children's cartoon with 'possum that blows up his testicles and whack baddies with them. Disney woulda been crucified, beaten, stoned, burned at the stake and sexually mutilated by the President himself if he tried to make children's TV or movies with material like that.
DX10 compatibility is only officially Vista only - the Alky project is working on XP compatibility.
So far, DX10 has been less than satisfying for me, however - it doesn't look that much better than DX9, tends to be crash prone (I crash about every 20 minutes in The Witcher and about 30 minutes in Hellgate even with the MS hotfix and latest drivers, but that's better than every 2 minutes without the hotfix). The Crysis demo has not crashed on me in DX10 after the hotfix, however, and gets good performance on higher settings than either Hellgate or The Witcher, so I think it does a better job of resource management. Note that I didn't have much of a chance to play Hellgate over the weekend and the latest patch lists some memory management issues being resolved, which I hope that translates to "less crash happy."
The reason the PC market is heavily into MMORPGs is because of several factors - a) it's almost impossible to pirate, b) successful games are lucrative cash-cows, and c) it's easy to convince a corporate entity to invest in them because of a and b. The PC is also still a premiere platform for shooters, as can be seen with the recent and upcoming Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Call of Duty 4, The Orange Box, etc (many are PC first or simultaneous releases). "Exclusive" games are a bit of a joke - if MS wants a (non-owned) studio to make a game exclusively for, say, XBox 360, they will pay a fee to the developing studio to make up for income they would lose by not releasing on the competing platform. Also, it is very easy to port between PC and XBox due to them both having the DirectX API, so it's a bit of a no-brainer. The PC, Mac and PS3 using the OpenGL API is generally a fairly easy port, as well, though there are some minor issues such as endian-ness.
having a marathon on Turkey day makes me wonder if it's as much a tribute to the first airing of the show on T-D 1988 at dinner time, UHF channel 23 in MSP as much because the movies are all turkeys. I remember that first airing because I was sick in my room with a horrible case of strep (not to mention couldn't get in to a doctor since it was Thanksgiving and they took emergencies only) rather than at dinner with my family and "Mystery Science Theater" sounded more interesting than the news. Laughing my ass off with strep was not fun, and I admit I didn't really get the show at first - why is this guy blocking my view of this movie?. I didn't make the connection between the riffing and the silhouette right away.
The picture makes Joel looks more sober (and bald) than the last time I saw him, which was doing stand-up comedy not long after he left the show. I also saw him on TV (Comedy Central maybe) doing stand-up, and both times he seemed very wasted and wasn't very funny. I hope he's back to the sharp wit days from the show and not the muddy comedy he did shortly thereafter.
I seriously doubt you could buy a rating from GI or most other serious gaming magazine. Reiner is one of the editors, so he probably has to at least do a partial review of content and offer his opinion, but he probably doesn't get as in-depth as the reviewer. These guys spend a lot of time playing games, so I can see how independents have a hard time finding reviewer time.
And no, I'm not saying that just because I know the other editor Andy (McNamara) from his band years. I've never subscribed to GI and only really read a couple of issues despite that - heck, I've bought more issues of PCGamer and EGM than GI.
Ah, and he's wrong, as well - somebody CAN in fact, enforce the ratings, and it has nothing to do with who buys the product - this type of person called a "parent."
This reminds me far too much of the movie rating system, though. For many years it was essentially voluntary to enforce PG or R ratings, then some crazies took issue to it and pushed enforcement. To me it was always more of a guideline, and there are plenty of movies out there with entirely broken ratings - Whale Rider, for instance - a G movie or MAYBE PG movie with a bong as a scenery piece that bumps it to PG-13. I watched this with my 4 and 5 year old niece and nephew and never even worried about it - they're too young to catch a reference like that, nor was it focused on at any time, so they have no reason to focus on it. Its not like someone was cutting and snorting a line of coke in the movie.
the reason #4 is true is because someone may go in and add something like bowings, tempos, cadenza's, etc. and then re-copyright the work. For instance, Haydn Concerto (#1) for Cello in C Major is by a composer that died in 1809 and written in the 1760s. The concerto was rediscovered in the 1960s in Prague and Cadenzas were added by Milos Sadlo, who died in 2003. This piece is probably copyrighted in Canada until 2053 and in the US until 2073 because of this, however, there's more - the US version is copyrighted under both Sadlo and Rostropovich, who died in 2007, so it may be copyrighted in the US until 2077 with an option to extend the copyright to 2097 under the Mickey Mouse law (yes, that's what I'm calling the copyright extension act from now on).
