If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Do we really still count HP as 'being in the market' for commercial Unix? Last time I checked HPUX was as dead as a commercial Unix OS can be, and that was 5 years ago. Which wasn't surprising because it's probably the most archaic and outdated OS I've ever used, a real masochist OS.
If I'm a douchebag and you're actually serious about what you posted (which I highly doubt), then you are a psychopath (actually people who get off on power and pain fit that profile most of the times, no philosophy involved in that).
Also, I found your reply wrote mildly amusing, seeing that literally every assumption about who/what/where I would be is false.
I just don't get how people can make this argument, most of the time justifying it saying 'it has only so and so few brain cells'.
I'm not a crab an neither is anyone saying crabs can't 'feel pain' like humans do. But I do know that there's lots of other animals that are not human, but that show without any doubt that they can suffer from pain much like humans do. Somehow most people who think crustaceans don't 'suffer' do agree that dogs or cats can suffer from pain, probably because they can identify with a suffering pet much more easily than they can identify with a suffering crab. The fact that you call assuming crabs 'feel' anything is 'unwanted' seems like you don't really care that much and feel better not thinking they might actually suffer.
For me, the fact that crabs have simple brains and no 'reason' whatsoever doesn't imply that they can't experience pain and suffer from it like other animals or humans. You only need nerve cells to transmit the pain stimuli, and crabs have these. So why not just assume that being boiled alive isn't exactly a pleasant experience for crabs and lobsters and swiftly drive a pin through their brains before boiling them?
Don't know why you seem to want to make a mud-throwing fight out of this, but you can stop now, I don't really care that much about your esteem of my programming skills. As long as my employer does I'm happy, and apparently he is because I'm making a really good living off of it.
Just let me add that '1080p (MPEG) video' sounds a bit like 'a 300MPH car (when pushed down a 20-story building)'. People don't generally encode HD video in MPEG, because MPEG (at least MPEGI/II) was specifically intended for SD video. Compared to VC-1 or H264 (which you now seem to agree you cannot play on your PS3) it's a ridiculously simple and lightweight codec, but also completely unsuitable for HD video. An SD video in MPEGII looks almost about as good as one at 1080p resolution if you use a good scaler (which actually _is_ in spu-medialib, maybe that's what you're getting so high on?).
So I'll give you that: you probably *can* play '1080p video (if it isn't interlaced like most MPEGII content anyway)' but I still don't think you can play 'high-definition video encoded in one of the modern codecs that are actually used for this purpose'. Don't know about the state of MPEG4 (divx/xvid) on Cell, but that's not what people use for HD content either. So all in all the PS3 is still not nearly a capable HD video player, which was what I was arguing before you started yelling back.
And AVI is not a video codec by the way, but a container format...
You sound a lot like that unsolo dude himself you know? Like a Sony/IBM advertisement.
Anyway, I'm not calling you a liar, maybe you do have some video's that somewhat work in 1080p, maybe you don't, I don't know but I highly doubt that you actually have a setup that reliably plays random 1080p videos. The reason is that no-one I know of can confirm an OSS player exists that can do that, and there's loads of people confirming even 720p MPEG with mplayer -vo ps3 is choppy and h264 is a slideshow. In other words just like it was a year ago. I can't find any videos on Youtube that seem very suspect to be fake either, and there's no-one on the dev forums saying he got 1080p h264 working either. But all the better if you can prove me wrong...
If I'd be able to write a codec on the SPE's: I don't know. I gave up when all hope for GPU acceleration on linux was lost. Just like most other people hacking away at the PS3. There's hardly a scene left for PS3 linux, mostly straightforward porting of simple emulators, and besides that some research stuff like Gallium3D.
Sure you do... Nevermind spu-medialib only accelerates IDCT and some scaling, and doesn't accelerate H.264 at all, but sure you get smooth framerates at 1080p on non-accelerated framebuffer video:-/
I'd actually love to see some evidence...
