XBox games use a special version of DX8 which is statically linked to the executable. It's not as simple as just switching the drivers around.
They would seem to have shot themselves in the foot rather when it comes to backwards compatibility for the XBox 2 (XBox Next?), though.
As for Cross XBoxLonghorn compatibility, I doubt they will support it unless they have the PC as locked down as they have the XBox. It think it's more likely that they may start creating a standardised gaming settings and network play system like the XBox Dashboard/XBox Live.
I think the idea is that people who produce things like TVs, Refrigerators, water heaters etc... could easily intergrate these things into their products for a minimal cost. So, you can have your iRefrigerator and plug a network cable in it, and it can now email you when it runs out of ice, or someone leaves the door open, or it needs de-icing. You could point your webserver at it and get a reading of the current temperature, how much ice it has etc...
You could put these things in drink kiosks so that they can email you when they're almost out of Dr. Pepper.
I can't see why you'd want one in a toaster, though...
Surely those same programmers, devoid of an IDE would have ended up putting a line something like:
printf("X=%d Y=%d\n", X, Y);
in their program, and doing exactly the same thing in response?
I think it's more that you can now compile a program so quickly that it's tempting to just compile and run it without bothering to review what you've written first.
I don't think you should be surprised that you've seen students write some of the worst code on the planet - they *are* students, after all - with no experience of real software development.
I also don't quite see how an integrated editor, compiler and debugger suddenly makes it possible to write crap code that you couldn't have written if you'd been using emacs, gcc and gdb...
> What are they teaching in physics class these > days? Oh, right. The people who teach > "environmentalism" are there because they flunked > physics.)
It most certainly is not a non issue. There aren't any foolproof spam filters yet, and until there are, by using one you always run the risk of missing a legitimate email.
Currently the oldest email address I've got (a hotmail account) is rendered practically unusable due to the sheer volume of spam getting through to it, and that's with the spam filters turned on - it most certainly is not a non-issue for me.
Barry Shein makes a very good point - if you've been on the internet for ages, spam pisses you off, but it's not going to stop you using the internet. If you've never used the internet before - say you're a senior citizen, and you decide to try out the internet - pretty soon you're getting ads for girls sucking off beasts of burden in your inbox - are you likely to stick around?
I found the bit in the article about the distributed attacks interesting. I wonder how widespread the tactic is among spammers? - The cracking of machines to use for sending spam mail...
A colleague bought one of these on Friday, and it is loveley. However, do beware of the size - it's very big for a phone. I am tempted by the idea of getting one, but I've been very spoiled by the thinness of my Palm V, and I'm not sure I could put up with the bulk of the P800.
You're certainly right that Direct3D was created to boost the popularity of Windows - when the first version came out, it was to try and get people gaming in Windows rather than DOS. I remember when they first did this thinking - Windows? Pah - that's just for wordprocessors - games will run too slowly in it. You also have to remember that Windows didn't have nearly the same competition in the PC marketplace that it has now - Linux was an interesting oddity, and there certainly weren't any games of note running on Linux at the time. Also, hardware accelerated OpenGL was still confined to the very high end - Intergraph Workstations and the like. Home PC hardware acceleration meant cards like the original Matrox Millennium. I doubt very much that Microsoft were intentionally going against OpenGL because they didn't want an API that people could use to port games to other platforms. There weren't any other gaming platforms to port to at the time, apart from the Mac. I think it's much more likely that OpenGL was seen as too high-end, and not suitable for PCs of that era. The real competitors that Direct3D had at the time were things like Renderware and BRender, which could both abstract the underlying hardware and provide good software rendering, which was important at the time.
John Carmack and the rest of the gaming industry started bitching Microsoft out for pushing Direct3D over the clearly superior OpenGL.
Before Direct3D, All games using 3D hardware had to have a different rendering subsystem depending on what graphics card you had - 3dFX, Rendition, PowerVR etc...
