I don't get what nVidia's problem is. They make money by selling video cards and chips, not driver source. The drivers are free. It's not like someone can take the drivers and use them to manufacture pirated video cards, right? And what good would it do you to have the source to their drivers if you hadn't already bought their product?
OTOH, maybe the code is part of the "secret" to the card's performance, and so they don't want competitors to see their fancy rendering algorithms...
...but Diamond also makes drivers for cards based on nVidia chips. If you buy a Viper 770, which is based on the TNT2, you're getting Diamond's drivers in the box, not nVidia's. Or are Diamond's drivers just nVidia's with "enhancements"? I'd like to find that out.
Either way, that means that nVidia is cooperating with the card manufacturers, like Diamond. So if they refuse to provide driver code, I wish they'd at least help out projects like XFree86 when the projects need it.
After all, XFree86 is doing nVidia a favor by trying to support their chips. Otherwise, every Linux gaming machine would have a Voodoo 3.
I remember last summer I tried to install a Viper 770 Ultra in a BSD box, and XFree86 wouldn't even start the server correctly. So, I bought an ATI Xpert 98, for $40, and it's worked fine since. (I wasn't using it for games, and I just tried the Viper because I had a spare one I wasn't using at the time.)
I was impressed with the Xpert 98. Very nice colors, very bright. Much better color than the Viper. The Viper is sitting in a Win32 machine right now, which is used for games (surprise) and playing DVDs (surprise surprise), and on the same monitor, the white output from the Viper is much dimmer than the Xpert 98. I'd love to use the Xpert for playing the DVDs, but I need the Viper's framerates for my games, heh...
Any old Amiga hands now hacking in Perl might be interested in checking out my homepage, especially if they have any of the old hardware laying around.
My pet project, PerlOS, is a microkernel running through a custom Perl interpreter, and as a bonus, uses a Perl shell for UI. Okay, so the performance isn't so hot;-), but it's fun to play around with. Anyway, I also provide a Perl-to-binary compiler, and the resulting code will boot on all but the most ancient Amigas. It works pretty well, IMHO, considering...
I read your post, and I say, Hadlock! Hey! You're being such a motherfuckin' cunt today! Is it because your parents found out you're a flamin' gay? Hadlock, you're a cunt, but that's okay...
because...
(1... 2... 1, 2, 3, 4!)
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, Everyone loves a cunt! Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, I think they're exell-unt!
You can use them to hold your change, You can use them to kill and maim, You can fill them up with strawberry jam, and squirt it at the baker-man!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, Everyone loves a cunt! Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, I think they're exell-unt!
They come in many sizes and shapes, Some are big, and some are small. Oh my! Yours must have come from an ape! I'm sorry, I have no monkey balls!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, Everyone loves a cunt! Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, I think they're exell-unt!
Cunts are for her, and are not for him But they do grant rewards, even though they are smelly: One a month, they fill to the brim, with delicious raspberry jelly!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, Everyone loves a cunt! Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, I think they're exell-unt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, Everyone loves a cunt! Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt, I think they're exell-unt!
...
So, you see, dear Hadlock There's no need to cry! You're a cunt, and everyone loves you, So please fuck off and die!
to make an observation, VMS is not dead. It is still being used in more places than you would realize, and still generates a lot of revenue for DEC AKA Compaq.
I think I ran into that at work once... and it pissed me off. Let me explain... although most of our HTTP and DB stuff is served from IBM Big Iron, we do have a few Sun E450s and a couple of Sun E1Ks. The Suns are loaded with Solaris 7, as is to be expected, and most of the operators (myself included) use CDE. So I'm helping someone write some tapes the other day, and the machine had CDE, and so dumb old me (thinking I was in Solaris) started pounding out Unix commands. After nothing worked, I looked at the title bar on the Xterm. It wasn't an Xterm, but a "DECTerm". I looked under the table, and sure enough, there was a DEC Alpha box. Ah.
The point of all that ranting is, yes, I agree, DEC still makes money.
I don't usually go over to that side of the server room, so I looked around a bit after finding the DEC machine, and what I found scared me. A bunch of 10-year old DEC daisy-wheel printers and reel-tape machines. I had no idea the company was using such old crap. What's even more scary is that the tape machines are even needed: some of our clients refuse to rewrite their media distribtution software to accept anything besides large tapes. The more "up-to-date" clients get the same information by FTP, but these old fogeys -- and some of these are household names -- are using completely rotted software.
