In the article, the chances of life is compaired to the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard.
This actually makes a strong point for the religious of the population. Some would say in the infinite galaxy, all possibilities will happen, due to the nature of infinity, but religion could say, "Something *had* to have interfered to actually -help- these number assume such a perfect state to attain life."
No no no no no!:-) Just step back from this and think of it like this. Think of those six constants as many sided dice, and only one (or possibly a few) combinations of those die will give rise to life. In all the cases that life does not arise, nothing exists to ponder why life does not exist. However in the one (or few) that life arises, that Life sits up in bed one day and thinks "it's so astonishingly unlikely that something like this could arise by chance, there has to be a divine creator who made it".[1] The whole point of the multiverse argument is that all these Universes may exist, and therefore as long as you roll the die enough times, you are bound to create Life in at least one of those Universes. The idea that the probabilities are tiny does not matter - if life wasn't possible here, we wouldn't be here to wonder why.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1] Of course, if you are an avid H2G2 fan, you will comprehend why this argument does, in fact, successfully lead to the conclusion that God does not exist, and that life can be truncated by philosophical ponderings on Zebra crossings.
Compounding the complexity challenge, the GIMP has its own way of doing things. Half of the work of editing an image seems to be making a good selection. Again, th$
Broken HTML ??? Looks like it - has someone cut and paste straight out of Emacs by any chance? Looks like the over-length line indicator.
Want to run that Linux game without installing the pesky OS? Here's an idea: Buy the Windows version! The Windows version will be out at least a year before the Linux port. The Windows version will be more supported by the manufacturer. The Windows version will not require you to recompile an X server to get better 3D graphics performance -- it will use proven, fast graphics drivers.
Buy the Windows version? Thats something I used to do. Now I view it as a last resort because I know that 12 months down the line, that Windows game stands a good chance of being dead in the water due to 'updates' to libraries made by more recent games installing themselves over the top of ones critical to that 1 year old game and breaking it. DLL Hell claims another casualty.
Now I look at games coming out and I make considerable enquiries to find out whether a Linux version is released, due for release, underway but not ready yet, under negotiation or even merely planned. Any of these is sufficient for me to put my wallet back in my pocket and WAIT. When I buy games, I want more than 12 months of use out of it. I still play games from a long way back in my collection and that matters to me. Just having the newest shiniest games is just icing on the cake - sweet but unfulfilling without the rest.
Why compromise? If you're going to pay money for those games of yours, at least have the good graces to play them on the fastest, most well-supported gaming platform there is for PC gaming.
And this well-supported gaming platform (Windows) benefits me how? I get the equivalent of a time-bombed game and I get to pay money for it? At least on Linux I can look at the libraries needed by a game and know that I can hope to untangle the resources it needs to keep functioning. And as time goes by, the arrival of Linux as a gaming platform is becoming less of a pipedream and more of a reality. My TNT2 card flies along quite nicely with XFree86 4.0.1 and the NVIDIA drivers - Descent 3, Quake 3 and others give me high performance fragging opportunities and I can grab Sim City 3000 or SMAC for some more cerebral entertainment. If we take the attitude that Windows is the be-all-and-end-all of gaming, we can never hope that a strong alternative will exist some day. For me, I like choice.
Just to give you some feel for the amount of debt that the US has build up. Lets play with this some more - there are approximately 250 million people in the US, of which approximately 180 million are tax payers. That means that to clear the debt in the US, each taxpayer would have to pay $31,400. Now all this talk of exponential growth in the economy is all very well, but when you consider that this debt is growing exponentially as well (deficit in June 2000 was $30.4 billion dollar) you have a big problem. The only thing keeping the US out of serious recession is the value of the dollar - if the investors believe that this debt is getting too large to service, the dollar will fall in value. Then things get messy.
So I'd say that the US had better start servicing that debt - at a rough estimate, assuming a 6% interest rate, the US tax payer must contribute nearly $2000 a year which goes to stabilizing the debt (not paying it off). That is entirely wasted money that could be spent elsewhere if it wasn't being flushed around various financial institutions.
So it is difficult to see why there is little or no outcry about this - it is probably the most serious problem that the US faces internally and it will have to pay for it sooner or later. The longer it is left, if the interest rate is larger than the growth in the economy, the burden of debt becomes ever heavier.