Direct3D was an attempt to allow a game to be written to a single API and run on any 3d card. But why not use OpenGL? You have to remember that those first set of cards weren't very powerful, and they didn't support all the base OpenGL features. At the time, due to the kind of things that OpenGL was being used for, it was accepted practice that if your hardware couldn't do some part of the standard, it would emulate it in software. Obviously you can't do that with games, so Direct3D was designed so that you could find out what features a card supported and just use them, degrading gracefully. It was only when Carmack got together with 3dFX and they produced the OpenGL minidriver, that people started pumping out incomplete OpenGL implementations for gaming.
It's true that DirectX was pretty crappy at first - version 3 was the first usable version, and it didn't really start getting good until version 5. Certainly by version 6 OpenGL was not 'clearly superior', and I would say all the versions since then have outclassed OpenGL. OpenGL 2 is looking pretty promising, though...
It's not surprising they're not selling seeing as you can't even buy them yet. Sure, you can pre-order them from Amazon, but there's no indication of how long you'd have to wait to get them - they say they'll start shipping them on the 1st of March, but who knows how fast they can make them, and how many other people are in the queue first? I'm sure some people who are considering getting one are going to wait a little while.
Also, I think they're probably one of those things that perhaps one person in a community will get, a bunch of people will have a go and love 'em, and you'll start getting a lot more purchases.
'Course, lowering the price wouldn't hurt, either...
She uses it quite a lot, and I've never heard her complain about it at all. Perhaps she has a newer firmware version or something? She's had it for about six months.
It's odd. It's almost like we're talking about different phones here.
If you want a different phone so badly, Carphone Warehouse are selling some repackaged Nokia 8210s for £110 no-contract at the moment. I'm sure you'd be able to sell your T68i for more than that...
Accoring to a page on the Transport for London website, about 1.1 million people currently use the tube during the morning peak period. They estimate that this will only increase by about 1% when congestion charging starts. We'll see on Monday.
London doesn't have the room to widen the roads. The road layout in the centre of London is in many places hundreds of years old. None of the US-Style grid system.
The cost of widening roads in central London would be astronomical - not to mention the fact that there are a lot of very old buildings that you can't just knock a bit off from.
I find it sad that so many people seem to think it is just fine to mine their site for data. Sure, there's not all that much that they can do about it, except remove the data or make it harder for regular users of the site to use it.
For example, The EuroTV site seems to work on the concept that they provide the information for free for users of their site, but you can pay them to get it on your site. They're using their site as an advert for their services, while at the same time offering a useful service to the community. By making freely available a system to allow anybody to use their data in their own websites without paying them for it, you're completely ridding them of their reason for having the site up at all.
Yes, you can argue that they shouldn't put the information out there if they don't want people to use it, but then you're giving them a good reason not to put the information out there at all, which makes all of us poorer.
As for whether they can dictate that CPAN remove the modules, certainly it's fair enough of them to request that the module be removed, but it is a shame they leapt to threats of lawsuits quite so quickly.
Tivos were selling for £150, last time I looked. I think you'd be hard pressed to put something together from scratch that came in for less than £200...
If you were going stay small, you'd need a mini-itx or similar, and one of them plus case plus a video capture card would already put you up to your £150 limit, and that's before you add in memory and a hard drive, not to mention a remote control.
Even after that, you need the software for it, and none of the free projects doing this kind of thing have reached anywhere near Tivo functionality yet.
The only way you'd make it cheaper than a Tivo is if you were using bits of old computers you've got lying around, which sure as hell isn't going to make it small or quiet.
Slashdot Mirror
XBox games use a special version of DX8 which is statically linked to the executable. It's not as simple as just switching the drivers around.
They would seem to have shot themselves in the foot rather when it comes to backwards compatibility for the XBox 2 (XBox Next?), though.
As for Cross XBoxLonghorn compatibility, I doubt they will support it unless they have the PC as locked down as they have the XBox. It think it's more likely that they may start creating a standardised gaming settings and network play system like the XBox Dashboard/XBox Live.
