I wonder if he's reading this, as well as the whole 7-part series. I'd pretty much have to believe so, as you say, for the ego trip.
But I wonder what he makes of the general disapproval. This especially comes from cracking a community system. Kind of like robbing a soup kitchen. He picked the wrong target.
But it leaves me wondering about those roads with no gate, but the sign, "Private Road - no tresspassing" on them. They don't receive town snowplowing, and are usually (though not always) unpaved.
What's the net analog to Private Roads?
This discussion makes me wonder if their "No Tresspassing" is as toothy as a pre-UCITA shrink-wrap license.
I'd like to see some commentary in WINE development about the shifting nature of the Win32 API(s), and what that has cost them in development time and effort. Clearly there must be SOME reason that WINE doesn't just run Win16 or Win32, but instead has Win31, Win95, Win98, and at least one WinNT switch values.
Impurities in the fluorinert tend to collect at the point where the fluid boils. That tends to insulate the hot spot from the coolant, making it even hotter.
This all dates back to Spring of 1990, when Rambus filed their original patent. (TTBOMK) This patent was abandoned and continued in 1992. Eventually the 1992 patent issued, but not before several more continuations and other legalese things like that were also filed.
In the early 1990's, the SDRAM standards were being hammered out in JEDEC. Rambus was a silent participant at those early meetings. Eventually, Rambus quite attending JEDEC meetings, somewhere around 1992 or 1993, IIRC. Many of the salient aspects of the SDRAM had been settled by this time, though not hammered into their final form.
The 1990 patent was abandoned, and went without note. The 1992 continuation issued without note, as well, since it rather specifically defined an early form of the Rambus architecture.
The continuations of the 1992 patent are the things causing all of the current fury. They reference the teachings of the original 1990 patent application, and extract new claims related to the current SDR and DDR SDRAM designs.
It's interesting to note that with continuations, office actions, and the like, you can extend patent protection well beyond the intended term. Your protection begins the day you file, and extends 17 years after the date your patent is granted. Recent patent reforms have fixed this somewhat, so your protection is 20 years after filing or 17 years after issue. I don't know if this reform addresses the issue of a string of continuations being used to extend patent life.
on sending data to/from a memory chip with both edges of the clock. At the time, it was called "toggle mode", and the patent predates Rambus by 3 or 4 years.
Rambus has patented two slightly different aspects of this: First, they do it with two clocks. (differential? which DDR SDRAM uses.) Second, they have a slightly different receiver arrangement. They use two complete receiver/latch circuits, where the IBM patent used a receiver/buffer and two latches.
Rambus also has a patent on adding a DLL to the mix.
Far more serious than these is their patent on the "CAS Latency Register" used in both SDR and DDR SDRAMS. This is a technique used YEARS before on other chips, but this is the first time it has been placed on a memory chip.
The history of this whole mess is badly checkered, and beyond this I really can't comment. Besides, I don't want to burn the phosphors off my tube and blister the keycaps by delivering my true feelings on this issue.
There has been userland PnP for some time, and it's in the 2.3 series kernel. PnP was even enough to get devfs into the kernel.
So uPnP seems to be some sort of extension of regular PnP. Will this new stuff fit with what we already have, or will it require substantial ripup and roadmap pain?
Given the number and nature of "I don't know's" in this deposition, either malfeasance or misfeasance might be considered. Either he's lying when he says, "I don't know," or he's dreadfully incompetent to hold the job. Someone in his position OUGHT to know the answers to those questions.
His lawyers not allowing him to answer questions of law is a more correct option, as is a simple, "No comment."
Does anyone remember the old Digi-Comps? I always wanted one, but never managed to put the allowance together for one before they were discontinued.
I'll have to think this one through, on a Lego-based mechanical computer. Not even sure it would take bulk Legos to do it, at least until you got to 32 bit architectures, hardware multiply, FPU, VM, etc.
Imagine, 1e-6 BogoMips. 1e-9 fps on Quake3
Oh, don't forget the 1/4 HP motor to drive it since the rubber-band failure rate would be too high at the number needed for this. And while we're at it, the motor would need a powerbooster so it could be driven by conventional Mindstorms when not driving the mechanical computer.
