I've never used the products under test. Does After Effects support network rendering of any kind?
LightWave 3D has a Windows, Mac, and (brand new) Linux renderer.
It seems that Mac users are more interested in the Linux renderer than Windows users are, in large part because of the savings in hardware costs.
In the past we would never have tackled something as
massive and invasive as a new threads implementation just after a ".0"
release (in this case, 8.0)....
With the introduction of the full family of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
product we now have the flexibility to incorporate the best technology...
when they're ready.
In other words, we shouldn't expect any more stable releases of Red Hat Linux.
I, for one, would have liked to see a RH 8.1 (without the NPTL), considering that RPM scriptlets and relocations are completely broken in 8.0, preventing the installation of many third-party packages.
I keep looking for an erratum for this show-stopping bug, but I guess it's called RH 9.
I've always viewed Red Hat's extensive patches as a risk.
The kernel package, for example, typically includes hundreds of patches.
Now that the core distribution is essentially being treated as a perpetual beta, I just can't see myself staying on Red Hat much longer.
As to the civilian satellites being targets,...
Saddam would have trouble...
picking satellites off
I wasn't thinking about the actual satellites, so much as the offices, personnel, relay stations, etc.
It weakens the presumption that civilians are off limits.
My question is: how safe is this for the companies?
Civilian resources that are used during a time of war become targets.
We hit a civilian bomb shelter during the last war that was being used a command and control center.
companies are now looking at the GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9700 cards and considering doing movie-quality rendering on them.
"Movie-quality" rendering is done in software, often by render farm nodes that don't even have a 3D video card.
High-end video cards are used during content creation.
You won't find a GeForce or Radeon on Maya's list of qualified hardware, 3ds max's list of tested graphics cards, or Softimage's list of certified graphics cards.
That's not to say that a consumer card won't work, but after spending $2,000+ on the software, plus maintenance, you want supported hardware.
Mr. Schild forwarded the BSA letter to the Open Office team, with the observation that "someone is trying to remove your product from FTP-Servers."
If it weren't for Heinlein's razor, I might raise an eyebrow that a legal agent of Microsoft is trying to purge the net of a competitor's product.
if ATI or Nvidia want to optimize their games so that they run super-fast on their cards, that's cool with me as long as it ads to my game playing experience.
When AMD's K6-2 processors were getting stomped by the Pentium II, it turned to 3DNow, leaning heavily on 3DNow-optimized Voodoo2 drivers and a 3DNow-optimized version of Quake 2.
Anand's Monster 3D-2 review shows 3DNow improving a last-place 44 FPS to a competitive 76 FPS.
Quake 2 played better because of the efforts of AMD and 3dfx.
However, the results weren't representative,
as the Turok and Forsaken benchmarks show.
I played System Shock 2 on a Voodoo3.
At the time, 3dfx had Quake 3 on the brain, struggling to tweak its drivers to keep up with the GeForce.
Those efforts were small consolation to me, as each new driver release would break something in System Shock, like making the weapon model sporadically disappear.
The problem with a marquis game like Quake is that it encourages short cuts.
The testing is done when Quake runs (a little faster).
I, for one, am glad that Quake 3 put an end to the miniGL nonsense.
Give me a card with decent, reliable performance in standard APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D.
Put it this way: would you buy a TV that was optimized for Friends?
Thanks for that.
In the response you posted, the Intuit rep. said: "you will be one of the few who can say, I've heard 'argument A' and I've heard 'argument B' and my decision is...."
In a market of informed consumers, there would be no Microsoft monopoly and no user-hostile copy-protection schemes, such as those employed by Microsoft and Intuit.
Consumers, like voters, often make their decisions based on very little information: sound bytes, capsule reviews, etc.
I used TurboTax for the first (and, likely, last) time last year.
I have the press, including Slashdot, to thank for steering me clear of this year's defective edition.
BTW, today's Techbargains, a popular deal and coupons site, has a blurb on this very topic: "Tax season is coming. Staples has Taxcut with lots of free software.
Turbotax has Macrovision copy protection that most users would prefer to avoid."
That's not a good argument against flexibility, but it does raise an interesting point: don't change the defaults lightly.
Windows NT to Windows 2000 was not a big change, but it took me a month to find the Services control panel.
buying a card that can run Doom 3 sweet now means you're pretty much set for the next generation of games produced using the D3 engine.
That may be the theory, but I expect Doom 3 licensees to produce progressively more demanding games.
Compare Quake 3 and F.A.K.K.2 to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight 2.
[More Gigahertz] do equal more capabilities....
there are plenty of applications (more every day) aside from games that demand more power
As another example, 3D accelerators, faster CPUs, and cheaper software have made digital content creation possible on the PC that, previously, would have required an unthinkable investment of resources for a solo artist.