I don't deny the PS3 is a great platform to test your Cell programming skills and that people are putting it to good use to accelerate stuff like Mesa, but as a video player solution the PS3's is basically worthless, and at the speed things are moving now the PS4 will be out before you get anything even remotely comparable to XBMC on an XBOX 1. I'd say it's better to just accept the fact than waste time now trying it out, unless it's just for the fun of with.
Actually I know the guy who's working on spu-medialib, he's unsolo from ps2dev.org. I've actually been exchanging some thoughts with him back when I was playing around trying to do video decoding on the PS3. Anyway, spu-medialib is far from complete and doesn't nearly make up for the lack of GPU acceleration, there hasn't been any major improvements since back when I was playing around with PS3 linux. You can still forget even getting 720p playback on PS3 linux. Don't know about the state Mesa/Gallium/anything else to do 3D on the Cell, but judging from the activity on PS3 dev forums there's nothing interesting for end-users there either.
Listen, I've tried PS3 linux before, I know what the hardware is, and I know what the limitations of PS3 linux are. These have not changed (apart from the bluetooth thing), and these are not bound to change. ie: the 2nd half of memory will always be basically useless, and the RSX will never be fully accessible from PS3 linux.
So effectively, there is no hope PS3 linux will get more useful than it already is, which is how it was when I checked it out. I've been running it for a few months which was about a year ago, and back then it broke 3 times on firmware updates. How you would know better how much time I spent with it eludes me...
If you don't believe what I'm saying about PS3 linux: go ahead and try it anyway, I couldn't care less, not my PS3, not my spare time. Just find out yourself how terrific it works and how much I'm trolling here. Don't see why I would be trolling about PS3 linux on Slashdot anyway but hey, some people here obviously feel better screaming troll all the time.
I said 'last time I checked' the bluetooth did not work, after which I haven't bothered to check on it again because it was already obvious it sucks for anything but Cell development.
And using the ps3vram driver you do _not_ have full access to the 256 MB video RAM, you can use it, but the bandwidth is terrible because it actually uses the GPU to DMA memory back and forth to a window in (directly accessible) XDR memory, because the bandwidth of the 2nd half of memory to the CPU is about 8MB/s (or something similarly slow, you get the point). The way it's used with ps3vram this is only useful as swap space, and even then swapping to the HD is almost as fast.
You obviously don't really know much about how PS3 linux works at all and are astroturfing.
I'd recommend not to. It's dog slow because you can only use 256 MB RAM, you don't have video acceleration, last time I checked I didn't have bluetooth (which means no wireless keyboard and mouse and no sixaxis), and Sony regularly (mostly unintentionally) breaks the system with firmware updates (at least up to the point you need to spend time to get it booting again). Unless you really want to program the Cell CPU Linux on the PS3 is pretty much worthless. Aside from some simple emulators for ancient systems you can forget doing anything useful on it.
The PS3 programming scene is also about as dead as it can be. I've been lurking on ps2dev for years and it's still the same 5 people and nothing has really been achieved yet...
Compared to *NIX development on Solaris, even *NIX development on Windows is more pleasant, so I wouldn't take that as a benchmark 'how *NIX' Linux actually is from a developer viewpoint.
I've been doing *NIX development on a lot of different OS's and versions for the pas few years, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, Solaris, Linux (from RH 7/RHEL 4 to Ubuntu 8.10), OS X and HPUX. About any flavour of *NIX you will encounter as a software engineer nowadays.
My experiences where that BSD is indeed the best base-line platform for *NIX development. If it compiles on BSD, it will most likely also compile on Linux, OS X and Solaris (unless you have an older Sun Studio release or didn't install one of the gazillion optional packages for proper userland tools and libraries). This is not true the other way around: stuff that works great on any Linux system might not work at all on BSD or OS X. Initially it frustrated me, in an 'always those damn BSD boxes' kind of way, but eventually I started to appreciate it more and more. Turned out I wasn't that much of a *NIX expert after all, only having worked with Linux. The code I write now is much better and although I still use Linux as my primary development platform, my code generally works out of the box on all other *NIX systems.
