We need to have some secrets for security like password and shared keys. But if all i need to know is the "IT configuration" to get around the security, there is no security. Determining the configuration is not the hard part of an attack.
Well here(Austria) I would say less than half the mp3 players sold are iPods. They have the "cool" factor but even the teens go for something with more bang for the buck. iPods don't get all that much shelf space either. All the music on my daughters and her friends mp3 players are usually from somebody's CD.
Maybe the iPod is the dominant type where you are, but I think its perhaps limited to the US mainly. They don't have a monopoly on music or online stores. After all the DRM free music should play just fine on a iPod too.
I hear ya, I really do. But at the same time this is the reason that more and more game companies are ignoring the mess of PC's and sticking with console only releases. You know what hardware and *software* that will be interacting with your game code.
I have also found that antiviral software on windows is a killer for some games WRT performance. And we haven't even got started with drivers and system setup issues...
Here in Vienna the public transport is just so good that Drink driving is a non issue(more or less) as is loosing your license regarding work. I don't have a car and I don't have a international license either and I can get around fine, 24/7. NZ is similar to the US, you need a car to get to work really, and drink driving is big issue there compared to here.
Well I guess it depends on the teenager then. There really is not the hassles with drunk teenagers here that we have in NZ. Perhaps its because they are expected to act more maturely at 16, and so they do. Rather than the other way round. Either way 21 is just bloody stupid. When can you join the army?
PV is a lot cheaper to maintain and service over a 30 year lifetime than solar thermal. And it is a lot cheaper for smaller installations, like on every home's rooftop.
Thats only true if you don't need tracking optics as per your first example.
You are not the only one. There is only so much you can do to reduce the price of silicon based cells so they go for efficiency. As it is the cost point seems to be the cheaper less efficiency polycrystalline cells at about 20% rather than the best at 40%. There is a catch even with "cheap" cells, you still have to package them and mount them. So anything lower than about 5% just doesn't seem work at all economically.
This is why so many here keep bring up solar thermal. Mirrors are about as cheap as you can get....
A good electrolysis cell runs at about 70%. So with a 20% PV cell that gives a sun to hydrogen efficiency of 14%. Some PV cells are up to 40% efficient giving a total of hydrogen conversion efficiency of 28%. Now we have electricity in the middle which is also dam useful on its own.
Not in the EU, or NZ. If its a R16 or R18 game you cannot buy it unless you are that age. But then again my daughter can by beer and wine and go to nightclubs legally and she is only 16.
So a porn FPS would qualify? Please, FPS are immature because you say so? Thats immature.
Sorry but your box does not fit the real world...
Thats what this debate is about. One group see something one way and therefore assume everyone else must also see it that way. It simply does not work in the real world. Personally I find quake a great family game. Many F1 drivers were go kart drivers first and there is serious sponsor deals for good go-kart drivers.
If something is entertaining that does not stop it from being "mature". There is no spade here, its about opinions, and these games wouldn't be sold in many countries if the target audience was 16 year olds because they can't even buy them, and some are not even allowed on the shelves.
Resident Evil, Bully, Hitman, and Manhunt are all games that my wife and I like to play. We are both a bit older than 16, in fact we are more that twice that age. We like to play the FPS games against each other on the home network and we both watch those kinds of movies. All of our friends enjoy similar types of moves and game and are also all over the age of 30 (in some case well over) and we are in a country where you can't buy a R16 game/movie.
These games may have some market in the 16 year olds. But its far from the only market that violent games have.
There's OpenGL, but from what I've heard it's a bit of a pain to use..
I have used both DX9/and opengl. Opengl is nicer in my opinion, but really the fact is they are about the same. Both have quirks and both run differently with different hardware and drivers making high performance hard. Now opengl is easier to port than DX so there really is not big deal. As evidance we have quake wars (Quake/doom engines) as an example. With ABR extensions features in DX make it quickly to opengl while the converse it not always true.
A good example of where the game community gets opengl wrong is the opengl 3 release. As far as I can tell its mainly folk who don't develop in opengl that a feeding the flamewars.
Sound and controllers is a big issue. I can totally agree with that. But i can't see it getting fixed all that fast.
