Again, you wouldn't need to make the renderer do that. The worst case scenario is you script LW to render the object to a buffer, transform and light it, then render it again on top of the buffer of the previous image. Build it up. Actually, that's more or less what LW's renderer does on a per-polygon basis. Incidently, there's a plugin for LW right now that does the instancing trick. Somebody in this thread brought it up already.
I'll have to look into that plugin. Would be nice to have.:) Too bad decent crowd-control software costs an arm and a leg, though.
First of all, the SDK only supplies hooks into the black box of the proprietary code. This is still not as good as having access to all of the code; if the SDK sucks, then you're still screwed.
And now to digress: instancing can only go so far. In an example of 1,000 monsters running down a hill, you only have one source model, but that model still has to be loaded into memory once for every instance. Every polygon still has to be rendered; heaven forbid the shot calls for raytracing! The only benefit of instancing in this case is that you can tweak the model once and have it propogate the changes 1,000 times.
It wouldn't do a damn thing for saving memory unless you also re-write the rendering software to load the object for each particular instance, render, unload, reload to next position, etc.
This is why animators render in layers. Greater control, less headaches, and no custom software necessary. Just intelligent thinking.
By author? How often do people do research by author rather than by subject? What if you have two authors with the same name but writing in very different subjects?
"By author" would single-handedly be the worst way to organize books. The local video store here in Japan has attempted to organize a large number of movies by director, which has only served to keep the employees busy having to find every single movie for every single patron, who can now no longer browse by genre. (One of the other terrible attempts at organization at a video store is to organize titles by "popularity"; a subjective, and therefore suspect, method if I've ever heard one.)
Philosophical and ethical issues should not be mixed with practical issues because the philosophy and the ethically right thing to do always has to take precedence over the practical thing, no matter what the consequenses.
In a Star Trek universe, yes. The vast majority of humanity, throughout history, has always bowed to practical concerns. Saying that practicality, morality, and ethics should not be mixed is a bit of a contradiction: philosphy springs out of the human reaction to the practicalities of existence. The former would not exist without the latter.
Your assumption seems to be that the only way anyone can make a living writing software is making "a product" out of it and you seem to think there's no way that product can be free at the same time, but in case you missed it, Red Hat, a company that has made a product out of free software and support services for that software just announced their best quarter so far.
So a company of programmers has announced that sales of their product, i.e. support, has turned a profit? Good for them! So the company does not exist on goodwill and happy thoughts, but has instead found a clever way to capitalize on the free labor of others.
It's a rhetorical question. That means you don't have to answer it. I think what the FSF believes is great, but it's only one philosophy, not the only one. It's easy to believe in something being free when it's intangible, like software. It doesn't address the issue of people making a living providing a service or product that other people want.
Just because someone is charging you for a word processor that could theoretically be given away does not entitle you to a free word processor. In life, nobody is entitled to anything, period. People could theoretically build cars for free, but it doesn't happen. Just because it seems like a cheap investment doesn't mean that typing on a computer all day to make your living should be done for free.
Slashdot wouldn't exist if there weren't programmers getting paid for what they're doing. They get paid when the company they work for makes money off of a product. That means somebody is selling something. Ideology is poor currency at the grocery store.
And YahooMail can only be accessed through their site, which means that you see banner ads and other forms of advertisement, which means that they're getting some sort of compensation.
It's a shame if Yahoo and MSN get blocked out, but the multi-protocol clients are, in fact, parasitic from a business viewpoint. They piggy-back onto servers for free and let someone else foot the bill and headaches of keeping them going.
I use a multi-chat client and it's damn convenient, but I can't blame businesses from locking out their proprietary services. They spent the money, they deserve the profit.
It would just be nice if everyone used a standardized protocol, and then the multi-service clients would cease to exist, anyway (as such.) Of course, then Yahoo and the other boys might very well pull out of the IM chat business if they should lose the incentive to compete. With them go also their servers, and the IM network. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
What we need is for some bright programmer to apply the same logic that P2P networks use to create a flexible P2P IM chat network, make it not suck (as in, think of the users in the design, not the engineers), and then get my family and friends to use it.
