I didn't read his comment as class warfare, I read it as the difference between being a student, and being an adult.
A couple of years ago, we had an intern join us at work. Towards the end of the internship (computer animation), she asked me what home build PC I'd recommend for about £700. I wrote a spec that was something along the lines of:
- a decent 24" monitor
- a £35 case + soundproofing
- a mid-range modular PSU (supported SLI if she needed it)
- 120mm heatsink + fan
- a pair of HDD's (for RAID0 - SSD's were too small, and too expensive at the time)
- 8Gb DDR3 1600 Mhz (I'd have gone for 1866, but it was too expensive)
- An asus motherboard
- AMD Althon X4
- A graphics card for about £100.
She posted the spec on facebook, and suddenly a small army of 20 year old students responded with: ZOMG! That CPU is SHIT! You're wasting your moeny! Get an i7! You don't need to buy a heatsink, you get one with the CPU! Why are you spending *that* much on a case and PSU, you can get both of them here for £25!! You can buy cheaper RAM than that! You can get a cheap 24" monitor for £100, what are you thinking!!! etc, etc.
She asked other people at work for their opinions (all people in their 30's), and they all pretty much said the same thing as me. Invest money in the stuff you're going to live with for years (monitor, case, psu, etc), and skimp on the stuff that is easy to replace (CPU/GPU). I think she kinda trusted our opinion a bit more than her class mates, so eventually she went with that system.
A couple of weeks later, I went to help her build it, and that was absolutely hilarious. The same students who'd been suggesting that she was wasting her money, all came out with things like "That computer is so quiet! My computer sounds like an airplane taking off!", or "Jesus! That thing boots so much faster than my i7!". Last time I spoke to her, she'd just upgraded it to an 8 core AMD chip for a little over £80.
Cheap components are a good thing, but PC builds that compromise on quality are not.
AMD drivers implement specs to the letter. NVidia drivers accept any old crap (which is annoying when you're trying to find out which GL call is causing the failure)
Someone mod this anon to 11. He's so right. The drivers fail to report GL errors correctly (unlike ATI/intel), hell, you can even link shaders without having compiled them (just setting the source is good enough). Nvidia drivers are the bain of my life.
Just for the record, plenty of people do use expensive tools to visualise colour spaces. I work with a small army of visual FX compositors and post production artists who use various tools to do exactly that. Some are off the shelf (e.g. Shake, Nuke), and quite a few are developed internally.
I wonder if MS and sony simply decided that going to a single supplier for both the CPU and GPU was cheaper than using two suppliers for each component.
Yes, but some of us need CPU power for offline rendering. Having a new xeon, with 3 to 4 times the performance, at about the same power usage, is somewhat useful.
Kids don't know what the purpose of watches are anymore, they're much more likely to use a mobile phone. It might work (a smaller package than a phone), but i suspect it's more likely to lead to a spate of muggings every summer.
Yeah, but this is being developed in Oxford, and whilst we have things that look like roads around here, they're not actually designed to be used by cars. All a self driving car around here needs to do is say: "I'm sorry, I can't do that Dave. Have you considered using your bicycle? Be sure to avoid being hit by a bus!".
Google "The complete spectrum ROM disassembly", turn to page 84, now explain to me what the Z80 machine code starting at memory address 0x1A48 is for.... (or just read the book, and it will tell you).
Lua is one of the fastest scripting languages around
However it has wildly varing performance characteristics between sucessive runs of exactly the same byte code. Sometimes it's super fast, other times you'll see a +200ms spike in execution time for absolutely no reason what so ever. For real time purposes, it's a very painful language to work with.
Sounds like you are unaware that heavy-players in the video game industry *all* mix & match Lua and C++ for their engines.
