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3D Labs Proposes OpenGL 2.0 To Kick DirectX
furiousgreencloud writes "3Dlabs is trying to drive the graphics interface away from hardware specific extentions, as seen in DirectX. Instead, they are proposing an open (no NDA) dialog on OpenGL 2.0. The guidelines mention good-ol-fashioned platform independence (linux included) and emphasis on programmability, time control and memory managemenmt. They've got a PDF availible for consumption."
Soon we'll have Nvidia making games tho I'm sure that will be created on a proprietary system even more stringent than where we are now. You don't think so? --- Example: ... "It's the hottest game of the year and they don't take ATI." (Sung to the toon of a Visa comercial. It's in Nvidias best intrest to make this happen. Tho maybe not in the markets best interest.
I am Jack's HTTP Server
because if i was writing a new game and wanted to see some $$$ i'd be writing for xbox using directx.
...but the current OpenGL standard is extensible enough for the time being. More important would be a complete OpenAPI setup with input, sound, network, and graphics options all combined and available on all platforms.
Sure, including specific instructions for per-pixel operations etc. for all cards as opposed to stuff like GL_EXT_NVIDIA_WHATEVER would be great, but it's not likely that there will be many drivers for any older cards for this, and all the new cards have great GL drivers already...
Basically, this is unneccessary.
Carmack's feedback on this ;)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
This 2.25MB pdf will surely be inaccessible in a few minutes. I've mirrored it at http://ekrout.resnet.bucknell.edu/mirrored.pdf.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Minus DirectSound, DirectInput, and all the other things which make DirectX a "good thing (tm)" for Windows (simple interoperability with hardware using standardized API's, simple driver writeups). For the time being I'll pass.
Besides, I can always teach my upcoming XBox to dual-boot. :) Best of both game-playing worlds.
Going to be interviewing a friend of mine at nVidia about this tomorrow morning, after he clears it. Will submit the story tomorrow if he gets the OK.
No comment.
"3Dlabs is trying to drive the graphics interface away from hardware specific extentions exhibited by DirectX, 3dlabs is proposing an open (no NDA) dialog on OpenGL 2.0."
Am I the only one who doesn't understand this malformed phrase?
Vendor specific extensions are making cross-vendor OpenGL development difficult. It is necessary to implement several different codepaths in order to achieve various effects on different hardware (bump mapping, cubic environment mapping, etc.) because each vendor wants to do it their own way to expose all of the new capabilities of their hardware. The SGI multitexture extension is probabily the only real exception to this since it seems to be supported by the bulk of cards on the market.
I don't know of any current AAA, A or B grade game that doesn't support at least one proprietary OpenGL extension.
DirectX8 exposes the hardware in an 'almost' abstract manner but again vendor specific features have started to creep into the mix (the different shader version support is something that comes to mind), meaning that developers still have to develop multiple versions of the same effect for different hardware.
This is definately a great move! I hope they succeed!
Not only is this a worthy cause (eliminating the depenence hardware specific extensions), but I fully support a graphics solution that doesn't have the final say on everything rest with MircoSoft.
Remember people, DirectX provides more then just 3d graphics. It also provides sound, input and networking API's.
hey hey.. don't blame opengl.. we all know its MS's fault.
theyre trying to butter us geaks up
well its working a charm heheeehe
Hasn't 3d Labs always wanted OpenGL to be the standard? And in some sense, haven't DirectX and OpenGL always been competitors? The article heading should have said something like "work for OpenGL 2.0 progressing".
Ceci n'est pas un post
This has probably already been said, but the SDL library is probably our best bet. It has been in development for the past two years or so, and has progressed immensely into a stable and feature-rich development platform. It is a complete cross-platform solution for high-performance game graphics, sound, and input on an insane amount of platforms, including the requisite Windows, Mac (both Classic and OS X) and *nix. Ports are also available or in the works for QNX, BeOS, Amiga, and a number of other OSes, I'm sure. I have used it for some of my projects, and I must say it is far superior to any other API I have ever tried, including DirectX (which it encapsulates nicely :-). Sam Latinga, the founder and main coordinator of SDL, is not only a great programmer and API engineer, but a nice guy as well.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
This isn't a 3DLabs initiative. This is headed by several companies in the video card manufacturing industry, nVidia being one of them.
No comment.
