In Europe, the equivalent of the first amendment is enshrined in the 'European Convention on Human Rights', and if our government breaks any part of it, we can take them to court in European High Court.
However, the government was not involved in these cases, it's just the case that most ISP's have sufficient protection in their contracts to allow them to drop a site for pretty much any reason.
As the law is still not particularly clear yet on whether an ISP can be held responsible for the content is hosts, most ISPs are much more willing to drop a customer than face an expensive court battle.
I must admit, I'm suprised this has been moderated as high as it has been...
The big difference between the X-Box and a standard PC is that all the transform/lighting/shadowing calculations will be done on the nVidia graphics processor, leaving the CPU completely free to do other stuff (physics, AI etc...).
The kind of performance that they should get with it looks like that it will be considerably more powerful than a playstation 2 (Which is what you'd expect, as it's coming out over a year later...).
The X-Box is still going to be a good buy, being a half to a third of the price of a computer, and games developers are going to be able to make much better use of the hardware than they can on a PC due to the fact that they don't have to get it to run on a wide range of hardware.
Look back in John Carmack's plan files, where he talks about it.... basically, you make a 3d texture that maps to the light intensity from a light and then tranform the cube into your world space. Then it's easy to just transform geometry vertices into the space of the lighting texture cube, and you can use it as a second pass for lighting. Nice;).
An employee of a company makes and open source version of a program that is used by thousands to pirate goods of the kind that your company produces, and you're not meant to have a go at them?
It is a 350 MHz 128 bit chip. Compare this to a 600 MHz 32 bit Athalon
It's only a 128 bit chip in that it can do vector calculations, in the same was as the PIII can do SSE vector calculations. It's just that with the EE, it's got a couple of vector floating point units rather than just one.
Well, considering they'll be showing it off at GDC today, I'd be very suprised if they don't have something to show off.. and come, on - how hard could it be to have a dev system? - it's mainly PC components!
They've got a lot of nice stuff - it's good to see 3D texture maps - they should be very useful for lighting, and it's good to see bump mapping in there. I'm quite interested in their shadow mapping stuff, but I'm not sure how fast it will be, and I'm not sure how well it will work with multiple lights...
However, most of this is beside the point. For any of these features to be useful, they really need to be implemented on the majority of 3D cards out there, otherwise it's too much effort for too little return to make use of the extra features. Just look at most 3d games out there - they're still mainly just using 1 pass renderering. (Well, apart from 1st person shooters, but they're mainly only using 2 passes for their static shadow maps...)
I'd imagine that this would be useful for selling pictures over the internet - if you've got a system where the only place the unencrypted image appears is inside the display device, then you can sell pictures to people using the full quality image rather than a thumbnail or apicture with 'preview only' stamped all over it. The customer can view the encrypted version and then buy an non-encrypted version if they like it for their own use.
I'd have thought that the cheapest option would be to do it yourself - you might not get something quite as neat or good as a professionally-built system, but you might be able to make it fit your needs better.
One of the things I'm looking into at the moment is working out how to make my computer much quieter. The first thing I intend to do is to vary the speed of the fans to react to the current internal temperature of the system. However, I'm wary of doing anything to the fan in the power supply as the computer will be on all day, and I'm worried about the risk of fire if I start tampering with it. I was thinking about the possibility of using an external power supply (or supplies), as they don't normally have fans...
How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use[?]
By 'Open' they mean that it is open for anybody to see how it works, so anybody can do an implementation. However, they probably *will* have to have some money;)
It's similar to the situation with MPEG. All the MPEG standards have sections in them that are covered by patents. However, normally for a technology to go into a standard, the patent owener has to agree to license it at a reasonable fee.
The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...
I'd imagine that in the field of mobile information appliances, there are a great many patents held by the by the large mobile phone companies (ericsson, nokia, etc.) which will cover the technology needed to create their products. Most of them will have deals with each other to cover them. If the patent has merit, they'll pay up - I doubt $20,000 is a great deal to a large company like that. Otherwise they'll just team up, get some very expensive lawyers and see if Geoworks has the balls to go up against them. I don't suppose it's a big deal, and I don't think that people who create WAP content will be hit by it, but I could be wrong.