My horror was complete when I discovered something I never thought anyone from my generation would ever see in use: an NEC Astra machine, from the mid-seventies! Complete with a proprietary (read: not PC-compatable in any fashion) OS, loaded from eight-inch floppies. The machine was used right up to when it died, on January 1, 2000. (70s hardware and softare isn't quite as Y2K compliant as today's;-)
I ran and hid behind the IBM fridge racks and haven't been over to that corner since.
I guess I started ranting again. Let me try and make a point out of all that... uh, VMS still pisses me off, and DEC can go to hell.:-D
Personally, I think this is a dumb question to be asking now. Before you moderate me down, listen to why I think that.
Unix is stronger than ever now. You could have had doubts about Unix's future in, say, the late eighties/early nineties. You could have pondered Unix's demise when NT was released (before people found out it sucked). But doubting Unix's power now is just silly. SysV Solaris (post SunOS) has only gotten stronger in the last ten years. Linux and the *BSDs are causing Unix to be more widely used.
No one is losing any marketshare. Unix-like OSes are gaining marketshare. There is a generation of IT managers who bet on NT in the early/mid nineties, and many of them are now switching to Linux, because it works better than NT, it's cheap as hell, it's open source, and they get to think they're part of the "new wave" of technologists.
Digital Unix (Tru64), HP-UX, and AIX haven't enjoyed the same publicity boom, but they all have a niche market, and AFAIK, Compaq, HP, and IBM aren't losing any money over them.
Unix isn't dying. It's entering a new Renaissance.
I suppose I'm a "conservative" hacker because I don't buy into the Redmond attitude that we need OS paradigm shifts every five years. Unix has been around for thirty years because it works. Saying that Unix is dying is like saying that cars with four wheels are just a fad.
I'm fully expecting that when IT managers are looking to do their next round of upgrades, Linux will be picked more often than W2K. IT people are tired of Redmond. Tired of the security problems of a bloated, closed-source OS, tired of service packs, tired of having to run around rebooting servers that forget to malloc their gig of RAM. W2K will be just another round of expensive, kludgely fixes and poor performance.
If Unix was dying, would Apple have chosen to integrate BSD elements into OSX? (Okay, maybe that was a bad example. Apple has never been stellar with their business plan.;-)
This is going to be quite a year for Linux. 1999 was the year that Linux got ready to take on the world, and 2000 is the year that it will.
Ummm - $75.00 for Solaris on as many systems as you want to install it on?
I will admit that I haven't seen that price before, and it is excellent. The only glaring restriction is that it must be used on systems with 8 or less CPUs, but that's not really Linux's market anyway, now is it?;-)
Why use Linux if there's a real Unix available for next to nothing?
There are a few reasons. Portability is one, and architecture support is another. Say I want to make a cheap x86 web server. Solaris rules the Sparc world, but with x86, there would be no reason to choose Solaris over Linux. (I've used x86 Solaris, and it's nothing to brag about.)
Having said all of this, I'd choose FreeBSD over Linux. But the story wasn't about FreeBSD.
Since this is commercial software, I'll assume it's not going to be OSS. All the same, it's very nice to hear "big names" taking Linux seriously.
Most of them have figured out, at least in the IT department, that MS products are useless for mission critical applications. Traditionally, the next step would be commercial Unix, but Linux is actually starting to be placed in the first round of options. The feature/performance hit isn't as bad as it used to be, and it's a hell a lot cheaper than corporate licenses for Solaris or Tru64.
IMHO, IBM's open support of Linux has probably done more than anything else to open corporate minds to it.
This will get even better with 2.4.
It's good to remember that, despite some opinions on Slashdot, Unix always has been and probably always will be primarily a server OS. The desktop is just an added bonus. Linux doesn't have a chance of touching Windows on the desktop for at least three more years anyway. (Things move fast in the computer world, but Average Joe PC is slow to change.)
The marketshare to be gained by Linux in the present is in the server room.
For those of you at work who are curious, but obivously can't visit a URL like "throbbingniggercock.com", it's just an "Under Construction" graphic. No porn, no big whoop.