On a side note: Solaris is simply terrible for software development. Every Solaris system is different, some do have this and that libraries, others don't. Some have GNU userland, some have crippled, incomplete userland tools with totally idiotic command-line interfaces. Some have compiler versions that kind of work, some can't even compile boost::shared_ptr. Some have GCC, some have Sun CC. Some have only STLPORT4 standard C++ libraries, some have only libCstd, some others have both but if you mix them your program might or might not link, but it definitely won't work. If you want to link in 3rd party binary stuff that's only available linked with libCstd you're basically screwed: forget about using Boost or any other development libraries that rely heavily on templates because libCstd is nonstandard, incomplete garbage that breaks perfectly valid C++ code.
It's a complete nightmare, a complete disaster, and if you'd ask me Sun should just kill Solaris alltogether and just release their own Linux distro (which they're more or less doing with OpenSolaris already, except it's not Linux)
With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of the past.
Right... So you expect less of a mess when you have different developers hacking away at the same files without a revision-control system to integrate what everyone is doing?
You're somewhat in the right direction, but not entirely right. The main difficulty programming the PS3 is not that it's particularly hard to break up a game engine/ AI/ graphics effects/ whatever into enough threads to keep the PS3's SPU's busy, the hardest part is actually scheduling the threads to prevent memory contention, stalling SPU processes, communicating inputs & outputs etc. It's a step back from writing code and having the compiler do all the hard work, only having to track the interaction between 2, maybe 3 threads that run all the time. With the PS3 you'd be handling the same 2 or 3 threads on the PPU, plus tens, maybe even 100s of 'micro-threads' distributed over the SPU's, constantly starting, pulling data from RAM, spending some time processing, pushing back the result, etc.
It doesn't really help that game engines are generally based on existing codebases and ported between architectures all the time either. It's not easy to extract high performance from a game engine that has to run well on the homogenuous 3-core architecture of the 360 as well as on the heterogenuous 2+7 core architecture of the PS3. And let's not forget the split-memory architecture, where half of the main memory effectively has zero bandwidth to the CPU and should only be accessed from the GPU. Which leaves only 256MB of RAM or a major headache laying out your data in memory.
Last but not least you're right about the GPU: the 360 GPU has significantly better fill-rates, especially when complex shaders are used. The Cell in the PS3 can be used to offload graphics stuff and not be limited by shader performance, but again it's not easy.
I believe the KZ2 engine was designed from the ground up for the PS3 architecture, which probably explains why it looks so good compared to cross-platform PS3 titles.
Canada is a responsible member of the international community that hasn't made threats to wipe neighbors off the map, allowed criminals within it's own population to overrun foreign embassies and supplied terrorist groups with financial support/weapons.
Well, maybe Canada hasn't, but both the US and Israel come pretty close. And that's not even considering they actually followed up on some of those threats. And spreading lies and FUD about terrorists, WOMD and the nuclear and/or missile programs of the 'rogue states' we should be so fucking scared about.
Haven't heard much complaining about Pakistan lately (note: missiles and nuclear technology), but that's probably because they are so helpful 'catching Bin Laden' (enemy of the state #1 you know).
Please stop basing your world views on the propaganda spread by the US and all those other 'responsible members of the international community', your only fooling yourself. We are being lied to and told half-truths by our prime minister here in the Netherlands, who still refuses to acknowledge Iraq was invaded based on false intelligence, and is still desperately trying to prevent the truth being uncovered. And we like to view our country as one of the most democratic and free in this world.
Have you heard of Swig [swig.org] you Bulgarian sodomite?
