This is similar to Acrobat itself - the Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) is free, but if you want to write or annotate, you need to buy a license. I assume Foxit has to pay Adobe a royalty to create a writer, as even though Acrobat itself is an Open standard. Adobe has a lot of patents on both Acrobat itself and the underlying renderer, which is a subset of PostScript.
Note that the Ghostscript program allows conversion (writing) of a file format such as Word into Acrobat by printing to an Acrobat file rather than a printer, but has dual licensing as well (free only for non-commercial use). Adobe has a similar "printer" for Windows that writes Acrobat format, but I think that is also commercially licensed (I have it at work).
Bungie also teamed with another group of developers to create that one - it wasn't an in-house project. It wasn't very profitable and had a lot of cost-overruns. If anything, I'd expect to see a "Myth: The Fallen Lords" sequel or a new franchise.
The original founder are no longer with Microsoft, so who knows what direction it will take. Alex Seropian is at Wideload games, Jason Jones keeps a very low profile, but apparently is at Arena:Net (see Moby Games). Artist Colin Brent disappeared after Marathon, and that's about all I know of him. Strange that MobyGames is missing all the early Bungie titles (!Gnop, Operation: Desert Storm, and Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete) - 2500 copies sold or not.
I lived the story, and converted myself into the go-to geek...
The reason I got into self-repairing my own hardware (circa 1995) was because a guy at FirstTech in Uptown, near Minneapolis (and yes, I had had good service in that store before) told me my motherboard was blown and he would need to replace it for $550 (after already paying a $100 diagnostic charge). I said no and left (not worth it for a 2 year old box), but before being resigned to only having one old computer (a PC running Slackware so I could play with the new OpenGL compatible Mesa library) I began my first foray into the fledgling online parts market using sites like pricewatch (but I don't think pricewatch listed mac stuff at that time - some other site), and found the motherboard new for $115. Before I ordered it, however, I decided to open the case and do a diagnostic myself as best as I was able, just in case I needed a new power supply unit (PSU). I had worked with multimeters before, so I borrowed one from my brother and tested the PSU (which I admit, the repair guy had said may also be bad, but he also lied and said he wouldn't know until a new motherboard was in) and indeed it was bad - horribly bad. It would spike to working levels for about a second, then drop to near 0. I decided to start with that, and ordered the part from a dealer I found (for ~$80 + shipping). After adding the power supply, I clicked the power button and the machine started and ran, with the old motherboard. And it continued to run, flawlessly, and for another 2 years (then I sold the machine for $100).
So basically, they would have charged me $550 to replace the motherboard, find it still didn't work, charge me another $200 + labor for a power supply, and I still would have had a 2 year old mac, even though I'd paid enough to buy some of the low-end hardware (like clones) that would be faster and better. I decided after that if a guy charged me $100/hour could not have correctly diagnosed a problem that took me around 15 minutes to find (mostly due to ignorance on how to open the case, and I had suspected the PSU from the start but was scared to break my case, which had a "warranty will be violated" sticker, but that was silly because it was out of warranty). I've since built dozens of machines from scratch and diagnosed problems correctly (every time!) when something failed on a PC I've looked at (a dozen hard drives, 4 sticks of RAM, a motherboard, 2 PSUs, and a northbridge cooling fan). The worst was a bad PSU that had blown multiple components including the mentioned mobo (my in-laws' computer, and it probably had a surge).
While it is possible to diagnose bad memory as a motherboard or CPU failure on some motherboards (some don't come on at all during POST [Power On Self Test] if memory, CPU, or Mobo are bad) it is fairly easy to test for any of these failures with diagnostic cards (which I don't have and every repair person probably does have). A bad PSU can be tested and detected with a multimeter and anything else should be easy to diagnose by looking and listening with the case open or once the machine is booted (for software, drive or CD/DVD issues).
I think what is meant is that by using CSG you can have perfect models shape-wise that get tessellated down to current hardware (or an acceptable speed). That doesn't mean the models will be perfect texture and material-wise, and while geometry shaders can tessellate, as I understand it, it would be more efficient to have a dedicated tessellation stage of the pipeline - I've even seen predictions that this will be the next type of shader added.
There is no real way in typical hardware to preserve roundness, as most if not all hardware is based on the polygon model and not ray tracing (which allows any mathematically defined shape). A geometry shader allows you to pass a formula and primitive data (e.g. a bezier curve and some points) which you can use to create points, lines, or polygons (triangle strips), but the hardware still breaks it down into vertices in the long run.
So yes, even if you have a NURBS surface defined in a shader, it will chew up processing power finding and creating vertices, but that is the purpose of the geometry shader - it allows you to generate vertices in hardware on the fly, and thus saves processor and memory bandwidth. The surface itself isn't really definable, as you need to pass in primitive types, but you could, say, use points as your primitive (defining nodes and weights) and generate the curves in the mesh to find your points and generate triangle strips from that.
I think you missed my point - something like the Death Star would still need to have LOD in texture, and probably still need to be hand tuned. You could use CSG to create the indentation by passing sphere definitions into the geometry shader and emitting vertices along that sphere intersections (for the inverted sphere area where the main weapon is) as well as for the main sphere itself. How many vertices to emit is an LOD issue - you probably want to emit less at further distances and would likely need to tune textures appropriately. With a 1024 vertex limit, however, I don't think you'll ever have a great CSG model of something like the Death Star, though it may be possible with multiple geometry shader calls - the 1024 limit is per geometry shader call (and multiple calls can be done per frame).