I'm no professional, but I've seen enough to know that even a $500 Quadro and a $2,000 Maya license is cheap, compared to a few years ago.
For that matter, there was a pretty decent reader-submitted still in a recent issue of 3D World that was created with Blender and Photo-Paint.
People can be famously unimaginative:
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
"640 K ought to be enough for anybody."
Here's hoping we don't run out of uses for all those extra Hz and B.
Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks.
The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.
Even construing your assertion charitably, I have to disagree.
There is a sweet spot for each component in a PC.
Let's use NewEgg for a price check on the Athlon XP.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 numbers are with the current video champ, the Radeon 9700 Pro.
Notice that they increase linearly with CPU speed (although not price, unfortunately).
You can certainly argue that the $120 premium for the most expensive Athlon XP at NewEgg is not worth 20 FPS (i.e., 46% more expensive, compared to 11% faster).
I agree.
On the other hand, $120 will not buy you an upgrade from a 120 GB "special edition" IDE drive to a comparable SCSI drive.
Even if you did spring for a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SCSI drive, you would be unlikely to experience faster game play.
The problem with arguing that the PC architecture is unbalanced is that the game writers already know that.
They limit texture detail, so that your main memory is barely a factor, let alone your hard drive.
I recommend the following for a serious gaming system:
CPU "sweet spot," currently around 2 GHz video card current generation, 64 MB (e.g., GeForce 4 Ti 4200) memory 512 MB, 133 MHz DDR or faster hard drive 60 GB, 7,200 RPM or faster
Just curious--what do you do with the other two Slackware systems?
I keep around a couple of old systems, but mostly for experimenting with other operating systems.
If the company... releases the source as GPL (or BSD) when they fold, this is a Good Act...
As long as they use a GPL-compatbile license, there's nothing stopping the GCC folks from poring over OpenWalcom for anything useful.
As the parent post said, it is GPL incompatible.
You can view it at the OSI site.
While I'm not one to sniff a gift fish, it's disappointing to see yet another "open source" license that will relegate Open Watcom to abandonware.
Most PC's cost nearly $2x10^3 for a real gaming strenth system ---- plus the games cost $59 each
You've got to be kidding.
$1,000 will get you a system with at least 256 MB, 2GHz, and a decent video card.
As for game prices, don't even get me started.
Let's look at PC Gamer's 2002 award winners:
Ghost Recon $30
Return to Castle Wolfenstein $30
Undying $10
Black & White $15
Max Payne $20
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns $5
Arcanum: of Steamworks & Magick Obscura $20
Civilization 3 $30
Flight Simulator 2002 $40
NASCAR Racing 4 $20 (or less)
I rarely buy brand-new games, but I picked up WarCraft 3 for $30 and NASCAR Racing 2003 for $40.
If you saw a PC game for $59, it was probably a collector's edition.
four or more controllers...
in your living room...
screen bigger than 19"...
doesn't make more noise...
don't keyboard or mouse to do anything
With the possible exception of the last point, yes, all of this is possible with a PC.
controllers
There are some great dual-shock clones available, such as the Thrustmaster FireStorm Dual Power, the Logitech RumblePad, and the Gravis Eliminator AfterShock.
Plug in as many as you like, depending on game support.
living room
A modest gaming system can fit in an attractive micro ATX case. Flex ATX is pushing it, unless you can find a motherboard with a decent 3D chip.
screen
Get a video card with TV out.
At 640x480, you'll be able to crank up the detail, anti aliasing, and anisotropic filtering.
Of course, you always have the option of higher resolution with HDTV, monitor, LCD projector, etc.
noise
You can build a quiet PC, so long as you don't use fire-breathing parts like a GeForce FX.
If you don't want to build, it can be difficult to tell how loud a store-bought system will be.
no keyboard
Well, I see the lack of keyboard as the biggest weakness of consoles.
I suppose you could map some macros with the game-pad drivers to launch your favorite games.
Clearly, a console is a more efficient way to get couch-potato gaming.
If you don't have a decent PC to start with, it's also cheaper.
I just love the depth and breadth of PC games.
Grand Theft Auto and Madden are great, but I can't give up WarCraft, NASCAR Racing, Falcon, and first-person shooters.
There's absolutely nothing on their list thats needed to take advantage of todays "cutting edge" games.
Todays "cutting edge" games are designed to play on 3 or 4 year old hardware
I came to the opposite conclusion after reading the article.
The GeForce2 Ti 200 is a capable, less than three-year old card that, in most of the benchmarks, is the bottleneck.
For example, 1.4GHz / GF4 is twice as fast in NeverWinter Nights as 2.25 GHz / GF2.
That tells me that it pays to have a current-generation video card.
