Which is a fair indication that UTV doesn't contain an MPEG encoder and probably stores the incoming DirecTV signal which is already compressed. That would certainly make it cheaper than having two decoders so that it can record two shows at once, just decode on playback.
Couldn't agree with you more. A soon as money's invovled someone has to be accountable for it all and I'm betting Sony doesn't want to have anything to do with it. In any system where money's involved you're going to attact the attention of people who wish to make lots of money at the expense of others, something MMORPGs could do without. Its hard enough to deal with virtual loss without combining it with financial misery;)
MSDN has all you need to know about DirectPlay and firewalls here. Even when using all of these "features" you still can't host more than one game behind a NAT without doing port forwarding and having the players pick their own non conflicting ports.
Re:Do we understand the implications?
on
Microsoft Loses
·
· Score: 1
Many excellent points. IE is fairly stable but now that its tightly integrated into my OS, when it locks up, so does the rest of the OS, even when you tell it to "Browse in a separate process". Still, I'd take it over Netscape 4.x any day.
I wouldn't say that MS does it better than anyone else though, their products are usually poorly designed and then hammered on by millions of people until theres no (or relatively few at least) bugs left. No offense intended to the coders at MS (I'm sure that the OS codebase must be a festering behemoth of NeverChangeThisInterfaceEx2W et al) but the things you find in Visual C for example, point to lots and lots and lots of special case coding. How else can Win2k need around a gig before you install apps when other OS's exist providing comparable functionality (I don't define needless MS extensions as functionality) in a fraction of that space?
Embrace and extend asside, blackmailing other companies to exclude competitors from the marketplace is evil.
Bwa ha ha ha ha... To my knowledge there's only one game for the Dreamcast which uses Wince. And I have seen a Dreamcast crash, when using the Web browser which uses, wait for it, Wince. The XBox might come in handy, I'll put it on top of my PSX2 as a dust cover;)
It does have a 200MHz bus, between the CPU and the Chipset. To my knowledge, they never said it would use 200MHz RAM. Althons still kick ass though! BTW: If someone offers you a Savage 2000, its a trick, RUN!
Point out one API which "permits only Microsoft products to be fully interoperable" and I'll show you where you're wrong - or I'll show you where it's documented. Any takers?
Where to begin:
Up until Win2k the PDB/DBG interfaces were not public and even then the DBG interface (dbghelp.dll) is inadequate and doesn't provide all of the information from PDBs like the locations, names and sizes of local variables within stack frames. Before Win2k, there was the woeful imagehlp interface which worked diferently under Win9x and WinNt. The interfaces exist since they are used by MS Visual Studio and the MS Debuggers but are not publicly available.
Up until Winsock 2.0 there was no way to enumerate the network devices like winipcfg does which can be important for asking users to chose an interface or for applications to make intelligent choices about what interface to use. There are undocumented Winsock 1.1 calls to get this information.
If that step forward is straight off a high cliff then I could agree with you. I've evaluated the final version of Win2k (they've given out timebombed versions to most developers who asked for the final) and Win2k is the most unstable and bloated version of the Win32 family to date.
As a game developer WinNT is not an option for developers using the DirectX API (yawn, yes DirectX 3.0 is included in NT4.0 from SP3 onwards but DirectX 3.0 is an unusable ancestor of DirectX 7.0 if you need to use the D3D API) so Win2K was of great interest to us considering that Win98 is about as stable as an elephant on a tight rope. Unfortunately, installing "Microsoft Visual Studio" onto Win2k overwrote components of IE5 such that Outlook Express could not ever be loaded again (all this and they chew up a 100meg+ of disk space to mirror the winnt\system32 folder to prevent incorect dll versions from bein installed by anyone, let along MS themselves). Of the 20 or so times I booted Win2k (which takes about twice as long as WinNT to boot) half of the shutdowns were because of failures.
Its not likely that I'll be using Win2k anytime soon until at least SP3 is out (SP3 was the first good version of NT4) and I have another 128meg of RAM for my system (128meg is woefully inadequate).
