Though I supposed the avoided the far superior "UncleFucka" for obvious reasons. I would have gone with that or "What Would Brian Boitano Do" for sure.
Personally, I really enjoyed this movie. Much more than I expected to, in fact. Though I saw, and enjoyed, the original Spirit of Christmas two or 3 years ago. I found the TV series very dissapointing. The movie renewed my faith in Trey Parker and Matt Stone..
and hey.. when do you get to talk about South Park on Slashdot without being moderated down????
yeah, it's a 509b. the problem is, when I disable pnp, the card doesn't work properly with '98. They weren't badmouthing them per se, but disabling pnp is not a solution for me. I use '98 more often than linux.
BTW: There is more to this story, too... The 509b I have was purchased used from a used computer store and has not been the most stable piece of hardware I've ever owned. I've had no real trouble with it in '98, however.
I'd like to say that everyone who's replied to my message has given me some insight into the AMD/Intel war.
I really though AMD and intel were just playing games and they both had higher end things they weren't showing. But I do remember AMD's trouble meeting demand, and I'm sure they don't want to have that with a 1 GHz athlon, and Intel is already having trouble with the upper end CuMines.
Amazing the game playing that goes on here. AMD demos 1.1 ghz, but "insiders" say they could do MUCH MORE, and release 1.1 ghz in quantities. Then intel pops out with the 1.5 ghz williamette.
It's like, if you CAN do it, AMD, just do it, and take the whole market from Intel, if you can do it an intel can't, then why wait? But I hear "things" about AMD engineers saying "We could mass produce 1.1 GHZ athlons tommorrow if Marketing gives the word". Well, why isn't marketing giving the word?
Because AMD is afraid intel can trump them, and they don't want to show their hand too early. The CPU games are amazing.
Let me just say that I installed red hat 6.1 over the weekend on a Jaz drive on a computer that is primarily a windows box. It went HORRIBLY.. I had the worst time with it, I eventually bought a new NIC after reading newsgroup posts about the 3c509b nics form 3com. I bought a NetGear nic, which eventually worked, but has made boot and shut down freeze a few times (I fixed this). It is not easy to set up Red Hat linux (I've never tried caldera or corel), that much is clear to me. It is FAR FAR easier to set up Windows 2000 from scratch (I've done that 25 or 30 times, in a testlab). It is the easiest install I've ever seen. Once it's up, I never have any problems finding drivers for my up-to-date hardware. Again, drivers WERE available in Linux for almost everything, but they were very difficult to find (Diamond MX300 sound card). When X first came up, it would only come up in 640x480, I had to mess around with the X86config file, where i set my refresh rate of my monitor incorrectly (it is a used monitor, and I don't actually know it's specs), so in one or two resolutions it was impossible to figure out what the hell was on the screen.
Now, After about 3/4 hours of work. It works great, and I'm ready to start messing around with perl and CGI. I personally don't mind the 3 or 4 hours lost, it was for a "good cause". I wouldn't even know how to begin getting CGI stuff set up in '98 (my other os, for gaming). But I have a fairly good idea about it in Linux.
I've been using Linux since the major distribution was slackware 2.0 (at least on the east coast). So I know somethng about it. I actually had fun setting it up on the Jaz drive. Though I can't actually get the Jaz Disk to boot, I can always pull it out and put another OS on another disk.
Now. I would never expect my mother to be able to do what I did, or even many of my friends. There is a gap between Linux and windows that is closing rapidly, but it is there, and it's not technology, it's usability.
Anyway, I thought I'd share a semi-newbie's experience. (I hadn't touched linux in 2 years).
The industry of which Gates has been the titular head of for years has historically exhibited scant generosity, empathy, or social vision, although recently having discovered the need for better public relations, has begun making some gestures towards charity. Bill Gates has personally given hundreds of millions to charitable causes, along with some Silicon Valley moguls, but bold and dramatic moves towards technological equality and empowerment are not in the nature of modern corporations.
Several hundred million? Try nearly twenty billion dollars.
First off, I don't think Tom wrote this article, I think someone else does.
That doesn't stop me from labeling this article a huge, steaming mess of tripe, however. I like AMD, if I could afford it right now, my home system would be an Athlon. They are going to hit the market with +1Ghz first, and their future does look pretty bright.