Actually, not only does mozilla not bring you back to the same spot on a previous page, links to placeholders within the same page also don't work, as well as an annoying bug where mozilla will lose your place on a page if you minimize the window.
The scroll bug is fixed and in the current build tree - I filed a bug report about 10 days ago and it was fixed in the last couple. Whether it made it into M18 I don't know - I run the nightlies now.
As for the minimising bug - have you checked Bugzilla? See if someone has reported it? (I can't reproduce it with build 2000101109 on Linux). There is all this great bug reporting and tracing available at Bugzilla to allow you to see what problems are known about - make use of it, and help the Mozilla team get rid of things that annoy you the most.
I wasted many night time hours when I should have been sleeping blowing up pillboxes and trying to wipe out opponents on the available Macs. And now, I discover that not only is the WinBolo (not much use there) but there is also LinBolo! I know what I'll be compiling this evening... Waaa! There goes my sleeping hours again!:-)
What benefit could MS hope to gain from.NET on Linux? It certainly would not benefit it to have Linux servers holding a significant part of the.NET server market - unless of course it all ends up with a closed-protocol and closed-source project and they can charge mega-$ for it.
On the client side though it might be a significant benefit for MS as the Linux desktop market grows to have.NET connectivity from a market penetration point of view. If MS holds the reins of power on the server end of.NET, and.NET clients become ubiquitous, it gives another market stranglehod to MS. That strikes me as the desired business direction -.NET servers running MS Software on an execlusively MS platform.
I sometimes upgrade my system, without buying a new copy of windoze. That's legal, right? Since Linux runs better on less hardware, it goes on the older systems.
Of course, nowadays systems often ship with an OEM BIOS-locked Windows disc image on CD. This means that even if you just upgrade your computer, you can forget about using that OEM Windows copy to 'repair' your Windows installation at the 6-month instability fixing session. Nice one. Not that it causes me any lost sleep, since Loki started the Linux gaming scene rolling along I haven't had to worry about booting up Windows for anything other than printing (Canon BJC5100 - paperweight under Linux...).
VRML has been around since 3D visualization was a clunky, slow reality on the web. While some of the VRML sites actually had some use (such as catalogues of 3D models) there was little utility in trying to navigate a 3D site using VRML, and little need either.
Since the birth of VRML, the whole 3D graphics on the home PC has changed enormously - first person shooters, advanced driving simulations and many other games have redefined what we expect from 3D visualization. So now we are in a position to make use of this 3D technology on the web.
But what does 3D actually gain us on the web? For discussion rooms, text is still superior, unless everyone has actual voice links and virtual blackboards on which to discuss ideas. Web sites merely relaying news are probably still best served as they exist today, as words and pictures, with the occasional movie file or music clip. So where precisely should 3D be deployed to actually be useful? Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash painted a vivid 3D world where users had their own corner of the multiverse, could travel and explore virtual environments and relate directly with Avatars, thus presenting a more 'immediate' environment with visual cues that relate directly to real world environments. Maybe this 'virtual meeting place' will become the new chat room over the next couple of years. We'll present a more 'natural' face on the web, but as with so many interactions on the web, we may not be what we appear in VR. There are no restrictions on how we choose to manifest ourselves in such a virtual world, be it skin colour, sex, size, augmentation or other.
So maybe the current multiplayer games universe will be gently replaced by a 3D side of the web which is similar to the Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing games we see now, as people get the technology going. But I think for the bulk of the web, in providing information and discussion potential, will not go down the 3D road.
"Ratios" in processing power are not mentioned anywhere in the article. Apparently some overenthusaistic PR guy (probably not Gates) said it was 3 generations ahead of current parts, and Abrash says that's a bit of an overstatement. It's merely 1.5 or 2 generations ahead. Wow, that really sucks.:)
This 1.5/2 generations makes perfect sense given what we know of NVIDIAs processor roadmap. Given that they have new processor releases, we will see at least the successor to the GeForce 2 before the XBox hits the shelves, and possibly another incremental improvement on that as well (like GeForce2 -> GeForce2 Ultra). So 1.5 -> 2 generations is entirely in line with what we are likely to see on the NVIDIA cards in our PCs in the same time frame.
