Seriously, though, I too am in this situation. I will be graduating in May, and I find myself just wanting to be a writer. I hope things do get better.
... I have gotten a letter, despite the fact that there is no company.
Let me explain:
A couple of years ago I was asked by my mother to create a game for the classes she teaches at a local university. Nothing fancy, you understand; just a standard quiz-show format (similar, I suppose, to "Jeopardy!") which she could use in class to test students' knowledge. The students loved it, but she didn't want to have to use a poster-board, since it wasn't easily visible in the back of the room.
The university informed her that it would not pay me, and that it only dealt with companies, despite the fact that all I asked was $1000.00 for the whole shebang.
So I filed incorporation papers with the state of NY to create a company so that I could get paid for my work. The same day that I sent in the papers, the university called to say that they could, in fact, pay me personally. So I did it and got paid personally. The company never went any further. I never purchased a single thing for it. That was four years ago.
So imagine my surprise when last week I got a letter from Microsoft, addressed to this defunct company, letting me know that I might have pirated products in use right under my nose, by my own employees!
"Egads!" I shrieked. I quickly raced down to the basement and found that no, I did not, in fact, have any employees or pirated software.
What Microsoft appears to be doing, IMHO, is trying to bully every small business (and many large ones, too) it can find, since they know that most can't afford to go to court against them. Shameful.
Addressing is no longer the primary problems in hard disk creation. The primary problem is throughput to the system. Disks are plenty big, and the price-per-gigabyte is agreeable to most, but hard disk data transfer to memory has not significantly increased in a very long time. Someone needs to find a way to speed that up. Hey, maybe we could get the Rambus people on that problem! (Just kidding.)
Here's my worry. AOL is not really known for its gaming ability; anything outside AOL's network is accessed by a massive proxy. So are AOL-PS2 customers going to play GAMES through that? They'll either burn out the servers or they'll get such high latency that their games will turn into slide shows.
Still, who else saw this coming? (Many hands go up.)
Frankly, I think that once you become a for-profit company, you had better have a solid business plan for making money.
The whole Eazel/Gnome thing is beginning to grate on my nerves. Though I like Gnome better than KDE, I am getting this sudden urge to drop the lot of them and re-install my trusty old copy of TkDesk; I can't remember a single time that crashed on me, or asked me for money, or ever even did anything other than what I wanted it to do.
Ximian ticks me off. Hey, guess what? As far as I can tell from the gnome.org pages, I can either download the Ximian packages or, if I don't want to go with the Ximian version, I can download and compile Gnome from the source. Great, just what I want to do: spend four years trying to get it to build/make/link/brush its teeth/get dressed/etc before giving up and downloading the Ximian-branded one. Just peachy. Well, I have news for you: not everyone wants the commercial versions. I want a binary (RPM, DEB, etc) of the non-Ximian Gnome. But I likely won't get it.
This is potential flamebait, but I thought GNOME was supposed to be a development environment, not just a desktop. If Ximian would stop trying to make Gnome just about the freaking desktop (they could start by developing a desktop with a different name), this would clear up a lot of confusion and help to draw the proper lines between development environment and desktop. Otherwise, neither has a chance.
Anyone who watches the History Channel (or, as my best friend calls it, the "Hitler Channel") as much as I do has surely seen pieces on the Battle of Stalingrad. One of the major reasons the Germans surrendered there was that they had mistakenly thought that the battle would be short (ie, over by October) and as such had not adequately prepared their men for the extremely harsh Russian winters. The footage I have seen shows a lot more snow on the ground than what appeared in this dreadful film.
Thanks for the corrections; I was pretty much working from memory.
My point was really that when OpenGL finally did become the spec to beat, 3Dfx still pushed Glide. Nothing says "pig-headed" like backing a doomed proprietary API.
You are right about the "Voodoo/TNT waging war" comment; I apologize. I shouldn't have said that the Voodoos "required" Glide.