HOWEVER, to say that a company that OWNS the chip market right now, a company with a 350 billion dollar market capitalization, one of the top ten companies in the world (according to Fortune magazine), to say that this company is going to pull out of the chip market, well... that isn't just silly, that's plain hilarious. AMD is David, Intel is Goliath, but Intel is certainly not going to fall due to one little stone.
As always, I am dissapointed by an amazingly virulent anti-intel slant from Tom's Hardware. I'm not Intel's biggest fan either, and I happen to believe that some of their business practices are right up there with microsoft, but I certainly don't think their chips are that bad. The pentium 3 and athlon are simply not that far away from each other. The new 1100 Mhz Athlon with the on-die L2 cache may pull pretty far ahead, but that's just not known yet.
I can't believe that whoever wrote this column could look at the facts in such a careless manner. Intel has faced tougher competition than this and remained competitive. Even when they don't have the best prodcut, marketing usually wins their battles for them. To say that their Death Toll can be heard is completely ridiculous.
Well, at least it's a column, and columns are meant to express opinions. This post should be taken as a response to a column and nothing more.
I remember back when Altavista was first starting, my friend whose father worked at Digital told me about it, up until that point I had been using Infoseek because you could format the search with quotes and the like. I went to altavista.com, and it's all "hey.. there's no search engine here."
When I finally started using AltaVista, it was just amazing, so many pages.
OK, I wasn't going to reply to this, but what the hell...
2. Nobody cares about Daikatana or John Romero any more. That's what the blowhard gets for splitting with Carmack, someone who actually has programming skills. Eidos should have thrown the pieces in a box 2 years ago and tried to make at least a scrap of profit. Right now, Daikatana has about as much of a chance of surfacing as Duke 4 (I won't get into that.)
John Romero doesn't program, that's not his job. Niether does Shigeru Miyamoto, Alex Garden (I think), and myriad other game designers in the industry. The entire point behind Ion Storm was that Tom Hall, John Romero, and Todd Porter (the hated one) DID *NOT* code, they were designers.... DESIGN IS LAW was their motto.
The only mistake Romero made was his ridiculous "I will make you my bitch" ad campaign, along with extreme ambition.
Just because someone is not a coder does not mean that they can't make games. Carmack is one of the best programmers in the universe. The Carmack/Romero connection produced the greatest games the pc has ever seen. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, each game redefined the genre it was in when it was released.
That time is over. Neither Quake2 nor Quake3 really redefined the genre, and Daikatana doesn't look to. I maintain that both Carmack AND Romero lost out when Romero left id.
I love all these people who hate a game they haven't even played.
I agree 100% with this article. The user feedback system is what made microsoft the software giant it is today . I've read several books on how microsoft got started, and the feedback system was always important. If we're ever going to get these opensource products to go anywhere (and this isn't just X, this is all open source GUIS), we need some way of getting it into the REAL public domain, and having "mom" look at it and say "this sucks" or "this rocks"
Don't forget Microsoft has a huge usability lab, and it does them well. Perhaps someone like Ret Hat could set something like that up. I really don't have a solution, but this is definitely an important problem.
I've seen a lot of posts here that say "see, everyone should port to linux!", but I'd like to point out that mere days ago the Soldier of Fortune demo was released. It weighed in at over 95 megs, and it still had something ridicioulous like 500,000 downloads. All 5 mirrors were clogged. Now I know that it's a different game genre, perhaps a more popular one. But if we want companies to port games to linux, we have to support them when they put out demos like this. I know 90 megs is large, but from what I've been hearing, it looks like a great game. Let's see if we can clog a few pipes with this one.
Actually, AFAIK, Id hasn't used assembly since Quake1. If you're interested Michael Abrash wrote a book called "Black Book of Graphics Programming" which details some of the tricks used in Quale.
I thought that id stuck to C from Quake2 on. (I'm fairly certain the quake3 code is in C, and not C++, The Quake Source was all C). As far as games go, really the only place to use assembly was the inner loop, or the per pixel rasterization loop. That is no longer necessary due to hardware acceleration (Quake 3 requires it), and I don't know if everyone noticed this, but I found Quake2 software mode to be FAR, FAR slower than Quake's software rasterizer.