Michael Abrash now gets to play on the Xbox and people are salivating at what this thing will do. Based on Mr. Abrash's
reputation and skill, I would say the Xbox will be great. However, based on how M$ usually manages to suck down the
best minds in the business into their black hole of mediocrity and Billy-boy mandates, I wouldn't hold yer breath.
Amen! I look at the people who work at the MS Research labs - great minds, great thinkers, prime movers in IT - and then I look at the MS products hitting the shelves and I just don't understand where all that mind power which is almost overflowing out of those centres fails to make an impact.
Still, we should be happy. If MS's products were much better, it would have been far harder to get Linux off the ground because people would have been happier where they were.
When Glide became open-sourced I hoped to see wrappers appear to allow those of us with accelerated OpenGL to be able to make use of Glide-specific applications. In fact, I almost wondered whether 3dfx would go down this route themselves - Glide on top of OpenGL would not be as optimal as the native Voodoo acceleration, but it would expand the base of Glide-accelerated cards and thereby accelerate the adoption of Glide.
Has anyone seen anything like this on the Linux side? Many wrappers exist for Windows to provide this functionality (with varying degrees of success) but there appears to be little evidence of such a beast in Unix-land.
However on the residential side some of things many providers (such as Sympatico) are moving to a PPPoE config. This has caused a lot of problems, as the supported clients are lousy. The reliability of the PPPoE clients is sorely lacking. The one provided by Sympatico, called Access Manager isn't supported on linux or NT/2000.
Access Mangler is probably best forgotten, and once you switch to Linux, Roaring Penguins PPPoE user-client is an easy install and setup, requiring no kernel patches. I've had NO problems at all with this setup and fast connection speeds (>100Kbytes/sec). If you are stuck on Windows, any PPPoE client should work - there doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about the Sympatico arrangement. Then of course the PPPoE support is supposed to be much improved in the 2.4.x series of kernels, so life should become even more flexible as these roll out.
I've got Bell Sympatico ADSL installed, and I've been extremely pleased with it - low ping times, transfer rates near the theoretical max (I pull 108Kbytes/sec continuous to local servers) and only one evening of unconnectable time in the last six months. Hardware installation was extremely straightforward, and everything runs beautifully under Linux (DLink card, 1Mb Nortel Modem, PPPoE using RoaringPenguin). Given that most of my cable using friends have trouble with availability and ping times to ostensibly local servers due to ridiculous routing, I'm pretty happy.
The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.
While this doesn't explain why windows won't boot all of a sudden (Obviously the Athlons have better taste in OS's:-) ) I was aghast to discover that my Athlon 650MHz Aptiva system only had a 150W power supply. This explained the system instability as I ramped the number of PCI cards up and is something I will have to replace if I move to a GeForce 2 at some point in the future (currently has a TNT2 Ultra).
Windows not booting could be all sorts of problems. After a "FDISK.EXE/MBR" to replace the hard drive boot block, I would go straight to a bootable Windows Rescue CD and try from there. If you have an OEM-supplied system, this may simply format your drive and reinstall Windows, so BEWARE. Nowadays I tend to keep more critical data on my Linux partitions along with periodic key backups of source code. This is a slight pain, because it is much easier to access files on the Windows partition from Linux than the reverse, but there are utilities out there for MS systems to access ext2 partitions.
It's also kinda pathetic that because of this, no one can broadcast any live video of the olympics... so in the states, you're forced to watch NBC, and you can't watch any other station broadcasting anywhere in the world... assuming you don't have satellite. Kinda has pissed me off, as I stream my video, as I don't have a television. Therefore, I have not seen any Olympics this year.
See if your cable provider has CBC, who are broadcasting from Canada and carry the events live. Then you can use NBC as a fallback to catch the events you missed!
Maybe these projects should take a long look at FlightGear before trying to do something new from scratch. It strikes me that FlightGear already provides a fair amount of infrastructure that could usefully be used in putting together a decent Combat Flight sim.