I'd rather see the ISS complete than see another mission series with no followup, like Apollo turned out to be. It ended up being a big detour to the moon. We never got PanAm shuttles, Clavius Base, or the Discovery mission to Jupitor. We can leave monoliths out.
I'm just saying that I'd rather see something - anything sustained rather than another flash in the pan. (No matter how brilliant that flash might be.)
I have the book, and have gotten partway through. But I ran square against his anti-space-station bigoted attitude, and found it hard to get past after a while. Maybe his Mars proposal doesn't need a space station. Maybe that's a good point of it. But the fact is, it's partly up there, now. At the moment, it's even planned to be finished. So at the moment, it's useless to rant against the space station while making a Case For Mars. But it seems to me that that's what Zubrin was doing. Maybe after the Service Module is up, and the thing isn't in imminent danger of de-orbit, I'll pick the book back up and read. Besides, if someone wanted to 'terminate the station now and save the money for Mars,' and made a pursuasive enough case, perhaps they could stop it. But I'm sure the 'saved money' would not be used to go to Mars. There's quite a bit on sci.space.tech about how 'off-the-shelf' stuff usually isn't really. Space travel really is HARD.
Here in Vermont, there are financial provisions for the people who have the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in their back yard. So how much money would you accept to have a power plant in your back yard? Keep in mind that the more money you want, the more money that electricity is going to cost. But if that's the price we have to pay for adequate supplies of electricity, then let's get ready to pay it.
For that matter, how many other things do you not want in your back yard? How much would you have to be paid to have them there?
Maybe someday we'll ALL have undesirable things in our back yards, and we'll ALL be subsidising each other.
Part of the bruhaha was Microsoft citing non-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in their letter to Slashdot. I got a mild kick out of reading that, when you put it together with the fact that circumvention does not become illegal until October. The only part of anti-circumvention that is currently in place is limitations on distribution of circumvention tools.
By their actions, Microsoft apparently turned WinZip into a circumvention tool illegal under the DMCA. For that matter, info-zip, pkunzip, gunzip and all of their ilk are also apparently illegal under the DMCA.
What if Microsoft had "protected" the MS-Kerberos spec with Rot13?
In the insurance world, aren't there some sort of minimum tests for protection, and aren't you required to make some sort of best effort to protect your property from theft or liability for injury of others? IMHO using a click-license stub on the front of a file that can be extracted readily with commonly available tools just doesn't qualify as protection.
Nor would using Rot13, which brings back to mind the original deCSS case. The encryption cracked to build deCSS was essentially a trivial 8-bit key, which would not be considered significant by anyone skilled in the art of cryptography. That indicates to me that they did not take sufficient efforts to protect their property. While that does not absolve the 'thief', it also means that the owner shares the blame. Isn't that the way it would work with physical property?
I've also been annoyed that Linux GUIs tend to either copy the Win95 look'n'feel or neXt. There just isn't much else, except maybe plain old Motif.
I enjoyed using the OS/2 Workplace Shell for years, while that was viable. The WPS was the only GUI that was sufficiently functional that I didn't always feel the need to have a command prompt open. Of course it had a command prompt, and I used it, but I just felt less compelled to than with any other GUI.
The true strength of the WPS was in consistently applying an object model to everything visible from the desktop. There was no 'extension hiding' shortcuts like in Win95, and file-association-type-things were much better and more consistently handled.
There was a partial attempt called DFM a while back. It wasn't really deep enough to do the whole job, but it was an interesting start. Unfortunately it was hosted on MassLinux, and never came back.
I want HAL back there in the back room feeding it the information, and letting me talk to it.
But I won't let HAL control the doors.
We were supposed to have HAL in 1997, and the NewsPad was a piece of toss-off technology so mundane that it should have apparently been old when HAL was new. But we still don't have it, primarily because of display cost. If a big color flatpanel is so expensive, mate it to more electronics and call it a laptop, instead of a mere limited-function display. Besides, Clavius base was SO big in 2001 that it must have been in existance for several years. And here we are flirting with a space station about to fall out of the sky before it's ever really occupied.