Don't visit it from work anyway. It could change by the time you read this, and even if not, you'd have a hard time explaining why a page at that URL showed up in the company cache server.;-)
"Oh, it was on Slashdot... no, I wasn't reading Slashdot! It must have been from some spam... yeah, that's the ticket!"
Slashdot Mirror
Remove this line from your .xinitrc:
Hope that helps. ;-)
OTOH, maybe the code is part of the "secret" to the card's performance, and so they don't want competitors to see their fancy rendering algorithms...
...but Diamond also makes drivers for cards based on nVidia chips. If you buy a Viper 770, which is based on the TNT2, you're getting Diamond's drivers in the box, not nVidia's. Or are Diamond's drivers just nVidia's with "enhancements"? I'd like to find that out.
Either way, that means that nVidia is cooperating with the card manufacturers, like Diamond. So if they refuse to provide driver code, I wish they'd at least help out projects like XFree86 when the projects need it.
After all, XFree86 is doing nVidia a favor by trying to support their chips. Otherwise, every Linux gaming machine would have a Voodoo 3.
I remember last summer I tried to install a Viper 770 Ultra in a BSD box, and XFree86 wouldn't even start the server correctly. So, I bought an ATI Xpert 98, for $40, and it's worked fine since. (I wasn't using it for games, and I just tried the Viper because I had a spare one I wasn't using at the time.)
I was impressed with the Xpert 98. Very nice colors, very bright. Much better color than the Viper. The Viper is sitting in a Win32 machine right now, which is used for games (surprise) and playing DVDs (surprise surprise), and on the same monitor, the white output from the Viper is much dimmer than the Xpert 98. I'd love to use the Xpert for playing the DVDs, but I need the Viper's framerates for my games, heh...
My pet project, PerlOS, is a microkernel running through a custom Perl interpreter, and as a bonus, uses a Perl shell for UI. Okay, so the performance isn't so hot ;-), but it's fun to play around with. Anyway, I also provide a Perl-to-binary compiler, and the resulting code will boot on all but the most ancient Amigas. It works pretty well, IMHO, considering...
And yes, it's GPLed.
I read your post, and I say, Hadlock! Hey!
You're being such a motherfuckin' cunt today!
Is it because your parents found out you're a flamin' gay?
Hadlock, you're a cunt, but that's okay...
because...
(1... 2... 1, 2, 3, 4!)
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
You can use them to hold your change,
You can use them to kill and maim,
You can fill them up with strawberry jam,
and squirt it at the baker-man!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
They come in many sizes and shapes,
Some are big, and some are small.
Oh my! Yours must have come from an ape!
I'm sorry, I have no monkey balls!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
Cunts are for her, and are not for him
But they do grant rewards, even though they are smelly:
One a month, they fill to the brim,
with delicious raspberry jelly!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
Everyone loves a cunt!
Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt,
I think they're exell-unt!
...
So, you see, dear Hadlock
There's no need to cry!
You're a cunt, and everyone loves you,
So please fuck off and die!
I think I ran into that at work once... and it pissed me off. Let me explain... although most of our HTTP and DB stuff is served from IBM Big Iron, we do have a few Sun E450s and a couple of Sun E1Ks. The Suns are loaded with Solaris 7, as is to be expected, and most of the operators (myself included) use CDE. So I'm helping someone write some tapes the other day, and the machine had CDE, and so dumb old me (thinking I was in Solaris) started pounding out Unix commands. After nothing worked, I looked at the title bar on the Xterm. It wasn't an Xterm, but a "DECTerm". I looked under the table, and sure enough, there was a DEC Alpha box. Ah.
The point of all that ranting is, yes, I agree, DEC still makes money.
I don't usually go over to that side of the server room, so I looked around a bit after finding the DEC machine, and what I found scared me. A bunch of 10-year old DEC daisy-wheel printers and reel-tape machines. I had no idea the company was using such old crap. What's even more scary is that the tape machines are even needed: some of our clients refuse to rewrite their media distribtution software to accept anything besides large tapes. The more "up-to-date" clients get the same information by FTP, but these old fogeys -- and some of these are household names -- are using completely rotted software.
My horror was complete when I discovered something I never thought anyone from my generation would ever see in use: an NEC Astra machine, from the mid-seventies! Complete with a proprietary (read: not PC-compatable in any fashion) OS, loaded from eight-inch floppies. The machine was used right up to when it died, on January 1, 2000. (70s hardware and softare isn't quite as Y2K compliant as today's ;-)
I ran and hid behind the IBM fridge racks and haven't been over to that corner since.