Okay, so as a workstation it didn't work out for me, so some people will say, its not a workstation, its a server. When those people can show me it doing everything my Cyrix120/32meg Debian box does I'll consider the change. I'm pretty sure if I tried to install Win2k Advanced Server (sic) on that machine the installer would laugh at me.
On an instersting side note, a rough calculation estimates that the mouse cursor "shadow" uses more CPU time than a 486DX4-100 and the fading menus are posibly even worse.
I'd really like to know why they need to store Credit Card numbers in the first place let alone all of the details. If I buy a TV from Best Buy they don't need my Name/Address/E-mail Address/Date of Birth/Magazine Interests etc. Sure the online merchant needs your address to send you the goods, but after that, they don't.
Unless I explicitly agree (hence the default being that I don't agree [that one's for all you sites which made me search for that darn check box which was inconvieniently ticked for me]) to have my e-mail Inbox or snail mail box filled with wads of trash they don't need squat.
How 'bout this. VISA (or AMEX/Diners/etc) goes into the instantaneous online transaction business.
I've filled my shopping cart with goodies and I'm heading for the checkout. At this point, I give them my name and the billing address of my VISA card (the public key). The merchant then contacts VISA and indicates that I want to make a purchase for the given amount. VISA then issues a challenge to get the credit card number correct (the private key). This can be easly done without ever transmitting the credit card number itself or anything which can be easily converted into my credit card number.
For example, VISA sends the merchant some random garbage who then passes it on to me. I enter my credit card number which is combined with the random garbage and spits out, for sake of argument, a 128 bit MD5. I send the MD5 back to the merchant who then sends it to VISA who can easily verify that the card number is correct, and then make sure I'm not over my limit etc.
VISA then indicates to the merchant if you succeeded or not and the transaction is completed. As an added bonus the transaction could require that you combine the amount of the transaction with you credit card number to prevent the merchant from being able to fiddle the books (not that a merchant would want to do this anyhow, I can't imagine that pissing VISA off is good for business).
So the net result is the merchant (whom has been identified as a weak link in the chain) never sees you credit card number.
All good points... I'd be MUCH happier if my Credit Card provider was providing this "service" directly. All that's needed is for VISA/Amex/MasterCard/etc to provide realtime authentication to vendors then they're wouldn't be any need for anyone to have your Credit Card details other than yourself.
I decide which items I want to purchase, enter my name/address and card type, the vendor contacts my Card provider who then issues a challenge for me to get the Credit Card number correct. I combine the challenge with my Credit Card number and return the result to the vendor who passes it through to the Credit Card provider and decides if its authentic.
Nothing revolutionary here, my Credit Card is never revealed to to the vendor (which partially elimates b) dishonest vendors since part of the authentication process should include the amount of the transaction, the vendor could decide to not ship the product(s), but the vendor will have to deal with the Credit Card company which has all the vendor's details (otherwise they wouldn't do business with them) and has the power to deny them making further transactions) and is never transmitted (which eliminates a) interception).
Hopefully this means that no other sites will shell out to Amazon to get 1-click on their sites. 1-click is far too dangerous for the general public to be using, especially the way that Amazon has their operation setup.
If you purchase anything from Amazon, all of the defaults settings enable 1-click and remember you credit card details. The next time you shop with Amazon 1-click is instant purchase. If you aren't paying complete attention to everything on the display and never check your shopping cart the purchases are made and the books will arive. To bad if you were just browsing;)
Re:Can You Install Windows 98? I think I can!
on
CNN Installs Linux
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· Score: 1
If you don't know what a video card looks like then you're sure as hell not going to know what a BIOS is let alone that you should hit DEL (or some other key) whilst the computer is booting, delve into the settings and change the boot order to have ATAPI go first (which they will obviously correlate with a CD-ROM drive) and then save the settings before rebooting to initiate the proceedure. Assuming he didn't inadvertantly change the processor voltage and blow his system up the machine should start the Win98 installation... and that's only step one.
You can already import this little number from Hong Kong... MP3 Station which is a measly $US52 instead of $US80. Not sure on the details of how it connects to the PSX or which PSX's it works with, or if its just a scam, but cool none the less.