I'm not a forefront gamer, actually something of a trailing edge-type. I paid $5.00 for Quake in the bargain bin, shortly before the LinuxQuake boxes started showing up at something like full price.
I've heard the argument that we might have to pay a bit to bootstrap the Linux gaming market. But somehow I don't think Linux gaming is going to be bootstrapped by a few fanatics paying an nX premium just to get Linux ports of old games.
We need the Linux game in the same box as the Windows game, on the same announce day. We need the Linux box on the registration card. Unfortunately, we can't do this on our own with mainstream games. The publishers have something to say about it.
But then again, ID Software built a distribution channel with the shareware release of Wolfenstein 3D, and moved themselves into the big leagues with Doom.
There are a bunch of home-grown Linux games out there. There are even Linux gaming sites. Maybe what we need are decent reviews and links. (Maybe we have them already, and I just need to look a bit harder.) Maybe we need to be prepared to port one of these games to Windows, so it can hit the mainstream, too. Supposedly we're all getting more net-savvy. Why can't we find a way to use the net to bootstrap our way into the retail stores.
On a related note, ID has been giving away the code a year or two later, but maintaining copyright on the artwork. This is reasonable considering that ESR's position that 95% of software work isn't making software for sale. But artwork shares many characteristics of software, except that the percentage-for-sale thing is probably reversed.
This is the kernel of the problems with the MPAA and RIAA. We don't know how to pay artists. Now it becomes a problem with Linux game development, as well.
Expense of a graphics card (was:Economics didn't
on
Goodbye, Number Nine
·
· Score: 2
I suspect that the greatest cost of a graphics card is merely the fact that it is a card, and plugs into a slot. Once you get past that expense, you get to the things we have, today.
The 'base function' graphics that you refer to isn't worth the slot to plug it in. In fact, it's usually integrated on the motherboard. I would expect the base function graphics card market to completely dry up and blow away because of this.
The curious part is if the base function graphics will get sucked into the Northbridge, using UMA for the display buffer. Sure, it's no high-performance solution. If you want that, buy a card and use a slot.
I always liked James Blish's "invention" of the Spindizzy used in the "Cities in Flight" series. It had a few trivial pieces of math behind it, based on one of Dirac's equations. But the fact that it had ANY math at all behind it, based on ANY real physics at all, makes it more interesting than many Science Fiction propulsion schemes.
Keep in mind that most of these "irrationally...
on
Irrational Exuberance
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· Score: 2
exhuberant" people probably use Windows, think that Microsoft makes great products, and wonder why the Department of Justice is persecuting such a great American success story.
To be a little less flip, isn't a main point that a lot of people who don't know a heck of a lot about the technology they're investing in are doing so with a heck of a lot of money? Seems related to my first humor-impaired sentence, to me.
The amount of margin purchasing bothers me WAY more. That should have been the ONE thing we learned from 1929, yet appears that we're heading back into the same track. By the way, 1929 was the last time the US Government ran a surplus, from what I've heard. We also had a president who said, "The business of America is doing business." The November election scares me.
1 - I've been involved in the design of DRDRAM for several years, now. I've been in memory design for 18 years, also. I'm slightly more informed on this than the average geek-on-the-street.
2 - I really don't like the principle behind DRDRAM. Proprietary things are supposed to eventually become commodities, not the other way around. Memory has long been THE commodity in a computer, and here they are trying to make it go the other way. But it's technically interesting, my contributions won't make or break the whole scheme, and the kids gotta eat.
Cons:
Fundamentally, for at least the near future, it simply takes more silicon to implement the Rambus interface. No matter how much learning you do, that area doesn't go away. Perhaps after the spec stabilizes fully, it may be possible to come up with better fully custom circuit implementations, but that's at least a little ways in the future. Plus in the performance race, it's possible that the spec may never stabilize sufficiently before a given generation is obsolete.
It's very complex. My boss would have slapped me silly had I ever even thought of coming up with this. In years past I've been slapped silly for coming up with stuff a fraction of this complexity.
