I would be surprised if the Slashdot effect did not play a small roll in this. With the number of people who visit regularly, we could qualify as a small city's worth of public opinion!
I always remembered iCE, ACiD, and members of other "KraD elite" ANSI art groups to be more interested in things like touting their own eliteness, getting unaffiliated artists banned from their elite boards just because they weren't part of the clubhouse, and in general just being totally immature and full of themselves. Perhaps I just met a few bad eggs, but the one thing I always remembered about the ol bbs days was the immaturaty of these guys.
Watching one of these guys join a more subdued bbs was kind of like having an insightful thread on USENET, then some AOL guy coming in saying "THiS PLaCe SuXx!! eYe aM MoRe eLeeT THaN YooU@!@!!11!"
Am I the only one who doesn't see a point in exploring mars? We can see as much of it as we want from here, and I don't imagine a rock who's surface temperature is below freezing year round would make a good vacation spot. Sure, at first it seems neat that we have the technology to send people there, but really, this isn't Star Trek. It's not like we are going to find aliens there or anything.
Those of us in the USA, think of how many of your tax dollars are going into people's pockets for doing nothing more than blasting rockets off the surface of the earth so that we can take nice pictures.
And if the point of exploring mars is to eventually colonize it, think again. Despite what some would tell you, the earth is still quite under-populated. There are tons more habitable but uninhabited places on earth, than there are on mars.
Although I agree with Mr. Katz and the author to a certan degree, I would argue that the Internet is not going to be _that_ big of a societal change until it becomes as accessible to the average room-temperature-IQ public as automobiles were when their invention changed society. Whereas anyone with at least an arm and a leg and an ass to sit can learn how to drive a car with a reasonable level of competancy, it takes intellegence to access the Internet, even through point-and-drool providers like AOL.
Besides, most people are quite comfortable being told what to do their entire lives. They don't feel the need to control their own lives, because then they wouuld have to take responsibility for their decisions. It's easier to just sit back and let some corporation and/or government control one's life. Note the ratio of entrepreneurs to employees.
The Internet is not going to change the lives of the everyday masses, the strong majority in the world (at least in the U.S.)--people who back over their own mailboxes and buy whatever books Oprah tells them to.
...and mount a "grassroots" campain similar in tone as DVD enthusiasts did when DIVX came out. If and when this SDMI pans out, we need to constantly bombard the media/reviewers/retailers with the facts about the two formats and make sure they understand how much SDMI hurts consumers while MP3 is what benefits consumers.
Because it is ultimately consumers that will decided the outcome of this "war". If we allow the RIAA to convince consumers that SDMI is right for them, then MP3 will be marginalized (note nothing can _Completely_ destroy a format).
DVD should be hailed as the biggest success that consumers have had over corporations trying to tell them what they want. We should use the pro-DVD/anti-DIVX campain as a model for our own.
Although financial support is definitely something many spare-time-Linux-hackers only dream of, what the Linux 3D community really needs is the cooperation of hardware vendors. Only then will accellerated 3D on Linux be able to compete with the Windows platform.
Matrox has made the first, and biggest step. They have released nearly their entire specification for the G200 chip. This has generated a big development effort, seemingly overnight, to finally get an accellerated 3D solution for Linux. Although the released specification was incomplete, it was enough to get rudimentary 3D support started.
As of late, Quake2 runs accellerated on G200 hardware. And best of all, the source is with us.
Recently, other 3D hardware companies seem to be dipping their toes in the water. 3DFX and nVidia have indicated their interest in Linux, with 3DFX looking to hire Linux specialists, and nVidia pledging a binary-only solution, but I argue that these are not as desirable. The whole "Linux way" revolves around community-based open source efforts, and this requires that a chip's specification be released.
Don't get me wrong. A binary-only driver is better than nothing, but not much better.
One concern among 3D hardware vendors is that releasing the specification will allow competitors an edge. True, the 3D hardware market is competitive at best and downright cutthroat at worst. But let's get real for a minute. A 3D card's lifespan is about six months. It takes this long for an even better card to come out that blows away the previous one. I find it hard to believe that in six months, a competitor can take a register-level specification, reverse engineer it, design, test, and manufacture a better chip (remember we need a _better one_ in six months) and beat the sales of the original chip. It's just not feasable, especially since all the hardware companies already have so much invested in their own R&D.
