I'd really like to see a sweet system, with good specs (i.e. P-III ~650 with 128 MB and a GeForce) running a game that was specifically coded for OpenGL, because now I'm curious. Most of the OpenGL I've seen simply does not look very good. Maybe I just haven't seen the right game, on the right system.
I can respect that. Indeed, the GeForce2 is intriguing to me, simply because of the reputation of its predecessor. Still, I wish nVidia would behave responsibly as far as drivers are concerned.
It would be hypocritical for someone to be angry with 3dfx over wanting to protect the Glide API and Voodoo drivers, when nVidia is guilty of wanting to protect their own code, by not releasing the source. (Why else would they not release the source code?) Just because 3dfx used the legal system to do this, and nVidia has (so far at least) just used bad P.R. to do this, doesn't make one company any more evil than the other.
I hardly notice any "jaggies" on my screen in Tribes, which I run at 800X600 (oops, almost typed 8000X600!) on a 17" monitor. My little ole Voodoo2 looks *fantastic* at this resolution, couldn't be happier (for Tribes at least) unless I was getting an even higher fill/frame rate at higher resolution... which I bet the Voodoo5 could do... hmmm. Tribes is written for Glide though, and it's a dying breed, from what I understand.
However, the textures are nice, no particularly noticeable aliasing, great frame rate, and it doesn't seem to suffer much for lack of 32-bit color. I'll check out the GeForce2, though, when it comes out. Could be a tough call...
P.S. DSL does help, a great deal, in Tribes (and probably any other online realtime multiplayer game). If you have the choice between upgrading your video card and upgrading your bandwidth this year, take the bandwidth. Unless you're Slashdot-Terminal of course, in which case you should buy an AGP-ISA converter.
Most of those articles are dead links, but this is what I gathered from the few that weren't...correct me if I'm wrong here.
3dfx is trying to stop Creative from making a Glide wrapper, i.e. the Unified drivers, which allow non-3dfx hardware to use the Glide API? And they claim that Creative illegally used source code developed at 3dfx, lent to Creative Labs, back when Creative actually made Voodoo-based cards, to create their Glide wrappers?
And that 3dfx deduced this from the fact that header information in the Creative wrapper was identical to information in their Glide source code, which most likely indicated that Creative infringed on the patents 3dfx has relating to Glide?
Whew, well all this is way over MY head... I have no idea whether the case has merit or not. I know Glide wrappers have been available for quite some time, at least since UltraHLE (Nintendo 64 emulator) was released, but I was under the impression that these were reverse-engineered, not compiled from stolen or unlicensed source code. The Glide API is Open Source now, but I would imagine you still have to follow the GPL license hopefully, which may prohibit using the source to drive non-3dfx hardware.
As far as I'm concerned, if 3dfx wants to protect their only real remaining advantages over nVidia, (e.g. Glide and fill rate), they have every right to do so. I'm not saying this case has merit, because IANASENAIAL(I am not a software engineer, nor am I a lawyer), but I won't stop buying 3dfx just because they filed a lawsuit. If consumers did that every time a lawsuit was filed, nobody would ever buy anything from anybody.
The frame rate can matter at rates faster than 120 frames per second, believe it or not.
I say this because most of the 3D goggles that are out use a shutter technology to divide the frames between lenses. Your right eye gets 1/2 the frames, and your left eye gets 1/2 the frames.
Therefore 120 fps=60 fps/eye, barely acceptable images for this kind of application!
ATI cards have been a huge disappointment every time I've tried them. Drivers are unstable, 3d acceleration is only so-so, and there are numerous compatability issues with some AMD motherboards.
Instead of buying a Voodoo5 (I'm guessing $199 here, although that may be a bit high), why don't you just go ahead and buy a used Pentium/K6-2 system? You'd be waaaaaay happier with the performance increase than you'd be trying to upgrade an ISA video card. There's only so much you can do with ISA video... and the graphics card technologies passed that point about five years ago.
I guess I don't know much about that case; anybody else got some links about what the above poster is saying? I have to claim ignorance, although I've always wondered why 3dfx got so much flak from some of the hardcore gamers. I've only been a (3d) gamer for about two years, so I don't think I ever heard about those lawsuits.
I don't know if I'd call 3dfx "evil", per se; I've seen many companies that behaved like little schoolchildren recently... =P
I've been waiting for the Voodoo5's to be released for quite some time; I would rather have a solid card from a company that supported Open Source drivers in my computer, than the fastest card from nVidia.