A DirectX 7 card like the GF2 doesn't cut it, any more.
The great thing about PC games is that they are scalable.
You can set up a new game to play well on three-year old PC, usually by lowering the resolution and detail.
When you upgrade, you can crank it up.
In the discussion of AMD vs. Intel, I was surprised to read the following:
While both the P4 and XEON are based upon a similar cores, the XEON offers multiprocessor support and larger L2 caches.
The Pentium III Xeon had larger L2 cache, but not the Pentium 4 Xeon.
I just checked intel.com, and there is a Xeon MP with a large L3 cache, but that only goes to 2 GHz, so I doubt that was under consideration.
Perhaps the author felt that it goes without saying, but I'll say it.
Regardless of theory, the choice of CPU would ideally be left until after some domain-specific benchmarks.
I'm the first to admit that I'm not buzz-word compliant, but I was surprised to read the following:
[Artima SuiteRunner] is a design fork not a code fork, because we didn't reuse any JUnit code.
We rethought and reworked JUnit's ideas, and wrote Artima SuiteRunner's code from scratch.
I thought refactoring was massaging, even rewriting parts of existing code.
So, is Linux a "refactored" Unix?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. It's the first thing I turn off if I have to use IE.
LightWave 3D has a Windows, Mac, and (brand new) Linux renderer. It seems that Mac users are more interested in the Linux renderer than Windows users are, in large part because of the savings in hardware costs.
Adobe is just using the superior metric system, which has 100 seconds / minute.
A comment at Linux Weekly News links to Matt Wilson's explanation:
In other words, we shouldn't expect any more stable releases of Red Hat Linux. I, for one, would have liked to see a RH 8.1 (without the NPTL), considering that RPM scriptlets and relocations are completely broken in 8.0, preventing the installation of many third-party packages. I keep looking for an erratum for this show-stopping bug, but I guess it's called RH 9.I've always viewed Red Hat's extensive patches as a risk. The kernel package, for example, typically includes hundreds of patches. Now that the core distribution is essentially being treated as a perpetual beta, I just can't see myself staying on Red Hat much longer.
I wasn't thinking about the actual satellites, so much as the offices, personnel, relay stations, etc. It weakens the presumption that civilians are off limits.
My question is: how safe is this for the companies? Civilian resources that are used during a time of war become targets. We hit a civilian bomb shelter during the last war that was being used a command and control center.
While it's not an innovation unique to sound cards, multi-channel audio is pretty cool. NASCAR Racing with four-speaker surround is hellah immersive.
"Movie-quality" rendering is done in software, often by render farm nodes that don't even have a 3D video card. High-end video cards are used during content creation.
You won't find a GeForce or Radeon on Maya's list of qualified hardware, 3ds max's list of tested graphics cards, or Softimage's list of certified graphics cards. That's not to say that a consumer card won't work, but after spending $2,000+ on the software, plus maintenance, you want supported hardware.
Except that the Dell CIO literally said, "Unix is Dead." Mott's the troll, here, not Timothy.
Mr. Schild forwarded the BSA letter to the Open Office team, with the observation that "someone is trying to remove your product from FTP-Servers." If it weren't for Heinlein's razor, I might raise an eyebrow that a legal agent of Microsoft is trying to purge the net of a competitor's product.
- "IDSA has a good faith belief that
... [WoS] infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members."
- "[BSA has] a good faith belief that none of the materials or activities listed above have been authorized"
I'm sorry, but Ms. Beck's apology doesn't cut it. A web robot cannot assert a "good faith belief."When AMD's K6-2 processors were getting stomped by the Pentium II, it turned to 3DNow, leaning heavily on 3DNow-optimized Voodoo2 drivers and a 3DNow-optimized version of Quake 2. Anand's Monster 3D-2 review shows 3DNow improving a last-place 44 FPS to a competitive 76 FPS. Quake 2 played better because of the efforts of AMD and 3dfx. However, the results weren't representative, as the Turok and Forsaken benchmarks show.
I played System Shock 2 on a Voodoo3. At the time, 3dfx had Quake 3 on the brain, struggling to tweak its drivers to keep up with the GeForce. Those efforts were small consolation to me, as each new driver release would break something in System Shock, like making the weapon model sporadically disappear.
The problem with a marquis game like Quake is that it encourages short cuts. The testing is done when Quake runs (a little faster). I, for one, am glad that Quake 3 put an end to the miniGL nonsense. Give me a card with decent, reliable performance in standard APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D. Put it this way: would you buy a TV that was optimized for Friends?
I used TurboTax for the first (and, likely, last) time last year. I have the press, including Slashdot, to thank for steering me clear of this year's defective edition.