Point is, hardware companies, please listen to reason. It is only beneficial to release your chip specifications. Upon doing so, you will 1. gain the trust and respect of the Linux community, 2. get free Linux support from the talented developers who are just foaming at the mouth to write drivers for your chip, and 3. be able to compete in the Linux 3D market which despite what Microsoft tells you is not going away any time soon.
If you don't have a linux strategy by now, you should be asking yourself why not?
Feast your eyes on that Microsoft page, folks. This may very well be the largest, most unsubstanciated collection of FUD you will EVER see in one place.
Hmm.. This seems to indicate they are "re-inventing the wheel" themselves. There are already people working on a 3d architecture for Linux, using GLX and Mesa. They have the Matrox G200 working through this already. Any chance these two groups can work together? Certainly supporting many cards through a single 3D system would ultimately be what Linux really needs. I'm not sure this is such A Good Thing if nVidia decides to roll their own proprietary non-standard system.
Currently if you want 3D and the source to go with it our only option is the G200.
Man, this is the first programming-related article that I have ever read that has left me totally clueless. Am I the only one that doesn't see what the big deal of CORBA is, or what the heck a "component spec" is useful for? What ever happened to just writing your program in C, compiling it and running it?
The flux article just goes to show that Microsoft and their partners (read ilk) still don't understand the difference between free speech and free beer.
If the ability to hoarde your "intellectual property" is your only incentive to create it, then you should probably question what it is really worth.
Abolishing the concept of "intellectual property" would only kill the particular innovation that was inspired by greed. Real innovation, inspired by creativity and a need for something better, would flourish as it has for centuries with or without IP law.
It is my firm belief that the best software, art, music, literature, etc. is usually produced by people who expect nothing in return.
Games are a big weak spot for Linux, so naturally it seems that making Linux an attractive game platform is an important long term goal for the community. Sure, some people don't like games, but no one can argue that games haven't partially driven CPU technology in the past and have almost totally driven low-end 3d technology.
So how do we push Linux (and unix in general) as a usefull game platform? Obviously we need to present game programmers with a programming interface that they can use to port games to (or ideally write original games for). Like GTK+ is for GUI applications (or Qt, depending on your religion), we need the "GTK+" of the game world. Some kind of library that:
1. Is portable 2. Is extendable 3. Can make use of hardware acceleration 4. Can grow with future graphics/sound technology 5. Is based on _some_ kind of industry standard
Number five is VERY important. A standard has to be agreed upon or developers are just going to shrug Linux off as a bunch of non-standard API's each evangalized by their own creator but no one else.
What we have been seeing lately, is too many chefs spoiling the soup. Everyone and his uncle has their own API they are trying to push, and no one is working together to agree on a standard.
You aren't going to like this but I'll say it anyway. The reason Windows has caught on as a game playform is because of DirectDraw and DirectSound (and to a lesser extent hardware-accellerated OpenGL). Simply, developers don't have to worry about writing their own routines to allocate video memory, access the sound card's dma buffers, etc. etc., because Microsoft for once provided a pretty decent standard API to write to, that everyone could pretty much agree on.
Everytime someone announces his own "KICKASS GAME API" we (the Linux/unix community) actually suffer a set-back. We slip farther from the goal of having a single, open, standard API for mainstream developers to rely on.
Fortunately we have things like Mesa, which seems to "Get It". I'm not going to advertise Mesa more than I have to, suffice to say it meets all of the five criteria I mentioned above. Personally I believe time spent on writing APIs that essentially do what Mesa already does is time wasted. LOOK INTO MESA before you decide to write "Yet Another Graphics API".
On the other hand, we have sound support on Linux. Currently it's a mess. Basically application writers need to directly access the sound driver in order to get any kind of noise working. We currently have no standard _OPEN_ API to work with, and for the most part sound capabilities under linux are limited to a single process using a sound card. This will not fly with game developers.