I really don't think you'd gain enough to warrant assembly language in other parts of a 3d engine (bsp traversial, picking the potentially visible set), it's too complicated, the inner loop of the rasterization engine, OTOH, is very, very small, probably 30 lines of assembly.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, I hope Carmack or Abrash is reading this so they can correct me on any points I missed.
I would also much prefer if Microsoft would clean up their own act instead of forcing us (taxpayers) to do it for them. They could certainly learn a thing or two from IBM. Also they should avoid the example set by AT&T (i.e. government is forced to take action)
I, for one, am glad to see IBM taking on sun. I'm tired of Scott McNealy and his damned gas. I read an interview with him where he did nothing but bash Bill Gates. He didn't talk about his products, or microsoft's products, he just bashed Gates. That actually made me nauseous. So jealous.
As far as this Java thing. Microsoft could always just NOT SUPPORT Java, which I THOUGHT they were going to do. That's what they need to do. Forget about Sun and their crap.
I know this won't be the popular viewpoint, but at least Gates & Co dont' WHINE.
I think Sweeney's got some really, really good ideas here, especially as far as virtual classes. I can see that being very useful in the future. I wonder if there are any languages currently in development that take advantage of any of the features he was talking about.
I'm fairly new to perl, but It seems to me that perl does SOME of the things he talks about for "language of the future".
At the very least, I now have a compeling reason to learn UnrealScript.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I supposed the avoided the far superior "UncleFucka" for obvious reasons. I would have gone with that or "What Would Brian Boitano Do" for sure.
Personally, I really enjoyed this movie. Much more than I expected to, in fact. Though I saw, and enjoyed, the original Spirit of Christmas two or 3 years ago. I found the TV series very dissapointing. The movie renewed my faith in Trey Parker and Matt Stone..
and hey.. when do you get to talk about South Park on Slashdot without being moderated down????
Ahem.
In my experience, Id games don't crash.
now if you were talking about say.. Tomb Raider...
yeah, it's a 509b. the problem is, when I disable pnp, the card doesn't work properly with '98. They weren't badmouthing them per se, but disabling pnp is not a solution for me. I use '98 more often than linux.
BTW: There is more to this story, too... The 509b I have was purchased used from a used computer store and has not been the most stable piece of hardware I've ever owned. I've had no real trouble with it in '98, however.
I'd like to say that everyone who's replied to my message has given me some insight into the AMD/Intel war.
I really though AMD and intel were just playing games and they both had higher end things they weren't showing. But I do remember AMD's trouble meeting demand, and I'm sure they don't want to have that with a 1 GHz athlon, and Intel is already having trouble with the upper end CuMines.
Thanks for the insight!
Amazing the game playing that goes on here. AMD demos 1.1 ghz, but "insiders" say they could do MUCH MORE, and release 1.1 ghz in quantities. Then intel pops out with the 1.5 ghz williamette.
It's like, if you CAN do it, AMD, just do it, and take the whole market from Intel, if you can do it an intel can't, then why wait? But I hear "things" about AMD engineers saying "We could mass produce 1.1 GHZ athlons tommorrow if Marketing gives the word". Well, why isn't marketing giving the word?
Because AMD is afraid intel can trump them, and they don't want to show their hand too early. The CPU games are amazing.
Let me just say that I installed red hat 6.1 over the weekend on a Jaz drive on a computer that is primarily a windows box. It went HORRIBLY.. I had the worst time with it, I eventually bought a new NIC after reading newsgroup posts about the 3c509b nics form 3com. I bought a NetGear nic, which eventually worked, but has made boot and shut down freeze a few times (I fixed this). It is not easy to set up Red Hat linux (I've never tried caldera or corel), that much is clear to me. It is FAR FAR easier to set up Windows 2000 from scratch (I've done that 25 or 30 times, in a testlab). It is the easiest install I've ever seen. Once it's up, I never have any problems finding drivers for my up-to-date hardware. Again, drivers WERE available in Linux for almost everything, but they were very difficult to find (Diamond MX300 sound card). When X first came up, it would only come up in 640x480, I had to mess around with the X86config file, where i set my refresh rate of my monitor incorrectly (it is a used monitor, and I don't actually know it's specs), so in one or two resolutions it was impossible to figure out what the hell was on the screen.