I have the luxury of playing with computer systems while I work on them for my job, so over the years I've looked at some nice 3Dfx, Nvidia, Matrox, and ATI cards.
It's weird, and I know I'm biased because I have a Voodoo2 paired with a Matrox Millenium G200 in my current computer, but I really like the "look" I get from a good game programmed in Glide. I hate proprietary APIs in theory, but I have to admit that Tribes, for instance, is just damn fun on a Voodoo card. More fun than Unreal Tourney or the Daikatana demo on the Matrox, at least...
I think that sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the specs of different cards, frame rates, hardware T&L, full screen anti-aliasing, blah blah blah fricking blah, when the entire point is to sit down and play a game, and maybe (in the case of multiplayer) meet some people who play games to have fun and blow some stuff up.
I don't care whether the Voodoo5 is the fastest card around, I guess. I just hope it's a good, solid gaming card, as good as 3dfx can make. They pioneered the conusmer market for 3d accelerators, and I will always respect that.
Really, good points. Greenspun recommends Oracle for some of the kinds of sites he builds, but it's a little bit pricey for some of us.
Although MySQL is certainly attractive on some levels, i.e. speed, light footprint, etc, their license is without question very commercially oriented, and definitely not free. I know some large sites (including Slashdot) use(d?) it, but those aren't the kind of sites Greenspun is talking about creating, IMHO.
Those reasons, coupled with the fact that MySQL is not really SQL compliant, and doesn't support transactions, forced me to do a little searching a few months ago.
PostgreSQL is a good alternative, but after checking around, we've decided to go with Borland Interbase 6.0, which is now Open Source. It's pretty slick, too, and not as slow as PostgreSQL (although it has trouble with many simultaneous connections.) If we can work threading support into Interbase 6.0 it will truly be an excellent option.
Sure, Oracle would be great, but let's face it; anybody who wants to go to a *free digital university* probably doesn't have that kind of cash.
I don't think he said Neal was first, he just said Neal did it right.
Besides, Neal's work is actually decent; unlike a lot of free content, he gave it away even though there is an actual, honest-to-goodness money-exchanged-for-a-real-book market for it. Unlike The Hacker Crackdown (yuk).
So are you kissing my ass then? Or is this some kind of bizarre, sarcastic thread, that's mestastitized into a throbbing, festering polyp on my ass? (Not unlike the one your lips are touching right now?) =P
Thanks for taking some valuable time explaining it to me!
Of course, no reasonably priced digital setup can come close to what you can get out of a *nice* (and by nice I mean comparable $$$) SLR, if you get the film developed at a pro studio with a good chemical development process.
For those of us with limited camera experience, however, who would normally bring our film to Ritz Camera or Walgreens or 1-Hour Photos 'r Us, the output from many color printers these days rivals what we've grown to expect from normal, everyday 8X10s from normal, everyday 35mm cameras. That's all I was trying to say in my first comment.
I can't take professional pictures. No matter *how* much money I spend on a camera or film, I am just never going to be a great photographer, because I don't have the time, patience, natural gift, or years experience. (By the way, that's supposed to be a compliment to anyone who actually does know photography. Good work! =P)
However, I can learn to use a digital camera in a couple hours, and if I can import a picture into my computer I can usually get the Gimp or Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or Onlinephotolab.com to turn it into something better than I ever could have done with a film camera, Zebra or not. =P
And my printer, well, it does that type of work justice. And then some.
It's been my experience that it is the quality of the digital cameras that is lagging behind the quality of the printers.
Have you seen what a modern Epson or HP color printer output looks like, when the print is done on photo quality paper from a scanned (not digital camera) picture? I guess not, because I worked in a photo lab for five years, and the quality is indistinguishable from that of an 8 X 10 real honest-to-goodness chemical process photo lab print. My HP 722c has gorgeous photo quality output, but not when I print from a digital camera...
Now, the lifespan of said prints is a different story...*sigh*
I think one of their core selling points is that Win2000 has DirectX 7.0 built in... maybe I'm wrong though...must....fight....temptation...of Windows.....arrrgghhh!
I've been wondering, ever since they came out with the Celeron 300A and 333A, are the FPU benchmarks/real world results really that bad compared to the P-II or P-III? Every once in a while I hear someone criticize them, but...
