If the sentence is justified by how many innocent Iraqis Saddam has killed, maybe he shouldn't be alone on the gallows.
You know what? I'm trying very hard not to think of the hundreds of thousands of innocent people the American military has killed over the years.... oh.. but that's OK right.. because they were doing GOOD!
Too bad for him that he didn't have the foresight to exempt himself from international law and basic human decency beforehand.
it is at times MUCH harder to accomplish the same effect in OpenGL than in D3D.
Ok, so what's your point? My original point was that whatever can be done in D3D can be done in OpenGL. Sure there are time and money issues which you have to balance with all your other budgetary constraints.
DirectX is not just about gaming you know. The entire DirectX suite comprises tools used for music, sound, 3D graphics, 2D imaging, input, networking, maths routines and a bunch of others i'm sure i forgot.
All people tend to focus on is the Direct3D component, and they forget that the rest are extremely useful for all manner of people, want to be a DJ? You need DirectSound and DirectMusic, want to do 3D virtualization? Direct3D and probably DirectInput, want to write a paint program? DirectDraw ( technically Direct3D ).
Sure, you don't want Direct3D because you can play Halo3 on your XBOX, but you ARE going to want it when you want to see that awesome new farbrauch tech demo, or you want to use that cool new automagic DJ sequencer, or if you want to listen to your cool new music CD.
Look, people don't care who's at fault, they just know there's a problem and it has to be fixed. Apple and Microsoft don't engage in finger-pointing, they just FIX THE PROBLEMS. This is what the open source community needs to do.
There does need to be some degree of "finger pointing" otherwise no-one will take responsibility for the problem. Once you determine where the problem lies you can take steps to fix it. The problem with "finger pointing" is that usually it involves one group saying "it's your problem", and the other group saying "no, it's yours", and in the end the problem never gets fixed. Apple and Microsoft don't have this issue because as soon as the problem is identified it's given the correct department to fix. It just highlights a major problem in open-source software, where most developers think they are GOD and are never wrong. Remember most applications are developed for FREE, without any reimbursement at all, so i can see why some developers would not want to implement that cool new feature.
Why the hell are there different sound libraries in the first place? Why would anybody need more than one?
Because people and developers like choice. GNOME has gstreamer, KDE has aRTS, then there is xine-lib, ALSA, OSS(deprecated), OpenAL, etc, no-one can decide what to use as a common ground. Then there are older legacy apps that attempt to directly access/dev/sound, which is probably what happened the original problem with the browser. The MP3 App ( amarok for example) might use xine-lib to access the sound card, xine-lib locks the device, and the browser ( which the programmers never thought to add the ability to use xine-lib ) tries to directly access the sound card and fails because it's locked. Or maybe the browser tries to use the default KDE aRTS which again would conflict with xine-lib. Because Linux is all about "choice", it sometimes provides too many choices. They have been trying to rectify this by including ALSA(another sound library) built into the kernel, but there are still lots of legacy apps out there.
That unfortunately is the biggest drawcard of DirectX. You write an application in DirectX and you pretty much guarantee that it will run on a host of different Windows configurations ( barring dodgy drivers ) because every application uses DirectX, so they all play nice. DirectX manages the resources and tries to make sure the system works.
Re:OpenGL can't compare to COMPLETE DirectX packag
on
Why Gaming Sucks On Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
Using my Ubuntu DD as example, why the hell, if I'm listening to an mp3 via a media player while surfing the web and see a video on you tube I want to watch, does the sound not Just Work? I have to close the player freeing the sound resource, restart the browser, and then revisit the page. What a pain. How the hell is busted architecture supposed to support all the layers of sound and music in a game?
That is not busted ass architecture. One of your misbehaving apps has acquired direct exclusive control over the sound card without using the proper sound libraries, or tried to get exclusive control when your sound library had the access. If all the programs used the same sound library it wouldn't be a problem. Same thing can happen on windows if you request it when you set up the DirectSound interface. Same deal with input, ever wondered why when you alt-tab from some games and the mouse pointer doesn't come back? It's because they requests exclusive control, and no other apps can use the mouse while the game has it. Most games are friendly and release it when they detect an alt-tab.