The IEEE has a set of ethics for its members to follow. There's nothing really ground breaking here just some common sense, but it does exist. Some of these you read and go, yeah, if I was building a bridge or a nuclear power plant then I'd follow all these, but they all directly apply to the "Software Engineer" (to Engineers this term is about as enjoyable as Floral Engineer;) ) too, even to me, and all I do is write games.
So when you install Office 2000 you don't think that its upgrading all your DLLs to the current Win32 API level. A classic case in point is InitCommonControlsEx which I got burned on recently since this function didn't appear in Win95 but did appear in Win95 OSR2 and all version onwards. The MSDN documentation clearly indicates that you ALL new apps should use InitCommonControlsEx and not InitCommonControls, so they are clearly insuating that someone is going to have to update COMCTL32.DLL so that your app will actually load. When you say that MS is maintaining backward compatability with new apps, they just upgrade your old system to run new apps. I bet that Office 2000 upgrades you to at least IE 4.02 if not IE 5.0, in which case you as well have just installed Win98 SE. Whilst this is all well and fine if the new DLLs are backward compatible with old apps, there have been some instances where this is not the case. WININET.DLL springs to mind. This DLL had its interface completely changed if you installed IE 4 on a Win95 box rendered all apps that relied on it useless.
Lets not forget that if all taxes were combined into one super tax the cost of administering all of the various forms of taxes (not only at the governmnet level but in the public sector through tax accoutants etc) would be drastically reduced, easily enough to cover this 5% internet tax;)
No game programmer will tell you that design isn't the most important part of a game. All the more reason to have experienced logic solvers administering it instead of kids who like pac-man.
The other point I see missing from the article is that I think Microsoft is doing this purely as a numbers game just like did with Netscape. Netscape had market share, put IE in Win98 and they can start saying that IE has market share based purely on the installed Win98 user base regardless of whether people are using IE or not.
The same will apply with this web server. Regardless if people are using it or not they will claim that every Win2k machine counts as a machine which is using their web server. One can only assume that the installed base of Win2k will grow to be larger than the installed base of Apache, they'll start telling everyone that they have the biggest market share, everyone uses their server, people will start buying into their FUD, assume there's no alternative (how could their be, didn't Microsoft create the universe anyhow) and whammo... game set match.
So by my estimates, Apache will be #2 in about two years time. Of course, when this happens many of you will correctly point out that those statistics are flawed... but will that change anything?
One of the other posts mentioned that it wouldn't be useful since you'd have to enter someone's dynamic IP to see their web page on your intranet... try typing the netbios name in...
As many of you may or may not have noticed, 3DFX is in the midst of purchasing STB and the Voodoo3 series of cards are only available from STB.
Creative/Diamond and the rest made a LOT of money selling 3DFX based cards and I bet they were less than happy to see 3DFX go exclusive with the Voodoo3 series. Hence both Creative/Diamond will be pushing TNT2 based cards in an effort to
a) make lots of money b) punish 3DFX for shutting them out
So, what's the ONLY reason not to buy a TNT2 over a Voodoo3? (its certainly not the speed, check out Tom's hardware) The answer is of course Glide. There's a good percentage of games out there which only run on Glide (Unreal was Glide only for a LONG time) and by developing a wrapper which looks like Glide to games but uses D3D (or OpenGL for that matter) I can play all the Glide games I want on my TNT2.
Will this end up in court, you bet, 3DFX has to protect the part of the market which they have a monopoly on. Who's going to win... that's for the lawyers to decide;)
An integrated development environment would be nice. Makefiles and gdb are no where near as productive as MS Developer Studio. Games these days are many hundreds of thousands lines of code and source code management and debugging tools are of high important. A SoftIce port to Linux would be nice and some nice front ends to cvs would be nice too.
On the plus side, egcs (gcc 3) seems to be more stable and fully featured than MS VC for C++ development. I guess I've been using an IDE for too long;)
If anyone has a favourite development environment under Linux, share the wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a fair indication that UTV doesn't contain an MPEG encoder and probably stores the incoming DirecTV signal which is already compressed. That would certainly make it cheaper than having two decoders so that it can record two shows at once, just decode on playback.