What does buying a game that runs on Windows have to do with sacraficing principles? It's a computer. "Not liking Microsoft" is not a significant principle in the grand scheme of things.
You've obviously never talked to anyone outside of the state. I worked for Creative Labs tech support in Stillwater for a year and heard it all. The first post was very accurate.
Liking Oklahoma City and Tulsa at the same time is impossible, especially if you live in Oklahoma.
Ironically, the two previous posts accurately reflect the respective attitudes of Tulsans and Oklahoma City natives.
I lived in Oklahoma for the last ten years, and now live in Japan. Change is good.
Ever park in Japan? This system was designed for the most crowded country in the world, where your driveway is about an inch bigger than your car all the way around.
I know, I live here, and parking is absolutely insane. Everywhere else on the planet is spoiled in comparison. Yet the Japanese manage to not ride each other's bumpers.
The problem is, if you've ever researched filing for a trademark, you'll find that the categories are pretty broad - Apple and Tibco both fall within the same category of information technology, which means there is a definite conflict by USPTO standards.
My girl usually doesn't even want me to buy her jewelry, and she wants a cheap wedding, too; the cheaper, the better. She thinks we have better things to spend our money on. We both love traveling to different countries, so she'd much rather I save up for that.
Most companies nowadays keep blacklists of known cracked/hacked/stolen serial numbers. If someone else lifts my serial number, or their cracking software manages to coincidentally generate the exact same code I'm using, I could get punished along with the rest. Not cool. Comments like, "it should just disable/uninstall itself," aren't very well thought out.
Far better for the company and the user to simply send out a message saying, "You may be using pirated software, please contact us."
This doesn't justify them self-policing their software at the expense of user privacy, but again, it comes down to how much information they're really picking up.
What's odd is their reasoning for obfuscating the code. They claim to have done so to protect their proprietary code from prying eyes.
They have only obfuscated the code on one side of the screen. Based on this reasoning, the code shown on the right side is non-infringing. However, if that were the case, then why wouldn't the non-infringing code also be displayed on the left side?
SCO also seems to have highlighted all offending code in red - which means that they failed to obfuscate so-called "proprietary code" on the right side.
Ungh...head hurts. Where management attempts to reason, programmers fear to tread.
Japan already has VoIP using a standard phone which can call any other phone. The system is being deployed by DSL providers, and was first introduced by Yahoo! BB Japan. The entire service, including my 12Mbps DSL connection, costs about US $30 a month (up to 24Mbps if you're within a mile of the DSL node.) Calls to the US are 2 cents per minute, and sound just fine. Calls to any other phone within Japan are also cheaper, and calls to another Yahoo! BB subscriber are free (go figure; companies can't resist putting that little hook in.)
Everything is handled through a standard DSL modem; you just plug your current phone into a jack on the back of the modem. It also has an optional wifi card option to allow you to connect with your laptop. I already have an Airport network, but at this point, it's my bottleneck.
I could go with 100Mbps fiber for about US $55, but I'd lose the VoIP, and I need it for calling the folks at home in the US. Besides, the internet can't keep up at that point (for most daily applications), so it's just a waste of money for the near future. I'm getting the same sort of transfer speeds I was getting back at my university in the states on an OC3 connection.
The revolutionary part is in getting the academia to believe it. It only took 2,500 years for them to start thinking about changing their minds on something.
The point is, time is always about perception; we measure time with instruments, sure, but they're still going to be interpreted by the human mind and therefore filtered to fit into what we believe.
What I find amusing about this is it just goes to show what can happen when somebody isn't "educated properly." Sometimes, that's exactly what the world needs.
For some interesting reading on the subject, read Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time." Heck, it might even be considered prior art.;)
Notice that all studies conducted by scientists involving sex and relationships seem to be slanted towards justifying one of two things:
a) why it's a good idea to have sex with a scientist, or
b) why it's okay if scientists can't get dates, anyway.
So it's okay if a young scientist is sitting alone in his room on a Saturday night, because, hey, he's a genius, and geniuses don't need that sort of thing. *sniff*
(If you think I'm off-base, just remember: the studies always seem to be male-centric.)
In my ten years in television production, I've seen a lot of changes; high-dollar proprietary replaced by off-the-shelf PCs, linear, deck-to-deck editing replaced by non-linear on a computer.