Have you ever *used* it?? As much as I like and use SWIG (even for my daily development), wrapping something huge as the complete Gnome libraries with SWIG is not going to be fun, especially not if you want bindings for any possible language (and not to forget: every interpreter version). You'll end up with of 100MB+ sourcefiles to compile *for each script language*, that compile to multiple huge shared objects *for each script language*, and these libraries will not be portable between different interpreter versions. And let's not forget that even SWIG cannot wrap all C++ constructs, and you will have to write tons of typemaps for all the C++ classes and structures that you want to use natively in your scripting language. Which means you need to be an expert in the intricate details of all the scripting languages you want to support.
All in all, SWIG is great and you can absolutely use it to create scripting bindings for Gnome, but calling it a substitute for the portable C-style bindings Gnome now has is just nonsense.
(I won't even mention Objective C, which is an abomination unto Nuggan)
And why exactly if I may ask? I'm not an objective-C expert but to my knowledge it's exactly what most people think C++ is: C with support for objects, period. For many tasks it's actually a really nice language that combines some of the main advantages of C++ (objects, inheritance, etc) with the advantages of C (small and clean syntax, fast compilation, fast execution).
So if you don't need full-fledged C++ or know you aren't proficient enough using its powerful features properly (like so many developers that think they do, C++ is still pretty difficult to really master), Objective-C is the perfect middle ground.
US fridges tend to be, well... gigantic, at least compared to the average fridge over here. That's why most people I know indeed have a second one in the garage/basement: you just cannot fit a crate of beer plus all your other fridgatives in a single fridge.
So this doesn't sound like a totally stupid idea, it might actually be a pretty good one.
What's convenient about a magazine you cannot easily read while taking a bath or take with you on while you go camping without having to worry about running out of batteries or breaking it.
Actually, MS SQL is pretty good, even as SQL servers go. In fact, it's one of those rare Microsoft products that I could appreciate when I was still working with them in a previous job.
Especially in a Windows-centric environment I can understand choosing MS SQL over other (even more expensive) proprietary solution or an open-source server such as Postgres or MySQL.
And let me add just for clarity that I'm only respondng to your own comment that said you will slow down your computer when you turn off Aero, because the desktop is not GPU accelerated anymore (note again: these are your own words). I'm not passing judgement on the 'coolness' or necessity of such features, because of course it is pretty obvious that you can use the GPU for cool stuff, it's what Linux and OS X do as well (albeit better/more functional, especially OS X), and that's what I use on a daily basis. So please keep your comments about 'narrow minded techies' on '80 character displays' out of this.
Let's just stop here because you obviously don't know much about how video cards work. You can 'cache' anything you like in video RAM without using the 3D capabilities at all, just like you can DMA stuff around without taxing the CPU, and draw stuff to the screen with just a few FIFO commands, it is not, (I repeat: it is NOT) what makes your system 'slow' unless you want to blur title bars, wiggle windows when you move them or add all kinds of other visual effects just because you can.
The only valid point you make is that with a full-blown GPU-accelerated desktop you can throw in much more eye candy without slowing down the system. My point is, that if you don't need/want/care about this eye-candy, about everything essentially already _is_ GPU-accelerated, even without Aero. Windows Vista doesn't NEED anything besides age-old window drawing, it just offers you the option to throw (in my opinion) useless eye at you that only distracts from the actual GUI.
Also I doubt your claim that Aero actually does TTF rendering on the GPU, do you have any references to back that up?
No I'm telling you video cards from 10 years back already provide hardware accelerated blitting (even translucent), filling, rectangle drawing, etc. So your desktop _is_ hardware accelarated by the video card without anything Aero, and it has been like this for years.
Of course you don't get all the fancy shader tricks but like I said, not everyone actually appreciates those.
Slashdot Mirror
If the deal goes through, only IBM, HP, and Fujitsu will be left as major competitors in the market for commercial Unix.
Do we really still count HP as 'being in the market' for commercial Unix? Last time I checked HPUX was as dead as a commercial Unix OS can be, and that was 5 years ago. Which wasn't surprising because it's probably the most archaic and outdated OS I've ever used, a real masochist OS.