Latency - Obvious, though there is a second side to this, under Pros.
Wash:
The frequencies are high, and the margins tight. I suspect EVERYONE is going to have to cope with the same realm, sooner or later. DRDRAM is simply a bit ahead of its time on this on, and is taking the pain, first. I remember when it was tough getting the whole chip to run at 100MHz for SDRAM, or even 150nS for page mode DRAM.
Pros:
Granularity - don't discount this one. Presently DIMMs are made with 8 chips, each organized with X8 outputs. That says that 64Mb technology makes 64MB DIMMs. It also says that 256Mb technology makes 256MB DIMMs, even though mainstream PCs today are only now making the transition from 64MB to 128MB. That's part of the reason we've dropped the 4X-per-generation habit, and are bringing out 128Mb SDRAM, because the market just isn't ready for 256Mb. 512Mb and 1Gb are on the drawing boards and early hardware now, so this problem is going to get worse. A single 1Gb chip holds 128MB. (Obviously)
Pin count - As more integration happens, the reduced pincount of DRDRAM may become a bigger factor. It's a simple matter of 168 vs 55, though the 55 need to be at a higher frequency. It's simply easier to integrate a DRDRAM interface and have enough pins to do all of those other things, like an AGP bus.
Banking (Latency) - While simple latency is poorer, under situations with multiple threads of access (multithreading and/or DMA streams) the higher bank count of Rambus becomes an advantage. If a bank is left open, or even if it has just been closed following a prior operation, you need to wait a 'restore time' before you can access that bank, again. With DRDRAM there are usually more accessable banks, so odds are better that the next access will be to a bank that is currently closed. Even if the simple latency is longer, if you don't have to pay the 'restore time' penalty, the effective latency becomes shorter. This doesn't show up unless you have multiple memory access streams, though.
At this point, it's worth noting, since nobody else has, that some term definition is needed.
DirectX is a collection of interfaces, primarily designed for gaming. The true purpose of DirectX was to kill DOS by making it possible to get decent access to hardware functions in Windows.
Direct3D - is a 3D graphical API, somewhat analogous to OpenGL. It has been through a tortorous evolution, because up until V3 it was pretty much unusable. Beginning with V3 it started looking very much like OpenGL. Later releases have started piling the features on and on, to where some say it has gone past OpenGL. Others say that it's merely piled on features, not well thought through.
DirectDraw - More of a 2D package, but more than that, a fundamental API for gaining access to the framebuffer and video mode. To use Direct3D or OpenGL in Windows, you need to go through DirectDraw, first. The 2D part of this is rather similar to SDL.
DirectSound - What else, an audio library.
DirectPlay - I'm not sure if this is input device access, or network play access. One or the other, and whichever it isn't, is DirectSomethingElse.
The real key to DirectX is that it is the ONE way to do game programming in Windows. Though at the moment, it appears that the suite is getting well covered in Linux, between Mesa/OpenGL, SDL, and that audio library that Loki is backing. We're still missing a DirectPlay analog, whether that's input devices or netplay, we're missing both packaged library sets.
It took the object appearance of a GUI, and carried it to a far deeper level. The desktop objects also had inheritance, and it showed throughout the UI.
For example, one time I was changing icons, waltzing through the silly dialogs, thinking that it was a pain in the neck. Then I thought, "WIBNI I could just drag that icon that I want and drop it over the current icon on the settings page?" I tried it, and it WORKED.
Many other things turned out to be that way. If you thought an object ought to behave in a certain fashion, give it a try. Most of the time, the desktop objects behaved in the absolutely intuitive fashion expected.
Discoverable
You could get along in a very simplistic fashion, but you could always find a deeper layer, and new things that the OO underpinnings could do for you.
More depth
Being CORBA based (SOM was an early CORBA) meant that classes could be replaced. There were add-ons that extended the WPS in many ways, Stardock's Object Desktop being the most noteworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if he's reading this, as well as the whole 7-part series. I'd pretty much have to believe so, as you say, for the ego trip.