The IMPSL work was copied from the Prague, but the copied piece had the Sadlo cadenzas, making it likely still under copyright in the EU since it was not the original. There was a large notice stating that the piece was likely under copyright in the US, Canada, and the EU, but an investigation was underway because no copyright was listed on the piece archived at the Prague, where the copy was made. I personally own the copy credited to Sadlo and Rostropovich, however, and was unable to find one of the insert pages, so I made a copy from IMPSL (I've since rediscovered the original and destroyed the copy), and I'm not exactly sure where that stands, especially since I didn't know the versions were different until after I downloaded it, but I would think it's the same as recordings - if I own a copy of the work, I should have some fair use rights. It's also possible I violated copyright law even though the version I own is a superset of the Sadlo version (it contains notational differences like fingerings, but is otherwise identical).
Note that that was the exception, not the rule - every other piece I downloaded off of IMPSL was completely legal with no exception in the US (and everywhere else), most being 100+ years old. It was a wonderful source of solo material, especially since I rarely find cello solo sheet music without special ordering it and have no idea of the complexity of the piece (I am pretty good, but Haydn in C pushes my limits - especially the third movement).
While I agree this is a silly patent, I also agree - it doesn't quite work the same as wiki or cgi-bin searches, but it isn't exactly doing an additional step, it's really avoiding a step and assuming search, unless a token is present. It checks the URL string during string URL parsing and if a token is *not present*, it searches for whatever is specified by stripping off the website location instead of following the string - the default action is search, not go to the URL specified as per a normal web action. To me this seems obvious for a store, since most of the time you're not going to have an exact URL to an item anyway, and if you do, you will likely have the entire link.
/-), e.g.
In layman's terms, here's the idea
A URL http://www.amazon.com/Van Helsing
means search for "Van Helsing"
if the user entered the page indicator (in this case,
"http://www.amazon.com/-Van Helsing" means go to the literal page http://www.amazon.com/-Van%20Helsing (even if one doesn't exist) - note that I've added %20, which is an automatic character translation for space in a URL, and retaining that character is essential for a URL to be valid).
NOTE: this does not currently work on Amazon's site, so don't bother trying it.
basically, it's like cgi-bin based search engine in reverse - if you don't get a '?' equivalent, then you automatically search. Yes, it seems incredibly obvious, and I (and many others) have written code that does something similar (if a page doesn't exist, pass the chunk of the URI after the ? into a search), but that isn't exactly the same.
My understanding is this funds the (free) multiplayer servers, similar to how Battle*Net funded with advertisements on the connect/find party screen (but yes, you still get the ads in single player). The game will also have subscription servers for ~$10/mo for an "elite" membership that gives you access to other areas. Obviously, being a business, they hope this makes additional income after cost.
Last date I heard was "end of September, 2007" for OpenGL 3.0. I've heard no new dates, and it still isn't ratified.
As was said in a previous post, CAD is more bandwidth dependent than games, which is why the OpenGL cards on the market are optimized for bandwidth. There is no good way to do CSG in hardware at the moment (thus the rumored tessellation shaders in next gen cards), so it's done in software.
I don't see why loading 100 parts on a consumer level card would be a problem, either, but it depends on part size and available memory. Remember, CAD is more dependent on CPU, main memory, and bandwidth than GPU. I also don't know of any CAD software that runs in fullscreen mode by default, so if the poster is running Vista Aero he/she will get a 10% or more speed hit due to compositing (actually Aero on or off doesn't seem to matter on my laptop, suggesting the custom drivers are always compositing over a DX9 context - Linux on my laptop does not have a speed hit in either mode and performs roughly the same as fullscreen OpenGL on Windows).
CAD passes more data because it still processes tessellation (converting a geometry to a polygon mesh) type features in CPU, then passes them to GPU (say CSG). Geometry Shaders don't handle tessellation well, but rumor (or speculation due to research and rumors) has it the next type of shader will be specifically for tessellation (so you'll have vertex, fragment/pixel, geometry, and tessellation shader) and you will be able to pass a set of primitives into the shader and perform CSG on them.
Anything that doesn't define a fragment shader uses the default Phong illumination model by default in OpenGL (or technically Phong-Blinn or something like that). CAD uses that for design, but uses software ray tracing for a final render. Ray tracing parallelizes well, but doesn't scale well to memory since in true form it requires every object in the scene to be in memory. Fast ray tracing techniques usually order objects in KD-trees to find reflections in the scene faster and are attaining decent speeds on CPUs (Intel estimates within a few years, GPUs will even be obsolete). Yes, people have done ray tracing in shaders, but this is still approximated and often without full scene data, or on a limited subset of data.