But the thing is games are not all that low level. High end games market is not where the money is. Your game needs to run on pretty average hardware if you want to sell a decent number of copies. Getting bleeding edge performance is something you can do for a console, but nobody does. You get the game out, fast and that means far less than optimal performance on the target platforms anyway. Then cross platform is not so hard. Stereo sound, mouse, keyboard and a joystick with not too much pixel shader performance required and a fall back and you can support a very large number of platforms and pc configurations without that much effort. Going low level is a good way to have a very small potential market and push development cost through the roof no matter what APIs you use.
There plenty of room for peaceful reckoning. It may not be legal reckoning however.
Example, if I want to prove the importance of privacy to some politician that say you shouldn't care if you have nothing to hide. Publish proof of his/hers internet traffic... We all know there is likely to plenty of things he wants secret in that. Or in this case GPS the car, collect proof and publish where they have been driving. Cheating on your wife/husband may be perfectly legal, but i bet he/she wants to keep it a secret.
Ditto. The first movies were good at the time because of what was around at the time. But compare that to Alien made IIRC one year later. Its a true classic today even if the alien was a quadruped. My nephew didn't like Aliens much thou..;)
The OSs that i need to target is Windows XP/Vista, Macs and unixs. But seriously the unixis for my market is really just linux. And we are still back to square one. Support for cross platform sound library's is pretty limited, a big list of *ixs not withstanding.
Oh just out of interest, what is the latency on OSS like. I have never checked.
My point was that cross platform api's don't really exist. You just pointed out one reason why.
Your post sounds like a rant, "we are better because they are dicks", kinda thing. Ironically you have not convined me of the evils of ALSA or the greatness of OSS.
Incidentally I am supporting neither and have used both. At this stage I use a higher level wrapper....
And what api will there be after another round of forks from people who just don't want to get along. How long before they are stable... before the next fork?
I don't disagree with you post on any particular point, except:
However, before any of that is going to happen, you need to have a good API.
This is bunk. You won't get anywhere with a "better" api with what ever measure you use for better, *unless* its a *lot* better. Vendors need a very good reason to drop there current apis, not just a good reason. Then you need the developers that already have code bases and experience on the other api's. A little better is not going to cut it.
Then there is how to define better. A better api for programmers is often a bad api for hardware implementors and driver developer's and vise versa. So who should make the calls on the api design, hardware vendors or developers?
Oh and remember there is a lot more to a 3D api than just the games market.
This boils down to just how bad is opengl/DX. It turns both are not that bad, and as established standards that would make them very hard to displace. One thing is for sure M$ won't help no matter how good it is unless they own it.
As indie (how do you spell that) games developer I can tell you that the idea of a complete "stack" is a great one, and one that is missing outside DX. But this is where cross platform makes life really difficult, because everything is different.
The hardware is different, the way to talk to the hardware is different, etc
A good example is sound on linux. ALSA has only recently starting working for me out of the box (and then only reliably with slackware). ALSA can support a lot of high end features on soundcards, so its complicated. Then theres all the iniliztion etc. A lot of apps still use the OSS method of talking to the card.
What about some lower level stuff and just play the dam sound? Seems to me the there is no simple lower level API/interface without every bell and whistle. So then they are all different and you end up with goobs of code dealing with each case after discovery even for simple stuff.
Oh there have been a number of attempts at 2d api's . They never seem to go anywhere because you can just use a opengl 1.1 complaint api and you get widespread support now. Not when the api becomes some kind of standard.
So you think that some competing company that is *not* Microsoft is going to get this new API implemented by M$? Seriously its single platform (I don't count xbox as an alternative) for a reason. That reason is that if you want grfx performance for a windows machine you *must* write DX code that runs on nothing else (well thats the idea).
I have used both, and I really don't find one better than the other, or either all that bad. Both have there quirks and good points, both behave differently with different drivers and hardware. DX discovery is perhaps slightly better, but seems to lack accuracy anyway....
I now use pretty much only opengl, because then I'm not tied to a single platform. Generally most features are exposed on both APIs quite quickly so you don't loose features either.
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In this case, was the sysadmin justified in looking after he had been promised to be paid and then told he was not being paid?
Another question. Do you think the FBI is justified in going through your email without a warrant?
./ then you would say no i guess. Something about privacy. So why are CEOs less entitled to privacy than others?
If I'm up with
What he did was not just wrong but most likely highly illegal as well.
What about Voting machines? Or crypto algorithms?
We need to have some secrets for security like password and shared keys. But if all i need to know is the "IT configuration" to get around the security, there is no security. Determining the configuration is not the hard part of an attack.