I seem to recall some benchmarks showing a perhaps 10% performance difference in FPU. Anyways, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks of the Celerons VS P-II's, P-III's, and Athlons, to see just how much the performance/dollars hit is.
I got a "free" Cisco 675 external DSL modem when I signed up for DSL with USWest. I've worked with a couple other types of DSL modems, and let me just say, this thing rocks.
It is highly configurable, USWest sent about four different manuals with it (RTFM, indeed!). It's given me some exposure to Cisco hardware, good experience with Telnet, routing tables, ports, and the CBOS (Cisco Broadband Operating System.) Also, it works on anything you can connect to an Ethernet hub or switch, Linux, Mac, Windows, BeOS, you name it. I've had 6 machines hooked up to it at once, with nary a glitch.
I'd be skeptical that a software modem could provide a very robust operating scheme. The 675 has never crashed, but a modem dependent on your WinBox to run just might.
Isn't it rather apparent that the US Army has been having trouble enlisting these days, and are now resorting to flashy gimmickry to try to entice new recruits?
I swear, between the $$$ commercials on prime time TV and these lame new attempts to seem hip, it's starting to seem more and more like the Starship Troopers future...
Slashdot Mirror
It would be hypocritical for someone to be angry with 3dfx over wanting to protect the Glide API and Voodoo drivers, when nVidia is guilty of wanting to protect their own code, by not releasing the source. (Why else would they not release the source code?) Just because 3dfx used the legal system to do this, and nVidia has (so far at least) just used bad P.R. to do this, doesn't make one company any more evil than the other.
I hardly notice any "jaggies" on my screen in Tribes, which I run at 800X600 (oops, almost typed 8000X600!) on a 17" monitor. My little ole Voodoo2 looks *fantastic* at this resolution, couldn't be happier (for Tribes at least) unless I was getting an even higher fill/frame rate at higher resolution... which I bet the Voodoo5 could do... hmmm. Tribes is written for Glide though, and it's a dying breed, from what I understand.
However, the textures are nice, no particularly noticeable aliasing, great frame rate, and it doesn't seem to suffer much for lack of 32-bit color. I'll check out the GeForce2, though, when it comes out. Could be a tough call...
P.S. DSL does help, a great deal, in Tribes (and probably any other online realtime multiplayer game). If you have the choice between upgrading your video card and upgrading your bandwidth this year, take the bandwidth. Unless you're Slashdot-Terminal of course, in which case you should buy an AGP-ISA converter.
3dfx is trying to stop Creative from making a Glide wrapper, i.e. the Unified drivers, which allow non-3dfx hardware to use the Glide API? And they claim that Creative illegally used source code developed at 3dfx, lent to Creative Labs, back when Creative actually made Voodoo-based cards, to create their Glide wrappers?
And that 3dfx deduced this from the fact that header information in the Creative wrapper was identical to information in their Glide source code, which most likely indicated that Creative infringed on the patents 3dfx has relating to Glide?
Whew, well all this is way over MY head... I have no idea whether the case has merit or not. I know Glide wrappers have been available for quite some time, at least since UltraHLE (Nintendo 64 emulator) was released, but I was under the impression that these were reverse-engineered, not compiled from stolen or unlicensed source code. The Glide API is Open Source now, but I would imagine you still have to follow the GPL license hopefully, which may prohibit using the source to drive non-3dfx hardware.
As far as I'm concerned, if 3dfx wants to protect their only real remaining advantages over nVidia, (e.g. Glide and fill rate), they have every right to do so. I'm not saying this case has merit, because IANASENAIAL(I am not a software engineer, nor am I a lawyer), but I won't stop buying 3dfx just because they filed a lawsuit. If consumers did that every time a lawsuit was filed, nobody would ever buy anything from anybody.
I say this because most of the 3D goggles that are out use a shutter technology to divide the frames between lenses. Your right eye gets 1/2 the frames, and your left eye gets 1/2 the frames.
Therefore 120 fps=60 fps/eye, barely acceptable images for this kind of application!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, nobody uses goggles....
yet. =P
Instead of buying a Voodoo5 (I'm guessing $199 here, although that may be a bit high), why don't you just go ahead and buy a used Pentium/K6-2 system? You'd be waaaaaay happier with the performance increase than you'd be trying to upgrade an ISA video card. There's only so much you can do with ISA video... and the graphics card technologies passed that point about five years ago.
Just a suggestion.