OpenGL is still slow compared to DX for most rendering due to legacy support, however. This was supposed to be addressed in OpenGL 3.0 (i.e. the "Lean and Mean" profile which streamlines OpenGL but makes fundamental non-backward compatible changes to OpenGL, similar to DX10, but also retains backwards compatibility with an compatible profile [which will be "frozen," which may be the hang-up]), due in September, but ratification didn't happen yet and nobody seems to know what the status is or when we'll see it or cards with it. OpenGL 3.1 is due about 3-5 months after 3.0 is ratified and is meant to bring new features such as geometry shaders into core (rather than extensions).
Since when is the King James Version more accurate than NIV or even, say the Revised Standard? Just because Jack Chick and Jack Thompson say so (at least for King James)? All 3 are based on the Textus Receptus, which is a 16th century Latin translation based on 12th century Greek text. Calling any one of them more or less accurate is inane, as all are different and yet based on the same source.
I agree that the ASV (and updates) should be more accurate since they go back to the oldest available documents and try to keep as close to the text as possible unless the meaning has changed, but unless you have an annotated ASV (though some are in the footnotes of mine, as I recall), you can miss some of the literal translations - for instance, as I understand it, there is no distinction between words like virgin and young woman in (ancient) Greek, so saying one person translated it wrong because they say the young woman Mary instead of the virgin Mary is entirely a matter of opinion. Many of the oldest available documents are damaged and a "best guess" approach was taken, as well - for instance, in Revelation the number of the beast is likely 666, but since that page is damaged in the available scrolls it could possibly be 667 (or another number - I believe it was 665) depending on whether a small mark is at the end of the number on the damaged page or not.
The old testament is dicey, too - the English version is a translation from the Greek Septuagint, which is a translation itself from the Hebrew Tanakh/Tanach. Whenever you talk about a translation from a translation (or worse), you're bound to find translation errors - unless you believe that God would not allow errors, which I'll leave between you and your beliefs.
this is half correct - Led Zeppelin was initially published by Atlantic records (a US record company) before forming Swan Song in the UK and using Atlantic only for distribution.
As you mention, US law reserves individual copyright for 70 years after the author's death + can be extended another 20 years under the Mickey Mouse law - er, Copyright Term Extension Act. IANAL, but I believe this is tied to the credited author of the song (not the band), so any songs written by John Bonham exclusively will become public domain before other songs (at earliest, 2050, 70 years after his death in 1980). Note that some songs partially fall under previous copyright law, such as "When the Levee Breaks" because it was originally a Memphis Minnie recording and that song's copyright has since expired, but that just means you can record it without paying royalties, not that you can steal it - the Zep version is credited to Page/Plant/Jones/Bonham/Memphis Minnie.
The UK Swan Song label music, which is as I understand it, bound by 50 year copyright from publication, and will likely go public domain long before the earlier Atlantic recordings, which are tied to US copyright law because they were published in the United States. The performance clause appears to be for if the performance is, say, broadcast but not officially published, which I believe was something added to end the perpetual copyright of non-published works in England.
I definitely agree with you - the first time I took a vectors and matrices course, I didn't know the use for it and ended up having to drop it before completion as I didn't see any use for it and that killed my motivation. At that time I was also taking a computer graphics course and about a week after dropping that course we started working in 3D using GL (no, not OpenGL, the SGI IRIX predecessor GL - this was a while ago ;) which uses matrices heavily. Suddenly that class was relevant and when I retook it (along with Graphics II) that class was a breeze.
My main problem with math is terminology. Mathematicians have a nasty habit of naming every concept, so it involves a lot of memorization and retention, which is not always something humans are good at. Take, for instance, one that bit me reading a research paper recently - a "degenerate polygon" - that means the polygon has simplified itself geometrically - say a quadrilateral with one vertex on a line between two other vertices, which makes it a triangle geometrically. The concept is simple, but the name is not obvious to the concept. That paper was riddled with such terms which made it a hard first read, but once I "rewrote" it by learning the terminology, it turned out to be a very simple concept (and, unfortunately, useless to my needs).
My wife loved South Park for about 2 years, then it got old, and used to like the Simpsons, too, so it's not entirely an aversion to animation - she just wouldn't pick it and doesn't get many of the in-jokes to other cartoons or just general Americana. I'm a sponge for Americana references and have found myself laughing at jokes when nobody else gets them. My wife would never find stuff in, say, the Fallout 2 game very funny, while I fell off my chair laughing multiple times (literally, at least once).
I can understand the motion sickness thing - I get it with some games, too, and it seems almost random amongst shooter type games. I used to think it was bob, but I now think it has something to do with the speed of movement more than anything (jerkiness). At one point I thought it was First Person, but I debunked that by getting violently ill within minutes of playing Darkened Skye (the Skittles game I got for $5...). I've never gotten ill playing UT02004, any Battlefield game, Morrowind, Oblivion, Descent (I-III + Freespace), Halo or the recent BioShock demo, but Doom, Quake, Half Life (I & II), Duke Nukem 3d, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex all made me sick within 10-15 minutes of play. I could play the Marathon series about 30-45 minutes.
