Macs havent had a BIOS for years--not in the traditional sense anyway. They use Open Firmware, an architecturally-neutral BIOS replacement (originally?) developed by Sun. It's pretty nifty...
I was at Best Buy yesterday, and there was an Apple section of shelf, front and center, on the main computer aisle. Seemed well put together, at least comparable to nicer CompUSA displays. Didn't talk to anyone past ogling the new Samsung 213-T displays, so have no idea if they've been given the Apple Kool-Aid, er trained.
This was in San Francisco, and coicidentially a few blocks from the smoking hole in the ground that was Sephora on Market street--the future site of the first Apple store here--and only a scant couple blocks from aforementioned CompUSA. Wonder how long those displays will stay in shape once she opens for business?
Fired up IE for the first time in months to look at the site. Noticed lack of "Electronic" genre on the left navigation bar, so tapped a few searches for my favorites.
Searching for Photek produced 734 matches, none of which having anything to do whatsoever with the DnB pioneer. The #1 result? Patsy Cline.
The voices are telling me to give in to Buy.com/Microsoft/RIAA and listen to shitty country music. What was I thinking all these years?
That doesn't mean that it is an equivalent skill or requires the same training and experience. There's a reason why brain surgeons make more money than nurses.
Education, or perhaps staggering school loan payments, shouldn't be the primary metric by which compensation is determined. It's a sad state of affairs that educators earn less than lawyers or doctors, yet probably have a greater positive impact on society. For example, my mother is a nurse, and a damn fine one. She's cared for (and likely saved the lives of) more patients than a dozen brain surgeons. Yet she earns far less.
And if I were YOU, I'd worry less about coder envy and more about the art school dropout who's going to be replacing YOU.
If you'd like to reveal yourself and/or continue this pissing contest offline, I'm sure you can find my email address.
A good HTML wrangler is as valuble to a [web] project as a good programmer. A full understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, browser bugs, etc is decidedly non-trivial.
If I were you, I'd worry less about the HTML kids' compensation and more about the Indian engineer who's going to be replacing you...
Try GtkRadiant. Open source and maintained since 1999 (CVS).
A couple of internal branches even have Maya-style scene graph support with nested transforms, instances, and the like.
I maintain the BSP compiler (Q3Map2), which along with the editor component, Radiant, has also been significantly enhanced from what Id software originally wrote.
The next major version of GtkRadiant, 1.3 has Half-Life and Counter-Strike support, in addition to the games currently supported: Quake 3 (and Team Arena), Star Trek Elite Force, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune 2, and Jedi Knight 2.
"I want you to remember, Clark... in all the years to come... in your most private moments... I want you to remember my hand at your throat... I want you to remember the one man who beat you..."
--------
First it comes out that multiplayer will be de-emphasized in D3. Then it's basically said that in order to display it properly you need to shell out $300 on a video card. I'll be more interested in Unreal 2. At least they actually care about what the PC gamer wants.
--------
Actually, Unreal 2 has no multiplayer component. If you want that, you'll need to shell out for Unreal Tournament 2003.
The following pure speculation, but given the following:
1. John Carmack has been a proponent of virtualized texture memory for some time (using system RAM as texture memory and only fetching small blocks of textures as needed, as opposed to uploading an entire texture + mipmaps).
2. Nintendo GameCube's video hardware was designed by ArtX, and is a proven working example of hardware using virtualized texture memory.
3. ATi owns ArtX.
4. DOOM III was demoed on ATi's next-generation R300 chipset.
The speculation bit: R300 has some ArtX influences, including virtualized texture memory. If so, this is a good thing (for reasons Carmack outlines in the linked document above).
Besides the usual awful AppleSoft BASIC hacks, my earliest (and fondest) memories of game tinkering were with Pinball Construction Set's awesome built-in editor. IIRC, it was the first game to ship with out-of-the-box modding support. EA was way ahead of its time, one might say...