Well here(Austria) I would say less than half the mp3 players sold are iPods. They have the "cool" factor but even the teens go for something with more bang for the buck. iPods don't get all that much shelf space either. All the music on my daughters and her friends mp3 players are usually from somebody's CD.
Maybe the iPod is the dominant type where you are, but I think its perhaps limited to the US mainly. They don't have a monopoly on music or online stores. After all the DRM free music should play just fine on a iPod too.
I do believe in most countries they can't stop you. In NZ all warranty etc must also be honored even after a few rounds with eBay.
I hear ya, I really do. But at the same time this is the reason that more and more game companies are ignoring the mess of PC's and sticking with console only releases. You know what hardware and *software* that will be interacting with your game code.
I have also found that antiviral software on windows is a killer for some games WRT performance. And we haven't even got started with drivers and system setup issues...
The problem is that I can't seem to buy my daughter a home nuke power kit. So how to get started?
I think its called a newspaper....
Here in Vienna the public transport is just so good that Drink driving is a non issue(more or less) as is loosing your license regarding work. I don't have a car and I don't have a international license either and I can get around fine, 24/7. NZ is similar to the US, you need a car to get to work really, and drink driving is big issue there compared to here.
Well I guess it depends on the teenager then. There really is not the hassles with drunk teenagers here that we have in NZ. Perhaps its because they are expected to act more maturely at 16, and so they do. Rather than the other way round. Either way 21 is just bloody stupid. When can you join the army?
PS that AC was me.
PV is a lot cheaper to maintain and service over a 30 year lifetime than solar thermal. And it is a lot cheaper for smaller installations, like on every home's rooftop.
Thats only true if you don't need tracking optics as per your first example.
You are not the only one. There is only so much you can do to reduce the price of silicon based cells so they go for efficiency. As it is the cost point seems to be the cheaper less efficiency polycrystalline cells at about 20% rather than the best at 40%. There is a catch even with "cheap" cells, you still have to package them and mount them. So anything lower than about 5% just doesn't seem work at all economically.
This is why so many here keep bring up solar thermal. Mirrors are about as cheap as you can get....
And I doubt we posses enough rare elements to build that many PV cells.
Err... what rare elements? Silicon oxide and the extremely small amounts of dopant's needed to make cells are very very common.
A good electrolysis cell runs at about 70%. So with a 20% PV cell that gives a sun to hydrogen efficiency of 14%. Some PV cells are up to 40% efficient giving a total of hydrogen conversion efficiency of 28%. Now we have electricity in the middle which is also dam useful on its own.
Not in the EU, or NZ. If its a R16 or R18 game you cannot buy it unless you are that age. But then again my daughter can by beer and wine and go to nightclubs legally and she is only 16.
So a porn FPS would qualify? Please, FPS are immature because you say so? Thats immature.
Sorry but your box does not fit the real world...
Thats what this debate is about. One group see something one way and therefore assume everyone else must also see it that way. It simply does not work in the real world. Personally I find quake a great family game. Many F1 drivers were go kart drivers first and there is serious sponsor deals for good go-kart drivers.
If something is entertaining that does not stop it from being "mature". There is no spade here, its about opinions, and these games wouldn't be sold in many countries if the target audience was 16 year olds because they can't even buy them, and some are not even allowed on the shelves.
Resident Evil, Bully, Hitman, and Manhunt are all games that my wife and I like to play. We are both a bit older than 16, in fact we are more that twice that age. We like to play the FPS games against each other on the home network and we both watch those kinds of movies. All of our friends enjoy similar types of moves and game and are also all over the age of 30 (in some case well over) and we are in a country where you can't buy a R16 game/movie.
These games may have some market in the 16 year olds. But its far from the only market that violent games have.
There's OpenGL, but from what I've heard it's a bit of a pain to use..
I have used both DX9/and opengl. Opengl is nicer in my opinion, but really the fact is they are about the same. Both have quirks and both run differently with different hardware and drivers making high performance hard. Now opengl is easier to port than DX so there really is not big deal. As evidance we have quake wars (Quake/doom engines) as an example. With ABR extensions features in DX make it quickly to opengl while the converse it not always true.
A good example of where the game community gets opengl wrong is the opengl 3 release. As far as I can tell its mainly folk who don't develop in opengl that a feeding the flamewars.