Loops
I'd recommend against general for and while loop constructs in the shading languages. These are difficult to statically analyze the behavior of. For instance, you could stall your pipeline with an infinite loop but no compiler can detect infinite loops. Also, loops are rarely used except for Perlin noise where you iterate down to a particular frequency.
Loops of a particular form can still be analyzed, and would be useful. Something like this:
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) { body }
If i is 'const' within the body, then this will iterate at most N times, giving you a bound on the compute time needed. Note that if N is an arbitrarily large number, it may still be difficult to analyse. Here's another form that is more generally boundable:
for (int i = 0; i < N && i < 20; i++) { body }
This will run at most twenty times, giving an easily computable upper bound on the total run time for the loop. Of course, 20 was just pulled out of a hat, and should probably be a constant specific to the compiler or hardware available.
Memory Management Issues
Pinning is dangerous, your program could be really broken on a graphics card with smaller memory than you intended. At the end of the standardization process it will probably become a mere 'hint' anyway.
An alternative might be to treat the memory management as a generational garbage collector, with user hints on what generation things should fall into. Rather than specify a particular management scheme, the programmer could hint at how dynamic the object would likely to be, say for instance ranking them from 0-7, with 0 being transient and 7 being pinned. Alternatively the systems themselves could become more intelligent, tossing everything into the transient area, and migrating them upstream automatically when the transient area starts to fill up.
Another useful operation would be to hint flushing everything below a certain level. So for instance you could give Everquest character models a level 5, the terrain a level 4, mobs a level 3, and various effects and candy at lower levels. Then on zone you would just specify a flush of levels 4 and under to clear that memory, while leaving the character models intact.
For added flexibility to this model, multiple different memory pools could be managed in this fashion. It remains to be tested whether that would be worthwhile or not.
Well, that's all I could think of off the top of my head. Good luck on OpenGL 2.0!
Michael
There's a lot of discussion on how/when/why they want to move forward to OpenGL 2.0. Gives some interesting insights into how these things are done.
Also, there's some talk about nVidia's new position on opening up their vertex shading IP, GL_vertex_program_NV vs. ATI's GL_EXT_vertex_shader, and which approach would be better for OpenGL 2.0 (low-level vs. high-level).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Jeez. Major trolling.
Or do you actually believe everything you just said?
The Structure of Array link is actually fairly interesting, but if you think about it it has no meaning to this argument. OpenGL has allows allowed you to specify seperate streams, but X/Y/Z are still bound together. That's not SOA, and not what Intel likes. When you get down to it the whole SOA thing was basically just Intel making up excuses and workarounds for poor CPU design.
In fact most modern hardware (Radeon, Geforce) will prefer it if you pack all your vertex components together, as DirectX has always worked. This all to make more efficient use of memory bandwidth.
Ofcouse that link to Paul Hsieh's site is ancient, and reflects a persons opinion of a battle that raged years ago, based on years old facts. Not all that interesting really.
Great, they're closing the barn door after the livestock has left.
Seriously, why now? This could have easily happened long ago, before Nvidia crushed the competition. I don't like the world where looking to open source (or even just open discussion) is the last resort of a dying technology.
Invisible Agent
This post is a mirror; when a monkey stares in, no hacker gazes out.
Acrobat plugin for Netscape works in Netscape and in Konqueror on Linux too. What's your point, fuckstick?
In similar news...
Linus Torvalds proposes to kick Bill Gates.
It is uncertain as to whether the world's richest man will propose a retaliation kick. Such a proposal could be viewed as a sign of weakness. It should be noted that while Gates is phyiscally much smaller than Torvalds, microsoft operating systems have a much larger market share than linux.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Can you provide an example of how it's dying? It's evolving, that's what this whole article is about, one of the largest revisions/additions/etc. to the OpenGL specification since it was made (hence the major version # increase). If you're going solely by games, well, most develop for Windows. In Windows, drivers seem to be optimized for D3D. So games use D3D. Plus, they're using the rest of the DX suite for sound/input/etc. anyway, why not? These are the same people who don't care about portability.
:)
So basically, You're just a troll. And I've been trolled. Damnit
>Plus, they're using the rest of the DX suite for sound/input/etc. anyway, why not? These are the same people who don't care about portability.