What I was getting at is one of the limitations of most mapping techniques (e.g. Parallax Occlusion Mapping) which are essentially a model definition on top of a surface defined by a height and normal (so 2 less floats than a vertex def at least on nVidia cards that work entirely with floats) - if you look at most of these surfaces from an angle, you can see that they are drawn on the surface and don't actually project out of the surface (the exception being curved surface relief maps, which can do that, but I believe have some flaw like are incompatible with soft shadows). A geometry shader allows true surface projection, so you could take a simpler model and make it more complex by projecting some or all of the vertices as required to correct silhouettes. Not that there aren't a number of issues involved that I haven't fully figured out such as connectivity (I think you might need a tri-mesh or line for each point outside the silhouette) and obstruction from oblique angles (as you move to the side, you can dump heights blocked so only the case where you stair-step up the model would result in needing all vertices - but even that may be possible to avoid by painting on the generated line or polygon from back to front).
Yeah, I agree Max is a pain to work with. It had the advantage of being the first 3d tool aimed more-or-less specifically at the game industry (before that, most companies wrote their own). Still, learning-curve wise I think it's better than Blender and is somewhat similar to some CAD packages. Functionality-wise is mixed.
heh - you probably missed the part of blender support for NURBS being terrible...
In reality, it doesn't matter much because GPUs are only just starting to be able to handle splines (and I expect CSG, but I haven't seen any shaders for it on the net, unlike NURBS) in hardware, so this has been relegated to software (requiring a convert to poly-mesh and push to the GPU every frame). I expect as geometry shaders advance and become more powerful we will see more NURBS surfaces and CSG (and probably raytracing, as well, but GPU memory needs to be able to hold the entire scene for true raytracing). I don't expect LOD will affect current requirements, as a reduction in detail means retexturing at the new detail level.
Current hardware is a bit restrictive for a lot of the fun geometry shaders could provide, however. My 8600 card can render 1024 vertices, which is a 32x32 mesh. Decent sized for most NURBS meshes, but this will be beautiful when it can handle a 256x256 mesh or larger to, say, allow true surface curvature silhouettes. AFAIK, true silhouettes are only possible using curved surface relief texture mapping (because the quadric calculations don't work with other major techniques like parallax mapping, but I don't remember why offhand). I have not done much research in this area in the past year or so, however, so my knowledge may be outdated.
exaggeration and sarcasm seem to be missed on the young-uns these days...
I was trying to stress a point - the US economy is tanking at a fairly rapid rate. If you look at trends any currency vs the US dollar, it almost always shows an upward trend - the Euro has gained 45 cents in 5 years and the Canadian Dollar about 35 cents in the same period. If that trend continues for a long time, US citizens will have no buying power, but will draw jobs and tourism money. This benefits BUSINESSES - they are essentially paying their employees less (since they are paid essentially the same and losing buying power) and making more profit on foreigners. Mexico is a prime example of this sort of economy - booming businesses and a lot of poverty.
I didn't mean to say that states themselves don't require it, I meant it is not a federal requirement for graduation. Federal requirements only specified Social Studies/History, English, and Science through all years of HS, if I recall correctly (math was only required through Algebra).
a newer version of DirectX probably won't fix many crashing problems - usually the installer will make sure you have a valid minimum level and that's been tested fairly thoroughly. Try to find a newer version of the graphics driver for your system (from nVidia, ATI, Intel, etc). A DX error doesn't always mean DirectX itself failed, as DX interfaces with various hardware drivers.
I had similar issues with Oblivion caused by bugs in the nVidia driver that were fixed in a later driver (relating to shadows - turning off shadows limited crashes [still had memory related crashes after 4-5 hours], but I still had corrupted shadows, which I'm not sure if they ever fixed). Also try turning down graphics settings, or disabling newer features in the graphics settings - these are more prone to bugs. It doesn't sound like this happens on other games, so its unlikely an overheating problem like when the GPU fan dies (you will more likely have graphics lock up in this case).
Apparently high energy costs haven't destroyed Europe. They just adapted.
well 'adapting' isn't quite as easy when the public transportation system stinks. Best I can do is catch a bus downtown, then a bus out to the suburb where I work, then take a circular (or walk 3 miles) for a grand total of 3 1/2 hours (one way, mostly waiting for buses) vs 15 minutes by car. There is a decent bike route, but at 17 miles (about 4 more than driving since the road and paths aren't straight like the freeway) it's a bit long to do daily (and not an option in winter).
So that leaves me with traveling little and wearing sweaters in the winter and opening the windows more often in summer, which I do anyway.
We pay "a few billion" for a great many things that you don't hear about here.
so does Canada, and their economy is doing great while ours is foundering. There is little doubt in my mind that the war in Iraq is destroying the value of the dollar.
There are alternatives to the mainstream universities.
you mean flipping burgers at McDonalds?
I'm guessing High school doesn't teach economics let alone the intertwined nature of the world economies? Here's a clue of what's happening, Mr Gloom and Doom. People and Companies are buying our goods because they're now cheaper. We on the other hand are going to spend more for imported goods. This means YOU
So what you're saying, in a nutshell, is congratulations on becoming a third world country. Life may stink in the US because it's filled with a bunch of educated cheap labor with no buying power, but in France (or insert country of choice here) it's wine and caviar every day!
Oh, and no, high schools in the US are not required to teach econ (it is required in most colleges, however).
Humorous in that Microsoft employs an industry leading ratio of programmer to QA (1:1 or 2:1, I forget). Most of that testing probably isn't hitting numbers in the excel spreadsheet, however, and to be forgiving, I'm sure min/max testing was on much larger and smaller numbers. Still, I'm amazed it wasn't found sooner.
Not just companies - the FBI. One of the first major pirate groups busted in the United States had members that worked for the feds in lieu of jail time or juvenile hall (the Super Pirates of Minneapolis [SPM]).