If I'm a douchebag and you're actually serious about what you posted (which I highly doubt), then you are a psychopath (actually people who get off on power and pain fit that profile most of the times, no philosophy involved in that).
Also, I found your reply wrote mildly amusing, seeing that literally every assumption about who/what/where I would be is false.
I just don't get how people can make this argument, most of the time justifying it saying 'it has only so and so few brain cells'.
I'm not a crab an neither is anyone saying crabs can't 'feel pain' like humans do. But I do know that there's lots of other animals that are not human, but that show without any doubt that they can suffer from pain much like humans do. Somehow most people who think crustaceans don't 'suffer' do agree that dogs or cats can suffer from pain, probably because they can identify with a suffering pet much more easily than they can identify with a suffering crab. The fact that you call assuming crabs 'feel' anything is 'unwanted' seems like you don't really care that much and feel better not thinking they might actually suffer.
For me, the fact that crabs have simple brains and no 'reason' whatsoever doesn't imply that they can't experience pain and suffer from it like other animals or humans. You only need nerve cells to transmit the pain stimuli, and crabs have these. So why not just assume that being boiled alive isn't exactly a pleasant experience for crabs and lobsters and swiftly drive a pin through their brains before boiling them?
Sure it does, and it is still 'basically useless', because you can only use it for swap and it's only marginally faster than swapping to disk.
Interesting to see how hard it apparently is to properly read what people are saying :-/
Don't know why you seem to want to make a mud-throwing fight out of this, but you can stop now, I don't really care that much about your esteem of my programming skills. As long as my employer does I'm happy, and apparently he is because I'm making a really good living off of it.
Just let me add that '1080p (MPEG) video' sounds a bit like 'a 300MPH car (when pushed down a 20-story building)'. People don't generally encode HD video in MPEG, because MPEG (at least MPEGI/II) was specifically intended for SD video. Compared to VC-1 or H264 (which you now seem to agree you cannot play on your PS3) it's a ridiculously simple and lightweight codec, but also completely unsuitable for HD video. An SD video in MPEGII looks almost about as good as one at 1080p resolution if you use a good scaler (which actually _is_ in spu-medialib, maybe that's what you're getting so high on?).
So I'll give you that: you probably *can* play '1080p video (if it isn't interlaced like most MPEGII content anyway)' but I still don't think you can play 'high-definition video encoded in one of the modern codecs that are actually used for this purpose'. Don't know about the state of MPEG4 (divx/xvid) on Cell, but that's not what people use for HD content either. So all in all the PS3 is still not nearly a capable HD video player, which was what I was arguing before you started yelling back.
And AVI is not a video codec by the way, but a container format...
You sound a lot like that unsolo dude himself you know? Like a Sony/IBM advertisement.
Anyway, I'm not calling you a liar, maybe you do have some video's that somewhat work in 1080p, maybe you don't, I don't know but I highly doubt that you actually have a setup that reliably plays random 1080p videos. The reason is that no-one I know of can confirm an OSS player exists that can do that, and there's loads of people confirming even 720p MPEG with mplayer -vo ps3 is choppy and h264 is a slideshow. In other words just like it was a year ago. I can't find any videos on Youtube that seem very suspect to be fake either, and there's no-one on the dev forums saying he got 1080p h264 working either. But all the better if you can prove me wrong...
If I'd be able to write a codec on the SPE's: I don't know. I gave up when all hope for GPU acceleration on linux was lost. Just like most other people hacking away at the PS3. There's hardly a scene left for PS3 linux, mostly straightforward porting of simple emulators, and besides that some research stuff like Gallium3D.
Sure you do... Nevermind spu-medialib only accelerates IDCT and some scaling, and doesn't accelerate H.264 at all, but sure you get smooth framerates at 1080p on non-accelerated framebuffer video :-/
I'd actually love to see some evidence...