They should care. Operation Flashpoint is a great game that has just been bitten by this lack of portablility. As BIS are tied into DirectPlay for online gaming they are unable to produce the Linux dedicated server that would enable the game to be hosted by online game services like Jolt.co.uk. As it stands now the game is hosted by a few people at home, while there are hundreds of Return to Castle Wolfenstein servers - and that is just for a 1 level preview!
slashdot should make it so the mods can mod trolls, and flamebait to -2 or even more down. what a great idea. and everyone, i want you to respond to this post agreeingly...with flamebait and other trolling as well!
Ask Jeeves about that first!
This does make me feel old. I have been listening to news about the new great standard that will make games available for all platforms for longer than most slashdotters have been alive.
It's a great idea but somebody please make it work before I die.
shoulda fed it some Arab towel heads.
check out Allegro... Allegro is a multimedia library for Windows, Linux, Dos, BeOS, MacOS etc.
Have you ever worked with a Moslem? Have you ever had a conversation with one? Do you know any Moslem who would say that you were their friend? They are not all the same. The Renaissance that started the culture in which we live is due to the Arabs who kept the knowledge that we lost. The numbers that we use to count with come from the Arabs. The names of half the stars come from the Arabs.
Some Arab words in English: logarithm, algebra, sheriff and many more
The newspapers tell truth and lies together.
Sure, but the latest OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) minutes also have this comment from Bimal Poddar (Intel):
Devil's Advocacy question: why do we want OpenGL to survive? If IHVs can't articulate this and drive progress, it won't survive.
A "devil's advocacy" remark at an ARB meeting, but maybe not so far fetched in reality. - Mike (OpenGL dabbler)
DirectX is so prolific, and MS has people who do nothing but provide support to developers for DirectX. If there is an issue with DirectX, MS patches it (how well they do that is another issue).
It's going to be a HARD sell to get development companies to move away from DX. More than 90% of the games you are going to sell will be for a platform that supports DX.
If you have a team of well paid developers who have several years developing for DX, why does it make sense to switch?
Though, I know this is not possible, I'd love to see an "embrace and extend" approach to this. Make an API that is "compatible" with DX, but has some "features" that DX does not support.
I know this is fanciful, but everyone is entitled to a dream, right?
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I can't believe I'm even replying to a trolling flamebait post such as yours, but if you are going to 'kill them all', then it's *Allah* who will be doing the sorting out. You don't know a single thing about Islam, do you?
Allah is God, you retard.
I hope the FBI tracks down you and every other terrorist sympathizer. You need 3 life sentences without possibility of parole, to be served as the butt boy for some big black bucks. Oh, but a homo like you would probably enjoy that.
A-fucking-men brother. Arabia is going to be one smoking sheet of radioactive glass before this thing is over. Toasted towel heads under glass.
We have a saying hear in the good old USA - ``What have you done for me lately?'' Don't need to be a rocket scientist to answer that one.
Now is the time to exterminate Islam. As long as there is one raghead left standing, there can never be peace. Death to all Muslims.
Please pay the troll at the troll bridge thank you.
In my opinion, if you're comparing DirectX and OpenGL then you're really talking about group multimedia projects, and I really think that sticking it out in C isn't the way to go for that.
I love C, but there are huge design benefits in going OO with C++. Eventually you'll get to the point where there'll be a large body of accepted base classes that should handle all the standard 3D objects you might need for a game, and then you won't have to (eg) search all over the internet to find obscure libraries in beta form just to get your program to load a model from a 3D cad program.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Are we perhaps forgetting about VA Linux laying off some of the key developers of GL software for Linux less than a week ago?
Sure, OpenGL 2.0 would be nice, but a nice spec isn't going to do us alot of good unless we can develope drivers and implement it.
VA Linux shut down their professional services organziation, which was funded by a number of other projects for graphics vendors and for other graphics research organizations.
3D Labs wants to kick things into high gear and start pushing for an open collaberation on OpenGL 2.0, what are they going to do about the lapse we are going to see in card drivers and the rendering infrastructure on these open platforms that no longer have developers?
I think what 3D Labs is doing is a Good Thing(tm), but I heard someone say somewhere that perhaps they arrived a bit late and unless they are going to pick up the buck and run with it, I would have to agree.
-- Morgan Collins [Ax0n] http://www.morcant.net/
Microsoft droolz!