The current golden child in the video editing industry is Final Cut Pro; it doesn't require any additional hardware cards, which means it can easily be run on a laptop as well as a PC. A faster computer means a faster editing suite, without having to fork out more cash for the software. In the Wintel world, you can get Speed Razor for the same flexibility.
The big boys may be running discreet and Avid systems, but they only represent a small percentage of the market (that part that has obscene amounts of money to burn.) There are a lot of botique shops out there that need a cheaper solution (something that doesn't cost more than a house to get into.)
Thankfully, video editing software and hardware are becoming just as much a commodity as many other high end applications have, and Apple is helping to drive the prices down with FCP. If you can manage to run a competitive business with off-the-shelf parts for as cheap as possible, then more power to you. Pocket the rest and call it good.
Premiere hasn't been the most popular film/television editing app on the Mac for a long time (especially since the first arrival of FCP and iMovie.) This is just another example of a company using Apple as an excuse to drop support for what is otherwise a complete lemon.
If you've used any semi-decent editor available for the Mac (the other major player in this space being Media 100), you see Premiere for the big, steaming pile of dung it is.
Yes, if you absolutely can't afford anything else, and you're not actually doing serious video production (i.e. getting paid for it), then Premiere is an incredibly mediocre way to fake it. I apologize if this offends any Premiere advocates out there, but I've been in television for six years now, and I've used Premiere on both Mac and Windows, and compared to just about every other application out there, Premiere is the worst.
People are buying Macs for other people, free of charge? Sign me up! News to me.
You have to consider that most companies and schools have IT departments, who also have to approve the purchase and subsequent support of the machines. What do you think the common likelihood of the average IT guy approving a Mac purchase?
Now, what I want to know is, why not use identically clocked G4 and G5 systems? Did they just tack on a new system to the systems they've benchmarked instead of doing side-by-side tests?
Because identically clocked systems don't exist? I find it interesting that the guy says the main reason the G4 lags is the current lower clock speed; I'd be perfectly happy if I could overclock my dual G4/1.25GHz to 2GHz...okay, so it'd either explode or require a liquid cooling system the size of a small fridge...;)
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I'll have to look into that plugin. Would be nice to have.
There are a couple of problems with your example.
First of all, the SDK only supplies hooks into the black box of the proprietary code. This is still not as good as having access to all of the code; if the SDK sucks, then you're still screwed.
And now to digress: instancing can only go so far. In an example of 1,000 monsters running down a hill, you only have one source model, but that model still has to be loaded into memory once for every instance. Every polygon still has to be rendered; heaven forbid the shot calls for raytracing! The only benefit of instancing in this case is that you can tweak the model once and have it propogate the changes 1,000 times.
It wouldn't do a damn thing for saving memory unless you also re-write the rendering software to load the object for each particular instance, render, unload, reload to next position, etc.
This is why animators render in layers. Greater control, less headaches, and no custom software necessary. Just intelligent thinking.
By author? How often do people do research by author rather than by subject? What if you have two authors with the same name but writing in very different subjects?
"By author" would single-handedly be the worst way to organize books. The local video store here in Japan has attempted to organize a large number of movies by director, which has only served to keep the employees busy having to find every single movie for every single patron, who can now no longer browse by genre. (One of the other terrible attempts at organization at a video store is to organize titles by "popularity"; a subjective, and therefore suspect, method if I've ever heard one.)
In a Star Trek universe, yes. The vast majority of humanity, throughout history, has always bowed to practical concerns. Saying that practicality, morality, and ethics should not be mixed is a bit of a contradiction: philosphy springs out of the human reaction to the practicalities of existence. The former would not exist without the latter.
So a company of programmers has announced that sales of their product, i.e. support, has turned a profit? Good for them! So the company does not exist on goodwill and happy thoughts, but has instead found a clever way to capitalize on the free labor of others.
I should know; I do. Yahoo! BB Japan is my ISP. Damn good service, and I can check from my cell phone.
It's a rhetorical question. That means you don't have to answer it. I think what the FSF believes is great, but it's only one philosophy, not the only one. It's easy to believe in something being free when it's intangible, like software. It doesn't address the issue of people making a living providing a service or product that other people want.