As a kid I went to church with an FBI computer crime guy (and his kid) and knew a good chunk of the group that replaced the SPM - a group called the Midwest Pirates Guild - from school friends and hanging out on BBS's, so I heard a lot of info from both sides. It was kinda weird knowing the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and almost humorous watching the FBI guy give computer crime talks and use cracks by people I knew as examples. All the people I knew personally that were involved moved on to respectable careers not involving crime, so it isn't always a bad thing to employ them (and many were involved in other crimes such as hacking and credit card fraud, the latter of which would make me want to string them up, having been a victim).
If you've seen the movie "Catch Me If You Can" you'll see another criminal-turned-FBI informant.
I'd have to agree with you - I'd like to see proof/info on that. The design hit appears to be driver related, not Vista related. The poster possibly is referring to the MS's original compositing plan of using hardware overlays before deciding they're obsolete. OpenGL on nVidia cards do not use this, so that is not the cause of my problems. Still, the compositing desktop framebuffer should run at near native levels (as I said, 10-15% due to overhead) and it's not. According to Siggraph slides, nVidia and Khronos had worked together to get near-native speeds.
Most of my code changes I did for Vista are based on this article. I haven't had any luck with the PFD_SUPPORT_COMPOSITING or PFD_SUPPORT_GDI flags (same framerate).
after further research, there is a hardware implementation of 1.4 that converts calls to DirectX. It is frozen, but not deprecated. The OpenGL that was dropped was a software implementation of 1.3 (the one deprecated way back in Longhorn). This driver is not being used, so is not the cause of my slowdown.
My biggest problem with SDL is its relative slowness compared to custom drivers. This may have improved from 1.2.4 to 1.2.12, I haven't checked, but a framerate hit of 5-10% (depending on platform) is too much for my tastes. I agree that the desktop env is a non-issue since OpenGL runs on top of X (which is part of every window manager).
The real problem with Linux games is they don't sell very well, which killed Loki, but its possible the market needs a second chance as I think marketshare is improving. OTOH, with no SecuROM or other security measure, you probably won't get many non massive A-list games due to the piracy fear - it's much safer to just sell to the dominant Windows market. I'd like to see a few more MMORPGs supporting alternate OS's and sales numbers for those because they don't have to fear piracy and it might give an indication of the true market.
The original plan was to support up to OpenGL 1.3 by converting calls in Vista to DirectX calls, but I believe they decided to drop OpenGL completely in the released version, which means only hardware is supported by callbacks. I haven't tried anything but hardware, so I can't tell you for sure. I do know they deprecated the API for this release, which means all support will soon be dropped, if it isn't already.
From my testing, a windowed OpenGL context in Vista has about a 2-4x performance hit with Aero enabled (and even without on my laptop - not sure if that's a bug or not). A fullscreen context gets roughly the same framerate as XP or Linux. Using OpenGL with a specific geometry shader in window mode on Vista gives me worse performance than running the same code in a software emulator on the same machine (nvemulate gets 10FPS, Vista gets 9). Note that I have not yet tested that code in fullscreen to see what the "real" framerate should be, which will tell me if it's Vista's fault, or a driver issue. Vista is supposedly just compositing (in layman's terms, cutting the OpenGL window and pasting it into a DirectX window) which in NO WAY be more than a 10-15% performance hit, and I get a hit in the 40-80% range (with very erratic frame rates). This indicates to me that either MS is intentionally crippling OpenGL or the drivers are really bad at the moment (and to be honest, it could be either).
Most games are played in fullscreen, and OpenGL works fine in fullscreen on Vista. The biggest problem with OpenGL right now is that it's 10-15% slower than DirectX. Updates to OpenGL - 3.0 (Long's Peak) due this month, and Mt Evans due in first quarter next year - should help close this gap (however, both are months later than originally expected).
That's pretty typical, and I've seen bands get screwed where the record company contract stated they were entitled to some or all proceeds from merchandise sales until recording costs were recouped (ok, some I can understand, but all really sucks). Record companies structure contracts in a way that artists (except songwriters) almost never break even - they pay themselves first (producer, songwriter, recording engineer, manager, marketing, distribution, and probably a few more I've missed), then use the artists tiny cut to pay off the recording debt. New artists often get horrible contracts that pay little, and even if their take is $1/album (good by some I've seen) the label needs to sell 10000 albums to "break even" if $10000 is borrowed up front to do the recording (10k was a typical 1990s session). The album probably technically recoups cost at about the 2-5k range (and since it's my opinion that most marketing costs for new artists are pocketed, probably less), but is considered a loss until all the "up-front" money is paid back. If the artist manages to sell 10k, they're still at the break-even point, and everyone else has been paid nicely (if the songwriter(s) is in the band, at least one member has made money).
That $44.50 covers venue cost (including maintenance), crews, engineers, etc. A bigger band usually has more up-front costs, but as long as the cost of the venue is paid, income is usually in the band's favor. Many artists make sure to pay themselves first and some are notorious for not paying their crew or set builders (like *ahem* that guy that was named a symbol for a while *ahem*). Anyhow, some bands are milking the audience for $100+ tickets, which I think is absurd, but then again, pro sports does that too (which I think is absurd).
I don't remember anything in Rolemaster that is fatal to a character during creation in any of the first 4 editions (0 [the parchment pamphlets], 1, 2, and RMCC - I don't have anything after that). I remember a game where you could start with fatal diseases (like Leprosy), but that was a low fantasy game (and might have been house rules).