What crachead modded this interesting..? It's true that most of us want to know what JC has to say about this, but the interesting part is what he actually says, not some guy stating it would be cool to have him throw a comment.
So the the rest of the world only exists to make Americans happy? Arabs have to make Americans happy. Europeans have to make Americans happy. Asians have to make Americans happy. I live in the wealthy west but all I see is the Bible-belt versus the Koran-belt. I think that the FBI are looking for you as an accomplice to Timothy McVeigh.
The ARB meeting notes mention that ISVs are in danger of abandoning OpenGL. But I wonder just which OpenGL ISVs would do that.
I divide OpenGL ISVs into three catagories:
Game Developers
Hobbiests / Researchers
CAD / 3D editors
Now 3DLabs doesn't sell any graphics cards to Game Developers, or game players, and there aren't many Hobbiests or Researchers, which leaves us with the CAD / 3D editor category.
But it's unlikely that any of the CAD / 3D editor ISVs will abandon OpenGL, because they all have non-Windows platforms, and if they switch to DirectX it means they would have to abandon their non-Windows platforms.
What I think is happening is that these ISVs are threatening to support only NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards -- both of which have OpenGL extensions for the latest DirectX features. So the problem for 3DLabs is that the ISVs are going to abandon OpenGL support for non-NVIDIA, non-ATI graphics cards. (Which would kill 3DLabs.)
My guess is that it's SoftImage XSI 2.0 (which apparently has full support for NVIDIA pixel shaders) that's causing the problem. Presumably a future version of Maya will have to do the same thing to stay competative.
Still, OpenGL 2.0 sounds like a good idea for the OpenGL community. (As well as an absolute requirement for 3DLabs!)
If we nuke them, will you promise to be standing downwind to, uh, watch it?
Go on, it'll be fun, you know you want to. Take some redneck friends in your pickup, make a good week of it.
Game developers have to develop where the market is. Game developers aren't scratching their heads in a huddle making sure some vertex shader is going to work on a MIPS box as well as a Intel one. They also aren't wondering if they ought to code some API extensions used by a chip that is in a fraction of a percent of boxes. The ones clamouring for standards are the third tier and lower chip makers that have a fraction of the market penetration ATi and nVidia have. If you've got support for ATi, nVidia, and 3dfx you're set to go on just about everything. I'd bet the markets for the big three (now the big two) is fairly even considering the proliferation of ATi cards in OEM systems. Selling your game to a publisher doesn't necessarily entail providing support for every potential market, just the ones the publisher decides are important. A bulk of game developers and publishers won't bitch much about standards while they can hit an incredible percentage of the gaming market by focusing on one system. The developers and publishers look at it like this: what are the machines we're targeting being used for? If the answer doesn't involve the machine sitting idle with signifigant amounts of computing power (enough for the proposed game, aka most consumer Windows machines) the game probably won't be developed for the system. Macs enjoy a much wider market than linux systems and have vendor support for APIs and are still second tier for game developers because not enough of them are sitting on desks in the game purchasing consumer's home.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Without support from NVIDIA/ATI/IMG/etc there is very little justification for these projects (ATI and IMG have said they will use closed source drivers for their new cards, NVIDIA has made its policy clear a long time ago).
I left 3D stuff a while ago, utterly bemused with the various complexities of D3D and OGL. There was a lot of legacy stuff in there and little fiddly bits that were in 'just because'. Now I presume there will be a refactor in the light of various progresses in the field. I believe refactoring to be a GOOD THING (tm).
OGL2 will be 100% backwards compatible. Well, that could be either good or bad.. If we end up with so much legacy kak the new version will just be a bigger more combersome beast than before. Remember the DOS/windows incarnations.. eugh.. But it can still be done well. Refactoring need not mean throwing away + starting from scratch.
I've done some Java3D.. that's fairly nice, fairly fast and I hope some of those lessons are fed into OGL2, along with things that other lib-developers have learned. Afterall, OGL ought to be faster and more widely used, given it's foothold (however weak some might percieve it to be).
I really hope that OGL2 will become ther real OPEN standard for 3d programming. Various little-libs have surfaced to hide the old OGL/Dx, but it's time for those to be set aside as the core tech becomes the thing to use.