However, my best friend and I got our PCs at the same time (well, about a week apart) and, aside from the fact that he got a 3Dfx card and I got an nVidia card, the systems were identical. Still, I consistently got a better framerate in OpenGL than he got in Glide in most games.
I haven't tested nVidia's FSAA, nor has my friend tested 3Dfx's (We'd like to play these games as opposed to just admire them), so I really can't speak for that. Ditto for Athlons; I haven't had the opportunity to use one yet. However, I am still in love with my TNT, and even before the announcement, I had decided to be an nVidia customer for as long as I thought they made a superior product.
And that's all. If ATI comes out with a screaming new chip (will they?), I'll consider buying that. But for the last year and a half, it has been my own opinion (I repeat, opinion) that the nVidia chips are generally better. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary; I have seen reviews of truly horrendous boards that use the nVidia core, but that's the boardmaker's fault, not nVidia's. I was also trying to keep the boards out of it as much as possible, and focus primarily on the core chips involved, a tough thing to do when 3Dfx went into the board business.
Finally, you didn't comment on the other aspects of my post (3Dfx's failed Rush and Banshee, nVidia's timely releases, etc). Did you agree with these? (I still hate Direct3D, but it's the only Deus Ex will run at a decent framerate on my TNT1. Time to upgrade, I guess.)
Please keep me posted (no pun intended); I always love an intelligent, well-argued debate... you booger. (Just kidding!)
A lot of people (especially shareholders and Voodoo_ owners) are discussing the sale, but there are a number of causes for this, not just one or two. Here's how history worked for, and ultimately against, 3Dfx. Apologies if I don't get the timeline exactly right:
In the beginning... 3D graphics chips were *really* expensive, running to the thousands of dollars and only working on certain hardware.
Then simple 3D graphics chips like S3's ViRGE (shudder) came along. They were slow and had a horrible framerate (the ViRGE is commonly referred to as the world's only 3D decelerator), but actually made the pictures look a bit more smooth. This trend continued for a while, until...
3Dfx released the Voodoo, ushering in really nice second-generation hardware acceleration. With high-res, high-color-depth and smooth framerates, they became the overnight champ. They scared the daylights out of companies like Number 9, S3, ATI and all the other 3D chipmakers. The only card these companies had was that the Voodoo was a secondary graphics card; it didn't do 2D. The other problem was that the Voodoo really only worked with Glide; most other graphics chips could work with OpenGL.
3Dfx tried to fix this problem with the Voodoo Rush, which was essentailly a 2D chip hot-glued to a Voodoo. The Rush failed miserably (First slip: Don't cobble together a half-assed product. Gamers and reviewers always know the difference.), because 3Dfx did not take into proper account the interaction and integration needed to make the 2D and 3D work together. 3Dfx then released the Voodoo2 (essentially a sped-up Voodoo), to much critical acclaim. Still, Glide was the only graphics system that it really worked with, and 3Dfx was convinced that Glide would eventually replace OpenGL. (Second slip: Hubris has brough down more empires than one can imagine. Always know that you are mortal.)
Around this time nVidia was starting to show signs of becoming a good chipmaker. While early chips like the NV1 were absolutely laughable when compared to the mighty 3Dfx chips, nVidia was busy trying to prove that they were fast learners (the Riva 128 was considered a great chip for gamers on a tight budget). Also around this time, most other 3D chipmakers (like Number 9, PowerVR and S3) were frantically trying to stay in business. A couple of them made it, but most either quit the 3D market or fizzled. 3Dfx was riding high, and went public amidst the dot-com market inflation. Things were looking good.
The release of the TNT was the first real threat to 3Dfx's business; it was fast, ran OpenGL & Direct3D (at the time a horrible choice for anyone, but there nonetheless) and also did 2D. At first 3Dfx tried to convince itself (and us) that the future would be powered by Voodoo/Glide, but when reviews of TNT chips essentially matched the Voodoo2, 3Dfx knew it was in for a fight to the death.