Another contention I have is OpenGL itself. What happened? Direct3D simply has more advanced support for today's hardware capabilities. Every game I do play that has both rendering options, the Direct3D version has far superior visuals. One particular example I can recall is some transparant surfaces in FarCry. When switching to openGl, some of those surfaces lose their transparancy, turing into shiny, but opaqe surfaces. This is simply unacceptable in todays games. While I don't know if it is necessarily a result of the difference of capabilites between Direct3D and OpenGL, or simply lazy devs, it just makes you wonder.
Lazy devs. There is nothing you can do D3D that can't be done in OGL if your card supports the extensions. If you are seeing visual differences, it is either lazy game programmers or lazy graphics driver programmers.
I barely notice any differences when comparing D3D to OGL in games, Homeworld for example, had 0 visual artifacts that i noticed.
* Sound on Linux is, well, "a debacle" comes to mind
OpenAL - UT2004/Q4 seems to work fine
* File I/O is different
Oh really? In what way? fopen() still opens files, and fwrite() still writes to files. I guess you mean really really large files that benefit from memory mapping.
* Input devices are handled differently
True, SDL goes a way to helping with that, but getting direct input is still a pain.
* Networking is ever so slightly different. (Go Winsock!:( )
True, but it's not hard at all to write a simple wrapper around it using the standard sock interface, there are some little quirks to do with closing connections properly ( have to shut down the sockets in the correct order ) but they are simple enough to get around.
* If you thought DX capability flags are a nightmare, you need to spend more time with OGL vendor extensions
Sad but true, but at least they are fully documented, and with Nvidia's new CG interface, you can do more things using shaders and less with extensions.
Others you missed that have problems.
Windowing - This is bloody annoying, SDL helps here though
Memory Management - using OS specific routines will get you into trouble! VirtualAlloc anyone?
Text files - Watch out for those cr/lf end lines!
Threading - *cringe*!!
Dynamic libraries - Ouch.. more headaches..
But.. now that has been said, all of those problems can be solved with a wrapper, in fact in a game i'm writing the only ones i havn't finished a wrapper for are Memory Management(just using new/delete/malloc) and sound(hasn't been implemented yet), the rest are happily wrapped up in interfaces(yes! even threads!) and the OS details are never exposed to the game system.
Again you'd have to change so much hardware, it would be no different than installing on a new machine. And you can just call them and they give you a new key in just a few minutes... not a big deal
Would it be a new machine? Say it's your home computer, you use it to play games, type up reports, browse the web. You replace all that, has the use of the machine changed? No, the hardware may be different, but the logical use of the "computer" has not. It is still that home computer.
Let's have another example. Say you buy a new computer(without an OS), and you give your old one to your little sister Suzie to use to play Pink Pony games. You remove Windows off Suzie's computer, install Linux on it, and install Windows Vista back on your new one. So now you have a brand spanking new computer but... it's going to be used the same, it's in the same physical location in the house, you are putting the same games and programs on it, but to all intents and purposes it's a new computer. Should this count as a "transfer to a new device" or computer?
The problem is whether an activation is allowed or not is completely up to the discretion of the support guy you talk to, if he's been having a shitty day, he could just refuse your request and you have no legal recourse at all to get your copy revalidated.
think about finding the first occurrence of '0000' in the digit sequence of pi, and ask yourself how far out that is likely to happen.
That's easy...
The string 0000 occurs at position 13,390 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.
http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery
WODE is a silly myth promoted by people with an axe to grind, usually those who have no real world experience with Java. Its extremely easy to write portable code in java, but java won't stop you from writing unportable code, just like any other language.
It's true that you can write portable code in Java, just like you can write portable code in C/C++, but you can't get the program to actually DO anything usefull. And when you try you have to end up debugging it. The easiest example i can think of right now is trying to open a.PDF file. Have you ever tried to write portable code to make Java tell the system to load a PDF file using the default executable handler?