Like the graphics world, we need an sound API that:
1. Is portable 2. Is extendable 3. Is hardware-independant 4. Allows more than one process/thread access to sound hardware simultaniously (a mixer)
One thing I have seen that looks promising is eSound. Do your own research on it but it looks pretty nice, and it will get the job done if its developers continue to do "The Right Thing".
It is important for us small-time game developers to look for APIs like Mesa and eSound, which are implemented properly and have potential to become some kind of standard, rather than latching on to one that has cool screenshots but only had a single game written to them--or worse, just writing our own game API.
I'll be the first to say that the author of a piece of software has the choice as to what license they use. But they should realize that, if they choose the closed, proprietary route, they should expect to be replaced by a free clone. I believe that every closed, proprietary effort that loses to an open alternative is a victory for free software.
Stop-motion panning has to be the most overused effect on movies and TV today. [sigh] From commercials to MTV to movies... I guess it's like everything that's cool at first but once everyone starts doing it it loses its value. See "slow-motion", "morphing" and the "Netscape blink tag" for other examples of this phenomenom.
I enjoy reading Slashdot, and one of the greatest things about it is the ability to discuss the articles.
Although I haven't been censored (yet), anyone interested might want to set their "comment threshold" (found by following the "Preferences" link at the top of the page) to something like -10, look at some previous articles' comments, and see how busy the moderators are at censoring what you read. They seem to be indiscriminately lowering people's scores below 0, so that their comments don't show up for most readers.
Now I agree that some of the posts are just silly, like "first post!" and "MEEPT!", but I have noticed quite a few comments that contained insightful conversation without profanity or flaming, that have been moderated down below zero. There really ought to be some accountability here with regards to who is moderating and how they moderate.
Could someone in charge post a list of criteria the moderators use for censoring posts if there is any criteria?
Slashdot Mirror
but if your other OS runs on StrongARM there's nothing stopping you.
I would be surprised if the Slashdot effect did not play a small roll in this. With the number of people who visit regularly, we could qualify as a small city's worth of public opinion!
I always remembered iCE, ACiD, and members of other "KraD elite" ANSI art groups to be more interested in things like touting their own eliteness, getting unaffiliated artists banned from their elite boards just because they weren't part of the clubhouse, and in general just being totally immature and full of themselves. Perhaps I just met a few bad eggs, but the one thing I always remembered about the ol bbs days was the immaturaty of these guys.
Watching one of these guys join a more subdued bbs was kind of like having an insightful thread on USENET, then some AOL guy coming in saying "THiS PLaCe SuXx!! eYe aM MoRe eLeeT THaN YooU@!@!!11!"
Most importantly, this comes with the source.
But which one?
Am I the only one who doesn't see a point in exploring mars? We can see as much of it as we want from here, and I don't imagine a rock who's surface temperature is below freezing year round would make a good vacation spot. Sure, at first it seems neat that we have the technology to send people there, but really, this isn't Star Trek. It's not like we are going to find aliens there or anything.
Those of us in the USA, think of how many of your tax dollars are going into people's pockets for doing nothing more than blasting rockets off the surface of the earth so that we can take nice pictures.
And if the point of exploring mars is to eventually colonize it, think again. Despite what some would tell you, the earth is still quite under-populated. There are tons more habitable but uninhabited places on earth, than there are on mars.
Natalie Portman is X times more sexy a Star Wars girl than Carrie Fisher. My vote is for around 7.
Although I agree with Mr. Katz and the author to a certan degree, I would argue that the Internet is not going to be _that_ big of a societal change until it becomes as accessible to the average room-temperature-IQ public as automobiles were when their invention changed society. Whereas anyone with at least an arm and a leg and an ass to sit can learn how to drive a car with a reasonable level of competancy, it takes intellegence to access the Internet, even through point-and-drool providers like AOL.
Besides, most people are quite comfortable being told what to do their entire lives. They don't feel the need to control their own lives, because then they wouuld have to take responsibility for their decisions. It's easier to just sit back and let some corporation and/or government control one's life. Note the ratio of entrepreneurs to employees.
The Internet is not going to change the lives of the everyday masses, the strong majority in the world (at least in the U.S.)--people who back over their own mailboxes and buy whatever books Oprah tells them to.