I don't know if I'd call 3dfx "evil", per se; I've seen many companies that behaved like little schoolchildren recently... =P
I have the luxury of playing with computer systems while I work on them for my job, so over the years I've looked at some nice 3Dfx, Nvidia, Matrox, and ATI cards.
It's weird, and I know I'm biased because I have a Voodoo2 paired with a Matrox Millenium G200 in my current computer, but I really like the "look" I get from a good game programmed in Glide. I hate proprietary APIs in theory, but I have to admit that Tribes, for instance, is just damn fun on a Voodoo card. More fun than Unreal Tourney or the Daikatana demo on the Matrox, at least...
I think that sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the specs of different cards, frame rates, hardware T&L, full screen anti-aliasing, blah blah blah fricking blah, when the entire point is to sit down and play a game, and maybe (in the case of multiplayer) meet some people who play games to have fun and blow some stuff up.
I don't care whether the Voodoo5 is the fastest card around, I guess. I just hope it's a good, solid gaming card, as good as 3dfx can make. They pioneered the conusmer market for 3d accelerators, and I will always respect that.
Although MySQL is certainly attractive on some levels, i.e. speed, light footprint, etc, their license is without question very commercially oriented, and definitely not free. I know some large sites (including Slashdot) use(d?) it, but those aren't the kind of sites Greenspun is talking about creating, IMHO.
Those reasons, coupled with the fact that MySQL is not really SQL compliant, and doesn't support transactions, forced me to do a little searching a few months ago.
PostgreSQL is a good alternative, but after checking around, we've decided to go with Borland Interbase 6.0, which is now Open Source. It's pretty slick, too, and not as slow as PostgreSQL (although it has trouble with many simultaneous connections.) If we can work threading support into Interbase 6.0 it will truly be an excellent option.
Sure, Oracle would be great, but let's face it; anybody who wants to go to a *free digital university* probably doesn't have that kind of cash.
Besides, Neal's work is actually decent; unlike a lot of free content, he gave it away even though there is an actual, honest-to-goodness money-exchanged-for-a-real-book market for it. Unlike The Hacker Crackdown (yuk).
Thanks for taking some valuable time explaining it to me!
For those of us with limited camera experience, however, who would normally bring our film to Ritz Camera or Walgreens or 1-Hour Photos 'r Us, the output from many color printers these days rivals what we've grown to expect from normal, everyday 8X10s from normal, everyday 35mm cameras. That's all I was trying to say in my first comment.
I can't take professional pictures. No matter *how* much money I spend on a camera or film, I am just never going to be a great photographer, because I don't have the time, patience, natural gift, or years experience. (By the way, that's supposed to be a compliment to anyone who actually does know photography. Good work! =P)
However, I can learn to use a digital camera in a couple hours, and if I can import a picture into my computer I can usually get the Gimp or Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or Onlinephotolab.com to turn it into something better than I ever could have done with a film camera, Zebra or not. =P
And my printer, well, it does that type of work justice. And then some.
Have you seen what a modern Epson or HP color printer output looks like, when the print is done on photo quality paper from a scanned (not digital camera) picture? I guess not, because I worked in a photo lab for five years, and the quality is indistinguishable from that of an 8 X 10 real honest-to-goodness chemical process photo lab print. My HP 722c has gorgeous photo quality output, but not when I print from a digital camera...
Now, the lifespan of said prints is a different story...*sigh*
Just kidding, Rob, Hemos, etc...
Just curious.
lol just kidding of course.
I seem to recall some benchmarks showing a perhaps 10% performance difference in FPU. Anyways, I'd be interested in seeing benchmarks of the Celerons VS P-II's, P-III's, and Athlons, to see just how much the performance/dollars hit is.
End of rant... =P
It is highly configurable, USWest sent about four different manuals with it (RTFM, indeed!). It's given me some exposure to Cisco hardware, good experience with Telnet, routing tables, ports, and the CBOS (Cisco Broadband Operating System.) Also, it works on anything you can connect to an Ethernet hub or switch, Linux, Mac, Windows, BeOS, you name it. I've had 6 machines hooked up to it at once, with nary a glitch.
I'd be skeptical that a software modem could provide a very robust operating scheme. The 675 has never crashed, but a modem dependent on your WinBox to run just might.
I swear, between the $$$ commercials on prime time TV and these lame new attempts to seem hip, it's starting to seem more and more like the Starship Troopers future...