I think you picked the wrong James Bond movie - especially given that "Tomorrow Never Dies" plotline involved changing the syncing of the GPS satellites in order to send a ship into Chinese waters to start a war. Obviously some sixth sense working but only on half power:-)
But this is why I asked; what is D3D doing that's surpassing OpenGL?
As far as I can tell, nothing. All the 3D accelerated functions available on my NVIDIA card are exposed under the OpenGL 1.2 spec, GL_ext_ extensions or on NVIDIA specific extensions - GL_NV_. This is of course on Linux using the NVIDIA drivers and the NVIDIA GL/gl.h etc. headers converted to Linux. In many respects the functionality of the card is available faster on OpenGL than DirectX because the Vendor specific extensions do not have to go through the OpenGL ARB before being implemented, whereas vendors are dependent on DirectX being releases with their own extensions built in.
Mozilla is still a long way from being useful. It still eats up 80Meg just for one session... Until they clean that up, Navigator and IE will be the best options.
Guess you aren't up to speed on things (and from your comments you are still deep in the woods) the current version of Mozilla runs at about 35MB on both Linux and Windows and no longer leaks memory left right and centre. Java works on Windows, PSM is available for Windows and Linux and the NSS 3.1 beta should help fill in a lot more of the https functionality. So Netscape has been left pretty much forgotten on my Linux box as Mozilla now handles my browsing and mail needs. I also run Mozilla at work on Win NT as it now outstrips Netscape and runs neck-and-neck with IE for speed, despite the GUI independent interface, so Mozilla is my browser of choice on my two main platforms. Stability is now better than five or six hours and its getting better pretty swiftly.
Mozilla doesn't support java, nor does it support the Java 1.3 plugin.
I'm amazed how many people spout this sort of statement without testing their assertions. Just installed the Java 1.3 beta plugin on Mozilla build 2000091908 on my NT 4.0 SP6a workstation. No problems - works like a charm.
Mozilla doesn't support java, nor does it support the Java 1.3 plugin. I find this considerably lacking.
Mozilla does support Java on Win32 (yuk!) - the implementation is not there yet on Linux. Mozilla doesn't wrap it up internally as Netscape 4.x did. Check out Project Blackwood for details on the implementation.
Mozilla should eventually come with a web configurator of sorts that would allow people to configure the browser before they download it.
That sounds vaguely possible, but it strikes me that it's easier to have that as something launched by the browser once you have downloaded it rather than by some packaging agent at the server.
As in, I want flash, java, and shockwave. I check them, and I download the browser with these things installed (be they plug-ins or otherwise).
I have no trouble running Flash in Mozilla. I haven't tried the latest Shockwave plugin. Mozilla has plugin-compatability with Netscape plugins, so just set them up for Netscape and they work in Mozilla.
I doubt the plugin manufacturers would have much problem with this (unless they were Microsoft), and it could usher in a new wave of recent-java browsers.
There may be licensing problems with having all the plugins on one server - from what I see, most plugins are distributed from the creator's websites and not from, say, the Netscape plugin collection.
The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.
Sorry - you are going to have to swallow your pride a little! Scroll down that page to the base where it has a link to XFree86 background and you will find the rest of the review. Just because there are links to two Windows reviews of the two cards doesn't mean that that is all!:-)
I first came across a few comments by Rasterman on how he was intending to try and lever OpenGL acceleration to render windows in Enlightenment many months ago. This struck me as being a smart way to get true alpha transparency support for the windows/menus/icons and not completely stuff up the CPU with processing by offloading the processing to the GPU. It also opens the doorway to a whole host of fancy, over the top special effects such as spinning, shrinking windows when you iconify them and the fancy transient effects seen in the Mac OS X window manager. This is the first tests I've seen of the actual code, but does anyone know how close the development code is to being an effective OpenGL accelerated window manager?
Slashdot Mirror
In the article, the chances of life is compaired to the possibility of a Boeing 747 aircraft being completely assembled as a result of a tornado striking a junkyard.
This actually makes a strong point for the religious of the population. Some would say in the infinite galaxy, all possibilities will happen, due to the nature of infinity, but religion could say, "Something *had* to have interfered to actually -help- these number assume such a perfect state to attain life."
