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Comment Re:Only usefull for wine? (Score 1) 55

You're telling me people are expected to dig up the reference card (assuming they know it exists), go through a terse set of pages looking for what you want, say, glVertex, not find it and then... assume it's deprecated? Wow, that's convenient and explicit. People will try to find confirmation, find that there is a reference page for it (without any version number) and think it was too obvious to be listed or something. Not because they're dumb and most certainly not because they should not be programming OpenGL. People have to start somewhere, and it's that very attitude you're displaying that means more people will choose DirectX instead.

Comment Re:Only usefull for wine? (Score 5, Informative) 55

Also documentation. Say what you will, D3D's docs are lightyears ahead of the messy, poorly-versioned documentation for OpenGL. Doesn't help that OpenGL kept backwards compatibility for so long that even fairly recent tutorials still use the horrendous immediate mode either, making tutorials for modern OpenGL harder to find. Meanwhile, Microsoft's SDKs have extensive tutorials and samples, and there's plenty of references to start from especially now that DirectX 10+ have slashed out all the crap accumulated from older versions.

Just use this as an example: search on Google for glVertex. First link goes to the official documentation. Nowhere on the page is it mentioned that this entire rendering system has been deprecated. Nowhere on the page can you see that the documentation is for OpenGL 2. There's a 2 in the URL, but changing it to a 3 or a 4 gives a 404 error. At least now some blessed soul made docs.gl, but the fact it's not even Khronos taking some time to fix their fucking documentation is absurd. You'll note though that even there, the docs for glVertex don't mention deprecation; the function just doesn't have an OpenGL 4 page.

Then there's debugging. Once you've used PIX or VS2012's built-in debugger, you really can't look back. Being able to save any frame, step through the entire rendering process event by event, and even go as far as debugging an individual pixel (down to what tried to write on the pixel, why the draw call did or didn't pass, and a way to put breakpoints in shader code using that pixel's input and output!) is just... It's unrivalled. Nothing from OpenGL even comes close to this.

Comment Re:Is D3D 9 advantageous over 10? (Score 1) 55

D3D 10 was a significant break from both the API perspective and in terms of how it works underneath. D3D 10 was included with Vista but never made available for Windows XP (because it relied on kernel changes and a new driver model that couldn't be backported) so game developers took their time in moving to it.

Not only that, the Xbox 360 also used something that was fairly close to DirectX 9 (in the same way the Xbox One uses an API close to DirectX 11), so it made sense to reuse the 360 version for PC with a few tweaks here and there. Certainly much easier than rebuilding for the vastly different DirectX 10 API.

With the arrival of the new console generation, we're seeing a sudden (and very welcome!) shift to DirectX 10+ and 64-bit executables.

Comment Re:MatLab is not really a good programming languag (Score 1) 205

Speaking from experience as an ex-physics undergrad who still kept up with a few friends who went on into physics MScs and PhDs, I was surprised to hear that the most popular language at the time was Fortran (and usually not the 95 version...). A few lucky ones could use C++ or Python or even Fortran 95.

Matlab was used for undergrad lab courses (with the professors distributing old copies of the software gratis, not really mentioning whether it was legal or not!) and was... okay at it. Doing plots could get tricky with error bars and the language had a lot of idiosyncrasies, but it worked and since all provided code was in Matlab you didn't have much of a choice in the matter. The funny bit was that the lab techs and professors were not aware that Matlab had derivative functions, so they asked people to do it all manually (and still wanted them to do that when I told them about it, though I personally kept on using them!).

Comment Re:Shash-job-vertisement (Score 1) 205

I'm a bit partial to Mathematica myself for certain things. The focus on functional programming is fun and very different from most languages, Matlab and Python included. The built-in libraries are ludicrously extensive, which helps speed up a lot of work. I wouldn't use it for performance-critical stuff or for applications that need to be run over and over, but for deriving math faster or prototyping something or generating really polished and diverse plots it's quite good.

Helps that my university has a site license though.

Comment Re:Society hypocrisy.... (Score 1) 387

Is it that the language used is too harsh, or that today's society is just too much censored and purged from any form of negativity ? Creating thin-skinned irresponsible generations.

It's pretty much impossible in a tech company to have an opinion, not have to excuse oneself about having this opinion, and have a long and brilliant career in the company. Sometimes, this translate into worthless technical discussion where nobody is giving any counter argument. Those followers are generally also those getting promoted, but also the most incompetent. I might represent an utter minority, but I'm only giving negative feedback. What I'm being asked is to provide a technical analysis, not to be friend with my boss. It would seem that people are unable to be honest with one another.

I fully understand Linus' comment, it is sad to have to antagonize people and community, but on the other side, if you comply to every whim, you're not aiming for excellence, and stay mediocre. Compromise is the worst. While it is sad to see people unable to differentiate between a technical and personal attack, and the other way, some person making personal attack from technical point, we might just have to live with it.

All in all, I prefer to have enemies, and be true to my principle, rather than only have friends and keep compromising on my value.

Your post sounds like one giant false dilemma. You can be true to your principles without insulting or bashing people. You can have an opinion and express it firmly without rubbing it in the face of your colleagues until their skin bleeds. You can have disagreements without resorting to name-calling. You can do your work while being polite.

Also, "thin-skinned irresponsible generations"? Spoken like an old geezer alright.

Comment Re:Ebola vs HIV (Score 1) 381

Ebola spreads through many more pathways than HIV. Ebola is far more deadly than HIV, which makes it a more dangerous disease overall. Worse, there is now empirical proof that despite the high mortality rate, Ebola can spread in large population centers. Previous outbreaks could be contained because they were restricted to small villages, where isolation was possible.

The biggest problem with Ebola is the incubation period: you can move an awful lot before you realize you are a carrier, and when you do realize that you are, you've generally been infectious for a while (the first symptoms being relatively similar to a flu). This makes tracing down all people you've had contact with exponentially harder. Then there's obviously the fact a lot of people are fucking stupid and will ignore medical advice for one reason or another, and the consequences be damned. The US has been lucky for that thus far, since the people who've contracted the disease on American soil have been fairly well-behaved (it's the CDC that cocked up).

Comment Re:Pass - Had major issues with Nexus 5 (from LG) (Score 1) 201

Be careful sampling from forum threads. People who don't have any problem don't post. Generally speaking, I think you'll find that looking up any device will pop up a few problems. It's when a significant proportion of the devices manufactured exhibit that problem that you can say the device's design is bad or faulty. Thousands of failures due to the same issue can still only mean a sub-0.1% failure rate, which'd be stellar.

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