I even know shooter fans that get sick playing Descent due to the disorienting environments (and nothing else), but that one never bothered me... it's very strange.
yeah - I was going to say the same. The Intellivision and ColecoVision both had 12 buttons in a telephone layout which accepted membrane overlays, however, making the layout of new games easier to learn. The Intellivision had 16 buttons and the ColecoVision 14, but the Coleco side buttons were the same, so technically it had 13 (In the same respect, I believe the Intellivision had 14).
Nintendo had no managed layout like an overlay, so it was a bit harder for the new user because you had to memorize the button mappings.
hmm... yeah, I'm reading into that way too much. I'm fairly certain the poster meant is the speed of light is constant for all observers (which is part of the postulate for the theory of special relativity), but in that case, the "everything is moving" part is incorrect. I think what is meant is everything is observed using the same constant speed (the speed of light in a vacuum) with relative position and velocity of observer and observee given in spacetime. Still, that isn't enough to cover the theory in a nutshell, as that misses such stuff as Einstein's famous potential energy equation E=mc^2 (which was debunked as incorrect in another Einstein theory, as I recall, but is still very popular).
Spacial Relativity was always a bit mind-bending to me anyway - if you don't have a reference (say, for instance, the observer closes his/her eyes), how do you know, say, a particle is not, in fact, going faster than light during the time it is not observed (OK, yeah, I know too much about Schroedinger)?
While I'm not as old as you, I've been playing videogames since I was 3 or 4 (on Magnavox Odyssey and Pong, later on a 2600). I don't play as many as I used to, but I still play them nonetheless.
Its not just comics (which to be quite honest, I've never seen as "just for kids" - I think that stigma was a generation before) - cartoons as well. Despite Anime and popular adult cartoons (mostly aired late at night), the genre is still seen as "for kids" by many parents in their mid-30s or later. Until Robotech in the early 80s (which I got to see thanks to mom's Betamax and being sick the week it aired at the non-schoolkid friendly time of 8:30AM Monday-Friday), most Anime that reached US shores was either kid stuff or cleaned extensively (like Gatchaman was to create "Battle of the Planets," though it was released later in a couple of other forms, e.g. G-Force). Kid friendly adult shows like the Simpsons re-emerged in the late 1980s (shows like the Flintstones pre-date it, but prime time animation mostly died in the 60s) which helped break the ice, but real adult cartoons didn't pop up until the 1990s (like Liquid Television on MTV and Phantom 2040 on network TV, followed by more prime-time adult TV that mostly died after a few episodes) and the only animation on network TV was Saturday morning cartoon fare.
Case in point - my wife (mid-30s) thinks Anime is silly and cartoons are for kids (she thought Akira was OK and didn't like Ghost in the Shell at all), but her best friend, who is still under 30, loves Anime and adult cartoons (stuff like Family Guy and Drawn Together are her favorites - I know because she has me record them for her). I grew up on the bubble between them and I think my generation is hit-or-miss. Same thing with computer games - I love them, but my wife hates them and thinks they're noisy and annoying. On the plus side, she needs 9-10 hours of sleep a night and I need 6-7, so I get a few hours to myself after she goes to sleep.
Hmm... I sorta disagree - that is a fairly close description of the postulates for Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, but it is lacking the requirement of observer(s). I think you're referring to General Relativity (see Wikipedia), however, which is more accurate, but also more confusing. I was attempting to avoid getting into this discussion with my initial post, mainly because I've had very little General Relativity (hey - I got my minor and got out ;)
Odd... I remember my textbook from years ago always calling it space-time (it was italicized when used in equations), but apparently spacetime is the actual name. I suppose the real reason is not to get it mixed up with "space minus time."
yes, 4-space is essentially 3-space objects over time, which is the basis of relativity (in as best layman's terms as possible - more importantly, one 3-space object relative to others in time).
Having not read the paper (not that I'd understand it - I've had some relativity, but no string theory) their argument is saying "there is no time," but you could argue "there is no space" using relativity because the third dimension technically covers all space. Space-time is probably the best name for it - an object at a particular position at a particular point in time relative to other objects at any moment in time. I'm guessing this theory essentially allows for one object at a particular moment in time to be compared to an object at a different moment in time and thus they say time is a non-factor, but it may entirely be due to bad terminology (should be space-time).
Jones still apparently is involved, but more for influencing creative direction and not an active programmer or artist. I've read that he is given a "special thanks" in the credits of Halo 3 and he was a spokesperson when they split with Microsoft, so it's possible he'll be the head of the spun off studio.