Now, After about 3/4 hours of work. It works great, and I'm ready to start messing around with perl and CGI. I personally don't mind the 3 or 4 hours lost, it was for a "good cause". I wouldn't even know how to begin getting CGI stuff set up in '98 (my other os, for gaming). But I have a fairly good idea about it in Linux.
I've been using Linux since the major distribution was slackware 2.0 (at least on the east coast). So I know somethng about it. I actually had fun setting it up on the Jaz drive. Though I can't actually get the Jaz Disk to boot, I can always pull it out and put another OS on another disk.
Now. I would never expect my mother to be able to do what I did, or even many of my friends. There is a gap between Linux and windows that is closing rapidly, but it is there, and it's not technology, it's usability.
Anyway, I thought I'd share a semi-newbie's experience. (I hadn't touched linux in 2 years).
Jesus man.. this is disgusting...
_ feb14.html
Were you even aware of This?http://www.canoe.ca/TopStories/columbinemain
Several hundred million? Try nearly twenty billion dollars.
First off, I don't think Tom wrote this article, I think someone else does.
That doesn't stop me from labeling this article a huge, steaming mess of tripe, however. I like AMD, if I could afford it right now, my home system would be an Athlon. They are going to hit the market with +1Ghz first, and their future does look pretty bright.
HOWEVER, to say that a company that OWNS the chip market right now, a company with a 350 billion dollar market capitalization, one of the top ten companies in the world (according to Fortune magazine), to say that this company is going to pull out of the chip market, well... that isn't just silly, that's plain hilarious. AMD is David, Intel is Goliath, but Intel is certainly not going to fall due to one little stone.
As always, I am dissapointed by an amazingly virulent anti-intel slant from Tom's Hardware. I'm not Intel's biggest fan either, and I happen to believe that some of their business practices are right up there with microsoft, but I certainly don't think their chips are that bad. The pentium 3 and athlon are simply not that far away from each other. The new 1100 Mhz Athlon with the on-die L2 cache may pull pretty far ahead, but that's just not known yet.
I can't believe that whoever wrote this column could look at the facts in such a careless manner. Intel has faced tougher competition than this and remained competitive. Even when they don't have the best prodcut, marketing usually wins their battles for them. To say that their Death Toll can be heard is completely ridiculous.
Well, at least it's a column, and columns are meant to express opinions. This post should be taken as a response to a column and nothing more.
Don't be silly.
While it might not replace your PC, it will certainly not die. The original playstation sold SEVENTY TWO MILLION UNITS.
I seriously doubt sony's just going to totally mismarket this one.
ROCK ON BRETT GLASS
I thought I was the only person that regulary read slashdot that didn't robotically fall into Stallman Worship just because of Linux.
Glad to see i'm not alone.
Off Topic yes, but important nonetheless.
There was more than just the "first post" spam, there was a few other "time travelling messages"
Seriously though, were we supposed to know this?
GIVE THIS MAN A CIGAR (or at least a shitload of moderator points)
Someone want to help all of us "fools" out who don't know what BOF means?
maybe if someone moderated this up again (SO PEOPLE WOULD SEE IT), it would get answered.
What a brilliant concept, I would have loved this when I was trying to get into college.
too bad colorado college was too expensive anyway.
www.altavista.digital.com ALL THE WAY, baby.
I remember back when Altavista was first starting, my friend whose father worked at Digital told me about it, up until that point I had been using Infoseek because you could format the search with quotes and the like. I went to altavista.com, and it's all "hey.. there's no search engine here."
When I finally started using AltaVista, it was just amazing, so many pages.
Too bad it turned into what it has.
LONG LIVE GOOGLE.
OK, I wasn't going to reply to this, but what the hell...
2. Nobody cares about Daikatana or John Romero any more. That's what the blowhard gets for splitting with Carmack, someone who actually has programming skills. Eidos should have thrown the pieces in a box 2 years ago and tried to make at least a scrap of profit. Right now, Daikatana has about as much of a chance of surfacing as Duke 4 (I won't get into that.)
