Nick.

http://www.theregister.co…_360_win_japan/

First dellusional performance numbers from Sony and now dellusional sales predictions from Microsoft. I suppose this can be considered a “theoretical maximum”.

http://www.siggraph.org/p…r+desc&rd=brief

I was searching for an OpenGL reference and this came up:

Very odd.

http://wiki.vislab.usyd.e…eoCreationGuide

I saw Jim’s XG page and Jason’s plant animation page and thought that you guys might be interested in some GL video stuff that I’ve been working on (around half-way down the linked page). It makes it *much* easier to make movies for publications (or the wiki page!).

http://people.vislab.usyd.edu.au/~nickl/

Man, I am soooo deep.

I was playing around with the webcam and it produces some cool pixelated images, so I put one up. It looks pretty wanky though. I think I’ll draw a moustache and glasses on it tomorrow.

http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/linuxPragmaCoding.html

I thought that his page was a short and interesting read. Some tips are obvious (use header files), some less obvious (use const, static, and assert), and some are things that I really need to start doing consistently (program and version strings, get_opt_long).

Update: a long list of style guides is available at http://www.chris-lott.org/resources/cstyle/

http://www.the-magicbox.com/0505/game050516i.shtml

Is it just me or is the Playstation 3 logo written in the Spiderman font?

XYZ Computing is carrying a story on how Agetec is making a stand against the objectification of women as “booth babes” at this year’s E3.

I think this is an admirable motion and I’m really looking forward to at least one company at E3 not plastering their booth with half-naked women extolling the virtues of the companies latest sexually-charged… golf game. Oh wait, quite a few companies don’t use booth “babes”. In fact, I think Nintendo make a point of dressing their staff in fairly conservative clothes (knee-length shorts and polo shirts) pretty much every year.

The problem seems to be that merely passively not objectifying women doesn’t make headlines. No, you need to hire “unattractive women” and hand out “granny’s panties” with your logo on them. At least that’s the impression I got from the slashdot post before I read the actual article it refers to which no mention of looking for particular unattractive women, just “real people who enjoy video games.”

Now I’m a little confused. Should I be mad at AgeTec because of the “granny’s panties” thing (or is that just bad taste)? Should I be mad at the Slashdot poster who translates “real people” to “unattractive women” (talk about setting high standards!)? Or should I be happy that there is at least some form of backlash against half-naked women selling me golf games?

http://www.kotaku.com/gam…lard-102775.php

This is an interesting article on the transformation of J Allard. He certainly looks different and gives hope to geeks everywhere. I think that the tone of the article was a bit harsh. I don’t see anything wrong with someone wanting to change their “look” if it makes them happy or helps their career. (Not that they should have to!)

For more high-resolution, back-lit J Allard goodness download the .tiff file from his homepage. It’ looks perfect for framing.

I was watching Media Watch yesterday and saw a blurb with Rupert Murdoch talking about how Fox may consider using blogs to supplement their news coverage. I don’t know if he was talking about using blog feeds or actually hiring bloggers to post specifically for Fox.

However, this got me thinking about blogs: who owns the information and who can reproduce it? I hate the idea of large media companies charging subscriptions for their content and then supplementing their coverage with other people’s blogs. Is it possible to have an content license in which commercial use of your blog requires payment? Talking a page out of “their” book, it could just be an unnoticable micropayment. 🙂

I think that it’s a good idea to have a license declaration on this website. I would personally lean toward the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. What about everyone else?

I don’t seem to be able to go 50 metres anywhere on campus without seeing some anti-VSU (Voluntary Student Unionism) propaganda. The thing I don’t understand is how the union hopes to convince students that they should be required by law to pay whatever fees the union sets. This is a far bigger ask than simply championing the value of being a union member. They are asking for a blank cheque from all current and future students. It’s a notion that I can only positively describe as “ballsy” and pessimistically describe as “condescending”.

If there is an ethical argument for CSU (Compulsory Student Unionism) I would really like to hear it. This website has a number of links to both sides of the argument. The most important link is probably the one to the who can you trust page that details the interests of the groups involved. The major arguments against VSU have nothing to do with the concept and everything to do with practicality: where will the funding come from? Well, that’s an entirely different issue.

In the end, I admit that my personal view on the union’s campaign is right on the line. I’m just not sure if I sit on the “you can’t blame them for trying” or the “they should really know better” side of things. My view on “where the funding should come from” is more cut and dry. I strongly feel that any required services should be funded by government. Student fees are a barrier to university entry and undermine a basic right to education.