Traveller was only fatal in the first edition and the "hardcore" variant of Megatraveller (optional rules), after that, you were booted before completing a term (mustered out). GDW games were all pretty deadly to squishies, with the possible exception of Twilight 2000 (since you had quite a few hit points per location and it was hard to die instantly). They weren't tho only ones, though, because I remember playing a small arms combat game by someone else where some hits did millions of points of damage (and you had at most about 15 hits in any location). Anything over about 4x your hits maxed out the critical table, so it was pretty absurd.
Rome is a Teen rated game, not M rated (look at the cover displayed). I imagine if the battles were bloody that would change, but they're not (just corpse ridden).
Few of the best selling games of all time are M rated, and few of those are even on that list of top 100 games - probably because most good sellers appeal to casual gamers - games like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, Tetris, Pokemon Red, Blue and Green, the Sims, etc. GTA is the only real franchise that breaks that trend.
What this says to me is kid oriented games will either be huge successes or huge flops, but Mature oriented games will rarely be either.
Hard-core incompetent is a bit extreme - his main failure was the failure to get hostages out of Iran, and that is as much to blame on US foreign policy and bad luck with rescue operations as anything. Many people give Reagan credit for getting the hostages out of Iran, but it was pretty much over and done with before he even took office - the Shah had died and Iran changed their demand (which included extradite the Shah to them for trial and execution) to just release the billions of Iranian money in American banks and agree not to interfere with their government (the Algiers Accords). I'm really not a believer in the conspiracy theory - I personally think Reagan just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get credit for that one.
A lot of people say Reagan was a god in comparison to Carter, but Reagan's administration was far from perfect - he ignored Iraqi genocide and even allied with their dictator because they were anti-Iran (not to mention armed them). His administration was full of scandals (e.g. the Iran-Contra affair, HUD rigging, and the lobbying scandal). He scrapped the SALT II nuclear non-proliferation treaty so he could get military spending for SDI, then claimed the soviets violated it first (this was never officially signed, so I can't say the treaty was broken, and the ensuing arms race contributed to the financial collapse of the USSR, so it wasn't all bad).
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "sold out to the Saudis," either - AFAIK, no such thing happened during Carter's presidency and the US has never wavered in its support of Israel. You are probably referencing his post-presidency book with an anti-Israel message that I see mentioned on many conservative blogs when I google for it - apparently the Carter foundation received a large Saudi grant after one of his books was released ripping Israel, including some money from a bin-Laden (NOT Osama). Having not read the book, I can't answer this objectively and you may be completely right in bashing him, but saying a bin-Laden is Osama is like saying a Jones is always Jim Jones (the mass murderer) and that is basically a conservative smear campaign.
Personally, I blame Carter for founding FEMA using an executive order (which probably hides provisions allowing them to declare martial law in a crisis, which is illegal), the failure to avoid the 1979 energy crisis, FAR too many executive orders (bypassing congress), and inability to work with congress. Incidentally, I pretty much blame Bush for the same thing - FEMA's poor performance, high gas prices, FAR too many executive orders, and an inability to work with Congress. Both Bush and Carter have used executive orders to make illegal activities legal - Bush in allowing the NSA to spy on US citizens [confirmed] and Carter by [allegedly] allowing FEMA to declare martial law without Congress. Since executive orders may be exempt from being public on the grounds of national security, we often don't even know what's in them.
Anyhow, you can probably tell I'm not overly fond of Carter, Reagan, or Bush. It's my opinion that the best candidates usually get eliminated early because generally only the most liberal and conservative people vote in the primaries and they tend to favor the more extreme members of their party (non-party members can vote, but they can only vote for one party, so moderates usually stay out). There hasn't been a viable 3rd party since Perot - before he dropped out he was a viable candidate, at least, though I personally was never on his bandwagon due to his proposed method of paying off the national debt with a huge gas tax. IMO that would just drive up inflation. Basically, the US has a 2 party system that is slanted toward extremism on both sides, and not even all states have binding elections, so the electors (in the electoral college - remember, the US doesn't really v
$60 a year ($5/mo) is what every commercial provider I know of in the US charges for programming fees, maintenance free or not (Comcast, Dish, and DirectTV are all $4.99 + any sales tax last I checked). It's probably more of a price viewed as acceptable by consumers than based on cost. If you don't like that, join the co-op others mentioned.
I only used the OSX version of IE on mac (so with protected memory and preemptive multitasking) and never had that problem. That version was slightly more robust than the other UNIX versions as well, as I recall, because MS had ported a lot of code while working on Office for mac. My work only supported Netscape on mac at that time, however, so I didn't do extensive work with it (just fiddling at home).
The fact of the matter is less about Netscape and more about demand for a crippled and reasonably unfunctional IE. IE on UNIX and for the most part on mac lacked any value-add over Netscape (no ASP, broken java scripting using Microsoft's variant jscript, no DHTML, CSS, VBScript, ActiveX, etc). It also was months (if not years) behind IE on Windows. As far as a straight up web browser goes, it worked fine and usually displayed properly, but so did Netscape. Admittedly, this is probably a race IE didn't want to win, as they had pretty much crushed Netscape by this time and were fighting anti-trust lawsuits, so ceding the UNIX side to other browsers would make them look better.
On the plus side as far as the browser was concerned, it seemed to install pretty easily and was compatible with Java. It also was fairly solid on Sun, as I think I only brought it down 3 or 4 times (compared to about 300 for Netscape, but in Netscape's defense, I used it a LOT more on more platforms and we had full javascript support for it, which caused a lot more crashes). Font support was more accurate with Windows as well because it included fonts.
Many features were copied from Netscape, like using a.microsoft directory containing cache files, lock files, etc (.netscape for Netscape,.mozilla for Mozilla). This strays a bit from the typical UNIX way, which would be to shove those temp files in/tmp or/var/tmp and only have a configuration dot file in the home directory.