I think the idea is that people who produce things like TVs, Refrigerators, water heaters etc... could easily intergrate these things into their products for a minimal cost. So, you can have your iRefrigerator and plug a network cable in it, and it can now email you when it runs out of ice, or someone leaves the door open, or it needs de-icing. You could point your webserver at it and get a reading of the current temperature, how much ice it has etc...
You could put these things in drink kiosks so that they can email you when they're almost out of Dr. Pepper.
I can't see why you'd want one in a toaster, though...
Surely those same programmers, devoid of an IDE would have ended up putting a line something like:
printf("X=%d Y=%d\n", X, Y);
in their program, and doing exactly the same thing in response?
I think it's more that you can now compile a program so quickly that it's tempting to just compile and run it without bothering to review what you've written first.
I don't think you should be surprised that you've seen students write some of the worst code on the planet - they *are* students, after all - with no experience of real software development.
I also don't quite see how an integrated editor, compiler and debugger suddenly makes it possible to write crap code that you couldn't have written if you'd been using emacs, gcc and gdb...
> What are they teaching in physics class these
> days? Oh, right. The people who teach
> "environmentalism" are there because they flunked
> physics.)
Ha ha ha!
Saucer of milk, table six!
Ha
It most certainly is not a non issue. There aren't any foolproof spam filters yet, and until there are, by using one you always run the risk of missing a legitimate email.
Currently the oldest email address I've got (a hotmail account) is rendered practically unusable due to the sheer volume of spam getting through to it, and that's with the spam filters turned on - it most certainly is not a non-issue for me.
Barry Shein makes a very good point - if you've been on the internet for ages, spam pisses you off, but it's not going to stop you using the internet. If you've never used the internet before - say you're a senior citizen, and you decide to try out the internet - pretty soon you're getting ads for girls sucking off beasts of burden in your inbox - are you likely to stick around?
Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year ;)
:)
I quite often seem to criticise Mr. Taco for what he writes in his little comment bits, but that's actually pretty funny
I found the bit in the article about the distributed attacks interesting. I wonder how widespread the tactic is among spammers? - The cracking of machines to use for sending spam mail...
But how do you debug? You're going to require a Windows box to test/debug the excecutable on anyway...
A colleague bought one of these on Friday, and it is loveley. However, do beware of the size - it's very big for a phone. I am tempted by the idea of getting one, but I've been very spoiled by the thinness of my Palm V, and I'm not sure I could put up with the bulk of the P800.
You're certainly right that Direct3D was created to boost the popularity of Windows - when the first version came out, it was to try and get people gaming in Windows rather than DOS. I remember when they first did this thinking - Windows? Pah - that's just for wordprocessors - games will run too slowly in it. You also have to remember that Windows didn't have nearly the same competition in the PC marketplace that it has now - Linux was an interesting oddity, and there certainly weren't any games of note running on Linux at the time. Also, hardware accelerated OpenGL was still confined to the very high end - Intergraph Workstations and the like. Home PC hardware acceleration meant cards like the original Matrox Millennium. I doubt very much that Microsoft were intentionally going against OpenGL because they didn't want an API that people could use to port games to other platforms. There weren't any other gaming platforms to port to at the time, apart from the Mac. I think it's much more likely that OpenGL was seen as too high-end, and not suitable for PCs of that era. The real competitors that Direct3D had at the time were things like Renderware and BRender, which could both abstract the underlying hardware and provide good software rendering, which was important at the time.
John Carmack and the rest of the gaming industry started bitching Microsoft out for pushing Direct3D over the clearly superior OpenGL.
Before Direct3D, All games using 3D hardware had to have a different rendering subsystem depending on what graphics card you had - 3dFX, Rendition, PowerVR etc...
Direct3D was an attempt to allow a game to be written to a single API and run on any 3d card. But why not use OpenGL? You have to remember that those first set of cards weren't very powerful, and they didn't support all the base OpenGL features. At the time, due to the kind of things that OpenGL was being used for, it was accepted practice that if your hardware couldn't do some part of the standard, it would emulate it in software. Obviously you can't do that with games, so Direct3D was designed so that you could find out what features a card supported and just use them, degrading gracefully. It was only when Carmack got together with 3dFX and they produced the OpenGL minidriver, that people started pumping out incomplete OpenGL implementations for gaming.