I have worked on shrinked wrap software that was intended to run on both Linux and Windows, and i can tell you that there are little bugs that crop up now and then due to inconsistent handling, rendering issues, font issues, and especially in the way the Look and feels work. Granted it's not as bad as most people think and mostly it's bugs in Java's default libraries, but there ARE issues, and you shouldn't just dismiss them with a wave of the hand just because you have not had an occasion to experience one
I have looked at Java SE 6, and they make great strides to solve the non-portable issues ( the disk free/left and desktop integration is a good example ), but the fact is that the Virtual Machine cannot always hide all the platform quirks, and sometimes you need to "debug" the code and write a workaround for a specific platform.
The "overheard" you speak of is largely irrelevant and has been for quite some time due to advances in computing power
If you mean "overhead" then that too is debateable and i'll take the bait.
Java IS slow. There is no doubt about it. Any chance to remove overhead should be taken. Yes it has the JIT ( which is quite good for servers ), but as i mentioned earlier, we develop shrink wrap desktop software which suffers from horrible performance issues relating directly to JIT, GC, and Swing. Yes, we have profiled it, and optimized it, but the problems are still there. The biggest advantage compling to native code using GCJ, is that of pipelining and cache hits when the instruction code is executed by the CPU, thereby reducing overhead. In performance critical apps ( like a desktop app, that needs microsecond response times ), every little bit of overhead we can remove is crucial.
I look forward to Java SE 6, the new features should help with some of my concerns. And as a final note, ask anyone who has actually done real world apps in Java, they will tell you that Java has it's problems.. but like all languages, is has good points too. I don't bash Java too much, i think we need to highlight it's inadequacies and it's benifits, and not just be evangelical sheep who won't listen to any critism of their holy language.
I would have thought that using an open source system specifically designed for multi-user conferences would have been a better choice for holding a virtual conference.
Open Crouquet is shaping up pretty well and dosn't come with half the hassles, you don't have to worry about users gate crashing your conerence ( Conference is closed... coz of AIDS! ), you can run Croquet on your own hardware, and it can be customized to suit your needs..
Maybe someone should mention this this to Sun?
Re:Both points backwards
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
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· Score: 2, Interesting
YouTube even when sending no money directly to media is creating value for the media companies even with illegal content by increasing mindshare and viewership of a show so media companies can collect money via other channels
I wish more media companies would sit up and take notice this point, both music and video. A good example is i found a song by Sarah McLachlan from a P2P network, i had never heard of her before and had no intention of buying her albums, but after hearing that song i went out and bought as many of her albums as i could. Now i'm a die hard fan.
Same goes for YouTube, you see a series you like, say Futurama, it makes you want to go out and buy the episodes so you can keep them for yourself. You may have never heard of it before and if it wasn't for YouTube you might never had.
If you could transfer all the properties from one atom to another (still beyond the state of the art at present) the resulting atom would be indistinguishable from the original.
You can't say that definitivly, not all the variables and rules of quantum physics have been accounted for yet, especially if you start including Chaos Theory and Quantum Chaos Theory.
Then the ME at Site A gets destroyed or reassembled as someone/something else.
Technically yes, although the state particles at site A actually become undefined. Meaning ANYTHING could concievably created from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal to a nuclear explosion depends on how the quantum waves collapse.
Walk in a room that essentially becomes somewhere near the Swiss alps for lunch and walk back to be home for dinner. Telecommute anywhere.
Again yes. The speed you "teleport" is restricted by the speed of light though. So it'll still take a couple of minutes to get to Mars.
Just thinking, it's probably closer to:
source$ measurestate source > sourceinfo
destination$ measurestate target > destinfo
source$ scp sourceinfo destination
destination$ combinestateinfo sourceinfo destinfo -o target
source$ rm -f source -- this line would be automatically run by a magical watchdog program.:P
Because you need "partial" measurements from both the source and target, then you perform an operation on the target to incorporate the info. And you are actually transferring the "state" of the object, not the object itself.