No no no no no! :-) Just step back from this and think of it like this. Think of those six constants as many sided dice, and only one (or possibly a few) combinations of those die will give rise to life. In all the cases that life does not arise, nothing exists to ponder why life does not exist. However in the one (or few) that life arises, that Life sits up in bed one day and thinks "it's so astonishingly unlikely that something like this could arise by chance, there has to be a divine creator who made it".[1] The whole point of the multiverse argument is that all these Universes may exist, and therefore as long as you roll the die enough times, you are bound to create Life in at least one of those Universes. The idea that the probabilities are tiny does not matter - if life wasn't possible here, we wouldn't be here to wonder why.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
[1] Of course, if you are an avid H2G2 fan, you will comprehend why this argument does, in fact, successfully lead to the conclusion that God does not exist, and that life can be truncated by philosophical ponderings on Zebra crossings.
Not to fear, the author has -- and$
Compounding the complexity challenge, the GIMP has its own way of doing things. Half of the work of editing an image seems to be making a good selection. Again, th$
Broken HTML ??? Looks like it - has someone cut and paste straight out of Emacs by any chance? Looks like the over-length line indicator.
Want to run that Linux game without installing the pesky OS? Here's an idea: Buy the Windows version! The Windows version will be out at least a year before the Linux port. The Windows version will be more supported by the manufacturer. The Windows version will not require you to recompile an X server to get better 3D graphics performance -- it will use proven, fast graphics drivers.
Buy the Windows version? Thats something I used to do. Now I view it as a last resort because I know that 12 months down the line, that Windows game stands a good chance of being dead in the water due to 'updates' to libraries made by more recent games installing themselves over the top of ones critical to that 1 year old game and breaking it. DLL Hell claims another casualty.
Now I look at games coming out and I make considerable enquiries to find out whether a Linux version is released, due for release, underway but not ready yet, under negotiation or even merely planned. Any of these is sufficient for me to put my wallet back in my pocket and WAIT. When I buy games, I want more than 12 months of use out of it. I still play games from a long way back in my collection and that matters to me. Just having the newest shiniest games is just icing on the cake - sweet but unfulfilling without the rest.
Why compromise? If you're going to pay money for those games of yours, at least have the good graces to play them on the fastest, most well-supported gaming platform there is for PC gaming.
And this well-supported gaming platform (Windows) benefits me how? I get the equivalent of a time-bombed game and I get to pay money for it? At least on Linux I can look at the libraries needed by a game and know that I can hope to untangle the resources it needs to keep functioning. And as time goes by, the arrival of Linux as a gaming platform is becoming less of a pipedream and more of a reality. My TNT2 card flies along quite nicely with XFree86 4.0.1 and the NVIDIA drivers - Descent 3, Quake 3 and others give me high performance fragging opportunities and I can grab Sim City 3000 or SMAC for some more cerebral entertainment. If we take the attitude that Windows is the be-all-and-end-all of gaming, we can never hope that a strong alternative will exist some day. For me, I like choice.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Just to give you some feel for the amount of debt that the US has build up. Lets play with this some more - there are approximately 250 million people in the US, of which approximately 180 million are tax payers. That means that to clear the debt in the US, each taxpayer would have to pay $31,400. Now all this talk of exponential growth in the economy is all very well, but when you consider that this debt is growing exponentially as well (deficit in June 2000 was $30.4 billion dollar) you have a big problem. The only thing keeping the US out of serious recession is the value of the dollar - if the investors believe that this debt is getting too large to service, the dollar will fall in value. Then things get messy.
To see the debt figures - click here
So I'd say that the US had better start servicing that debt - at a rough estimate, assuming a 6% interest rate, the US tax payer must contribute nearly $2000 a year which goes to stabilizing the debt (not paying it off). That is entirely wasted money that could be spent elsewhere if it wasn't being flushed around various financial institutions.
So it is difficult to see why there is little or no outcry about this - it is probably the most serious problem that the US faces internally and it will have to pay for it sooner or later. The longer it is left, if the interest rate is larger than the growth in the economy, the burden of debt becomes ever heavier.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Actually, not only does mozilla not bring you back to the same spot on a previous page, links to placeholders within the same page also don't work, as well as an annoying bug where mozilla will lose your place on a page if you minimize the window.