...and mount a "grassroots" campain similar in tone as DVD enthusiasts did when DIVX came out. If and when this SDMI pans out, we need to constantly bombard the media/reviewers/retailers with the facts about the two formats and make sure they understand how much SDMI hurts consumers while MP3 is what benefits consumers.
Because it is ultimately consumers that will decided the outcome of this "war". If we allow the RIAA to convince consumers that SDMI is right for them, then MP3 will be marginalized (note nothing can _Completely_ destroy a format).
DVD should be hailed as the biggest success that consumers have had over corporations trying to tell them what they want. We should use the pro-DVD/anti-DIVX campain as a model for our own.
Thats why I said the specs were incomplete :)
Although financial support is definitely something many spare-time-Linux-hackers only dream of, what the Linux 3D community really needs is the cooperation of hardware vendors. Only then will accellerated 3D on Linux be able to compete with the Windows platform.
Matrox has made the first, and biggest step. They have released nearly their entire specification for the G200 chip. This has generated a big development effort, seemingly overnight, to finally get an accellerated 3D solution for Linux. Although the released specification was incomplete, it was enough to get rudimentary 3D support started.
As of late, Quake2 runs accellerated on G200 hardware. And best of all, the source is with us.
Recently, other 3D hardware companies seem to be dipping their toes in the water. 3DFX and nVidia have indicated their interest in Linux, with 3DFX looking to hire Linux specialists, and nVidia pledging a binary-only solution, but I argue that these are not as desirable. The whole "Linux way" revolves around community-based open source efforts, and this requires that a chip's specification be released.
Don't get me wrong. A binary-only driver is better than nothing, but not much better.
One concern among 3D hardware vendors is that releasing the specification will allow competitors an edge. True, the 3D hardware market is competitive at best and downright cutthroat at worst. But let's get real for a minute. A 3D card's lifespan is about six months. It takes this long for an even better card to come out that blows away the previous one. I find it hard to believe that in six months, a competitor can take a register-level specification, reverse engineer it, design, test, and manufacture a better chip (remember we need a _better one_ in six months) and beat the sales of the original chip. It's just not feasable, especially since all the hardware companies already have so much invested in their own R&D.
Point is, hardware companies, please listen to reason. It is only beneficial to release your chip specifications. Upon doing so, you will 1. gain the trust and respect of the Linux community, 2. get free Linux support from the talented developers who are just foaming at the mouth to write drivers for your chip, and 3. be able to compete in the Linux 3D market which despite what Microsoft tells you is not going away any time soon.
If you don't have a linux strategy by now, you should be asking yourself why not?
Feast your eyes on that Microsoft page, folks. This may very well be the largest, most unsubstanciated collection of FUD you will EVER see in one place.
Hmm.. This seems to indicate they are "re-inventing the wheel" themselves. There are already people working on a 3d architecture for Linux, using GLX and Mesa. They have the Matrox G200 working through this already. Any chance these two groups can work together? Certainly supporting many cards through a single 3D system would ultimately be what Linux really needs. I'm not sure this is such A Good Thing if nVidia decides to roll their own proprietary non-standard system.
Currently if you want 3D and the source to go with it our only option is the G200.
Man, this is the first programming-related article that I have ever read that has left me totally clueless. Am I the only one that doesn't see what the big deal of CORBA is, or what the heck a "component spec" is useful for? What ever happened to just writing your program in C, compiling it and running it?
Am I _that_ clueless?
The flux article just goes to show that Microsoft and their partners (read ilk) still don't understand the difference between free speech and free beer.
If the ability to hoarde your "intellectual property" is your only incentive to create it, then you should probably question what it is really worth.
Abolishing the concept of "intellectual property" would only kill the particular innovation that was inspired by greed. Real innovation, inspired by creativity and a need for something better, would flourish as it has for centuries with or without IP law.
It is my firm belief that the best software, art, music, literature, etc. is usually produced by people who expect nothing in return.
Could be the price of the hardware and software.
Games are a big weak spot for Linux, so naturally it seems that making Linux an attractive game platform is an important long term goal for the community. Sure, some people don't like games, but no one can argue that games haven't partially driven CPU technology in the past and have almost totally driven low-end 3d technology.