To conclude: I don't think it'll be a very big deal.
Visual C++ is a very nice piece of kit, thank you. Most Windows users do not have some kind of fanatical loyalty to Microsoft or any other software developer. People pick and choose their software to provide a good comprimise between facility, ease of use and price. Many Microsoft products hit the right spot for them and therefore they use them. If something else come along that improves significantly on that equation, then they'll move over to that.
It's a mistake to assume that the average windows user shows the same loyalty to their operating system/ software developer as many Linux users do to Linux.
He should put a PC104 motherboard in the old case and run Windows on it - you might be able to get it to run with the iMac USB Mouse and Keyboard... I'd love to see an iMac with the W98 bootup screen on it... (or the BSOD;)
I couldn't agree more. There's nothing I hate more than websites that aren't readable by the lowest common denominator. I tend to use Opera as my primary browser, and I quite often turn off page colours and images - a large number of pages out there are completely unusable due to the lack of ALT in their image tags. Also, many of them require javascript to be able to follow links (I often have it turned off), and don't get me started on Shockwave...
Anyway, the main reason of this post was to drop this link: NTK's grey day..., which I think will strike a chord with many of us...
Slashdot Mirror
So having clicked on your .sig, do you think the average Windows user is going to think:
a) Hmm - evidently Windows security is a bit lax - I'd better change my Operating System to Linux, or
b) That fucking Linux zealot just crashed my computer, the bastard. What is it with these guys?
In Europe, the equivalent of the first amendment is enshrined in the 'European Convention on Human Rights', and if our government breaks any part of it, we can take them to court in European High Court.
However, the government was not involved in these cases, it's just the case that most ISP's have sufficient protection in their contracts to allow them to drop a site for pretty much any reason.
As the law is still not particularly clear yet on whether an ISP can be held responsible for the content is hosts, most ISPs are much more willing to drop a customer than face an expensive court battle.
I must admit, I'm suprised this has been moderated as high as it has been...
What?
Surely you aren't comparing it to Linux? Because damn! that's fast...
Okay, comparing it to BeOS and you might have a point, but a standard Linux setup... yeah, right.
Sorry, that was harsh.
It's late.
weird, even.
Should preview more, I suppose.
That Demon acknowledged that they had the article on there and then refused to remove it.
By going and finding the article, they could not claim that they knew nothing about it and that they could not therefore be held accountable for it.
They would have been better off to deny all knowledge of it, and refuse to look for it. Demon would then have been in a much stronger position.
The big difference between the X-Box and a standard PC is that all the transform/lighting/shadowing calculations will be done on the nVidia graphics processor, leaving the CPU completely free to do other stuff (physics, AI etc...).
The kind of performance that they should get with it looks like that it will be considerably more powerful than a playstation 2 (Which is what you'd expect, as it's coming out over a year later...).
The X-Box is still going to be a good buy, being a half to a third of the price of a computer, and games developers are going to be able to make much better use of the hardware than they can on a PC due to the fact that they don't have to get it to run on a wide range of hardware.
Look back in John Carmack's plan files, where he talks about it.... basically, you make a 3d texture that maps to the light intensity from a light and then tranform the cube into your world space. Then it's easy to just transform geometry vertices into the space of the lighting texture cube, and you can use it as a second pass for lighting. Nice ;).
An employee of a company makes and open source version of a program that is used by thousands to pirate goods of the kind that your company produces, and you're not meant to have a go at them?
And this hasn't been moderated down to a Troll?
It is a 350 MHz 128 bit chip. Compare this to a 600 MHz 32 bit Athalon
It's only a 128 bit chip in that it can do vector calculations, in the same was as the PIII can do SSE vector calculations. It's just that with the EE, it's got a couple of vector floating point units rather than just one.
Well, considering they'll be showing it off at GDC today, I'd be very suprised if they don't have something to show off.. and come, on - how hard could it be to have a dev system? - it's mainly PC components!