The scroll bug is fixed and in the current build tree - I filed a bug report about 10 days ago and it was fixed in the last couple. Whether it made it into M18 I don't know - I run the nightlies now.
As for the minimising bug - have you checked Bugzilla? See if someone has reported it? (I can't reproduce it with build 2000101109 on Linux). There is all this great bug reporting and tracing available at Bugzilla to allow you to see what problems are known about - make use of it, and help the Mozilla team get rid of things that annoy you the most.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Oh shit.
Oh Shit oh shit oh shit.
I wasted many night time hours when I should have been sleeping blowing up pillboxes and trying to wipe out opponents on the available Macs. And now, I discover that not only is the WinBolo (not much use there) but there is also LinBolo! I know what I'll be compiling this evening... Waaa! There goes my sleeping hours again! :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
What benefit could MS hope to gain from .NET on Linux? It certainly would not benefit it to have Linux servers holding a significant part of the .NET server market - unless of course it all ends up with a closed-protocol and closed-source project and they can charge mega-$ for it.
On the client side though it might be a significant benefit for MS as the Linux desktop market grows to have .NET connectivity from a market penetration point of view. If MS holds the reins of power on the server end of .NET, and .NET clients become ubiquitous, it gives another market stranglehod to MS. That strikes me as the desired business direction - .NET servers running MS Software on an execlusively MS platform.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I sometimes upgrade my system, without buying a new copy of windoze. That's legal, right? Since Linux runs better on less hardware, it goes on the older systems.
Of course, nowadays systems often ship with an OEM BIOS-locked Windows disc image on CD. This means that even if you just upgrade your computer, you can forget about using that OEM Windows copy to 'repair' your Windows installation at the 6-month instability fixing session. Nice one. Not that it causes me any lost sleep, since Loki started the Linux gaming scene rolling along I haven't had to worry about booting up Windows for anything other than printing (Canon BJC5100 - paperweight under Linux ...).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
VRML has been around since 3D visualization was a clunky, slow reality on the web. While some of the VRML sites actually had some use (such as catalogues of 3D models) there was little utility in trying to navigate a 3D site using VRML, and little need either.
Since the birth of VRML, the whole 3D graphics on the home PC has changed enormously - first person shooters, advanced driving simulations and many other games have redefined what we expect from 3D visualization. So now we are in a position to make use of this 3D technology on the web.
But what does 3D actually gain us on the web? For discussion rooms, text is still superior, unless everyone has actual voice links and virtual blackboards on which to discuss ideas. Web sites merely relaying news are probably still best served as they exist today, as words and pictures, with the occasional movie file or music clip. So where precisely should 3D be deployed to actually be useful? Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash painted a vivid 3D world where users had their own corner of the multiverse, could travel and explore virtual environments and relate directly with Avatars, thus presenting a more 'immediate' environment with visual cues that relate directly to real world environments. Maybe this 'virtual meeting place' will become the new chat room over the next couple of years. We'll present a more 'natural' face on the web, but as with so many interactions on the web, we may not be what we appear in VR. There are no restrictions on how we choose to manifest ourselves in such a virtual world, be it skin colour, sex, size, augmentation or other.
So maybe the current multiplayer games universe will be gently replaced by a 3D side of the web which is similar to the Massively-Multiplayer Online Role Playing games we see now, as people get the technology going. But I think for the bulk of the web, in providing information and discussion potential, will not go down the 3D road.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
"Ratios" in processing power are not mentioned anywhere in the article. Apparently some overenthusaistic PR guy (probably not Gates) said it was 3 generations ahead of current parts, and Abrash says that's a bit of an overstatement. It's merely 1.5 or 2 generations ahead. Wow, that really sucks. :)
This 1.5/2 generations makes perfect sense given what we know of NVIDIAs processor roadmap. Given that they have new processor releases, we will see at least the successor to the GeForce 2 before the XBox hits the shelves, and possibly another incremental improvement on that as well (like GeForce2 -> GeForce2 Ultra). So 1.5 -> 2 generations is entirely in line with what we are likely to see on the NVIDIA cards in our PCs in the same time frame.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Michael Abrash now gets to play on the Xbox and people are salivating at what this thing will do. Based on Mr. Abrash's reputation and skill, I would say the Xbox will be great. However, based on how M$ usually manages to suck down the best minds in the business into their black hole of mediocrity and Billy-boy mandates, I wouldn't hold yer breath.