And every single game team that has used lua extensively, soon ends up regretting it. I've yet to see a single game actually ship using a vanilla version of lua. Without exception, every dev studio I've seen has been forced to make extensive modifications to the garbage collector. Hell, I've even seen some games ship using scripts that are not allowed to create anything on the lua stack at all. one example that sticks out: We had 8 x Vector3, 8 x Matrix, 8 x quaternion, all as static objects within a lua state machine. All scripts had to use one of those pre-defined vars. All of that to avoid the complete idiocy of the language for real time purposes. Although it's often quoted as being good for real time applications, that's actually very wide of the mark. I cartainly won't be making the mistake of using lua in a game engine ever again.....
lua is a pretty darn fast interpreted language, and since its all bound to C on the backend anyway its easy to rapid develop with lua and strip it away later
Until the garbage collector kicks in, and then you start can start crying. Squirrell is a much better choice imho.
Thats exactly what people that can't program in assembly think.
They are wrong.
And yet every time I see some moron claim to be an ASM guru, I constantly see the same braindead mistakes. "Lookz, I've opteemized thees function call to make full use of XMM0 to XMM15". Brilliant. So you've basically halved the performance by disabling hyper-threading? Well done! These are the same kind of deluded idiots who still believe inlining code is an optimisation.
Technically speaking, it's not the progress that's going backwards, it's just that you're adding more tasks to the right of the bar (thereby making longer, and making the progress appear to have gone backwards).
And you can bet that if you win in court, they will suddenly be a company with no assets, and will be wound up the second the verdict comes in, leaving you with no option but to pay your own legal fees.
Although it also works in reverse. When I graduated uni, one company I applied to for work, took my major project, and started using it in production. Athough I didn't get the job, I was tipped off by a friend who'd started working there, that my work had formed the backbone of their new product. The uni's legal team got involved, and I ended up with a nice handsome payout for my efforts a few months later!:)
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You're making the assumption that Nvidia actually walked away, and that this isn't some bunk they're putting out as a way of saving face.
The fact that the CPU wasn't a complete mind-fuck to work with also helped, as did the exceptional quality of the dev-tools.
I didn't read his comment as class warfare, I read it as the difference between being a student, and being an adult.
A couple of years ago, we had an intern join us at work. Towards the end of the internship (computer animation), she asked me what home build PC I'd recommend for about £700. I wrote a spec that was something along the lines of:
- a decent 24" monitor
- a £35 case + soundproofing
- a mid-range modular PSU (supported SLI if she needed it)
- 120mm heatsink + fan
- a pair of HDD's (for RAID0 - SSD's were too small, and too expensive at the time)
- 8Gb DDR3 1600 Mhz (I'd have gone for 1866, but it was too expensive)
- An asus motherboard
- AMD Althon X4
- A graphics card for about £100.
She posted the spec on facebook, and suddenly a small army of 20 year old students responded with: ZOMG! That CPU is SHIT! You're wasting your moeny! Get an i7! You don't need to buy a heatsink, you get one with the CPU! Why are you spending *that* much on a case and PSU, you can get both of them here for £25!! You can buy cheaper RAM than that! You can get a cheap 24" monitor for £100, what are you thinking!!! etc, etc.
She asked other people at work for their opinions (all people in their 30's), and they all pretty much said the same thing as me. Invest money in the stuff you're going to live with for years (monitor, case, psu, etc), and skimp on the stuff that is easy to replace (CPU/GPU). I think she kinda trusted our opinion a bit more than her class mates, so eventually she went with that system.
A couple of weeks later, I went to help her build it, and that was absolutely hilarious. The same students who'd been suggesting that she was wasting her money, all came out with things like "That computer is so quiet! My computer sounds like an airplane taking off!", or "Jesus! That thing boots so much faster than my i7!". Last time I spoke to her, she'd just upgraded it to an 8 core AMD chip for a little over £80.
Cheap components are a good thing, but PC builds that compromise on quality are not.
AMD drivers implement specs to the letter. NVidia drivers accept any old crap (which is annoying when you're trying to find out which GL call is causing the failure)
Someone mod this anon to 11. He's so right. The drivers fail to report GL errors correctly (unlike ATI/intel), hell, you can even link shaders without having compiled them (just setting the source is good enough). Nvidia drivers are the bain of my life.