3Dfx had to do something; people were buying TNT cards, and that spelled trouble. 3Dfx ultimately decided that their best (only?) option was to do it all: the chip and the board. They bought STB (right after I bought my PC which had an STB graphics card and a TNT chip -- doh!) and stopped selling Voodoo technology to third parties, most of whom immediately jumped into bed with nVidia (remember how pissed off Creative was?). The Voodoo3 would come from only one source: 3Dfx. (Third slip: Don't alienate the very people who provide most of your revenue, i.e. boardmakers)
As the Voodoo3 and TNT/TNT-Ultra waged war, gamers were slowly coming to realize that nVidia's chip was just as fast (or faster), on par with price, and didn't require the proprietary Glide. PC makers also realized this and started shifting towards nVidia graphics boards. And since they came from a variety of boardmakers, the PC makers could pick and choose their vendor while still using the nVidia core. Meanwhile, 3Dfx watched their sales plummet as they realized that shipping the Voodoo3 without support for 32-bit color was turning many gamers away. (Fourth slip: Of course we didn't need 32-bit color support then; most games turned into slideshows at that depth. But the first rule of business is to make the customer happy.
nVidia also got gamers horny by releasing a new chip approximately every six months; 3Dfx was releasing at a rate of one new chip about every year to year-and-a-half. 3Dfx had failed to realize that hardcore gamers demand speed, and that gamers will do just about anything within their power to get that little extra boost of speed from their machines. (If you don't believe me, visit Tweak3D and see for yourself.) 3Dfx was also having serious financial problems; between the collapse of the dot-com-saturated market bubble and disappointing sales, 3Dfx must have realized that going solo was a terrible mistake.
Since then, 3Dfx has been in free-fall, and the announcement of their sale is just the SPLAT of a once-mighty graphics giant hitting the pavement; even their open-source drivers were not enough to save them. 3Dfx never developed (or at least never released) a new architecture; the V2 through V5 were essentially speed upgrades and hot-glue-and-duct-tape "new features" to their now sorely outdated and overworked architecture. (Why do you think they have required so much more power and cooling? I mean, a power brick for the V5? Are they kidding me?)
Meanwhile, nVidia continues to dominate the market; they will provide the precious GPU for Microsoft's upcoming XBox, and the GeForce 2 Ultra GTS Pro Whizbang 7 Foomlegricken Supersize (or whatever the hell they call the latest chip) consistently garners rave reviews among journalists and gamers alike. Even the lack of open-source drivers hasn't stopped people (even open-source advocates like myself) from going with them. In short, 3Dfx got beat by a company with a real third-generation graphics chip, but not without help from itself.
I am sorry to see them go; they were nVidia's biggest rival, and I am always a fan of good competition. My only hope is that nVidia open-sources their own drivers, and perhaps learns from 3Dfx's mistakes. No, I hope we all learn from 3Dfx's mistakes.
Well, now that we know what it'll look like, I'd give it about... oh, say... twenty minutes till it shows up on themes.org.
Come on, theme-makers! We can have this whole interface cloned MOTNHS before Whistler ever comes out! Heh heh... ----------------------------------------
Robert Dumas
The problem is that we'll have the same domain squatting that we've had in the past, and we will have solved nothing.
For example, I recently saw in 2600 Magazine how Verizon (the result of the Bell Atlantic/GTE merger) registered something like seven hundred domains, all with "Verizon" in them... even insulting ones, like "verizonsucks.com". They had registered all these domains under the.com,.net and.org TLDs. When the 2600 guys couldn't register "verizonsucks.com", they registered "verizonREALLYsucks.com". In response, Verizon sent them a letter informing them of their violation of trademark laws. Read all about it straight from the horse's mouth. (This brings up the point: If Verizon registered "robdumas.com", could that be considered to be fraudulently using my name? I mean, after all, if I can't register a domain with THEIR name, would I/should I let them register a domain with MY name in it?)
Anyway, simply adding a new TLD will just mean that they register there, too.