It's true that DirectX was pretty crappy at first - version 3 was the first usable version, and it didn't really start getting good until version 5. Certainly by version 6 OpenGL was not 'clearly superior', and I would say all the versions since then have outclassed OpenGL. OpenGL 2 is looking pretty promising, though...
It's not surprising they're not selling seeing as you can't even buy them yet. Sure, you can pre-order them from Amazon, but there's no indication of how long you'd have to wait to get them - they say they'll start shipping them on the 1st of March, but who knows how fast they can make them, and how many other people are in the queue first? I'm sure some people who are considering getting one are going to wait a little while.
Also, I think they're probably one of those things that perhaps one person in a community will get, a bunch of people will have a go and love 'em, and you'll start getting a lot more purchases.
'Course, lowering the price wouldn't hurt, either...
CT: Yeah yeah. It's a dupe. Funny that not a single reader emailed me in almost 2 hours to tell me.
Funny that - perhaps people get the idea that you won't look at their mails, seeing as you can't even be bothered to read your own goddamn website...
I can't believe you actually get paid to do this...
Actually (apart from working on Linux) the biggest advantage that Film Gimp has is its ability to work with floating-point image formats.
However, it has a long way to go - when I evaluated it, I found it extremely unstable - hopefully that will improve in the future.
She uses it quite a lot, and I've never heard her complain about it at all. Perhaps she has a newer firmware version or something? She's had it for about six months.
It's odd. It's almost like we're talking about different phones here.
If you want a different phone so badly, Carphone Warehouse are selling some repackaged Nokia 8210s for £110 no-contract at the moment. I'm sure you'd be able to sell your T68i for more than that...
Hey, nice link, brainiac.
Odd - my fiancee has a T68i, and loves it...
Different strokes, I suppose...
These aren't the same cameras as the police ones.
How would you suggest handling London's congestion problems?
Accoring to a page on the Transport for London website, about 1.1 million people currently use the tube during the morning peak period. They estimate that this will only increase by about 1% when congestion charging starts. We'll see on Monday.
London doesn't have the room to widen the roads. The road layout in the centre of London is in many places hundreds of years old. None of the US-Style grid system.
The cost of widening roads in central London would be astronomical - not to mention the fact that there are a lot of very old buildings that you can't just knock a bit off from.
Okay, which idiot branded the parent post a troll?
I'll work on the media player if you give me the mod chip first... Say, it doesn't interfere with Xbox Live, does it?
I find it sad that so many people seem to think it is just fine to mine their site for data. Sure, there's not all that much that they can do about it, except remove the data or make it harder for regular users of the site to use it.
For example, The EuroTV site seems to work on the concept that they provide the information for free for users of their site, but you can pay them to get it on your site. They're using their site as an advert for their services, while at the same time offering a useful service to the community. By making freely available a system to allow anybody to use their data in their own websites without paying them for it, you're completely ridding them of their reason for having the site up at all.
Yes, you can argue that they shouldn't put the information out there if they don't want people to use it, but then you're giving them a good reason not to put the information out there at all, which makes all of us poorer.
As for whether they can dictate that CPAN remove the modules, certainly it's fair enough of them to request that the module be removed, but it is a shame they leapt to threats of lawsuits quite so quickly.
Tivos were selling for £150, last time I looked. I think you'd be hard pressed to put something together from scratch that came in for less than £200...
If you were going stay small, you'd need a mini-itx or similar, and one of them plus case plus a video capture card would already put you up to your £150 limit, and that's before you add in memory and a hard drive, not to mention a remote control.
Even after that, you need the software for it, and none of the free projects doing this kind of thing have reached anywhere near Tivo functionality yet.
The only way you'd make it cheaper than a Tivo is if you were using bits of old computers you've got lying around, which sure as hell isn't going to make it small or quiet.
Apart from ebay, is there anywhere in the UK one can purchase a Tivo nowadays?