Just because someone is charging you for a word processor that could theoretically be given away does not entitle you to a free word processor. In life, nobody is entitled to anything, period. People could theoretically build cars for free, but it doesn't happen. Just because it seems like a cheap investment doesn't mean that typing on a computer all day to make your living should be done for free.
Slashdot wouldn't exist if there weren't programmers getting paid for what they're doing. They get paid when the company they work for makes money off of a product. That means somebody is selling something. Ideology is poor currency at the grocery store.
And YahooMail can only be accessed through their site, which means that you see banner ads and other forms of advertisement, which means that they're getting some sort of compensation.
It's a shame if Yahoo and MSN get blocked out, but the multi-protocol clients are, in fact, parasitic from a business viewpoint. They piggy-back onto servers for free and let someone else foot the bill and headaches of keeping them going.
I use a multi-chat client and it's damn convenient, but I can't blame businesses from locking out their proprietary services. They spent the money, they deserve the profit.
It would just be nice if everyone used a standardized protocol, and then the multi-service clients would cease to exist, anyway (as such.) Of course, then Yahoo and the other boys might very well pull out of the IM chat business if they should lose the incentive to compete. With them go also their servers, and the IM network. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
What we need is for some bright programmer to apply the same logic that P2P networks use to create a flexible P2P IM chat network, make it not suck (as in, think of the users in the design, not the engineers), and then get my family and friends to use it.
I'm a Mac user. Your point is?
What does buying a game that runs on Windows have to do with sacraficing principles? It's a computer. "Not liking Microsoft" is not a significant principle in the grand scheme of things.
I'm finding it hard to relate your post to what I said, or the parent. Care to clarify?
You've obviously never talked to anyone outside of the state. I worked for Creative Labs tech support in Stillwater for a year and heard it all. The first post was very accurate.
Liking Oklahoma City and Tulsa at the same time is impossible, especially if you live in Oklahoma.
Ironically, the two previous posts accurately reflect the respective attitudes of Tulsans and Oklahoma City natives.
I lived in Oklahoma for the last ten years, and now live in Japan. Change is good.
Ever park in Japan? This system was designed for the most crowded country in the world, where your driveway is about an inch bigger than your car all the way around.
I know, I live here, and parking is absolutely insane. Everywhere else on the planet is spoiled in comparison. Yet the Japanese manage to not ride each other's bumpers.
The problem is, if you've ever researched filing for a trademark, you'll find that the categories are pretty broad - Apple and Tibco both fall within the same category of information technology, which means there is a definite conflict by USPTO standards.
My girl usually doesn't even want me to buy her jewelry, and she wants a cheap wedding, too; the cheaper, the better. She thinks we have better things to spend our money on. We both love traveling to different countries, so she'd much rather I save up for that.
:)
I agree that she's the exception, not the rule.
Most companies nowadays keep blacklists of known cracked/hacked/stolen serial numbers. If someone else lifts my serial number, or their cracking software manages to coincidentally generate the exact same code I'm using, I could get punished along with the rest. Not cool. Comments like, "it should just disable/uninstall itself," aren't very well thought out.
Far better for the company and the user to simply send out a message saying, "You may be using pirated software, please contact us."
This doesn't justify them self-policing their software at the expense of user privacy, but again, it comes down to how much information they're really picking up.
What's odd is their reasoning for obfuscating the code. They claim to have done so to protect their proprietary code from prying eyes.
They have only obfuscated the code on one side of the screen. Based on this reasoning, the code shown on the right side is non-infringing. However, if that were the case, then why wouldn't the non-infringing code also be displayed on the left side?
SCO also seems to have highlighted all offending code in red - which means that they failed to obfuscate so-called "proprietary code" on the right side.
Ungh...head hurts. Where management attempts to reason, programmers fear to tread.
Japan already has VoIP using a standard phone which can call any other phone. The system is being deployed by DSL providers, and was first introduced by Yahoo! BB Japan. The entire service, including my 12Mbps DSL connection, costs about US $30 a month (up to 24Mbps if you're within a mile of the DSL node.) Calls to the US are 2 cents per minute, and sound just fine. Calls to any other phone within Japan are also cheaper, and calls to another Yahoo! BB subscriber are free (go figure; companies can't resist putting that little hook in.)