Because of the No cloning theorem(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_th eorem) which "forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state"
Put simply you can record the quantum states of an atom/particle(or your entire body) and then send this information using a classical channel like radio. Once this information gets to your destination(eg Mars) the guys at that end can use that information to affect some particles over there, and because of Quantum Entanglement, those particles on Mars will instantly take on the recorded state. The particles at the start will then lose their state due to the no cloning therom(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_the orem). So you can teleport, but you can't teleport at greater than the speed of light because you still have to send the data to the destination.
Note that it's not technically "Teleportation", you are just changing the states at the quantum level.
Basically there is this table that contains a list of handlers for the various exes, if if a handler returns a failure the loop that parses the table will stop iterating. If you insert a kernel module first you can take control of all executable types b4 any other handles get to handle it.
BUT...It requires root access and wont work on SELinux. This is a serious how? I mean if you have root access, then the entire system is compromised already.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh... you mean like George W. Bush did..
Can't be too broken, at least it totals up to 100%
DirectX is not just about gaming you know. The entire DirectX suite comprises tools used for music, sound, 3D graphics, 2D imaging, input, networking, maths routines and a bunch of others i'm sure i forgot.
All people tend to focus on is the Direct3D component, and they forget that the rest are extremely useful for all manner of people, want to be a DJ? You need DirectSound and DirectMusic, want to do 3D virtualization? Direct3D and probably DirectInput, want to write a paint program? DirectDraw ( technically Direct3D ).
Sure, you don't want Direct3D because you can play Halo3 on your XBOX, but you ARE going to want it when you want to see that awesome new farbrauch tech demo, or you want to use that cool new automagic DJ sequencer, or if you want to listen to your cool new music CD.
Until they put "This game cannot be used in a virtual environment" in the EULA. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
That unfortunately is the biggest drawcard of DirectX. You write an application in DirectX and you pretty much guarantee that it will run on a host of different Windows configurations ( barring dodgy drivers ) because every application uses DirectX, so they all play nice. DirectX manages the resources and tries to make sure the system works.
I barely notice any differences when comparing D3D to OGL in games, Homeworld for example, had 0 visual artifacts that i noticed.
OpenAL - UT2004/Q4 seems to work fine
Oh really? In what way? fopen() still opens files, and fwrite() still writes to files. I guess you mean really really large files that benefit from memory mapping.
True, SDL goes a way to helping with that, but getting direct input is still a pain.
True, but it's not hard at all to write a simple wrapper around it using the standard sock interface, there are some little quirks to do with closing connections properly ( have to shut down the sockets in the correct order ) but they are simple enough to get around.
Sad but true, but at least they are fully documented, and with Nvidia's new CG interface, you can do more things using shaders and less with extensions.
Others you missed that have problems.
Windowing - This is bloody annoying, SDL helps here though
Memory Management - using OS specific routines will get you into trouble! VirtualAlloc anyone?
Text files - Watch out for those cr/lf end lines!
Threading - *cringe*!!
Dynamic libraries - Ouch.. more headaches..
But.. now that has been said, all of those problems can be solved with a wrapper, in fact in a game i'm writing the only ones i havn't finished a wrapper for are Memory Management(just using new/delete/malloc) and sound(hasn't been implemented yet), the rest are happily wrapped up in interfaces(yes! even threads!) and the OS details are never exposed to the game system.
Oh yeah.. let's just add MORE overhead to processing instructions.
Crap! forgot to close the blockqoute.. that'll teach me not to use preview. :(
It's true that you can write portable code in Java, just like you can write portable code in C/C++, but you can't get the program to actually DO anything usefull. And when you try you have to end up debugging it. The easiest example i can think of right now is trying to open a
I have worked on shrinked wrap software that was intended to run on both Linux and Windows, and i can tell you that there are little bugs that crop up now and then due to inconsistent handling, rendering issues, font issues, and especially in the way the Look and feels work. Granted it's not as bad as most people think and mostly it's bugs in Java's default libraries, but there ARE issues, and you shouldn't just dismiss them with a wave of the hand just because you have not had an occasion to experience one
I have looked at Java SE 6, and they make great strides to solve the non-portable issues ( the disk free/left and desktop integration is a good example ), but the fact is that the Virtual Machine cannot always hide all the platform quirks, and sometimes you need to "debug" the code and write a workaround for a specific platform.