I guess I started ranting again. Let me try and make a point out of all that... uh, VMS still pisses me off, and DEC can go to hell. :-D
/. Trolls, you have your orders. Set your sights on soc.culture.japan.moderated and blast it into kingdom come.
Amen, brother. However, even though it's not saying much, the alt.eroticas aren't quite what they used to me...
*sigh*... ;-)
Unix is stronger than ever now. You could have had doubts about Unix's future in, say, the late eighties/early nineties. You could have pondered Unix's demise when NT was released (before people found out it sucked). But doubting Unix's power now is just silly. SysV Solaris (post SunOS) has only gotten stronger in the last ten years. Linux and the *BSDs are causing Unix to be more widely used.
No one is losing any marketshare. Unix-like OSes are gaining marketshare. There is a generation of IT managers who bet on NT in the early/mid nineties, and many of them are now switching to Linux, because it works better than NT, it's cheap as hell, it's open source, and they get to think they're part of the "new wave" of technologists.
Digital Unix (Tru64), HP-UX, and AIX haven't enjoyed the same publicity boom, but they all have a niche market, and AFAIK, Compaq, HP, and IBM aren't losing any money over them.
Unix isn't dying. It's entering a new Renaissance.
I suppose I'm a "conservative" hacker because I don't buy into the Redmond attitude that we need OS paradigm shifts every five years. Unix has been around for thirty years because it works. Saying that Unix is dying is like saying that cars with four wheels are just a fad.
I'm fully expecting that when IT managers are looking to do their next round of upgrades, Linux will be picked more often than W2K. IT people are tired of Redmond. Tired of the security problems of a bloated, closed-source OS, tired of service packs, tired of having to run around rebooting servers that forget to malloc their gig of RAM. W2K will be just another round of expensive, kludgely fixes and poor performance.
If Unix was dying, would Apple have chosen to integrate BSD elements into OSX? (Okay, maybe that was a bad example. Apple has never been stellar with their business plan. ;-)
This is going to be quite a year for Linux. 1999 was the year that Linux got ready to take on the world, and 2000 is the year that it will.
Just my two yen.
I will admit that I haven't seen that price before, and it is excellent. The only glaring restriction is that it must be used on systems with 8 or less CPUs, but that's not really Linux's market anyway, now is it? ;-)
There are a few reasons. Portability is one, and architecture support is another. Say I want to make a cheap x86 web server. Solaris rules the Sparc world, but with x86, there would be no reason to choose Solaris over Linux. (I've used x86 Solaris, and it's nothing to brag about.)
Having said all of this, I'd choose FreeBSD over Linux. But the story wasn't about FreeBSD.
Except that SAS has been available on Unix for many years.
Exactly; that's my point. Not that it's available for Linux, it makes Linux that much more viable for corporate clients.
Most of them have figured out, at least in the IT department, that MS products are useless for mission critical applications. Traditionally, the next step would be commercial Unix, but Linux is actually starting to be placed in the first round of options. The feature/performance hit isn't as bad as it used to be, and it's a hell a lot cheaper than corporate licenses for Solaris or Tru64.
IMHO, IBM's open support of Linux has probably done more than anything else to open corporate minds to it.
This will get even better with 2.4.
It's good to remember that, despite some opinions on Slashdot, Unix always has been and probably always will be primarily a server OS. The desktop is just an added bonus. Linux doesn't have a chance of touching Windows on the desktop for at least three more years anyway. (Things move fast in the computer world, but Average Joe PC is slow to change.)
The marketshare to be gained by Linux in the present is in the server room.
For those of you at work who are curious, but obivously can't visit a URL like "throbbingniggercock.com", it's just an "Under Construction" graphic. No porn, no big whoop.
Don't visit it from work anyway. It could change by the time you read this, and even if not, you'd have a hard time explaining why a page at that URL showed up in the company cache server. ;-)
"Oh, it was on Slashdot... no, I wasn't reading Slashdot! It must have been from some spam... yeah, that's the ticket!"
Probably not, since the offender is in a different country, and would have to agree to the arbitration, obviously. :-)