Slashdot Mirror
heh - but they still let him in...
50 Cent is more like 49.5 Cent in Canada, anyway.
This is similar to Acrobat itself - the Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader) is free, but if you want to write or annotate, you need to buy a license. I assume Foxit has to pay Adobe a royalty to create a writer, as even though Acrobat itself is an Open standard. Adobe has a lot of patents on both Acrobat itself and the underlying renderer, which is a subset of PostScript.
Note that the Ghostscript program allows conversion (writing) of a file format such as Word into Acrobat by printing to an Acrobat file rather than a printer, but has dual licensing as well (free only for non-commercial use). Adobe has a similar "printer" for Windows that writes Acrobat format, but I think that is also commercially licensed (I have it at work).
Bungie also teamed with another group of developers to create that one - it wasn't an in-house project. It wasn't very profitable and had a lot of cost-overruns. If anything, I'd expect to see a "Myth: The Fallen Lords" sequel or a new franchise.
The original founder are no longer with Microsoft, so who knows what direction it will take. Alex Seropian is at Wideload games, Jason Jones keeps a very low profile, but apparently is at Arena:Net (see Moby Games). Artist Colin Brent disappeared after Marathon, and that's about all I know of him. Strange that MobyGames is missing all the early Bungie titles (!Gnop, Operation: Desert Storm, and Minotaur: Labyrinth of Crete) - 2500 copies sold or not.
I lived the story, and converted myself into the go-to geek...
The reason I got into self-repairing my own hardware (circa 1995) was because a guy at FirstTech in Uptown, near Minneapolis (and yes, I had had good service in that store before) told me my motherboard was blown and he would need to replace it for $550 (after already paying a $100 diagnostic charge). I said no and left (not worth it for a 2 year old box), but before being resigned to only having one old computer (a PC running Slackware so I could play with the new OpenGL compatible Mesa library) I began my first foray into the fledgling online parts market using sites like pricewatch (but I don't think pricewatch listed mac stuff at that time - some other site), and found the motherboard new for $115. Before I ordered it, however, I decided to open the case and do a diagnostic myself as best as I was able, just in case I needed a new power supply unit (PSU). I had worked with multimeters before, so I borrowed one from my brother and tested the PSU (which I admit, the repair guy had said may also be bad, but he also lied and said he wouldn't know until a new motherboard was in) and indeed it was bad - horribly bad. It would spike to working levels for about a second, then drop to near 0. I decided to start with that, and ordered the part from a dealer I found (for ~$80 + shipping). After adding the power supply, I clicked the power button and the machine started and ran, with the old motherboard. And it continued to run, flawlessly, and for another 2 years (then I sold the machine for $100).
So basically, they would have charged me $550 to replace the motherboard, find it still didn't work, charge me another $200 + labor for a power supply, and I still would have had a 2 year old mac, even though I'd paid enough to buy some of the low-end hardware (like clones) that would be faster and better. I decided after that if a guy charged me $100/hour could not have correctly diagnosed a problem that took me around 15 minutes to find (mostly due to ignorance on how to open the case, and I had suspected the PSU from the start but was scared to break my case, which had a "warranty will be violated" sticker, but that was silly because it was out of warranty). I've since built dozens of machines from scratch and diagnosed problems correctly (every time!) when something failed on a PC I've looked at (a dozen hard drives, 4 sticks of RAM, a motherboard, 2 PSUs, and a northbridge cooling fan). The worst was a bad PSU that had blown multiple components including the mentioned mobo (my in-laws' computer, and it probably had a surge).
While it is possible to diagnose bad memory as a motherboard or CPU failure on some motherboards (some don't come on at all during POST [Power On Self Test] if memory, CPU, or Mobo are bad) it is fairly easy to test for any of these failures with diagnostic cards (which I don't have and every repair person probably does have). A bad PSU can be tested and detected with a multimeter and anything else should be easy to diagnose by looking and listening with the case open or once the machine is booted (for software, drive or CD/DVD issues).
I think what is meant is that by using CSG you can have perfect models shape-wise that get tessellated down to current hardware (or an acceptable speed). That doesn't mean the models will be perfect texture and material-wise, and while geometry shaders can tessellate, as I understand it, it would be more efficient to have a dedicated tessellation stage of the pipeline - I've even seen predictions that this will be the next type of shader added.
There is no real way in typical hardware to preserve roundness, as most if not all hardware is based on the polygon model and not ray tracing (which allows any mathematically defined shape). A geometry shader allows you to pass a formula and primitive data (e.g. a bezier curve and some points) which you can use to create points, lines, or polygons (triangle strips), but the hardware still breaks it down into vertices in the long run.
So yes, even if you have a NURBS surface defined in a shader, it will chew up processing power finding and creating vertices, but that is the purpose of the geometry shader - it allows you to generate vertices in hardware on the fly, and thus saves processor and memory bandwidth. The surface itself isn't really definable, as you need to pass in primitive types, but you could, say, use points as your primitive (defining nodes and weights) and generate the curves in the mesh to find your points and generate triangle strips from that.
I think you missed my point - something like the Death Star would still need to have LOD in texture, and probably still need to be hand tuned. You could use CSG to create the indentation by passing sphere definitions into the geometry shader and emitting vertices along that sphere intersections (for the inverted sphere area where the main weapon is) as well as for the main sphere itself. How many vertices to emit is an LOD issue - you probably want to emit less at further distances and would likely need to tune textures appropriately. With a 1024 vertex limit, however, I don't think you'll ever have a great CSG model of something like the Death Star, though it may be possible with multiple geometry shader calls - the 1024 limit is per geometry shader call (and multiple calls can be done per frame).