The only way a.gnu TLD would be worth adding is if we, the Open Source community, somehow controlled it, so we could attempt to keep cybersquatters out, without compromising the freedom of it. Perhaps in order to GET a.gnu domain, you must PRODUCE something under the GNU Public License.
Hey, maybe one day we'll all open up Slashdot to find that Microsoft wants to register "microsoft.gnu"! Ha!
Two final point of interest, somewhat related to this story/thread:
The policy of InterNIC USED to be $70US for two years (or $35US per year). This was a FLAT fee. Unfortunately, thanks to the agreement reached between ICANN and NSI last year, NSI can charge whatever it likes (well, presumably within reason). So how long do you think it'll be before NSI puts up its own "domain auction" site? Before you know it, joeschmoe.com, joeschmoe.net and joeschmoe.org will be owned by Ted Turner (or someone like him; I have nothing against Mr. Turner), and would cost you thousands of dollars to get back.
I find it VERY unnerving that Register.com, one of the new domain registrars, is an "affiliate" of GreatDomains.com, a company who basically buys and sells domains to the highest bidder. I happen to own "novastar.net" (no, there's nothing there... I haven't gotten around to it), and registering it cost me $70US. No more, no less. But, according to GreatDomains.com, the domain "novastar.org" would cost me $250,000US! Is that a rip-off, or what?
I'm interested to hear what others have to say about the topic. Reply here, or e-mail me. ---------------------------------------- Robert Dumas
It never really hit me until a few weeks ago. We really are on the virge of 2001, the year of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke's "Space Odyssey", and yet we are really no closer to where we hoped (back then) we would be by now.
Think about that.
We have NO lunar bases, NO civilian shuttle trips, NO mission to Jupiter... we gave up on space almost entirely.
What would it be like to step back to 1950 or so, and tell someone what 2000 is REALLY like? Other than the prospect of the Internet, I think they'd be really disappointed. "What, no flying cars? No futuristic, silver-jumpsuit clothing? Pollution? AIDS? Social and racial separations?"
I contrast this by imagining how I would react if Doc Brown or Marty showed up in the DeLorean and told me that the world of 2050 really looks like "Blade Runner" without the flying cars; dirty cities, dark skies pouring down acid rain, radiation, plagues, etc.
I wonder what it would take to put us on that fast-track to flying cars and warp-capable starships. Perhaps our materialism has gotten the better of us; we're so engrossed in protecting our little hoards that we forget that technology can benefit EVERYONE. I hope we haven't; I hear those flying cars get good fuel mileage.
---------------------------------------- Robert Dumas
FANTASTIC article. Eloquently written, not threatening (as MS would have us believe), to the point, and, finally, GUTSY. Bravo, M. Gassee, on a move that is, if I may be blunt, as ballsy as I have ever seen from a non-OSS vendor. Be is really trying to get the word out on BeOS, and I can't think of a better way. I've messed with it a bit, and I think it is a great OS.
Microsoft definitely fears BeOS and Linux, make no mistake about that. Why? Because, if users get PCs with BeOS or Linux on it, they will see Windows 9x for what it really is, a cobbled-together, crash-prone OS, with serious security and reliability issues. OSes like BeOS and Linux are true multi-tasking, stable, do-the-job OSes. The only difference is that the world doesn't think it can survive without Microsoft. The truth is, we can. This is obvious on the server end, but not on the desktop end. Corel has released WordPerfect for Linux, and Be is a great multimedia-creation system. Thy both have niches right now, but I am looking forward to the day when we will be able to get any app, be it a graphics package, accounting software, Internet tools, games (Oh, yeah, I'm a gamer), and more for any OS we choose.