But I wonder what he makes of the general disapproval. This especially comes from cracking a community system. Kind of like robbing a soup kitchen. He picked the wrong target.
A proud tradition begun in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
At least they did add, "increasingly inappropriately named," to the trilogy reference.
I like you're analogy.
But it leaves me wondering about those roads with no gate, but the sign, "Private Road - no tresspassing" on them. They don't receive town snowplowing, and are usually (though not always) unpaved.
What's the net analog to Private Roads?
This discussion makes me wonder if their "No Tresspassing" is as toothy as a pre-UCITA shrink-wrap license.
I'd like to see some commentary in WINE development about the shifting nature of the Win32 API(s), and what that has cost them in development time and effort. Clearly there must be SOME reason that WINE doesn't just run Win16 or Win32, but instead has Win31, Win95, Win98, and at least one WinNT switch values.
I know, if I'd like to see it, do it myself.
A mere babysitter pales compared to getting both kids farmed out with friends/neighbors OVERNIGHT!
Impurities in the fluorinert tend to collect at the point where the fluid boils. That tends to insulate the hot spot from the coolant, making it even hotter.
Thermal runaway.
This all dates back to Spring of 1990, when Rambus filed their original patent. (TTBOMK) This patent was abandoned and continued in 1992. Eventually the 1992 patent issued, but not before several more continuations and other legalese things like that were also filed.
In the early 1990's, the SDRAM standards were being hammered out in JEDEC. Rambus was a silent participant at those early meetings. Eventually, Rambus quite attending JEDEC meetings, somewhere around 1992 or 1993, IIRC. Many of the salient aspects of the SDRAM had been settled by this time, though not hammered into their final form.
The 1990 patent was abandoned, and went without note. The 1992 continuation issued without note, as well, since it rather specifically defined an early form of the Rambus architecture.
The continuations of the 1992 patent are the things causing all of the current fury. They reference the teachings of the original 1990 patent application, and extract new claims related to the current SDR and DDR SDRAM designs.
It's interesting to note that with continuations, office actions, and the like, you can extend patent protection well beyond the intended term. Your protection begins the day you file, and extends 17 years after the date your patent is granted. Recent patent reforms have fixed this somewhat, so your protection is 20 years after filing or 17 years after issue. I don't know if this reform addresses the issue of a string of continuations being used to extend patent life.
on sending data to/from a memory chip with both edges of the clock. At the time, it was called "toggle mode", and the patent predates Rambus by 3 or 4 years.
Rambus has patented two slightly different aspects of this: First, they do it with two clocks. (differential? which DDR SDRAM uses.) Second, they have a slightly different receiver arrangement. They use two complete receiver/latch circuits, where the IBM patent used a receiver/buffer and two latches.
Rambus also has a patent on adding a DLL to the mix.
Far more serious than these is their patent on the "CAS Latency Register" used in both SDR and DDR SDRAMS. This is a technique used YEARS before on other chips, but this is the first time it has been placed on a memory chip.
The history of this whole mess is badly checkered, and beyond this I really can't comment. Besides, I don't want to burn the phosphors off my tube and blister the keycaps by delivering my true feelings on this issue.
There has been userland PnP for some time, and it's in the 2.3 series kernel. PnP was even enough to get devfs into the kernel.
So uPnP seems to be some sort of extension of regular PnP. Will this new stuff fit with what we already have, or will it require substantial ripup and roadmap pain?
Given the number and nature of "I don't know's" in this deposition, either malfeasance or misfeasance might be considered. Either he's lying when he says, "I don't know," or he's dreadfully incompetent to hold the job. Someone in his position OUGHT to know the answers to those questions.
His lawyers not allowing him to answer questions of law is a more correct option, as is a simple, "No comment."
Does anyone remember the old Digi-Comps? I always wanted one, but never managed to put the allowance together for one before they were discontinued.
I'll have to think this one through, on a Lego-based mechanical computer. Not even sure it would take bulk Legos to do it, at least until you got to 32 bit architectures, hardware multiply, FPU, VM, etc.