...because all they're only tools for illegal purposes anyway, regardless of their beneficial uses. To be safe, ban VCRs, MD players, CD rippers, DVD burners, stethescopes, lockpicks, cellphones and toothpicks too.
Cheaters will always find a way to cheat. If it matters, don't play against someone you don't know/trust. Besides, your CLQ ranking isn't Life.
OpenGL proxies already allow this sort of thing anyway. It's removed now, but there was a "Matrix" Quake2 opengl32.dll proxy hack that did similar things here:
http://users.chello.be/sf15772/
Somewhere floating around there are screenshots. It intercepted OpenGL calls and replaced all the walls with Matrix-style green character waterfalls and called the real opengl32.dll internally.
i have found similar results. the scheduler seems to have gotten a nice kick, as well. under heavy concurrency load, i saw performance increases in the order of 800-1200% (!) on identical hardware.
/me thinks apache + tux on that dell hw will perform nicely...
it'll be a crippled port not unlike what Sierra tried to do to Half-Life
half-life for mac os was ported (to 99% completion) by andrew meggs, an excellent coder, i might add. sierra killed the project because of support cost issues. see westlake for example of the burden of patches to the windows version to the person(s) responsible for a mac port.
and unlike half-life, which used a chomping stack of mfc for its menus (arguably the most annoying aspect of the port), halo is, and has been, running under mac os for a long time.
besides, to steal an oft-used carmackism, game coders should do "The Right Thing" and have the discipline to code portably from day one. i believe jason jones et al share that sentiment...
Slashdot Mirror
Macs havent had a BIOS for years--not in the traditional sense anyway. They use Open Firmware, an architecturally-neutral BIOS replacement (originally?) developed by Sun. It's pretty nifty...
More info here.
Nitpicking?
:)
Sorry...
I was at Best Buy yesterday, and there was an Apple section of shelf, front and center, on the main computer aisle. Seemed well put together, at least comparable to nicer CompUSA displays. Didn't talk to anyone past ogling the new Samsung 213-T displays, so have no idea if they've been given the Apple Kool-Aid, er trained.
This was in San Francisco, and coicidentially a few blocks from the smoking hole in the ground that was Sephora on Market street--the future site of the first Apple store here--and only a scant couple blocks from aforementioned CompUSA. Wonder how long those displays will stay in shape once she opens for business?
y
Fired up IE for the first time in months to look at the site. Noticed lack of "Electronic" genre on the left navigation bar, so tapped a few searches for my favorites.
Searching for Photek produced 734 matches, none of which having anything to do whatsoever with the DnB pioneer. The #1 result? Patsy Cline.
The voices are telling me to give in to Buy.com/Microsoft/RIAA and listen to shitty country music. What was I thinking all these years?
y
Go go Proton Radio...
via Reuters
When AOL's proxy servers go down, they take the internet with it, making the typical Slashdot effect seem like a mild inconvenience.
I'm positive Ars has a large readership on AO...
er, nevermind.
y
y
In other news:
finalfantasydog, champion of lurking Slashdot pseudoflamers, still smarting from Yet Another First Post slipping from his greasy fing
Ah, screw it. I have better things to do than waste my time replying to this.
Enjoy the karma, and next time notice the punctuation, assbag.
Duplicate?
That doesn't mean that it is an equivalent skill or requires the same training and experience. There's a reason why brain surgeons make more money than nurses.
Education, or perhaps staggering school loan payments, shouldn't be the primary metric by which compensation is determined. It's a sad state of affairs that educators earn less than lawyers or doctors, yet probably have a greater positive impact on society. For example, my mother is a nurse, and a damn fine one. She's cared for (and likely saved the lives of) more patients than a dozen brain surgeons. Yet she earns far less.
And if I were YOU, I'd worry less about coder envy and more about the art school dropout who's going to be replacing YOU.