Sound and controllers is a big issue. I can totally agree with that. But i can't see it getting fixed all that fast.
But the thing is games are not all that low level. High end games market is not where the money is. Your game needs to run on pretty average hardware if you want to sell a decent number of copies. Getting bleeding edge performance is something you can do for a console, but nobody does. You get the game out, fast and that means far less than optimal performance on the target platforms anyway. Then cross platform is not so hard. Stereo sound, mouse, keyboard and a joystick with not too much pixel shader performance required and a fall back and you can support a very large number of platforms and pc configurations without that much effort. Going low level is a good way to have a very small potential market and push development cost through the roof no matter what APIs you use.
And when steam goes belly up? Or just stops "supporting" older games? Or gets brought out by Yahoo/EA and they discontinue the service? Then what?
Steam is DRM plain and simple and Just like the yahoo music shop or M$ Music, it won't be authenticating your games forever.
...the time for peaceful reckoning is past.
There plenty of room for peaceful reckoning. It may not be legal reckoning however.
Example, if I want to prove the importance of privacy to some politician that say you shouldn't care if you have nothing to hide. Publish proof of his/hers internet traffic... We all know there is likely to plenty of things he wants secret in that. Or in this case GPS the car, collect proof and publish where they have been driving. Cheating on your wife/husband may be perfectly legal, but i bet he/she wants to keep it a secret.
Ditto. The first movies were good at the time because of what was around at the time. But compare that to Alien made IIRC one year later. Its a true classic today even if the alien was a quadruped. My nephew didn't like Aliens much thou.. ;)
The OSs that i need to target is Windows XP/Vista, Macs and unixs. But seriously the unixis for my market is really just linux. And we are still back to square one. Support for cross platform sound library's is pretty limited, a big list of *ixs not withstanding.
Oh just out of interest, what is the latency on OSS like. I have never checked.
My point was that cross platform api's don't really exist. You just pointed out one reason why.
Your post sounds like a rant, "we are better because they are dicks", kinda thing. Ironically you have not convined me of the evils of ALSA or the greatness of OSS.
Incidentally I am supporting neither and have used both. At this stage I use a higher level wrapper....
And what api will there be after another round of forks from people who just don't want to get along. How long before they are stable... before the next fork?
However, before any of that is going to happen, you need to have a good API.
This is bunk. You won't get anywhere with a "better" api with what ever measure you use for better, *unless* its a *lot* better. Vendors need a very good reason to drop there current apis, not just a good reason. Then you need the developers that already have code bases and experience on the other api's. A little better is not going to cut it.
Then there is how to define better. A better api for programmers is often a bad api for hardware implementors and driver developer's and vise versa. So who should make the calls on the api design, hardware vendors or developers?
Oh and remember there is a lot more to a 3D api than just the games market.
This boils down to just how bad is opengl/DX. It turns both are not that bad, and as established standards that would make them very hard to displace. One thing is for sure M$ won't help no matter how good it is unless they own it.
As indie (how do you spell that) games developer I can tell you that the idea of a complete "stack" is a great one, and one that is missing outside DX. But this is where cross platform makes life really difficult, because everything is different. The hardware is different, the way to talk to the hardware is different, etc
A good example is sound on linux. ALSA has only recently starting working for me out of the box (and then only reliably with slackware). ALSA can support a lot of high end features on soundcards, so its complicated. Then theres all the iniliztion etc. A lot of apps still use the OSS method of talking to the card.
What about some lower level stuff and just play the dam sound? Seems to me the there is no simple lower level API/interface without every bell and whistle. So then they are all different and you end up with goobs of code dealing with each case after discovery even for simple stuff.
Oh there have been a number of attempts at 2d api's . They never seem to go anywhere because you can just use a opengl 1.1 complaint api and you get widespread support now. Not when the api becomes some kind of standard.
So you think that some competing company that is *not* Microsoft is going to get this new API implemented by M$? Seriously its single platform (I don't count xbox as an alternative) for a reason. That reason is that if you want grfx performance for a windows machine you *must* write DX code that runs on nothing else (well thats the idea).
I have used both, and I really don't find one better than the other, or either all that bad. Both have there quirks and good points, both behave differently with different drivers and hardware. DX discovery is perhaps slightly better, but seems to lack accuracy anyway....
I now use pretty much only opengl, because then I'm not tied to a single platform. Generally most features are exposed on both APIs quite quickly so you don't loose features either.