What I was getting at is one of the limitations of most mapping techniques (e.g. Parallax Occlusion Mapping) which are essentially a model definition on top of a surface defined by a height and normal (so 2 less floats than a vertex def at least on nVidia cards that work entirely with floats) - if you look at most of these surfaces from an angle, you can see that they are drawn on the surface and don't actually project out of the surface (the exception being curved surface relief maps, which can do that, but I believe have some flaw like are incompatible with soft shadows). A geometry shader allows true surface projection, so you could take a simpler model and make it more complex by projecting some or all of the vertices as required to correct silhouettes. Not that there aren't a number of issues involved that I haven't fully figured out such as connectivity (I think you might need a tri-mesh or line for each point outside the silhouette) and obstruction from oblique angles (as you move to the side, you can dump heights blocked so only the case where you stair-step up the model would result in needing all vertices - but even that may be possible to avoid by painting on the generated line or polygon from back to front).
Yeah, I agree Max is a pain to work with. It had the advantage of being the first 3d tool aimed more-or-less specifically at the game industry (before that, most companies wrote their own). Still, learning-curve wise I think it's better than Blender and is somewhat similar to some CAD packages. Functionality-wise is mixed.
heh - you probably missed the part of blender support for NURBS being terrible...
In reality, it doesn't matter much because GPUs are only just starting to be able to handle splines (and I expect CSG, but I haven't seen any shaders for it on the net, unlike NURBS) in hardware, so this has been relegated to software (requiring a convert to poly-mesh and push to the GPU every frame). I expect as geometry shaders advance and become more powerful we will see more NURBS surfaces and CSG (and probably raytracing, as well, but GPU memory needs to be able to hold the entire scene for true raytracing). I don't expect LOD will affect current requirements, as a reduction in detail means retexturing at the new detail level.
Current hardware is a bit restrictive for a lot of the fun geometry shaders could provide, however. My 8600 card can render 1024 vertices, which is a 32x32 mesh. Decent sized for most NURBS meshes, but this will be beautiful when it can handle a 256x256 mesh or larger to, say, allow true surface curvature silhouettes. AFAIK, true silhouettes are only possible using curved surface relief texture mapping (because the quadric calculations don't work with other major techniques like parallax mapping, but I don't remember why offhand). I have not done much research in this area in the past year or so, however, so my knowledge may be outdated.
exaggeration and sarcasm seem to be missed on the young-uns these days...
I was trying to stress a point - the US economy is tanking at a fairly rapid rate. If you look at trends any currency vs the US dollar, it almost always shows an upward trend - the Euro has gained 45 cents in 5 years and the Canadian Dollar about 35 cents in the same period. If that trend continues for a long time, US citizens will have no buying power, but will draw jobs and tourism money. This benefits BUSINESSES - they are essentially paying their employees less (since they are paid essentially the same and losing buying power) and making more profit on foreigners. Mexico is a prime example of this sort of economy - booming businesses and a lot of poverty.
I didn't mean to say that states themselves don't require it, I meant it is not a federal requirement for graduation. Federal requirements only specified Social Studies/History, English, and Science through all years of HS, if I recall correctly (math was only required through Algebra).
a newer version of DirectX probably won't fix many crashing problems - usually the installer will make sure you have a valid minimum level and that's been tested fairly thoroughly. Try to find a newer version of the graphics driver for your system (from nVidia, ATI, Intel, etc). A DX error doesn't always mean DirectX itself failed, as DX interfaces with various hardware drivers.
I had similar issues with Oblivion caused by bugs in the nVidia driver that were fixed in a later driver (relating to shadows - turning off shadows limited crashes [still had memory related crashes after 4-5 hours], but I still had corrupted shadows, which I'm not sure if they ever fixed). Also try turning down graphics settings, or disabling newer features in the graphics settings - these are more prone to bugs. It doesn't sound like this happens on other games, so its unlikely an overheating problem like when the GPU fan dies (you will more likely have graphics lock up in this case).
well 'adapting' isn't quite as easy when the public transportation system stinks. Best I can do is catch a bus downtown, then a bus out to the suburb where I work, then take a circular (or walk 3 miles) for a grand total of 3 1/2 hours (one way, mostly waiting for buses) vs 15 minutes by car. There is a decent bike route, but at 17 miles (about 4 more than driving since the road and paths aren't straight like the freeway) it's a bit long to do daily (and not an option in winter).
So that leaves me with traveling little and wearing sweaters in the winter and opening the windows more often in summer, which I do anyway.
so does Canada, and their economy is doing great while ours is foundering. There is little doubt in my mind that the war in Iraq is destroying the value of the dollar.
you mean flipping burgers at McDonalds?
So what you're saying, in a nutshell, is congratulations on becoming a third world country. Life may stink in the US because it's filled with a bunch of educated cheap labor with no buying power, but in France (or insert country of choice here) it's wine and caviar every day!
Oh, and no, high schools in the US are not required to teach econ (it is required in most colleges, however).
Humorous in that Microsoft employs an industry leading ratio of programmer to QA (1:1 or 2:1, I forget). Most of that testing probably isn't hitting numbers in the excel spreadsheet, however, and to be forgiving, I'm sure min/max testing was on much larger and smaller numbers. Still, I'm amazed it wasn't found sooner.
Not just companies - the FBI. One of the first major pirate groups busted in the United States had members that worked for the feds in lieu of jail time or juvenile hall (the Super Pirates of Minneapolis [SPM]).