Quick note on 'extras', should OGL include libs for keyboard/mouse/sound/controller access? Well, I honestly don't know the answer, but my guess is that there should be hooks for plugging such things in, but I also think that OGL should be focussed on the job in hand: rendering fast, amazing 3D graphics.
Just like OpenGL's interleaved vertex arrays.
Circa ... 1996?
Yes, that Hsieh link is fairly old, but I find it a good primer for those who haven't really paid attention to the debate.
As someone who's worked with both DirectX and OpenGL, I can honestly say that it is much simpler to work with OpenGL. Direct3D took me weeks to even begin to get the hang of, while OpenGL was intuitive enough to be fairly straightforward to learn. Not to mention, most of the programs I write are faster in OpenGL. This might, however, reflect the fact that I spend more time on OpenGL, or that the OpenGL drivers on GeForces are spectacular.
Any tool that makes it easier for a developer to do 3D rendering, is easier to debug because of simplicity, and just plain looks better in my opinion is a good thing.
No comment.
It's hopelessness has doomed Open GL 2.0 before it has even come out.
Let's see OpenGL 1.5 first. I'm tired of software dev'rs artificially bumping up version numbers for no reason. Christ, Deneba skipped Canvas 4 altogether, going from 3.5 to 5.0- what's the deal? And Photoshop 5 vs. 5.5- they include one extra bit of external software- what the hell was that? Heck, why not just bump it from 1.3 to 9.0 in order to "surpass" DirectX- it's about bloody time!
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
DirectX might be a great API but it means nothing outside of game play. OpenGL is the future since its cross platform. This type of thing can sometimes cause alot of trouble in this industry... it's good to have choices but a solid standard is needed to see who's got the talent / money. And since it's open, everybody can contribute to it.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
This is the same old argument of 'Standard interace vs. proprietary interface'. Proprietary ALWAYS wins because if everyone's the same no one has an edge. Companies out to make money are not going to give away or give up the edge that the proprietary extensions give them.
- Sig this!
I'm sure jantzi loves you wasting university bandwith.
guess who.
Regarding your statement: "In fact most modern hardware (Radeon, Geforce) will prefer it if you pack all your vertex components together, as DirectX has always worked. This all to make more efficient use of memory bandwidth. "
For GeForce this is NOT true. The cache for DMA transfers of non-interleaved arrays makes it just as good as interleaved arrays (or packed components). The primary exception here would be if padding were necessary for an individual array (eg GL_SHORT normals).
In general, it's much more important to write sequentially to AGP memory since the memory is uncached. This usually means that static vertex attributes should be *not* be interleaved with dynamic ones.
Thanks -
Cass
sigh, another BS post from some stinking MS appologist. It seems that every Slashdot story these days has one of these, invariably posted early and marked up to +5, with long winded enthusiatic support replies. Every one of them, like the Steven Barkto originals, praising the M$ implimentation and directly or indirectly contradicting the whole point of the posted article! Never are these pieces of crap honest, informative or useful. So, the uncareful reader is led astray.
siri
For instance, you could stall your pipeline with an infinite loop
That's easy - just get a faster CPU, it will execute the loop faster!
Actually its Muslim, not Moslem..
True, but us game developers also buggered up the market by NOT actively pushing OpenGL instead of D3D, and developing for D3D *when we HAD a choice*.
There was even a petition to Microsoft to better support OpenGL for gaming, which Microsoft responded by ramming D3D down everyones throats.
I'm just thankfull that Carmack didn't sell out - he's the primary reason OpenGL support for games is still around. The OpenGL-Game-Dev list traffic has unfortunately slowed down, but it's not dead (yet.)
> Game developers aren't scratching their heads in a huddle
> making sure some vertex shader is going to work on a MIPS box as well as a Intel one.
You don't do any PS2 coding do you?
When your game is simulatenously being ported to X-Box, and the PS2 you need to re-implement the vertex shader natively on each hardware. It would save a LOT of time if us developers could use just ONE vertex shader description language for BOTH platforms !
> A bulk of game developers and publishers won't bitch much about standards
> while they can hit an incredible percentage of the gaming market by focusing on one system.
And loose 1/2 your sales?! That's the reason a standard exists - so we DON'T have to code specifically for one card !
Game developers want to maximize their sales with the least amount of work.
Rest of your comment is correct.
~~~
WTF is "Your comment violated the postersubj compression filter. Comment aborted" and why isn't it in the FAQ ?