John Romero doesn't program, that's not his job. Niether does Shigeru Miyamoto, Alex Garden (I think), and myriad other game designers in the industry. The entire point behind Ion Storm was that Tom Hall, John Romero, and Todd Porter (the hated one) DID *NOT* code, they were designers.... DESIGN IS LAW was their motto.
The only mistake Romero made was his ridiculous "I will make you my bitch" ad campaign, along with extreme ambition.
Just because someone is not a coder does not mean that they can't make games. Carmack is one of the best programmers in the universe. The Carmack/Romero connection produced the greatest games the pc has ever seen. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, each game redefined the genre it was in when it was released.
That time is over. Neither Quake2 nor Quake3 really redefined the genre, and Daikatana doesn't look to. I maintain that both Carmack AND Romero lost out when Romero left id.
I love all these people who hate a game they haven't even played.
--FreshView
The two most important are already there, Q3a and UT.
Other Games:
-------------
Age Of Empires/Age of Empires 2. (never happen, but it would rock)
Homeworld
Starcraft
Warcraft2: Battle Net Edition
Half Life
Soldier of Fortune
Daikatana (heh, I suppose it has to be made at all first)
That's about it for now. If those games were ported to Linux, I wouldn't need windows anymore.
I agree 100% with this article. The user feedback system is what made microsoft the software giant it is today . I've read several books on how microsoft got started, and the feedback system was always important. If we're ever going to get these opensource products to go anywhere (and this isn't just X, this is all open source GUIS), we need some way of getting it into the REAL public domain, and having "mom" look at it and say "this sucks" or "this rocks"
Don't forget Microsoft has a huge usability lab, and it does them well. Perhaps someone like Ret Hat could set something like that up. I really don't have a solution, but this is definitely an important problem.
I've seen a lot of posts here that say "see, everyone should port to linux!", but I'd like to point out that mere days ago the Soldier of Fortune demo was released. It weighed in at over 95 megs, and it still had something ridicioulous like 500,000 downloads. All 5 mirrors were clogged. Now I know that it's a different game genre, perhaps a more popular one. But if we want companies to port games to linux, we have to support them when they put out demos like this. I know 90 megs is large, but from what I've been hearing, it looks like a great game. Let's see if we can clog a few pipes with this one.
Actually, AFAIK, Id hasn't used assembly since Quake1. If you're interested Michael Abrash wrote a book called "Black Book of Graphics Programming" which details some of the tricks used in Quale.
I thought that id stuck to C from Quake2 on. (I'm fairly certain the quake3 code is in C, and not C++, The Quake Source was all C). As far as games go, really the only place to use assembly was the inner loop, or the per pixel rasterization loop. That is no longer necessary due to hardware acceleration (Quake 3 requires it), and I don't know if everyone noticed this, but I found Quake2 software mode to be FAR, FAR slower than Quake's software rasterizer.
I really don't think you'd gain enough to warrant assembly language in other parts of a 3d engine (bsp traversial, picking the potentially visible set), it's too complicated, the inner loop of the rasterization engine, OTOH, is very, very small, probably 30 lines of assembly.
Anyway, those are my thoughts, I hope Carmack or Abrash is reading this so they can correct me on any points I missed.
I would also much prefer if Microsoft would clean up their own act instead of forcing us (taxpayers) to do it for them. They could certainly learn a thing or two from IBM. Also they should avoid the example set by AT&T (i.e. government is forced to take action)
I, for one, am glad to see IBM taking on sun. I'm tired of Scott McNealy and his damned gas. I read an interview with him where he did nothing but bash Bill Gates. He didn't talk about his products, or microsoft's products, he just bashed Gates. That actually made me nauseous. So jealous.
As far as this Java thing. Microsoft could always just NOT SUPPORT Java, which I THOUGHT they were going to do. That's what they need to do. Forget about Sun and their crap.
I know this won't be the popular viewpoint, but at least Gates & Co dont' WHINE.
GO IBM!
All I can say is that this better be a joke.
I think Sweeney's got some really, really good ideas here, especially as far as virtual classes. I can see that being very useful in the future. I wonder if there are any languages currently in development that take advantage of any of the features he was talking about.
I'm fairly new to perl, but It seems to me that perl does SOME of the things he talks about for "language of the future".
At the very least, I now have a compeling reason to learn UnrealScript.