Imagine, 1e-6 BogoMips. 1e-9 fps on Quake3
Oh, don't forget the 1/4 HP motor to drive it since the rubber-band failure rate would be too high at the number needed for this. And while we're at it, the motor would need a powerbooster so it could be driven by conventional Mindstorms when not driving the mechanical computer.
My 14 yo son still plays with them, too. But I have to get past him to get to the minstorms.
I'd rather see the ISS complete than see another mission series with no followup, like Apollo turned out to be. It ended up being a big detour to the moon. We never got PanAm shuttles, Clavius Base, or the Discovery mission to Jupitor. We can leave monoliths out.
I'm just saying that I'd rather see something - anything sustained rather than another flash in the pan. (No matter how brilliant that flash might be.)
I have the book, and have gotten partway through. But I ran square against his anti-space-station bigoted attitude, and found it hard to get past after a while. Maybe his Mars proposal doesn't need a space station. Maybe that's a good point of it. But the fact is, it's partly up there, now. At the moment, it's even planned to be finished. So at the moment, it's useless to rant against the space station while making a Case For Mars. But it seems to me that that's what Zubrin was doing. Maybe after the Service Module is up, and the thing isn't in imminent danger of de-orbit, I'll pick the book back up and read. Besides, if someone wanted to 'terminate the station now and save the money for Mars,' and made a pursuasive enough case, perhaps they could stop it. But I'm sure the 'saved money' would not be used to go to Mars. There's quite a bit on sci.space.tech about how 'off-the-shelf' stuff usually isn't really. Space travel really is HARD.
Here in Vermont, there are financial provisions for the people who have the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in their back yard. So how much money would you accept to have a power plant in your back yard? Keep in mind that the more money you want, the more money that electricity is going to cost. But if that's the price we have to pay for adequate supplies of electricity, then let's get ready to pay it.
For that matter, how many other things do you not want in your back yard? How much would you have to be paid to have them there?
Maybe someday we'll ALL have undesirable things in our back yards, and we'll ALL be subsidising each other.
Part of the bruhaha was Microsoft citing non-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in their letter to Slashdot. I got a mild kick out of reading that, when you put it together with the fact that circumvention does not become illegal until October. The only part of anti-circumvention that is currently in place is limitations on distribution of circumvention tools.
By their actions, Microsoft apparently turned WinZip into a circumvention tool illegal under the DMCA. For that matter, info-zip, pkunzip, gunzip and all of their ilk are also apparently illegal under the DMCA.
What if Microsoft had "protected" the MS-Kerberos spec with Rot13?
In the insurance world, aren't there some sort of minimum tests for protection, and aren't you required to make some sort of best effort to protect your property from theft or liability for injury of others? IMHO using a click-license stub on the front of a file that can be extracted readily with commonly available tools just doesn't qualify as protection.
Nor would using Rot13, which brings back to mind the original deCSS case. The encryption cracked to build deCSS was essentially a trivial 8-bit key, which would not be considered significant by anyone skilled in the art of cryptography. That indicates to me that they did not take sufficient efforts to protect their property. While that does not absolve the 'thief', it also means that the owner shares the blame. Isn't that the way it would work with physical property?
I've also been annoyed that Linux GUIs tend to either copy the Win95 look'n'feel or neXt. There just isn't much else, except maybe plain old Motif.
I enjoyed using the OS/2 Workplace Shell for years, while that was viable. The WPS was the only GUI that was sufficiently functional that I didn't always feel the need to have a command prompt open. Of course it had a command prompt, and I used it, but I just felt less compelled to than with any other GUI.
The true strength of the WPS was in consistently applying an object model to everything visible from the desktop. There was no 'extension hiding' shortcuts like in Win95, and file-association-type-things were much better and more consistently handled.
There was a partial attempt called DFM a while back. It wasn't really deep enough to do the whole job, but it was an interesting start. Unfortunately it was hosted on MassLinux, and never came back.
I want HAL back there in the back room feeding it the information, and letting me talk to it.
But I won't let HAL control the doors.