Everything is handled through a standard DSL modem; you just plug your current phone into a jack on the back of the modem. It also has an optional wifi card option to allow you to connect with your laptop. I already have an Airport network, but at this point, it's my bottleneck.
I could go with 100Mbps fiber for about US $55, but I'd lose the VoIP, and I need it for calling the folks at home in the US. Besides, the internet can't keep up at that point (for most daily applications), so it's just a waste of money for the near future. I'm getting the same sort of transfer speeds I was getting back at my university in the states on an OC3 connection.
Maybe you would, too. Can you show a correlation between streetlights and mugging/raping?
Usually, it's a matter of dangerous areas, not dangerous lighting.
The revolutionary part is in getting the academia to believe it. It only took 2,500 years for them to start thinking about changing their minds on something.
;)
The point is, time is always about perception; we measure time with instruments, sure, but they're still going to be interpreted by the human mind and therefore filtered to fit into what we believe.
What I find amusing about this is it just goes to show what can happen when somebody isn't "educated properly." Sometimes, that's exactly what the world needs.
For some interesting reading on the subject, read Terry Pratchett's "Thief of Time." Heck, it might even be considered prior art.
That's nothing. I saw a copy being sold by a guy on the street in Thailand, and it's not even out in Asia yet.
Notice that all studies conducted by scientists involving sex and relationships seem to be slanted towards justifying one of two things:
a) why it's a good idea to have sex with a scientist, or
b) why it's okay if scientists can't get dates, anyway.
So it's okay if a young scientist is sitting alone in his room on a Saturday night, because, hey, he's a genius, and geniuses don't need that sort of thing. *sniff*
(If you think I'm off-base, just remember: the studies always seem to be male-centric.)
I assume you're referring to Premiere?
In my ten years in television production, I've seen a lot of changes; high-dollar proprietary replaced by off-the-shelf PCs, linear, deck-to-deck editing replaced by non-linear on a computer.
The current golden child in the video editing industry is Final Cut Pro; it doesn't require any additional hardware cards, which means it can easily be run on a laptop as well as a PC. A faster computer means a faster editing suite, without having to fork out more cash for the software. In the Wintel world, you can get Speed Razor for the same flexibility.
The big boys may be running discreet and Avid systems, but they only represent a small percentage of the market (that part that has obscene amounts of money to burn.) There are a lot of botique shops out there that need a cheaper solution (something that doesn't cost more than a house to get into.)
Thankfully, video editing software and hardware are becoming just as much a commodity as many other high end applications have, and Apple is helping to drive the prices down with FCP. If you can manage to run a competitive business with off-the-shelf parts for as cheap as possible, then more power to you. Pocket the rest and call it good.
Premiere hasn't been the most popular film/television editing app on the Mac for a long time (especially since the first arrival of FCP and iMovie.) This is just another example of a company using Apple as an excuse to drop support for what is otherwise a complete lemon.
If you've used any semi-decent editor available for the Mac (the other major player in this space being Media 100), you see Premiere for the big, steaming pile of dung it is.
Yes, if you absolutely can't afford anything else, and you're not actually doing serious video production (i.e. getting paid for it), then Premiere is an incredibly mediocre way to fake it. I apologize if this offends any Premiere advocates out there, but I've been in television for six years now, and I've used Premiere on both Mac and Windows, and compared to just about every other application out there, Premiere is the worst.
Because mocking SCO is fun?
People are buying Macs for other people, free of charge? Sign me up! News to me.
You have to consider that most companies and schools have IT departments, who also have to approve the purchase and subsequent support of the machines. What do you think the common likelihood of the average IT guy approving a Mac purchase?
Now, what I want to know is, why not use identically clocked G4 and G5 systems? Did they just tack on a new system to the systems they've benchmarked instead of doing side-by-side tests?
;)
Because identically clocked systems don't exist? I find it interesting that the guy says the main reason the G4 lags is the current lower clock speed; I'd be perfectly happy if I could overclock my dual G4/1.25GHz to 2GHz...okay, so it'd either explode or require a liquid cooling system the size of a small fridge...