I would like to stress that I am not anti-MS. I just think that there are an increasing number of products that do a better job with smaller hardware requirements. I do think that when they really want to, they can make a good product. They just don't really want to. They are more concerned with profit margins than product quality. And that is why there is so much resistance out there. Corporations (and consumers) are getting fed up with the exhorbitant cost of MS software, the insane licensing agreements, and the downright shoddy quality of some of Microsoft's software. I want to stress this:
YOU CAN'T FOOL THE INDUSTRY FOREVER. You may be able to get away with poor design and high costs for a while, but this industry is constantly reinventing itself for lower and lower costs, and anyone who does not join in this trend will be OUT OF BUSINESS. Microsoft has lasted this long because they don't leave a "crack in the wall" for OEMs to use other (better) OSes.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, though, I too am in this situation. I will be graduating in May, and I find myself just wanting to be a writer. I hope things do get better.
Let me explain:
A couple of years ago I was asked by my mother to create a game for the classes she teaches at a local university. Nothing fancy, you understand; just a standard quiz-show format (similar, I suppose, to "Jeopardy!") which she could use in class to test students' knowledge. The students loved it, but she didn't want to have to use a poster-board, since it wasn't easily visible in the back of the room.
The university informed her that it would not pay me, and that it only dealt with companies, despite the fact that all I asked was $1000.00 for the whole shebang.
So I filed incorporation papers with the state of NY to create a company so that I could get paid for my work. The same day that I sent in the papers, the university called to say that they could, in fact, pay me personally. So I did it and got paid personally. The company never went any further. I never purchased a single thing for it. That was four years ago.
So imagine my surprise when last week I got a letter from Microsoft, addressed to this defunct company, letting me know that I might have pirated products in use right under my nose, by my own employees!
"Egads!" I shrieked. I quickly raced down to the basement and found that no, I did not, in fact, have any employees or pirated software.
What Microsoft appears to be doing, IMHO, is trying to bully every small business (and many large ones, too) it can find, since they know that most can't afford to go to court against them. Shameful.
Addressing is no longer the primary problems in hard disk creation. The primary problem is throughput to the system. Disks are plenty big, and the price-per-gigabyte is agreeable to most, but hard disk data transfer to memory has not significantly increased in a very long time. Someone needs to find a way to speed that up. Hey, maybe we could get the Rambus people on that problem! (Just kidding.)
Here's my worry. AOL is not really known for its gaming ability; anything outside AOL's network is accessed by a massive proxy. So are AOL-PS2 customers going to play GAMES through that? They'll either burn out the servers or they'll get such high latency that their games will turn into slide shows.
Still, who else saw this coming? (Many hands go up.)
Thats what I thought.
The whole Eazel/Gnome thing is beginning to grate on my nerves. Though I like Gnome better than KDE, I am getting this sudden urge to drop the lot of them and re-install my trusty old copy of TkDesk; I can't remember a single time that crashed on me, or asked me for money, or ever even did anything other than what I wanted it to do.
Ximian ticks me off. Hey, guess what? As far as I can tell from the gnome.org pages, I can either download the Ximian packages or, if I don't want to go with the Ximian version, I can download and compile Gnome from the source. Great, just what I want to do: spend four years trying to get it to build/make/link/brush its teeth/get dressed/etc before giving up and downloading the Ximian-branded one. Just peachy. Well, I have news for you: not everyone wants the commercial versions. I want a binary (RPM, DEB, etc) of the non-Ximian Gnome. But I likely won't get it.
This is potential flamebait, but I thought GNOME was supposed to be a development environment, not just a desktop. If Ximian would stop trying to make Gnome just about the freaking desktop (they could start by developing a desktop with a different name), this would clear up a lot of confusion and help to draw the proper lines between development environment and desktop. Otherwise, neither has a chance.
Naaaaah.
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
Anyone who watches the History Channel (or, as my best friend calls it, the "Hitler Channel") as much as I do has surely seen pieces on the Battle of Stalingrad. One of the major reasons the Germans surrendered there was that they had mistakenly thought that the battle would be short (ie, over by October) and as such had not adequately prepared their men for the extremely harsh Russian winters. The footage I have seen shows a lot more snow on the ground than what appeared in this dreadful film.