If you'd like to reveal yourself and/or continue this pissing contest offline, I'm sure you can find my email address.
y
A good HTML wrangler is as valuble to a [web] project as a good programmer. A full understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, browser bugs, etc is decidedly non-trivial.
If I were you, I'd worry less about the HTML kids' compensation and more about the Indian engineer who's going to be replacing you...
y
Crypto freak, you should know there's no security through obscurity
Try GtkRadiant. Open source and maintained since 1999 (CVS).
A couple of internal branches even have Maya-style scene graph support with nested transforms, instances, and the like.
I maintain the BSP compiler (Q3Map2), which along with the editor component, Radiant, has also been significantly enhanced from what Id software originally wrote.
The next major version of GtkRadiant, 1.3 has Half-Life and Counter-Strike support, in addition to the games currently supported: Quake 3 (and Team Arena), Star Trek Elite Force, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune 2, and Jedi Knight 2.
y
here
Has anyone read the Frank Miller graphic novel?
From this synopsis:
"I want you to remember, Clark... in all the years to come... in your most private moments... I want you to remember my hand at your throat... I want you to remember the one man who beat you..."
Essentially Batman kicks Superman's ass.
y
I doubt they'd bother.
--------
First it comes out that multiplayer will be de-emphasized in D3. Then it's basically said that in order to display it properly you need to shell out $300 on a video card. I'll be more interested in Unreal 2. At least they actually care about what the PC gamer wants.
--------
Actually, Unreal 2 has no multiplayer component. If you want that, you'll need to shell out for Unreal Tournament 2003.
y
The following pure speculation, but given the following:
1. John Carmack has been a proponent of virtualized texture memory for some time (using system RAM as texture memory and only fetching small blocks of textures as needed, as opposed to uploading an entire texture + mipmaps).
2. Nintendo GameCube's video hardware was designed by ArtX, and is a proven working example of hardware using virtualized texture memory.
3. ATi owns ArtX.
4. DOOM III was demoed on ATi's next-generation R300 chipset.
The speculation bit: R300 has some ArtX influences, including virtualized texture memory. If so, this is a good thing (for reasons Carmack outlines in the linked document above).
y
Carmack has a fairly high say-to-do ratio...
Besides the usual awful AppleSoft BASIC hacks, my earliest (and fondest) memories of game tinkering were with Pinball Construction Set's awesome built-in editor. IIRC, it was the first game to ship with out-of-the-box modding support. EA was way ahead of its time, one might say...
Bill Budge is my hero.
y
...because all they're only tools for illegal purposes anyway, regardless of their beneficial uses. To be safe, ban VCRs, MD players, CD rippers, DVD burners, stethescopes, lockpicks, cellphones and toothpicks too.
Cheaters will always find a way to cheat. If it matters, don't play against someone you don't know/trust. Besides, your CLQ ranking isn't Life.
OpenGL proxies already allow this sort of thing anyway. It's removed now, but there was a "Matrix" Quake2 opengl32.dll proxy hack that did similar things here:
http://users.chello.be/sf15772/
Somewhere floating around there are screenshots. It intercepted OpenGL calls and replaced all the walls with Matrix-style green character waterfalls and called the real opengl32.dll internally.
y
Those nutty Amiga people...
y
i have found similar results. the scheduler seems to have gotten a nice kick, as well. under heavy concurrency load, i saw performance increases in the order of 800-1200% (!) on identical hardware.
/me thinks apache + tux on that dell hw will perform nicely...
ydnar
half-life for mac os was ported (to 99% completion) by andrew meggs, an excellent coder, i might add. sierra killed the project because of support cost issues. see westlake for example of the burden of patches to the windows version to the person(s) responsible for a mac port.
and unlike half-life, which used a chomping stack of mfc for its menus (arguably the most annoying aspect of the port), halo is, and has been, running under mac os for a long time.
besides, to steal an oft-used carmackism, game coders should do "The Right Thing" and have the discipline to code portably from day one. i believe jason jones et al share that sentiment...