They've got a lot of nice stuff - it's good to see 3D texture maps - they should be very useful for lighting, and it's good to see bump mapping in there. I'm quite interested in their shadow mapping stuff, but I'm not sure how fast it will be, and I'm not sure how well it will work with multiple lights...
However, most of this is beside the point. For any of these features to be useful, they really need to be implemented on the majority of 3D cards out there, otherwise it's too much effort for too little return to make use of the extra features. Just look at most 3d games out there - they're still mainly just using 1 pass renderering. (Well, apart from 1st person shooters, but they're mainly only using 2 passes for their static shadow maps...)
I'm 79.5% Pure, 20.5% ./ Corrupt..
./ Pure...)
The shame!
(I'd hoped to be at least 90%
cheers,
Tim
I'd imagine that this would be useful for selling pictures over the internet - if you've got a system where the only place the unencrypted image appears is inside the display device, then you can sell pictures to people using the full quality image rather than a thumbnail or apicture with 'preview only' stamped all over it. The customer can view the encrypted version and then buy an non-encrypted version if they like it for their own use.
How could it be anything else?
I'd have thought that the cheapest option would be to do it yourself - you might not get something quite as neat or good as a professionally-built system, but you might be able to make it fit your needs better.
One of the things I'm looking into at the moment is working out how to make my computer much quieter. The first thing I intend to do is to vary the speed of the fans to react to the current internal temperature of the system. However, I'm wary of doing anything to the fan in the power supply as the computer will be on all day, and I'm worried about the risk of fire if I start tampering with it. I was thinking about the possibility of using an external power supply (or supplies), as they don't normally have fans...
thoughts, links, anyone?
cheers,
Tim
How can the forum declare that this is an open specification, then allow someone to charge a royalty for it's use[?]
;)
By 'Open' they mean that it is open for anybody to see how it works, so anybody can do an implementation. However, they probably *will* have to have some money
It's similar to the situation with MPEG. All the MPEG standards have sections in them that are covered by patents. However, normally for a technology to go into a standard, the patent owener has to agree to license it at a reasonable fee.
The reason standards bodies don't avoid patented technology is that they have to concentrate on producing a good, rather than absolutely free, standard. Often there is no alternative to do anything but go with a patented soultion because no other solutions are avaliable. For instance, I challenge you to find a non-patented technique for audio compression that even approaches systems like MP3 and AAC...
cheers,
Tim
I'd imagine that in the field of mobile information appliances, there are a great many patents held by the by the large mobile phone companies (ericsson, nokia, etc.) which will cover the technology needed to create their products. Most of them will have deals with each other to cover them. If the patent has merit, they'll pay up - I doubt $20,000 is a great deal to a large company like that. Otherwise they'll just team up, get some very expensive lawyers and see if Geoworks has the balls to go up against them. I don't suppose it's a big deal, and I don't think that people who create WAP content will be hit by it, but I could be wrong.
To conclude: I don't think it'll be a very big deal.
cheers,
Tim
Rob, it's 'too much Lego', not 'too many legos'....
Visual C++ is a very nice piece of kit, thank you. Most Windows users do not have some kind of fanatical loyalty to Microsoft or any other software developer. People pick and choose their software to provide a good comprimise between facility, ease of use and price. Many Microsoft products hit the right spot for them and therefore they use them. If something else come along that improves significantly on that equation, then they'll move over to that.
It's a mistake to assume that the average windows user shows the same loyalty to their operating system/ software developer as many Linux users do to Linux.
He should put a PC104 motherboard in the old case and run Windows on it - you might be able to get it to run with the iMac USB Mouse and Keyboard... I'd love to see an iMac with the W98 bootup screen on it... (or the BSOD ;)
Although I suppose I'd have been more accurate if I'd said that it was close in value to the dollar, rather than price... ;)
For those that don't know, 1 Euro is pretty close in price to one US dollar.
Anyway, the main reason of this post was to drop this link: NTK's grey day..., which I think will strike a chord with many of us...