Couldn't agree with you more. A soon as money's invovled someone has to be accountable for it all and I'm betting Sony doesn't want to have anything to do with it. In any system where money's involved you're going to attact the attention of people who wish to make lots of money at the expense of others, something MMORPGs could do without. Its hard enough to deal with virtual loss without combining it with financial misery ;)
MSDN has all you need to know about DirectPlay and firewalls here. Even when using all of these "features" you still can't host more than one game behind a NAT without doing port forwarding and having the players pick their own non conflicting ports.
Many excellent points. IE is fairly stable but now that its tightly integrated into my OS, when it locks up, so does the rest of the OS, even when you tell it to "Browse in a separate process". Still, I'd take it over Netscape 4.x any day.
I wouldn't say that MS does it better than anyone else though, their products are usually poorly designed and then hammered on by millions of people until theres no (or relatively few at least) bugs left. No offense intended to the coders at MS (I'm sure that the OS codebase must be a festering behemoth of NeverChangeThisInterfaceEx2W et al) but the things you find in Visual C for example, point to lots and lots and lots of special case coding. How else can Win2k need around a gig before you install apps when other OS's exist providing comparable functionality (I don't define needless MS extensions as functionality) in a fraction of that space?
Embrace and extend asside, blackmailing other companies to exclude competitors from the marketplace is evil.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ... To my knowledge there's only one game for the Dreamcast which uses Wince. And I have seen a Dreamcast crash, when using the Web browser which uses, wait for it, Wince. The XBox might come in handy, I'll put it on top of my PSX2 as a dust cover ;)
It does have a 200MHz bus, between the CPU and the Chipset. To my knowledge, they never said it would use 200MHz RAM. Althons still kick ass though! BTW: If someone offers you a Savage 2000, its a trick, RUN!
Should paid advertisements be noted as such ;)
Point out one API which "permits only Microsoft products to be fully interoperable" and I'll show you where you're wrong - or I'll show you where it's documented. Any takers?
Where to begin:
Up until Win2k the PDB/DBG interfaces were not public and even then the DBG interface (dbghelp.dll) is inadequate and doesn't provide all of the information from PDBs like the locations, names and sizes of local variables within stack frames. Before Win2k, there was the woeful imagehlp interface which worked diferently under Win9x and WinNt. The interfaces exist since they are used by MS Visual Studio and the MS Debuggers but are not publicly available.
Up until Winsock 2.0 there was no way to enumerate the network devices like winipcfg does which can be important for asking users to chose an interface or for applications to make intelligent choices about what interface to use. There are undocumented Winsock 1.1 calls to get this information.
Show me the money.
If that step forward is straight off a high cliff then I could agree with you. I've evaluated the final version of Win2k (they've given out timebombed versions to most developers who asked for the final) and Win2k is the most unstable and bloated version of the Win32 family to date.
As a game developer WinNT is not an option for developers using the DirectX API (yawn, yes DirectX 3.0 is included in NT4.0 from SP3 onwards but DirectX 3.0 is an unusable ancestor of DirectX 7.0 if you need to use the D3D API) so Win2K was of great interest to us considering that Win98 is about as stable as an elephant on a tight rope. Unfortunately, installing "Microsoft Visual Studio" onto Win2k overwrote components of IE5 such that Outlook Express could not ever be loaded again (all this and they chew up a 100meg+ of disk space to mirror the winnt\system32 folder to prevent incorect dll versions from bein installed by anyone, let along MS themselves). Of the 20 or so times I booted Win2k (which takes about twice as long as WinNT to boot) half of the shutdowns were because of failures.
Its not likely that I'll be using Win2k anytime soon until at least SP3 is out (SP3 was the first good version of NT4) and I have another 128meg of RAM for my system (128meg is woefully inadequate).
Okay, so as a workstation it didn't work out for me, so some people will say, its not a workstation, its a server. When those people can show me it doing everything my Cyrix120/32meg Debian box does I'll consider the change. I'm pretty sure if I tried to install Win2k Advanced Server (sic) on that machine the installer would laugh at me.