As a kid I went to church with an FBI computer crime guy (and his kid) and knew a good chunk of the group that replaced the SPM - a group called the Midwest Pirates Guild - from school friends and hanging out on BBS's, so I heard a lot of info from both sides. It was kinda weird knowing the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and almost humorous watching the FBI guy give computer crime talks and use cracks by people I knew as examples. All the people I knew personally that were involved moved on to respectable careers not involving crime, so it isn't always a bad thing to employ them (and many were involved in other crimes such as hacking and credit card fraud, the latter of which would make me want to string them up, having been a victim).
If you've seen the movie "Catch Me If You Can" you'll see another criminal-turned-FBI informant.
I'd have to agree with you - I'd like to see proof/info on that. The design hit appears to be driver related, not Vista related. The poster possibly is referring to the MS's original compositing plan of using hardware overlays before deciding they're obsolete. OpenGL on nVidia cards do not use this, so that is not the cause of my problems. Still, the compositing desktop framebuffer should run at near native levels (as I said, 10-15% due to overhead) and it's not. According to Siggraph slides, nVidia and Khronos had worked together to get near-native speeds.
Most of my code changes I did for Vista are based on this article. I haven't had any luck with the PFD_SUPPORT_COMPOSITING or PFD_SUPPORT_GDI flags (same framerate).
after further research, there is a hardware implementation of 1.4 that converts calls to DirectX. It is frozen, but not deprecated. The OpenGL that was dropped was a software implementation of 1.3 (the one deprecated way back in Longhorn). This driver is not being used, so is not the cause of my slowdown.
My biggest problem with SDL is its relative slowness compared to custom drivers. This may have improved from 1.2.4 to 1.2.12, I haven't checked, but a framerate hit of 5-10% (depending on platform) is too much for my tastes. I agree that the desktop env is a non-issue since OpenGL runs on top of X (which is part of every window manager).
The real problem with Linux games is they don't sell very well, which killed Loki, but its possible the market needs a second chance as I think marketshare is improving. OTOH, with no SecuROM or other security measure, you probably won't get many non massive A-list games due to the piracy fear - it's much safer to just sell to the dominant Windows market. I'd like to see a few more MMORPGs supporting alternate OS's and sales numbers for those because they don't have to fear piracy and it might give an indication of the true market.
and the answer is... sorta.
The original plan was to support up to OpenGL 1.3 by converting calls in Vista to DirectX calls, but I believe they decided to drop OpenGL completely in the released version, which means only hardware is supported by callbacks. I haven't tried anything but hardware, so I can't tell you for sure. I do know they deprecated the API for this release, which means all support will soon be dropped, if it isn't already.
From my testing, a windowed OpenGL context in Vista has about a 2-4x performance hit with Aero enabled (and even without on my laptop - not sure if that's a bug or not). A fullscreen context gets roughly the same framerate as XP or Linux. Using OpenGL with a specific geometry shader in window mode on Vista gives me worse performance than running the same code in a software emulator on the same machine (nvemulate gets 10FPS, Vista gets 9). Note that I have not yet tested that code in fullscreen to see what the "real" framerate should be, which will tell me if it's Vista's fault, or a driver issue. Vista is supposedly just compositing (in layman's terms, cutting the OpenGL window and pasting it into a DirectX window) which in NO WAY be more than a 10-15% performance hit, and I get a hit in the 40-80% range (with very erratic frame rates). This indicates to me that either MS is intentionally crippling OpenGL or the drivers are really bad at the moment (and to be honest, it could be either).
Most games are played in fullscreen, and OpenGL works fine in fullscreen on Vista. The biggest problem with OpenGL right now is that it's 10-15% slower than DirectX. Updates to OpenGL - 3.0 (Long's Peak) due this month, and Mt Evans due in first quarter next year - should help close this gap (however, both are months later than originally expected).
bah - if it doesn't have a CLI I can text in, it ain't Linux. ;)
That's pretty typical, and I've seen bands get screwed where the record company contract stated they were entitled to some or all proceeds from merchandise sales until recording costs were recouped (ok, some I can understand, but all really sucks). Record companies structure contracts in a way that artists (except songwriters) almost never break even - they pay themselves first (producer, songwriter, recording engineer, manager, marketing, distribution, and probably a few more I've missed), then use the artists tiny cut to pay off the recording debt. New artists often get horrible contracts that pay little, and even if their take is $1/album (good by some I've seen) the label needs to sell 10000 albums to "break even" if $10000 is borrowed up front to do the recording (10k was a typical 1990s session). The album probably technically recoups cost at about the 2-5k range (and since it's my opinion that most marketing costs for new artists are pocketed, probably less), but is considered a loss until all the "up-front" money is paid back. If the artist manages to sell 10k, they're still at the break-even point, and everyone else has been paid nicely (if the songwriter(s) is in the band, at least one member has made money).
That $44.50 covers venue cost (including maintenance), crews, engineers, etc. A bigger band usually has more up-front costs, but as long as the cost of the venue is paid, income is usually in the band's favor. Many artists make sure to pay themselves first and some are notorious for not paying their crew or set builders (like *ahem* that guy that was named a symbol for a while *ahem*). Anyhow, some bands are milking the audience for $100+ tickets, which I think is absurd, but then again, pro sports does that too (which I think is absurd).
I don't remember anything in Rolemaster that is fatal to a character during creation in any of the first 4 editions (0 [the parchment pamphlets], 1, 2, and RMCC - I don't have anything after that). I remember a game where you could start with fatal diseases (like Leprosy), but that was a low fantasy game (and might have been house rules).
Traveller was only fatal in the first edition and the "hardcore" variant of Megatraveller (optional rules), after that, you were booted before completing a term (mustered out). GDW games were all pretty deadly to squishies, with the possible exception of Twilight 2000 (since you had quite a few hit points per location and it was hard to die instantly). They weren't tho only ones, though, because I remember playing a small arms combat game by someone else where some hits did millions of points of damage (and you had at most about 15 hits in any location). Anything over about 4x your hits maxed out the critical table, so it was pretty absurd.