I don't deny the PS3 is a great platform to test your Cell programming skills and that people are putting it to good use to accelerate stuff like Mesa, but as a video player solution the PS3's is basically worthless, and at the speed things are moving now the PS4 will be out before you get anything even remotely comparable to XBMC on an XBOX 1. I'd say it's better to just accept the fact than waste time now trying it out, unless it's just for the fun of with.
Actually I know the guy who's working on spu-medialib, he's unsolo from ps2dev.org. I've actually been exchanging some thoughts with him back when I was playing around trying to do video decoding on the PS3. Anyway, spu-medialib is far from complete and doesn't nearly make up for the lack of GPU acceleration, there hasn't been any major improvements since back when I was playing around with PS3 linux. You can still forget even getting 720p playback on PS3 linux. Don't know about the state Mesa/Gallium/anything else to do 3D on the Cell, but judging from the activity on PS3 dev forums there's nothing interesting for end-users there either.
Listen, I've tried PS3 linux before, I know what the hardware is, and I know what the limitations of PS3 linux are. These have not changed (apart from the bluetooth thing), and these are not bound to change. ie: the 2nd half of memory will always be basically useless, and the RSX will never be fully accessible from PS3 linux.
So effectively, there is no hope PS3 linux will get more useful than it already is, which is how it was when I checked it out. I've been running it for a few months which was about a year ago, and back then it broke 3 times on firmware updates. How you would know better how much time I spent with it eludes me...
If you don't believe what I'm saying about PS3 linux: go ahead and try it anyway, I couldn't care less, not my PS3, not my spare time. Just find out yourself how terrific it works and how much I'm trolling here. Don't see why I would be trolling about PS3 linux on Slashdot anyway but hey, some people here obviously feel better screaming troll all the time.
I said 'last time I checked' the bluetooth did not work, after which I haven't bothered to check on it again because it was already obvious it sucks for anything but Cell development.
And using the ps3vram driver you do _not_ have full access to the 256 MB video RAM, you can use it, but the bandwidth is terrible because it actually uses the GPU to DMA memory back and forth to a window in (directly accessible) XDR memory, because the bandwidth of the 2nd half of memory to the CPU is about 8MB/s (or something similarly slow, you get the point). The way it's used with ps3vram this is only useful as swap space, and even then swapping to the HD is almost as fast.
You obviously don't really know much about how PS3 linux works at all and are astroturfing.
I'd recommend not to. It's dog slow because you can only use 256 MB RAM, you don't have video acceleration, last time I checked I didn't have bluetooth (which means no wireless keyboard and mouse and no sixaxis), and Sony regularly (mostly unintentionally) breaks the system with firmware updates (at least up to the point you need to spend time to get it booting again). Unless you really want to program the Cell CPU Linux on the PS3 is pretty much worthless. Aside from some simple emulators for ancient systems you can forget doing anything useful on it.
The PS3 programming scene is also about as dead as it can be. I've been lurking on ps2dev for years and it's still the same 5 people and nothing has really been achieved yet...
Compared to *NIX development on Solaris, even *NIX development on Windows is more pleasant, so I wouldn't take that as a benchmark 'how *NIX' Linux actually is from a developer viewpoint.
I've been doing *NIX development on a lot of different OS's and versions for the pas few years, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, SunOS, Solaris, Linux (from RH 7/RHEL 4 to Ubuntu 8.10), OS X and HPUX. About any flavour of *NIX you will encounter as a software engineer nowadays.
My experiences where that BSD is indeed the best base-line platform for *NIX development. If it compiles on BSD, it will most likely also compile on Linux, OS X and Solaris (unless you have an older Sun Studio release or didn't install one of the gazillion optional packages for proper userland tools and libraries). This is not true the other way around: stuff that works great on any Linux system might not work at all on BSD or OS X. Initially it frustrated me, in an 'always those damn BSD boxes' kind of way, but eventually I started to appreciate it more and more. Turned out I wasn't that much of a *NIX expert after all, only having worked with Linux. The code I write now is much better and although I still use Linux as my primary development platform, my code generally works out of the box on all other *NIX systems.