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
Funny...
I could swear that I submitted this EXACT SAME STORY not two weeks ago.
Oh well... phocked over again.
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
My point was really that when OpenGL finally did become the spec to beat, 3Dfx still pushed Glide. Nothing says "pig-headed" like backing a doomed proprietary API.
You are right about the "Voodoo/TNT waging war" comment; I apologize. I shouldn't have said that the Voodoos "required" Glide.
However, my best friend and I got our PCs at the same time (well, about a week apart) and, aside from the fact that he got a 3Dfx card and I got an nVidia card, the systems were identical. Still, I consistently got a better framerate in OpenGL than he got in Glide in most games.
I haven't tested nVidia's FSAA, nor has my friend tested 3Dfx's (We'd like to play these games as opposed to just admire them), so I really can't speak for that. Ditto for Athlons; I haven't had the opportunity to use one yet. However, I am still in love with my TNT, and even before the announcement, I had decided to be an nVidia customer for as long as I thought they made a superior product.
And that's all. If ATI comes out with a screaming new chip (will they?), I'll consider buying that. But for the last year and a half, it has been my own opinion (I repeat, opinion) that the nVidia chips are generally better. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary; I have seen reviews of truly horrendous boards that use the nVidia core, but that's the boardmaker's fault, not nVidia's. I was also trying to keep the boards out of it as much as possible, and focus primarily on the core chips involved, a tough thing to do when 3Dfx went into the board business.
Finally, you didn't comment on the other aspects of my post (3Dfx's failed Rush and Banshee, nVidia's timely releases, etc). Did you agree with these? (I still hate Direct3D, but it's the only Deus Ex will run at a decent framerate on my TNT1. Time to upgrade, I guess.)
Please keep me posted (no pun intended); I always love an intelligent, well-argued debate... you booger. (Just kidding!)
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
I, for one, think that keeping a kid's attention is quite easy. My friend and I took his 5-year-old son to see Princess Mononoke, and he LOVED it.
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
- In the beginning... 3D graphics chips were *really* expensive, running to the thousands of dollars and only working on certain hardware.
- Then simple 3D graphics chips like S3's ViRGE (shudder) came along. They were slow and had a horrible framerate (the ViRGE is commonly referred to as the world's only 3D decelerator), but actually made the pictures look a bit more smooth. This trend continued for a while, until...
- 3Dfx released the Voodoo, ushering in really nice second-generation hardware acceleration. With high-res, high-color-depth and smooth framerates, they became the overnight champ. They scared the daylights out of companies like Number 9, S3, ATI and all the other 3D chipmakers. The only card these companies had was that the Voodoo was a secondary graphics card; it didn't do 2D. The other problem was that the Voodoo really only worked with Glide; most other graphics chips could work with OpenGL.
- 3Dfx tried to fix this problem with the Voodoo Rush, which was essentailly a 2D chip hot-glued to a Voodoo. The Rush failed miserably (First slip: Don't cobble together a half-assed product. Gamers and reviewers always know the difference.), because 3Dfx did not take into proper account the interaction and integration needed to make the 2D and 3D work together. 3Dfx then released the Voodoo2 (essentially a sped-up Voodoo), to much critical acclaim. Still, Glide was the only graphics system that it really worked with, and 3Dfx was convinced that Glide would eventually replace OpenGL. (Second slip: Hubris has brough down more empires than one can imagine. Always know that you are mortal.)
- Around this time nVidia was starting to show signs of becoming a good chipmaker. While early chips like the NV1 were absolutely laughable when compared to the mighty 3Dfx chips, nVidia was busy trying to prove that they were fast learners (the Riva 128 was considered a great chip for gamers on a tight budget).
- The release of the TNT was the first real threat to 3Dfx's business; it was fast, ran OpenGL & Direct3D (at the time a horrible choice for anyone, but there nonetheless) and also did 2D. At first 3Dfx tried to convince itself (and us) that the future would be powered by Voodoo/Glide, but when reviews of TNT chips essentially matched the Voodoo2, 3Dfx knew it was in for a fight to the death.