On an instersting side note, a rough calculation estimates that the mouse cursor "shadow" uses more CPU time than a 486DX4-100 and the fading menus are posibly even worse.
I'd really like to know why they need to store Credit Card numbers in the first place let alone all of the details. If I buy a TV from Best Buy they don't need my Name/Address/E-mail Address/Date of Birth/Magazine Interests etc. Sure the online merchant needs your address to send you the goods, but after that, they don't.
Unless I explicitly agree (hence the default being that I don't agree [that one's for all you sites which made me search for that darn check box which was inconvieniently ticked for me]) to have my e-mail Inbox or snail mail box filled with wads of trash they don't need squat.
How 'bout this. VISA (or AMEX/Diners/etc) goes into the instantaneous online transaction business.
I've filled my shopping cart with goodies and I'm heading for the checkout. At this point, I give them my name and the billing address of my VISA card (the public key). The merchant then contacts VISA and indicates that I want to make a purchase for the given amount. VISA then issues a challenge to get the credit card number correct (the private key). This can be easly done without ever transmitting the credit card number itself or anything which can be easily converted into my credit card number.
For example, VISA sends the merchant some random garbage who then passes it on to me. I enter my credit card number which is combined with the random garbage and spits out, for sake of argument, a 128 bit MD5. I send the MD5 back to the merchant who then sends it to VISA who can easily verify that the card number is correct, and then make sure I'm not over my limit etc.
VISA then indicates to the merchant if you succeeded or not and the transaction is completed. As an added bonus the transaction could require that you combine the amount of the transaction with you credit card number to prevent the merchant from being able to fiddle the books (not that a merchant would want to do this anyhow, I can't imagine that pissing VISA off is good for business).
So the net result is the merchant (whom has been identified as a weak link in the chain) never sees you credit card number.
RDRAM can move data on both edges of the clock (rising and faling) and has a throughput of 700MHz hence the PC700 name.
All good points ... I'd be MUCH happier if my Credit Card provider was providing this "service" directly. All that's needed is for VISA/Amex/MasterCard/etc to provide realtime authentication to vendors then they're wouldn't be any need for anyone to have your Credit Card details other than yourself.
I decide which items I want to purchase, enter my name/address and card type, the vendor contacts my Card provider who then issues a challenge for me to get the Credit Card number correct. I combine the challenge with my Credit Card number and return the result to the vendor who passes it through to the Credit Card provider and decides if its authentic.
Nothing revolutionary here, my Credit Card is never revealed to to the vendor (which partially elimates b) dishonest vendors since part of the authentication process should include the amount of the transaction, the vendor could decide to not ship the product(s), but the vendor will have to deal with the Credit Card company which has all the vendor's details (otherwise they wouldn't do business with them) and has the power to deny them making further transactions) and is never transmitted (which eliminates a) interception).
Hopefully this means that no other sites will shell out to Amazon to get 1-click on their sites. 1-click is far too dangerous for the general public to be using, especially the way that Amazon has their operation setup.
;)
If you purchase anything from Amazon, all of the defaults settings enable 1-click and remember you credit card details. The next time you shop with Amazon 1-click is instant purchase. If you aren't paying complete attention to everything on the display and never check your shopping cart the purchases are made and the books will arive. To bad if you were just browsing
If you don't know what a video card looks like then you're sure as hell not going to know what a BIOS is let alone that you should hit DEL (or some other key) whilst the computer is booting, delve into the settings and change the boot order to have ATAPI go first (which they will obviously correlate with a CD-ROM drive) and then save the settings before rebooting to initiate the proceedure. Assuming he didn't inadvertantly change the processor voltage and blow his system up the machine should start the Win98 installation ... and that's only step one.
"Where do you want to go today?".
You can already import this little number from Hong Kong ... MP3 Station which is a measly $US52 instead of $US80. Not sure on the details of how it connects to the PSX or which PSX's it works with, or if its just a scam, but cool none the less.
Doh ... further inspection indicates that FireWire isn't part of their chipset, merely that it would be connected to the PCI bus ;(
Hmm ... there's a box labelled 1394A in the diagram but it doesn't go into more detail. Anyone care to shed more light one it.