On a side note: Solaris is simply terrible for software development. Every Solaris system is different, some do have this and that libraries, others don't. Some have GNU userland, some have crippled, incomplete userland tools with totally idiotic command-line interfaces. Some have compiler versions that kind of work, some can't even compile boost::shared_ptr. Some have GCC, some have Sun CC. Some have only STLPORT4 standard C++ libraries, some have only libCstd, some others have both but if you mix them your program might or might not link, but it definitely won't work. If you want to link in 3rd party binary stuff that's only available linked with libCstd you're basically screwed: forget about using Boost or any other development libraries that rely heavily on templates because libCstd is nonstandard, incomplete garbage that breaks perfectly valid C++ code.
It's a complete nightmare, a complete disaster, and if you'd ask me Sun should just kill Solaris alltogether and just release their own Linux distro (which they're more or less doing with OpenSolaris already, except it's not Linux)
With a little care and extra work, it seems as though we'll be able to make the system such that multiple developers can collaboratively edit the source, making messy merges a thing of the past.
Right... So you expect less of a mess when you have different developers hacking away at the same files without a revision-control system to integrate what everyone is doing?
You made me laugh, thanks!
For the record: I have a PS3 myself, and I like it.
Dumbass...
You're somewhat in the right direction, but not entirely right. The main difficulty programming the PS3 is not that it's particularly hard to break up a game engine/ AI/ graphics effects/ whatever into enough threads to keep the PS3's SPU's busy, the hardest part is actually scheduling the threads to prevent memory contention, stalling SPU processes, communicating inputs & outputs etc. It's a step back from writing code and having the compiler do all the hard work, only having to track the interaction between 2, maybe 3 threads that run all the time. With the PS3 you'd be handling the same 2 or 3 threads on the PPU, plus tens, maybe even 100s of 'micro-threads' distributed over the SPU's, constantly starting, pulling data from RAM, spending some time processing, pushing back the result, etc.
It doesn't really help that game engines are generally based on existing codebases and ported between architectures all the time either. It's not easy to extract high performance from a game engine that has to run well on the homogenuous 3-core architecture of the 360 as well as on the heterogenuous 2+7 core architecture of the PS3. And let's not forget the split-memory architecture, where half of the main memory effectively has zero bandwidth to the CPU and should only be accessed from the GPU. Which leaves only 256MB of RAM or a major headache laying out your data in memory.
Last but not least you're right about the GPU: the 360 GPU has significantly better fill-rates, especially when complex shaders are used. The Cell in the PS3 can be used to offload graphics stuff and not be limited by shader performance, but again it's not easy.
I believe the KZ2 engine was designed from the ground up for the PS3 architecture, which probably explains why it looks so good compared to cross-platform PS3 titles.
Canada is a responsible member of the international community that hasn't made threats to wipe neighbors off the map, allowed criminals within it's own population to overrun foreign embassies and supplied terrorist groups with financial support/weapons.
Well, maybe Canada hasn't, but both the US and Israel come pretty close. And that's not even considering they actually followed up on some of those threats. And spreading lies and FUD about terrorists, WOMD and the nuclear and/or missile programs of the 'rogue states' we should be so fucking scared about.
Haven't heard much complaining about Pakistan lately (note: missiles and nuclear technology), but that's probably because they are so helpful 'catching Bin Laden' (enemy of the state #1 you know).
Please stop basing your world views on the propaganda spread by the US and all those other 'responsible members of the international community', your only fooling yourself. We are being lied to and told half-truths by our prime minister here in the Netherlands, who still refuses to acknowledge Iraq was invaded based on false intelligence, and is still desperately trying to prevent the truth being uncovered. And we like to view our country as one of the most democratic and free in this world.
Have you heard of Swig [swig.org] you Bulgarian sodomite?