The author of the post, and the person who posted the story, clearly wanted to make a comparison between OpenGL and ALL of DirectX, which as as mentioned before, is ludicrous because of all the stuff OpenGL is lacking.
DirectX does only three things: graphics, sound, and input. OpenGL handles graphics, GLUT handles input, and OpenAL can do sound. Other multimedia programming libraries include Allegro, SDL, and ClanLib, all of which can coexist peacefully with OpenGL graphics.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is hardware. That hardware is owned by your targetgroup. That targetgroup will buy/use your application. What do you do? That's right! You use the API that will make the targetgroup able to run your application on the hardware they own. Does the targetgroup care which api, which dll's, which 3d object format etc you use? No. They probably don't even know what a 'vertex' is.
So if you have to use OpenGL, use OpenGL. If you have to use D3D, use D3D. Being productive, THAT's the key here. Not the emotional connection with any API. Save the emotions for a hobbyproject.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
To the 2 long posts immediately above. You have absolutely proved my point: You are both hate-filled bigots who want nothing less than to exterminate people who are different from you.
:)
You have shown the true face of the anti-gay crowd: kill 'am all, right? I bet you both tone your rhetoric down in public for fear of being shouted down. Being anonymous here, you can reveal your true feelings.
To anyone else reading this thread: when you spout anti-gay rhetoric, you're aligning yourselves with psychos like these. Definitely not a good idea.
President Bush has said that everyone now must decide if they are with us (the USA) or against us; we must all choose sides. Well, boys, we now know what side you're on: the side of hatred and repression.
Enjoy your backwards, in-bred lives. I'll enjoy my open-minded and free one, free from hatred and judgementalism.
Oh, btw, I'm straight.
...their idea )
OpenGL ARB meeting notes
Notice this:
Action: John Stauffer volunteered Apple to lead the short-term unification work. 3Dlabs volunteered to lead the long-term 2.0 work.
Hmm. Ever heard of Xbox?
i gotta say getting DRI, OpenGL, SDL or whatever working on a linux box does not seem as easy as applying some directx patch MS puts out. i've got an ATI AIW 128 32MB AGP card, and it goes something like this: build and install XFree86 4.1.0 from source (this gets the games working ok), next, build and install ati.2 drivers from the wonderfull livid folks. this gets xawtv working. build a new kernel, install kde, any system changes, (move your mouse the wrong way), and rebuild and re-install them all again. don't get me wrong, once it's installed and working, it works great (i wish i had the ability to record the xawtv streams to avi files), but getting it up seems to have a STEEP learning curve.
gay men are still, and have always been, the #1 'breeders' for AIDS.
Not exactly. Gay men used to account for 80-90% of all reported cases of HIV & AIDS. According to the CDC:
"In 1999 alone, 15,464 AIDS cases were reported among MSM (men who have sex with men), compared with 10,138 among IDUs (intravenous drug users) and 7,139 among men and women who acquired HIV heterosexually."
link...
In other words, in 1999, new AIDS cases among gay men accounted for less than half of all new AIDS cases. While they still are the single group with the largest number of new cases, their respective percentage of all new cases has been dropping and continues to do so.
must be why the lezbos don't get AIDS as much.
"As much" Hmm.... Typical right-wing FUD. As I said, AIDS among WSW (women who have sex with women, the CDC's abbreviation, as are the others I mentioned above) is practically non-existant. Again, from the CDC:
"Through December 1998, 109,311 women were reported with AIDS. Of these, 2,220 were reported to have had sex with women; however, the vast majority had other [Picture] risks (such as injection drug use, sex with high-risk men, or receipt of blood or blood products). Of the 347 (out of 2,220) women who were reported to have had sex only with women, 98% also had another risk-- injection drug use in most cases."
Let's do the math: of the 347 women with new AIDS cases who only had sex with women, 98% had another risk fact, like IDU. Lessee: 2% times 347 equals
~7 PEOPLE! So out of 109,311 women with AIDS, exactly 7 had only the risk factor of being a lesbian. "As much" indeed...
As a final note about lesbians:
"A separate study of more than 1 million female blood donors found no HIV-infected women whose only risk was sex with women."
See that, Mr. Dittohead? NONE! Put that into your right-wing pipe and smoke it.
link...