We were supposed to have HAL in 1997, and the NewsPad was a piece of toss-off technology so mundane that it should have apparently been old when HAL was new. But we still don't have it, primarily because of display cost. If a big color flatpanel is so expensive, mate it to more electronics and call it a laptop, instead of a mere limited-function display. Besides, Clavius base was SO big in 2001 that it must have been in existance for several years. And here we are flirting with a space station about to fall out of the sky before it's ever really occupied.
I'm not a forefront gamer, actually something of a trailing edge-type. I paid $5.00 for Quake in the bargain bin, shortly before the LinuxQuake boxes started showing up at something like full price.
I've heard the argument that we might have to pay a bit to bootstrap the Linux gaming market. But somehow I don't think Linux gaming is going to be bootstrapped by a few fanatics paying an nX premium just to get Linux ports of old games.
We need the Linux game in the same box as the Windows game, on the same announce day. We need the Linux box on the registration card. Unfortunately, we can't do this on our own with mainstream games. The publishers have something to say about it.
But then again, ID Software built a distribution channel with the shareware release of Wolfenstein 3D, and moved themselves into the big leagues with Doom.
There are a bunch of home-grown Linux games out there. There are even Linux gaming sites. Maybe what we need are decent reviews and links. (Maybe we have them already, and I just need to look a bit harder.) Maybe we need to be prepared to port one of these games to Windows, so it can hit the mainstream, too. Supposedly we're all getting more net-savvy. Why can't we find a way to use the net to bootstrap our way into the retail stores.
On a related note, ID has been giving away the code a year or two later, but maintaining copyright on the artwork. This is reasonable considering that ESR's position that 95% of software work isn't making software for sale. But artwork shares many characteristics of software, except that the percentage-for-sale thing is probably reversed.
This is the kernel of the problems with the MPAA and RIAA. We don't know how to pay artists. Now it becomes a problem with Linux game development, as well.
I suspect that the greatest cost of a graphics card is merely the fact that it is a card, and plugs into a slot. Once you get past that expense, you get to the things we have, today.
The 'base function' graphics that you refer to isn't worth the slot to plug it in. In fact, it's usually integrated on the motherboard. I would expect the base function graphics card market to completely dry up and blow away because of this.
The curious part is if the base function graphics will get sucked into the Northbridge, using UMA for the display buffer. Sure, it's no high-performance solution. If you want that, buy a card and use a slot.
I always liked James Blish's "invention" of the Spindizzy used in the "Cities in Flight" series. It had a few trivial pieces of math behind it, based on one of Dirac's equations. But the fact that it had ANY math at all behind it, based on ANY real physics at all, makes it more interesting than many Science Fiction propulsion schemes.
exhuberant" people probably use Windows, think that Microsoft makes great products, and wonder why the Department of Justice is persecuting such a great American success story.
To be a little less flip, isn't a main point that a lot of people who don't know a heck of a lot about the technology they're investing in are doing so with a heck of a lot of money? Seems related to my first humor-impaired sentence, to me.
The amount of margin purchasing bothers me WAY more. That should have been the ONE thing we learned from 1929, yet appears that we're heading back into the same track. By the way, 1929 was the last time the US Government ran a surplus, from what I've heard. We also had a president who said, "The business of America is doing business." The November election scares me.
Two forenotes:
1 - I've been involved in the design of DRDRAM for several years, now. I've been in memory design for 18 years, also. I'm slightly more informed on this than the average geek-on-the-street.
2 - I really don't like the principle behind DRDRAM. Proprietary things are supposed to eventually become commodities, not the other way around. Memory has long been THE commodity in a computer, and here they are trying to make it go the other way. But it's technically interesting, my contributions won't make or break the whole scheme, and the kids gotta eat.
Cons:
Fundamentally, for at least the near future, it simply takes more silicon to implement the Rambus interface. No matter how much learning you do, that area doesn't go away. Perhaps after the spec stabilizes fully, it may be possible to come up with better fully custom circuit implementations, but that's at least a little ways in the future. Plus in the performance race, it's possible that the spec may never stabilize sufficiently before a given generation is obsolete.