Amen! I look at the people who work at the MS Research labs - great minds, great thinkers, prime movers in IT - and then I look at the MS products hitting the shelves and I just don't understand where all that mind power which is almost overflowing out of those centres fails to make an impact.
Still, we should be happy. If MS's products were much better, it would have been far harder to get Linux off the ground because people would have been happier where they were.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
When Glide became open-sourced I hoped to see wrappers appear to allow those of us with accelerated OpenGL to be able to make use of Glide-specific applications. In fact, I almost wondered whether 3dfx would go down this route themselves - Glide on top of OpenGL would not be as optimal as the native Voodoo acceleration, but it would expand the base of Glide-accelerated cards and thereby accelerate the adoption of Glide.
Has anyone seen anything like this on the Linux side? Many wrappers exist for Windows to provide this functionality (with varying degrees of success) but there appears to be little evidence of such a beast in Unix-land.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
However on the residential side some of things many providers (such as Sympatico) are moving to a PPPoE config. This has caused a lot of problems, as the supported clients are lousy. The reliability of the PPPoE clients is sorely lacking. The one provided by Sympatico, called Access Manager isn't supported on linux or NT/2000.
Access Mangler is probably best forgotten, and once you switch to Linux, Roaring Penguins PPPoE user-client is an easy install and setup, requiring no kernel patches. I've had NO problems at all with this setup and fast connection speeds (>100Kbytes/sec). If you are stuck on Windows, any PPPoE client should work - there doesn't appear to be anything particularly special about the Sympatico arrangement. Then of course the PPPoE support is supposed to be much improved in the 2.4.x series of kernels, so life should become even more flexible as these roll out.
CHeers,
Toby Haynes
I've got Bell Sympatico ADSL installed, and I've been extremely pleased with it - low ping times, transfer rates near the theoretical max (I pull 108Kbytes/sec continuous to local servers) and only one evening of unconnectable time in the last six months. Hardware installation was extremely straightforward, and everything runs beautifully under Linux (DLink card, 1Mb Nortel Modem, PPPoE using RoaringPenguin). Given that most of my cable using friends have trouble with availability and ping times to ostensibly local servers due to ridiculous routing, I'm pretty happy.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The thing I see most about Athlons is the power supply being too weak. Do yourself a favor : spend a few more bucks and get a 300w power supply. The Athlon cpu itself isn't that power hungry (esp. in the case of Durons), but the motherboard's chipset more than makes up for it. Also if your video card is monstrous (Geforce2 and Voodoo5), that will also be sucking down alot of juice.
While this doesn't explain why windows won't boot all of a sudden (Obviously the Athlons have better taste in OS's :-) ) I was aghast to discover that my Athlon 650MHz Aptiva system only had a 150W power supply. This explained the system instability as I ramped the number of PCI cards up and is something I will have to replace if I move to a GeForce 2 at some point in the future (currently has a TNT2 Ultra).
Windows not booting could be all sorts of problems. After a "FDISK.EXE /MBR" to replace the hard drive boot block, I would go straight to a bootable Windows Rescue CD and try from there. If you have an OEM-supplied system, this may simply format your drive and reinstall Windows, so BEWARE. Nowadays I tend to keep more critical data on my Linux partitions along with periodic key backups of source code. This is a slight pain, because it is much easier to access files on the Windows partition from Linux than the reverse, but there are utilities out there for MS systems to access ext2 partitions.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
It's also kinda pathetic that because of this, no one can broadcast any live video of the olympics... so in the states, you're forced to watch NBC, and you can't watch any other station broadcasting anywhere in the world... assuming you don't have satellite. Kinda has pissed me off, as I stream my video, as I don't have a television. Therefore, I have not seen any Olympics this year.
See if your cable provider has CBC, who are broadcasting from Canada and carry the events live. Then you can use NBC as a fallback to catch the events you missed!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Maybe these projects should take a long look at FlightGear before trying to do something new from scratch. It strikes me that FlightGear already provides a fair amount of infrastructure that could usefully be used in putting together a decent Combat Flight sim.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I think you picked the wrong James Bond movie - especially given that "Tomorrow Never Dies" plotline involved changing the syncing of the GPS satellites in order to send a ship into Chinese waters to start a war. Obviously some sixth sense working but only on half power :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
But this is why I asked; what is D3D doing that's surpassing OpenGL?