The government funds AIDS research because it the potential to affect everyone. If we cut off government-sponsored AIDS research, then thousands of babies and straight men & women (and yes, gay men too) would die unnecessarily.
Organizational support for OpenGL continues, but it's not like the days when SGI was really pushing it. The Farenheit debacle turned off many people. Apple is still OpenGL oriented, but support is weak. From the minutes of the last meeting: "The next meeting date is set for Tue-Wed, December 11-12, 2001. Apple is tentatively willing to host again, if needed - the food budget was a bit of a problem for them this time."
What this proposal really calls for is a sort of "RenderMan Lite". The concept is very like RenderMan, with programmable shaders written in a C-like language.
This is an instance of the "programmable peripheral" problem. There's always a temptation to put programmability in peripheral devices. The usual problems of embedded systems programming apply - a special toolset is needed for the target system, debugging support is usually weak, and synchronization between host and target is complicated. That's why programmable peripherals are rare. (For example, we don't usually see the ability to put the file system in the disk controller, or the TCP/IP stack in the Ethernet controller, although hardware has been built and sold for both of those functions.)
What usually happens is that agreement emerges on what functionality a device should export, and device controllers implement that functionality, rather than exposing their innards.
contrary to what many seem to think, it's not so easy to monopolize an industry (MS won theirs through finance when all the other players were busy coding). I know that *I* wouldn't code for Ndiva cards only, and neither would any other programmer who had to put food on the table. Even games which were Glide driven had a software mode (and usually a d3d mode too)
The market has made much more money by being open and allowing competition than by using APIs meant for one system
Or are you still using S3 MeTaL?(I'm not)
One other thing to notice is that Nvidia made their fortune my making a video card *without a specific API*. Their card was designed specifically to run on windows d3d, which saved them money. I think the best way for Nvidia to keep making money is to keep making the fastest cards on the planet.
It's been a long time.
Coltrane, man. Coltrane.
or Charlie Parker, or Dizzy Gillespie.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
All I can see are the pictures of the Muslims over in Pakistan cheering as New York is up in flames... oh how pissed I was to see that!!!
DX will win because in the end, programmers (in the general sense) are like everyone else, they are lazy. The API that provides the most bang for the buck will win
Programmers are lazy, so they will use the API that is either chained to their neck (Windows' basic interface API) or the 'best bang for the buck.' Since most everyone in the commercial software world has at least a few major APIs hanging from that iron chain (Windows), 'best' is not the winner.
And NO Linux is not the end-all-be-all home to the "best" APIs. The history of computing is littered with the smoking wreckage of companies that produced "the best" and found that all their customers already had "crappy enough" chained to their necks. And if you think companies are evil then I hope you enjoy your free Quake clone.
That's like saying that all Linux does is run programs!
Which would be correct. Linux is a kernel; a kernel's job is to run programs.
Well, but Direct3D is a tad ahead at the moment.
Just a tad, and DirectX Graphics's superiority is in areas that require hardware that most consumers (early adopters excluded) do not yet own. Even so, I hope Microsoft is enjoying its fleeting precious moments of superiority because they will end very soon.
But if infinately weaker than DirectInput
Or "GLUT is infinitely weaker than DirectInput." Could you elaborate?
But does it do MIDI like DirectMusic?
The sound quality of the General MIDI support on most consumer-grade sound cards sucks, and General MIDI has never been good for many genres of electronic music. Point me to a .mid file doing a good impression of a tb-303 to convince me otherwise. Why else did Unreal Tournament use S3M, XM, and IT tracked music instead of MIDI, and most newer games like q3a use streaming MP3 or ogg anyway?
Then what about protocol-independant multiplayer (DirectPlay)
The sockets API is also protocol independent and can support any protocol for which your sockets implementation (such as BSDsock or Winsock2) has a backend.
and multimedia (DirectShow)?
Why can't you use the game engine (built on d3d+dsound or opengl+openal) to do cut scenes, as Metal Gear Solid and Zelda 64 do? Or do you have some other reason for wanting to play movies?
[Allegro, SDL, and ClanLib] can do the same with DirectX, but because of all of DirectX's features, you don't need extra libs
All three libraries have DirectX backends, but they also have backends for operating systems not controlled by Single Point of Failure Corp.
Will I retire or break 10K?