- 3Dfx had to do something; people were buying TNT cards, and that spelled trouble. 3Dfx ultimately decided that their best (only?) option was to do it all: the chip and the board. They bought STB (right after I bought my PC which had an STB graphics card and a TNT chip -- doh!) and stopped selling Voodoo technology to third parties, most of whom immediately jumped into bed with nVidia (remember how pissed off Creative was?). The Voodoo3 would come from only one source: 3Dfx. (Third slip: Don't alienate the very people who provide most of your revenue, i.e. boardmakers)
- As the Voodoo3 and TNT/TNT-Ultra waged war, gamers were slowly coming to realize that nVidia's chip was just as fast (or faster), on par with price, and didn't require the proprietary Glide. PC makers also realized this and started shifting towards nVidia graphics boards. And since they came from a variety of boardmakers, the PC makers could pick and choose their vendor while still using the nVidia core. Meanwhile, 3Dfx watched their sales plummet as they realized that shipping the Voodoo3 without support for 32-bit color was turning many gamers away. (Fourth slip: Of course we didn't need 32-bit color support then; most games turned into slideshows at that depth. But the first rule of business is to make the customer happy.
- nVidia also got gamers horny by releasing a new chip approximately every six months; 3Dfx was releasing at a rate of one new chip about every year to year-and-a-half. 3Dfx had failed to realize that hardcore gamers demand speed, and that gamers will do just about anything within their power to get that little extra boost of speed from their machines. (If you don't believe me, visit Tweak3D and see for yourself.) 3Dfx was also having serious financial problems; between the collapse of the dot-com-saturated market bubble and disappointing sales, 3Dfx must have realized that going solo was a terrible mistake.
Since then, 3Dfx has been in free-fall, and the announcement of their sale is just the SPLAT of a once-mighty graphics giant hitting the pavement; even their open-source drivers were not enough to save them. 3Dfx never developed (or at least never released) a new architecture; the V2 through V5 were essentially speed upgrades and hot-glue-and-duct-tape "new features" to their now sorely outdated and overworked architecture. (Why do you think they have required so much more power and cooling? I mean, a power brick for the V5? Are they kidding me?)Also around this time, most other 3D chipmakers (like Number 9, PowerVR and S3) were frantically trying to stay in business. A couple of them made it, but most either quit the 3D market or fizzled. 3Dfx was riding high, and went public amidst the dot-com market inflation. Things were looking good.
Meanwhile, nVidia continues to dominate the market; they will provide the precious GPU for Microsoft's upcoming XBox, and the GeForce 2 Ultra GTS Pro Whizbang 7 Foomlegricken Supersize (or whatever the hell they call the latest chip) consistently garners rave reviews among journalists and gamers alike. Even the lack of open-source drivers hasn't stopped people (even open-source advocates like myself) from going with them. In short, 3Dfx got beat by a company with a real third-generation graphics chip, but not without help from itself.
I am sorry to see them go; they were nVidia's biggest rival, and I am always a fan of good competition. My only hope is that nVidia open-sources their own drivers, and perhaps learns from 3Dfx's mistakes. No, I hope we all learn from 3Dfx's mistakes.
Robert Dumas (robertdumas@hotmail.com)
Come on, theme-makers! We can have this whole interface cloned MOTNHS before Whistler ever comes out! Heh heh...
Robert Dumas
----------------------------------------
For example, I recently saw in 2600 Magazine how Verizon (the result of the Bell Atlantic/GTE merger) registered something like seven hundred domains, all with "Verizon" in them... even insulting ones, like "verizonsucks.com". They had registered all these domains under the .com, .net and .org TLDs. When the 2600 guys couldn't register "verizonsucks.com", they registered "verizonREALLYsucks.com". In response, Verizon sent them a letter informing them of their violation of trademark laws. Read all about it straight from the horse's mouth. (This brings up the point: If Verizon registered "robdumas.com", could that be considered to be fraudulently using my name? I mean, after all, if I can't register a domain with THEIR name, would I/should I let them register a domain with MY name in it?)