As far as I can tell, nothing. All the 3D accelerated functions available on my NVIDIA card are exposed under the OpenGL 1.2 spec, GL_ext_ extensions or on NVIDIA specific extensions - GL_NV_. This is of course on Linux using the NVIDIA drivers and the NVIDIA GL/gl.h etc. headers converted to Linux. In many respects the functionality of the card is available faster on OpenGL than DirectX because the Vendor specific extensions do not have to go through the OpenGL ARB before being implemented, whereas vendors are dependent on DirectX being releases with their own extensions built in.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Mozilla is still a long way from being useful. It still eats up 80Meg just for one session... Until they clean that up, Navigator and IE will be the best options.
Guess you aren't up to speed on things (and from your comments you are still deep in the woods) the current version of Mozilla runs at about 35MB on both Linux and Windows and no longer leaks memory left right and centre. Java works on Windows, PSM is available for Windows and Linux and the NSS 3.1 beta should help fill in a lot more of the https functionality. So Netscape has been left pretty much forgotten on my Linux box as Mozilla now handles my browsing and mail needs. I also run Mozilla at work on Win NT as it now outstrips Netscape and runs neck-and-neck with IE for speed, despite the GUI independent interface, so Mozilla is my browser of choice on my two main platforms. Stability is now better than five or six hours and its getting better pretty swiftly.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Mozilla doesn't support java, nor does it support the Java 1.3 plugin.
I'm amazed how many people spout this sort of statement without testing their assertions. Just installed the Java 1.3 beta plugin on Mozilla build 2000091908 on my NT 4.0 SP6a workstation. No problems - works like a charm.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Mozilla doesn't support java, nor does it support the Java 1.3 plugin. I find this considerably lacking.
Mozilla does support Java on Win32 (yuk!) - the implementation is not there yet on Linux. Mozilla doesn't wrap it up internally as Netscape 4.x did. Check out Project Blackwood for details on the implementation.
Mozilla should eventually come with a web configurator of sorts that would allow people to configure the browser before they download it.
That sounds vaguely possible, but it strikes me that it's easier to have that as something launched by the browser once you have downloaded it rather than by some packaging agent at the server.
As in, I want flash, java, and shockwave. I check them, and I download the browser with these things installed (be they plug-ins or otherwise).
I have no trouble running Flash in Mozilla. I haven't tried the latest Shockwave plugin. Mozilla has plugin-compatability with Netscape plugins, so just set them up for Netscape and they work in Mozilla.
I doubt the plugin manufacturers would have much problem with this (unless they were Microsoft), and it could usher in a new wave of recent-java browsers.
There may be licensing problems with having all the plugins on one server - from what I see, most plugins are distributed from the creator's websites and not from, say, the Netscape plugin collection.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The linked article is cobbled together review of the g450 for WINDOWS (I haven't looked at the GeForce side) with a cover page discussing Linux. You can see here the trail of where this story came from! The review features lovely snapshots of Windows drivers and it doesn't look like the reviewer has been near X.
Sorry - you are going to have to swallow your pride a little! Scroll down that page to the base where it has a link to XFree86 background and you will find the rest of the review. Just because there are links to two Windows reviews of the two cards doesn't mean that that is all! :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I first came across a few comments by Rasterman on how he was intending to try and lever OpenGL acceleration to render windows in Enlightenment many months ago. This struck me as being a smart way to get true alpha transparency support for the windows/menus/icons and not completely stuff up the CPU with processing by offloading the processing to the GPU. It also opens the doorway to a whole host of fancy, over the top special effects such as spinning, shrinking windows when you iconify them and the fancy transient effects seen in the Mac OS X window manager. This is the first tests I've seen of the actual code, but does anyone know how close the development code is to being an effective OpenGL accelerated window manager?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You mean BNL wins approval of CmdrTaco, Canada lets out a collective "Eh?"? Shome mishtake shurely :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes