The Emperor Wears No Clothes

Here’s a sobering article by Michael Lewis about the financial bubble.

Yes, its long. Yes, it will piss you off when you read it.

Yes, it will cut through the veneer of bullshit being erected by the financial industry to claim they are not at fault for this fiasco.

Yes, you should be writing angry letters to Orrin Hatch (web site, contact) and Bob Bennett (web site, contact), your two bailout brethren, who voted to give these guys 700 billion of our hard-earned money, our children’s hard-earned money, our grandchildren’s hard-earned money and probably a few more generations after that, too.

Tell them how pissed off you are. Let them know that “politics as usual” with your money just isn’t acceptable anymore, no matter how much of a republican they claim to be.

White Paper about D3D WARP 10

Andy Glaister at Microsoft has written a white paper about the Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP). For those of you interested in this new feature that appeared in the November 2008 DirectX SDK, check out this white paper as it is not included in the SDK.

Direct3D Programming Tip #1: Getting Started

Inspired by Sara Ford’s Visual Studio Tips, I thought I would start writing a series of tips for Direct3D programmers. I doubt I will be able to be as prolific as Sara, with a new tip each and every single day.

So where do we start? Let’s start with the very basics for a native Direct3D programmer. You will need:

• A C++ development environment.
• A DirectX SDK.
• A version control system.

Once you have these in place, you’re ready to get started writing your own Direct3D programs.

They Blew It

P. J. O’Rourke writes an excellent op-ed on how the Republicans blew it this time around. (Read the whole thing, its worth it.)

Its not really surprising to me that the republicans were rejected by enough of the people to elect Barack Obama. Why? Becuase for the past ten years, they haven’t been acting the way we’d expect republicans to act. They’ve been big spending, government increasing, civil liberty trampling whores to special interests. The number of infractions is so long, I don’t feel like enumerating all of them, but here’s a couple for you: prescription drug “benefit”, “Borin’ Orrin” Hatch’s CHIPS health care boondoggle, agribusiness subsidies, steel industry subsidies, lobbyist bribe taking, excessive moralizing (do what I say, not what I do) along with 700 billion other items. Thankfully, they did stop short of housing troops in my home, but only just. (I’m not listing Iraq, because kicking ass first and asking questions later is what we expect from republicans.)

Now the ball is firmly on the democrat side of the court. They have majorities in the house and senate and will soon control the executive branch. They won’t have anyone else on which to blame the problems that come up, although being politicians I’m sure they’ll try. For the democrats its time to put up or shut up. For the republicans, its just time to shut up for a while.

November 2008 DirectX SDK

The November 2008 DirectX SDK is available for download.

Benjamin Nitschke’s PDC Video Picks

Fellow DirectX/XNA MVP Benjamin Nitschke lists a bunch of PDC videos worth watching. I haven’t watched them yet, but it looks like he picked ones that I would have picked as well.

XNA Game Studio 3.0 Released

On October 30th, Microsoft released XNA Game Studio 3.0 for download.

If you are unfamiliar with what’s new in the 3.0 release, check out the GameFest 2008 presentation What’s New in XNA Game Studio 3.0.

Direct3D 11 Preview @ Utah Code Camp

I gave a talk at the Fall 2008 Utah Code Camp going over the information that’s been publicly released about Direct3D 11. Direct3D 11 will be first available in the November 2008 DirectX SDK. When that is released, I’ll be able to talk more about the features in Direct3D 11.

For now, you can look at the slides for my code camp talk, which are mostly cribbed from presentations at GameFest 2008. (Again, not all the details of Direct3D 11 have been made public yet.)