Have you ever *used* it?? As much as I like and use SWIG (even for my daily development), wrapping something huge as the complete Gnome libraries with SWIG is not going to be fun, especially not if you want bindings for any possible language (and not to forget: every interpreter version). You'll end up with of 100MB+ sourcefiles to compile *for each script language*, that compile to multiple huge shared objects *for each script language*, and these libraries will not be portable between different interpreter versions. And let's not forget that even SWIG cannot wrap all C++ constructs, and you will have to write tons of typemaps for all the C++ classes and structures that you want to use natively in your scripting language. Which means you need to be an expert in the intricate details of all the scripting languages you want to support.
All in all, SWIG is great and you can absolutely use it to create scripting bindings for Gnome, but calling it a substitute for the portable C-style bindings Gnome now has is just nonsense.
(I won't even mention Objective C, which is an abomination unto Nuggan)
And why exactly if I may ask? I'm not an objective-C expert but to my knowledge it's exactly what most people think C++ is: C with support for objects, period. For many tasks it's actually a really nice language that combines some of the main advantages of C++ (objects, inheritance, etc) with the advantages of C (small and clean syntax, fast compilation, fast execution).
So if you don't need full-fledged C++ or know you aren't proficient enough using its powerful features properly (like so many developers that think they do, C++ is still pretty difficult to really master), Objective-C is the perfect middle ground.
US fridges tend to be, well... gigantic, at least compared to the average fridge over here. That's why most people I know indeed have a second one in the garage/basement: you just cannot fit a crate of beer plus all your other fridgatives in a single fridge.
So this doesn't sound like a totally stupid idea, it might actually be a pretty good one.
I only read DDJ while taking a bath, not much else to do while you're in it and reading a book isn't ideal either if you don't want to ruin them ;-)
What's convenient about a magazine you cannot easily read while taking a bath or take with you on while you go camping without having to worry about running out of batteries or breaking it.
Actually, MS SQL is pretty good, even as SQL servers go. In fact, it's one of those rare Microsoft products that I could appreciate when I was still working with them in a previous job.
Especially in a Windows-centric environment I can understand choosing MS SQL over other (even more expensive) proprietary solution or an open-source server such as Postgres or MySQL.
And let me add just for clarity that I'm only respondng to your own comment that said you will slow down your computer when you turn off Aero, because the desktop is not GPU accelerated anymore (note again: these are your own words). I'm not passing judgement on the 'coolness' or necessity of such features, because of course it is pretty obvious that you can use the GPU for cool stuff, it's what Linux and OS X do as well (albeit better/more functional, especially OS X), and that's what I use on a daily basis. So please keep your comments about 'narrow minded techies' on '80 character displays' out of this.
Let's just stop here because you obviously don't know much about how video cards work. You can 'cache' anything you like in video RAM without using the 3D capabilities at all, just like you can DMA stuff around without taxing the CPU, and draw stuff to the screen with just a few FIFO commands, it is not, (I repeat: it is NOT) what makes your system 'slow' unless you want to blur title bars, wiggle windows when you move them or add all kinds of other visual effects just because you can.
The only valid point you make is that with a full-blown GPU-accelerated desktop you can throw in much more eye candy without slowing down the system. My point is, that if you don't need/want/care about this eye-candy, about everything essentially already _is_ GPU-accelerated, even without Aero. Windows Vista doesn't NEED anything besides age-old window drawing, it just offers you the option to throw (in my opinion) useless eye at you that only distracts from the actual GUI.
Also I doubt your claim that Aero actually does TTF rendering on the GPU, do you have any references to back that up?
No I'm telling you video cards from 10 years back already provide hardware accelerated blitting (even translucent), filling, rectangle drawing, etc. So your desktop _is_ hardware accelarated by the video card without anything Aero, and it has been like this for years.
Of course you don't get all the fancy shader tricks but like I said, not everyone actually appreciates those.