BTW, today's Techbargains, a popular deal and coupons site, has a blurb on this very topic: "Tax season is coming. Staples has Taxcut with lots of free software. Turbotax has Macrovision copy protection that most users would prefer to avoid."
That's not a good argument against flexibility, but it does raise an interesting point: don't change the defaults lightly. Windows NT to Windows 2000 was not a big change, but it took me a month to find the Services control panel.
That may be the theory, but I expect Doom 3 licensees to produce progressively more demanding games. Compare Quake 3 and F.A.K.K.2 to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight 2.
As another example, 3D accelerators, faster CPUs, and cheaper software have made digital content creation possible on the PC that, previously, would have required an unthinkable investment of resources for a solo artist. I'm no professional, but I've seen enough to know that even a $500 Quadro and a $2,000 Maya license is cheap, compared to a few years ago. For that matter, there was a pretty decent reader-submitted still in a recent issue of 3D World that was created with Blender and Photo-Paint.
People can be famously unimaginative:
- "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- "640 K ought to be enough for anybody."
Here's hoping we don't run out of uses for all those extra Hz and B.Even construing your assertion charitably, I have to disagree. There is a sweet spot for each component in a PC. Let's use NewEgg for a price check on the Athlon XP.
The Unreal Tournament 2003 numbers are with the current video champ, the Radeon 9700 Pro. Notice that they increase linearly with CPU speed (although not price, unfortunately).You can certainly argue that the $120 premium for the most expensive Athlon XP at NewEgg is not worth 20 FPS (i.e., 46% more expensive, compared to 11% faster). I agree. On the other hand, $120 will not buy you an upgrade from a 120 GB "special edition" IDE drive to a comparable SCSI drive. Even if you did spring for a 10,000 or 15,000 RPM SCSI drive, you would be unlikely to experience faster game play.
The problem with arguing that the PC architecture is unbalanced is that the game writers already know that. They limit texture detail, so that your main memory is barely a factor, let alone your hard drive. I recommend the following for a serious gaming system:
Tweak as desired.Just curious--what do you do with the other two Slackware systems? I keep around a couple of old systems, but mostly for experimenting with other operating systems.
Hey, Timothy, did you forget to link to the story?
As the parent post said, it is GPL incompatible. You can view it at the OSI site.
While I'm not one to sniff a gift fish, it's disappointing to see yet another "open source" license that will relegate Open Watcom to abandonware.
You've got to be kidding. $1,000 will get you a system with at least 256 MB, 2GHz, and a decent video card.
As for game prices, don't even get me started. Let's look at PC Gamer's 2002 award winners:
I rarely buy brand-new games, but I picked up WarCraft 3 for $30 and NASCAR Racing 2003 for $40. If you saw a PC game for $59, it was probably a collector's edition.With the possible exception of the last point, yes, all of this is possible with a PC.
controllers There are some great dual-shock clones available, such as the Thrustmaster FireStorm Dual Power, the Logitech RumblePad, and the Gravis Eliminator AfterShock. Plug in as many as you like, depending on game support.
living room A modest gaming system can fit in an attractive micro ATX case. Flex ATX is pushing it, unless you can find a motherboard with a decent 3D chip.
screen Get a video card with TV out. At 640x480, you'll be able to crank up the detail, anti aliasing, and anisotropic filtering. Of course, you always have the option of higher resolution with HDTV, monitor, LCD projector, etc.
noise You can build a quiet PC, so long as you don't use fire-breathing parts like a GeForce FX. If you don't want to build, it can be difficult to tell how loud a store-bought system will be.
no keyboard Well, I see the lack of keyboard as the biggest weakness of consoles. I suppose you could map some macros with the game-pad drivers to launch your favorite games.
Clearly, a console is a more efficient way to get couch-potato gaming. If you don't have a decent PC to start with, it's also cheaper. I just love the depth and breadth of PC games. Grand Theft Auto and Madden are great, but I can't give up WarCraft, NASCAR Racing, Falcon, and first-person shooters.
Todays "cutting edge" games are designed to play on 3 or 4 year old hardware
I came to the opposite conclusion after reading the article. The GeForce2 Ti 200 is a capable, less than three-year old card that, in most of the benchmarks, is the bottleneck. For example, 1.4GHz / GF4 is twice as fast in NeverWinter Nights as 2.25 GHz / GF2. That tells me that it pays to have a current-generation video card. A DirectX 7 card like the GF2 doesn't cut it, any more.
The great thing about PC games is that they are scalable. You can set up a new game to play well on three-year old PC, usually by lowering the resolution and detail. When you upgrade, you can crank it up.
Perhaps the author felt that it goes without saying, but I'll say it. Regardless of theory, the choice of CPU would ideally be left until after some domain-specific benchmarks.