If you mean "overhead" then that too is debateable and i'll take the bait.
Java IS slow. There is no doubt about it. Any chance to remove overhead should be taken. Yes it has the JIT ( which is quite good for servers ), but as i mentioned earlier, we develop shrink wrap desktop software which suffers from horrible performance issues relating directly to JIT, GC, and Swing. Yes, we have profiled it, and optimized it, but the problems are still there. The biggest advantage compling to native code using GCJ, is that of pipelining and cache hits when the instruction code is executed by the CPU, thereby reducing overhead. In performance critical apps ( like a desktop app, that needs microsecond response times ), every little bit of overhead we can remove is crucial.
I look forward to Java SE 6, the new features should help with some of my concerns. And as a final note, ask anyone who has actually done real world apps in Java, they will tell you that Java has it's problems.. but like all languages, is has good points too. I don't bash Java too much, i think we need to highlight it's inadequacies and it's benifits, and not just be evangelical sheep who won't listen to any critism of their holy language.
I would have thought that using an open source system specifically designed for multi-user conferences would have been a better choice for holding a virtual conference.
http://www.opencroquet.org/
Open Crouquet is shaping up pretty well and dosn't come with half the hassles, you don't have to worry about users gate crashing your conerence ( Conference is closed... coz of AIDS! ), you can run Croquet on your own hardware, and it can be customized to suit your needs..
Maybe someone should mention this this to Sun?
YouTube even when sending no money directly to media is creating value for the media companies even with illegal content by increasing mindshare and viewership of a show so media companies can collect money via other channels I wish more media companies would sit up and take notice this point, both music and video. A good example is i found a song by Sarah McLachlan from a P2P network, i had never heard of her before and had no intention of buying her albums, but after hearing that song i went out and bought as many of her albums as i could. Now i'm a die hard fan.
Same goes for YouTube, you see a series you like, say Futurama, it makes you want to go out and buy the episodes so you can keep them for yourself. You may have never heard of it before and if it wasn't for YouTube you might never had.
Again yes. The speed you "teleport" is restricted by the speed of light though. So it'll still take a couple of minutes to get to Mars.
Sorry, take the slashes of the end of the URL's.
Unfortunately we won't know until we give it a try. There has been alot of research into that subject for a while now with no definitive conclusion. This guy http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/overview.html/ certainly thinks it is, while a (hopefully) less biased article on wikipedia is here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_brain/
Just thinking, it's probably closer to: :P
source$ measurestate source > sourceinfo
destination$ measurestate target > destinfo
source$ scp sourceinfo destination
destination$ combinestateinfo sourceinfo destinfo -o target
source$ rm -f source -- this line would be automatically run by a magical watchdog program.
Because you need "partial" measurements from both the source and target, then you perform an operation on the target to incorporate the info. And you are actually transferring the "state" of the object, not the object itself.
Actually it is a
h eorem) which "forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state"
$ mv source target
Because of the No cloning theorem(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
e orem). So you can teleport, but you can't teleport at greater than the speed of light because you still have to send the data to the destination.
Put simply you can record the quantum states of an atom/particle(or your entire body) and then send this information using a classical channel like radio. Once this information gets to your destination(eg Mars) the guys at that end can use that information to affect some particles over there, and because of Quantum Entanglement, those particles on Mars will instantly take on the recorded state. The particles at the start will then lose their state due to the no cloning therom(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_th
Note that it's not technically "Teleportation", you are just changing the states at the quantum level.
For those who won't read it..
Basically there is this table that contains a list of handlers for the various exes, if if a handler returns a failure the loop that parses the table will stop iterating. If you insert a kernel module first you can take control of all executable types b4 any other handles get to handle it.
BUT...It requires root access and wont work on SELinux. This is a serious how? I mean if you have root access, then the entire system is compromised already.