Just for the record, plenty of people do use expensive tools to visualise colour spaces. I work with a small army of visual FX compositors and post production artists who use various tools to do exactly that. Some are off the shelf (e.g. Shake, Nuke), and quite a few are developed internally.
I wonder if MS and sony simply decided that going to a single supplier for both the CPU and GPU was cheaper than using two suppliers for each component.
... and yet everyone else would hear that as:
Blurgh, Blurgh. Blurgh, blurgh... Bubble, bubble, bubble.... shhhhhheeeeeerssshk... Blurgh, blurgh. Blurgh, blurgh.... Bubble bubble bubble
Yes, but some of us need CPU power for offline rendering. Having a new xeon, with 3 to 4 times the performance, at about the same power usage, is somewhat useful.
Kids don't know what the purpose of watches are anymore, they're much more likely to use a mobile phone. It might work (a smaller package than a phone), but i suspect it's more likely to lead to a spate of muggings every summer.
Why would anyone need more than 640Kb?
.... I can't help thinking this
Besides which, restocking your home with a replacement set of new-shiny stealables, is just asking for a return visit from the burglers.....
Yeah, but this is being developed in Oxford, and whilst we have things that look like roads around here, they're not actually designed to be used by cars. All a self driving car around here needs to do is say: "I'm sorry, I can't do that Dave. Have you considered using your bicycle? Be sure to avoid being hit by a bus!".
Google "The complete spectrum ROM disassembly", turn to page 84, now explain to me what the Z80 machine code starting at memory address 0x1A48 is for.... (or just read the book, and it will tell you).
Lua is one of the fastest scripting languages around
However it has wildly varing performance characteristics between sucessive runs of exactly the same byte code. Sometimes it's super fast, other times you'll see a +200ms spike in execution time for absolutely no reason what so ever. For real time purposes, it's a very painful language to work with.
Lua by itself is pretty abysmal, performance wise
So far, this is the truest statement anyone has made in this thread.
Sounds like you are unaware that heavy-players in the video game industry *all* mix & match Lua and C++ for their engines.
And every single game team that has used lua extensively, soon ends up regretting it. I've yet to see a single game actually ship using a vanilla version of lua. Without exception, every dev studio I've seen has been forced to make extensive modifications to the garbage collector. Hell, I've even seen some games ship using scripts that are not allowed to create anything on the lua stack at all. one example that sticks out: We had 8 x Vector3, 8 x Matrix, 8 x quaternion, all as static objects within a lua state machine. All scripts had to use one of those pre-defined vars. All of that to avoid the complete idiocy of the language for real time purposes. Although it's often quoted as being good for real time applications, that's actually very wide of the mark. I cartainly won't be making the mistake of using lua in a game engine ever again.....
lua is a pretty darn fast interpreted language, and since its all bound to C on the backend anyway its easy to rapid develop with lua and strip it away later
Until the garbage collector kicks in, and then you start can start crying. Squirrell is a much better choice imho.
Thats exactly what people that can't program in assembly think. They are wrong.
And yet every time I see some moron claim to be an ASM guru, I constantly see the same braindead mistakes. "Lookz, I've opteemized thees function call to make full use of XMM0 to XMM15". Brilliant. So you've basically halved the performance by disabling hyper-threading? Well done! These are the same kind of deluded idiots who still believe inlining code is an optimisation.
Technically speaking, it's not the progress that's going backwards, it's just that you're adding more tasks to the right of the bar (thereby making longer, and making the progress appear to have gone backwards).
I managed to get a refund. From talking to the MS person on the phone, it sounds like it's the most common request at MS support right now....
But if you're not constrained by computing power, you could do all of your 3D rendering using a real time ray-tracer written in Java Script!
And you can bet that if you win in court, they will suddenly be a company with no assets, and will be wound up the second the verdict comes in, leaving you with no option but to pay your own legal fees.
Although it also works in reverse. When I graduated uni, one company I applied to for work, took my major project, and started using it in production. Athough I didn't get the job, I was tipped off by a friend who'd started working there, that my work had formed the backbone of their new product. The uni's legal team got involved, and I ended up with a nice handsome payout for my efforts a few months later! :)