Rome is a Teen rated game, not M rated (look at the cover displayed). I imagine if the battles were bloody that would change, but they're not (just corpse ridden).
Few of the best selling games of all time are M rated, and few of those are even on that list of top 100 games - probably because most good sellers appeal to casual gamers - games like Super Mario Bros, Super Mario World, Tetris, Pokemon Red, Blue and Green, the Sims, etc. GTA is the only real franchise that breaks that trend.
What this says to me is kid oriented games will either be huge successes or huge flops, but Mature oriented games will rarely be either.
Hard-core incompetent is a bit extreme - his main failure was the failure to get hostages out of Iran, and that is as much to blame on US foreign policy and bad luck with rescue operations as anything. Many people give Reagan credit for getting the hostages out of Iran, but it was pretty much over and done with before he even took office - the Shah had died and Iran changed their demand (which included extradite the Shah to them for trial and execution) to just release the billions of Iranian money in American banks and agree not to interfere with their government (the Algiers Accords). I'm really not a believer in the conspiracy theory - I personally think Reagan just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get credit for that one.
A lot of people say Reagan was a god in comparison to Carter, but Reagan's administration was far from perfect - he ignored Iraqi genocide and even allied with their dictator because they were anti-Iran (not to mention armed them). His administration was full of scandals (e.g. the Iran-Contra affair, HUD rigging, and the lobbying scandal). He scrapped the SALT II nuclear non-proliferation treaty so he could get military spending for SDI, then claimed the soviets violated it first (this was never officially signed, so I can't say the treaty was broken, and the ensuing arms race contributed to the financial collapse of the USSR, so it wasn't all bad).
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "sold out to the Saudis," either - AFAIK, no such thing happened during Carter's presidency and the US has never wavered in its support of Israel. You are probably referencing his post-presidency book with an anti-Israel message that I see mentioned on many conservative blogs when I google for it - apparently the Carter foundation received a large Saudi grant after one of his books was released ripping Israel, including some money from a bin-Laden (NOT Osama). Having not read the book, I can't answer this objectively and you may be completely right in bashing him, but saying a bin-Laden is Osama is like saying a Jones is always Jim Jones (the mass murderer) and that is basically a conservative smear campaign.
Personally, I blame Carter for founding FEMA using an executive order (which probably hides provisions allowing them to declare martial law in a crisis, which is illegal), the failure to avoid the 1979 energy crisis, FAR too many executive orders (bypassing congress), and inability to work with congress. Incidentally, I pretty much blame Bush for the same thing - FEMA's poor performance, high gas prices, FAR too many executive orders, and an inability to work with Congress. Both Bush and Carter have used executive orders to make illegal activities legal - Bush in allowing the NSA to spy on US citizens [confirmed] and Carter by [allegedly] allowing FEMA to declare martial law without Congress. Since executive orders may be exempt from being public on the grounds of national security, we often don't even know what's in them.
Anyhow, you can probably tell I'm not overly fond of Carter, Reagan, or Bush. It's my opinion that the best candidates usually get eliminated early because generally only the most liberal and conservative people vote in the primaries and they tend to favor the more extreme members of their party (non-party members can vote, but they can only vote for one party, so moderates usually stay out). There hasn't been a viable 3rd party since Perot - before he dropped out he was a viable candidate, at least, though I personally was never on his bandwagon due to his proposed method of paying off the national debt with a huge gas tax. IMO that would just drive up inflation. Basically, the US has a 2 party system that is slanted toward extremism on both sides, and not even all states have binding elections, so the electors (in the electoral college - remember, the US doesn't really v
$60 a year ($5/mo) is what every commercial provider I know of in the US charges for programming fees, maintenance free or not (Comcast, Dish, and DirectTV are all $4.99 + any sales tax last I checked). It's probably more of a price viewed as acceptable by consumers than based on cost. If you don't like that, join the co-op others mentioned.
I only used the OSX version of IE on mac (so with protected memory and preemptive multitasking) and never had that problem. That version was slightly more robust than the other UNIX versions as well, as I recall, because MS had ported a lot of code while working on Office for mac. My work only supported Netscape on mac at that time, however, so I didn't do extensive work with it (just fiddling at home).
The fact of the matter is less about Netscape and more about demand for a crippled and reasonably unfunctional IE. IE on UNIX and for the most part on mac lacked any value-add over Netscape (no ASP, broken java scripting using Microsoft's variant jscript, no DHTML, CSS, VBScript, ActiveX, etc). It also was months (if not years) behind IE on Windows. As far as a straight up web browser goes, it worked fine and usually displayed properly, but so did Netscape. Admittedly, this is probably a race IE didn't want to win, as they had pretty much crushed Netscape by this time and were fighting anti-trust lawsuits, so ceding the UNIX side to other browsers would make them look better.
.microsoft directory containing cache files, lock files, etc (.netscape for Netscape, .mozilla for Mozilla). This strays a bit from the typical UNIX way, which would be to shove those temp files in /tmp or /var/tmp and only have a configuration dot file in the home directory.
On the plus side as far as the browser was concerned, it seemed to install pretty easily and was compatible with Java. It also was fairly solid on Sun, as I think I only brought it down 3 or 4 times (compared to about 300 for Netscape, but in Netscape's defense, I used it a LOT more on more platforms and we had full javascript support for it, which caused a lot more crashes). Font support was more accurate with Windows as well because it included fonts.
Many features were copied from Netscape, like using a