So how do we push Linux (and unix in general) as a usefull game platform? Obviously we need to present game programmers with a programming interface that they can use to port games to (or ideally write original games for). Like GTK+ is for GUI applications (or Qt, depending on your religion), we need the "GTK+" of the game world. Some kind of library that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Can make use of hardware acceleration
4. Can grow with future graphics/sound technology
5. Is based on _some_ kind of industry standard
Number five is VERY important. A standard has to be agreed upon or developers are just going to shrug Linux off as a bunch of non-standard API's each evangalized by their own creator but no one else.
What we have been seeing lately, is too many chefs spoiling the soup. Everyone and his uncle has their own API they are trying to push, and no one is working together to agree on a standard.
You aren't going to like this but I'll say it anyway. The reason Windows has caught on as a game playform is because of DirectDraw and DirectSound (and to a lesser extent hardware-accellerated OpenGL). Simply, developers don't have to worry about writing their own routines to allocate video memory, access the sound card's dma buffers, etc. etc., because Microsoft for once provided a pretty decent standard API to write to, that everyone could pretty much agree on.
Everytime someone announces his own "KICKASS GAME API" we (the Linux/unix community) actually suffer a set-back. We slip farther from the goal of having a single, open, standard API for mainstream developers to rely on.
Fortunately we have things like Mesa, which seems to "Get It". I'm not going to advertise Mesa more than I have to, suffice to say it meets all of the five criteria I mentioned above. Personally I believe time spent on writing APIs that essentially do what Mesa already does is time wasted. LOOK INTO MESA before you decide to write "Yet Another Graphics API".
On the other hand, we have sound support on Linux. Currently it's a mess. Basically application writers need to directly access the sound driver in order to get any kind of noise working. We currently have no standard _OPEN_ API to work with, and for the most part sound capabilities under linux are limited to a single process using a sound card. This will not fly with game developers.
Like the graphics world, we need an sound API that:
1. Is portable
2. Is extendable
3. Is hardware-independant
4. Allows more than one process/thread access to sound hardware simultaniously (a mixer)
One thing I have seen that looks promising is eSound. Do your own research on it but it looks pretty nice, and it will get the job done if its developers continue to do "The Right Thing".
It is important for us small-time game developers to look for APIs like Mesa and eSound, which are implemented properly and have potential to become some kind of standard, rather than latching on to one that has cool screenshots but only had a single game written to them--or worse, just writing our own game API.
I'll be the first to say that the author of a piece of software has the choice as to what license they use. But they should realize that, if they choose the closed, proprietary route, they should expect to be replaced by a free clone. I believe that every closed, proprietary effort that loses to an open alternative is a victory for free software.
Stop-motion panning has to be the most overused effect on movies and TV today. [sigh] From commercials to MTV to movies... I guess it's like everything that's cool at first but once everyone starts doing it it loses its value. See "slow-motion", "morphing" and the "Netscape blink tag" for other examples of this phenomenom.
The day Linux becomes as easy to use as Windows is the day it becomes as useless as Windows.
For 2d and 3d graphics, Mesa is already here, and I predict we will see more and more hardware support in the upcoming few years.
Sound is a mess. No standard API in site (unless you consider that mess they call OSS). Esound looks promising if they don't screw it up.
moderation.
I enjoy reading Slashdot, and one of the greatest things about it is the ability to discuss the articles.
Although I haven't been censored (yet), anyone interested might want to set their "comment threshold" (found by following the "Preferences" link at the top of the page) to something like -10, look at some previous articles' comments, and see how busy the moderators are at censoring what you read. They seem to be indiscriminately lowering people's scores below 0, so that their comments don't show up for most readers.
Now I agree that some of the posts are just silly, like "first post!" and "MEEPT!", but I have noticed quite a few comments that contained insightful conversation without profanity or flaming, that have been moderated down below zero. There really ought to be some accountability here with regards to who is moderating and how they moderate.
Could someone in charge post a list of criteria the moderators use for censoring posts if there is any criteria?
>you're forgetting the psx2 will also play all psx1 games. So the psx2 will automatically have more games than sega
:)
...which is perhaps the sweetest thing about the PSX2
Auction them on ebay. There are even more ridiculous stuff auctioned there...