Anyway, simply adding a new TLD will just mean that they register there, too.
The only way a .gnu TLD would be worth adding is if we, the Open Source community, somehow controlled it, so we could attempt to keep cybersquatters out, without compromising the freedom of it. Perhaps in order to GET a .gnu domain, you must PRODUCE something under the GNU Public License.
Hey, maybe one day we'll all open up Slashdot to find that Microsoft wants to register "microsoft.gnu"! Ha!
Two final point of interest, somewhat related to this story/thread:
I'm interested to hear what others have to say about the topic. Reply here, or e-mail me.
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Robert Dumas
Think about that.
We have NO lunar bases, NO civilian shuttle trips, NO mission to Jupiter... we gave up on space almost entirely.
What would it be like to step back to 1950 or so, and tell someone what 2000 is REALLY like? Other than the prospect of the Internet, I think they'd be really disappointed. "What, no flying cars? No futuristic, silver-jumpsuit clothing? Pollution? AIDS? Social and racial separations?"
I contrast this by imagining how I would react if Doc Brown or Marty showed up in the DeLorean and told me that the world of 2050 really looks like "Blade Runner" without the flying cars; dirty cities, dark skies pouring down acid rain, radiation, plagues, etc.
I wonder what it would take to put us on that fast-track to flying cars and warp-capable starships. Perhaps our materialism has gotten the better of us; we're so engrossed in protecting our little hoards that we forget that technology can benefit EVERYONE. I hope we haven't; I hear those flying cars get good fuel mileage.
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Robert Dumas
Actually, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't AnimEigo have the rights to Robotech/Macross?- ---------
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Robert Dumas
I suppose there could be worse companies to have that patent. CNet is actually a fairly OK service.
Heeeeeeyyyyyyy...
Maybe we can convince the CNet people to forbid all use of ads EVERYWHERE, thus getting rid of all those annoying banners all over the Web! Hooray!
*SLAP!*
Then again... maybe not.
BTW, I bet most of us use the Slashdot Legal Analysis (tm) when we see stuff like that. Just tell CmdrTaco and CowboyNeal not to sue for royalties. ;)
Microsoft definitely fears BeOS and Linux, make no mistake about that. Why? Because, if users get PCs with BeOS or Linux on it, they will see Windows 9x for what it really is, a cobbled-together, crash-prone OS, with serious security and reliability issues. OSes like BeOS and Linux are true multi-tasking, stable, do-the-job OSes. The only difference is that the world doesn't think it can survive without Microsoft. The truth is, we can. This is obvious on the server end, but not on the desktop end. Corel has released WordPerfect for Linux, and Be is a great multimedia-creation system. Thy both have niches right now, but I am looking forward to the day when we will be able to get any app, be it a graphics package, accounting software, Internet tools, games (Oh, yeah, I'm a gamer), and more for any OS we choose.
I would like to stress that I am not anti-MS. I just think that there are an increasing number of products that do a better job with smaller hardware requirements. I do think that when they really want to, they can make a good product. They just don't really want to. They are more concerned with profit margins than product quality. And that is why there is so much resistance out there. Corporations (and consumers) are getting fed up with the exhorbitant cost of MS software, the insane licensing agreements, and the downright shoddy quality of some of Microsoft's software. I want to stress this:
YOU CAN'T FOOL THE INDUSTRY FOREVER. You may be able to get away with poor design and high costs for a while, but this industry is constantly reinventing itself for lower and lower costs, and anyone who does not join in this trend will be OUT OF BUSINESS. Microsoft has lasted this long because they don't leave a "crack in the wall" for OEMs to use other (better) OSes.
I always welcome comments. Please email me at robertdumas@hotmail.com with comments.