It's very complex. My boss would have slapped me silly had I ever even thought of coming up with this. In years past I've been slapped silly for coming up with stuff a fraction of this complexity.
Latency - Obvious, though there is a second side to this, under Pros.
Wash:
The frequencies are high, and the margins tight. I suspect EVERYONE is going to have to cope with the same realm, sooner or later. DRDRAM is simply a bit ahead of its time on this on, and is taking the pain, first. I remember when it was tough getting the whole chip to run at 100MHz for SDRAM, or even 150nS for page mode DRAM.
Pros:
Granularity - don't discount this one. Presently DIMMs are made with 8 chips, each organized with X8 outputs. That says that 64Mb technology makes 64MB DIMMs. It also says that 256Mb technology makes 256MB DIMMs, even though mainstream PCs today are only now making the transition from 64MB to 128MB. That's part of the reason we've dropped the 4X-per-generation habit, and are bringing out 128Mb SDRAM, because the market just isn't ready for 256Mb. 512Mb and 1Gb are on the drawing boards and early hardware now, so this problem is going to get worse. A single 1Gb chip holds 128MB. (Obviously)
Pin count - As more integration happens, the reduced pincount of DRDRAM may become a bigger factor. It's a simple matter of 168 vs 55, though the 55 need to be at a higher frequency. It's simply easier to integrate a DRDRAM interface and have enough pins to do all of those other things, like an AGP bus.
Banking (Latency) - While simple latency is poorer, under situations with multiple threads of access (multithreading and/or DMA streams) the higher bank count of Rambus becomes an advantage. If a bank is left open, or even if it has just been closed following a prior operation, you need to wait a 'restore time' before you can access that bank, again. With DRDRAM there are usually more accessable banks, so odds are better that the next access will be to a bank that is currently closed. Even if the simple latency is longer, if you don't have to pay the 'restore time' penalty, the effective latency becomes shorter. This doesn't show up unless you have multiple memory access streams, though.
No summary
At this point, it's worth noting, since nobody else has, that some term definition is needed.
DirectX is a collection of interfaces, primarily designed for gaming. The true purpose of DirectX was to kill DOS by making it possible to get decent access to hardware functions in Windows.
Direct3D - is a 3D graphical API, somewhat analogous to OpenGL. It has been through a tortorous evolution, because up until V3 it was pretty much unusable. Beginning with V3 it started looking very much like OpenGL. Later releases have started piling the features on and on, to where some say it has gone past OpenGL. Others say that it's merely piled on features, not well thought through.
DirectDraw - More of a 2D package, but more than that, a fundamental API for gaining access to the framebuffer and video mode. To use Direct3D or OpenGL in Windows, you need to go through DirectDraw, first. The 2D part of this is rather similar to SDL.
DirectSound - What else, an audio library.
DirectPlay - I'm not sure if this is input device access, or network play access. One or the other, and whichever it isn't, is DirectSomethingElse.
The real key to DirectX is that it is the ONE way to do game programming in Windows. Though at the moment, it appears that the suite is getting well covered in Linux, between Mesa/OpenGL, SDL, and that audio library that Loki is backing. We're still missing a DirectPlay analog, whether that's input devices or netplay, we're missing both packaged library sets.
Consistency.
It took the object appearance of a GUI, and carried it to a far deeper level. The desktop objects also had inheritance, and it showed throughout the UI.
For example, one time I was changing icons, waltzing through the silly dialogs, thinking that it was a pain in the neck. Then I thought, "WIBNI I could just drag that icon that I want and drop it over the current icon on the settings page?" I tried it, and it WORKED.
Many other things turned out to be that way. If you thought an object ought to behave in a certain fashion, give it a try. Most of the time, the desktop objects behaved in the absolutely intuitive fashion expected.
Discoverable
You could get along in a very simplistic fashion, but you could always find a deeper layer, and new things that the OO underpinnings could do for you.
More depth
Being CORBA based (SOM was an early CORBA) meant that classes could be replaced. There were add-ons that extended the WPS in many ways, Stardock's Object Desktop being the most noteworthy.
There's more, but not now.