Athlon Chipset
The IEEE has a set of ethics for its members to follow. There's nothing really ground breaking here just some common sense, but it does exist. Some of these you read and go, yeah, if I was building a bridge or a nuclear power plant then I'd follow all these, but they all directly apply to the "Software Engineer" (to Engineers this term is about as enjoyable as Floral Engineer ;) ) too, even to me, and all I do is write games.
So when you install Office 2000 you don't think that its upgrading all your DLLs to the current Win32 API level. A classic case in point is InitCommonControlsEx which I got burned on recently since this function didn't appear in Win95 but did appear in Win95 OSR2 and all version onwards. The MSDN documentation clearly indicates that you ALL new apps should use InitCommonControlsEx and not InitCommonControls, so they are clearly insuating that someone is going to have to update COMCTL32.DLL so that your app will actually load. When you say that MS is maintaining backward compatability with new apps, they just upgrade your old system to run new apps. I bet that Office 2000 upgrades you to at least IE 4.02 if not IE 5.0, in which case you as well have just installed Win98 SE. Whilst this is all well and fine if the new DLLs are backward compatible with old apps, there have been some instances where this is not the case. WININET.DLL springs to mind. This DLL had its interface completely changed if you installed IE 4 on a Win95 box rendered all apps that relied on it useless.
Ugh.
You sound like a GST proponent ;)
;)
Lets not forget that if all taxes were combined into one super tax the cost of administering all of the various forms of taxes (not only at the governmnet level but in the public sector through tax accoutants etc) would be drastically reduced, easily enough to cover this 5% internet tax
No game programmer will tell you that design isn't the most important part of a game. All the more reason to have experienced logic solvers administering it instead of kids who like pac-man.
The other point I see missing from the article is that I think Microsoft is doing this purely as a numbers game just like did with Netscape. Netscape had market share, put IE in Win98 and they can start saying that IE has market share based purely on the installed Win98 user base regardless of whether people are using IE or not.
... game set match.
... but will that change anything?
... try typing the netbios name in ...
The same will apply with this web server. Regardless if people are using it or not they will claim that every Win2k machine counts as a machine which is using their web server. One can only assume that the installed base of Win2k will grow to be larger than the installed base of Apache, they'll start telling everyone that they have the biggest market share, everyone uses their server, people will start buying into their FUD, assume there's no alternative (how could their be, didn't Microsoft create the universe anyhow) and whammo
So by my estimates, Apache will be #2 in about two years time. Of course, when this happens many of you will correctly point out that those statistics are flawed
One of the other posts mentioned that it wouldn't be useful since you'd have to enter someone's dynamic IP to see their web page on your intranet
As many of you may or may not have noticed, 3DFX is in the midst of purchasing STB and the Voodoo3 series of cards are only available from STB.
... that's for the lawyers to decide ;)
Creative/Diamond and the rest made a LOT of money selling 3DFX based cards and I bet they were less than happy to see 3DFX go exclusive with the Voodoo3 series. Hence both Creative/Diamond will be pushing TNT2 based cards in an effort to
a) make lots of money
b) punish 3DFX for shutting them out
So, what's the ONLY reason not to buy a TNT2 over a Voodoo3? (its certainly not the speed, check out Tom's hardware) The answer is of course Glide. There's a good percentage of games out there which only run on Glide (Unreal was Glide only for a LONG time) and by developing a wrapper which looks like Glide to games but uses D3D (or OpenGL for that matter) I can play all the Glide games I want on my TNT2.
Will this end up in court, you bet, 3DFX has to protect the part of the market which they have a monopoly on. Who's going to win
An integrated development environment would be nice. Makefiles and gdb are no where near as productive as MS Developer Studio. Games these days are many hundreds of thousands lines of code and source code management and debugging tools are of high important. A SoftIce port to Linux would be nice and some nice front ends to cvs would be nice too.
;)
On the plus side, egcs (gcc 3) seems to be more stable and fully featured than MS VC for C++ development. I guess I've been using an IDE for too long
If anyone has a favourite development environment under Linux, share the wealth.
Styx.