Something I really miss from SGI's tech spec listings nowadays are the exact capabilities. I remember the good old days when Infinite Reality came out, and they listed maximum hardware supported antialiasing(8x8 at the time, 4x4 being default). *Sighs*
A major error: The O2 is NOT the same box as the Octane 2. The Octane Two can be maxed out with 8GB RAM, has the same graphics stuff, can have two CPU's, and has a fast memory solution as well, in the form of a fast crossbar switch. It was the O2, the little cute desktop box that had UMA, and a maximum of 1GB of RAM.
Which resolution was the "realtime" rendering done at? And did they only do an OpenGL playback of the scene, or did they actually do a full render(With special drivers and software to utilize the hardware)?
The PoV-ray benchmark is kinda f*cked up... Of course they aren't gonna notice a large difference with such a simple scene with such simple settings and such a low resolution. For a better measurement of difference, choose several different scenes of varying complexity(Some with lots of surfaces, some with lots of textures, some with complicated lights... You get the picture), run them at a high resolution. Oh, and define a baseline for the benchmark also. One test that is pretty decent is the dresser.rib scene that is included with BMRT. Simple geometry, but highly complex radiosity solution. Takes a while to render, and gives more sense of the difference between chips.
However, you also have your fair share of good ideas, such as the Harrier and the Tornado. And the Apache that will be license-built in the UK is gonna go through a certain amount of upgrades also.
Heh, about tanks:
The US M1 series are dependant upon the British Chobham armor for their survivability. Even the upgraded version for the M1A2's were made in the UK. The REALLY fun part is that the British more or less gave away the Chobham armor to the US(1 million dollars for armor like that is just peanuts) in the 70's, which shows pretty clearly that you have better stuff in the UK(For example the Challenger 2, which with it's upgrades has all the features of a fully tricked out M1A2, plus better range, better armor and a better cannon)
For more information, read through the only objective sources about military hardware available to the public, the publications from Jane's, in this case 'Armored Fighting Vehicles of the World'.
You forget something. In real war, the commander(If he can see the threat) only issues an order to the relevant unit to take care of the threat bearing down on him, then he moves on to looking over the situation again. Say, for example, a major, commander of an armour battalion sees an enemy armour company bearing down on one of his companies. He then orders one of his aides to issue a warning of the threat and perhaps an order to that unit to meet and take care of that threat. The actual implementation of the orders are up to the captain commanding the company in question.
The above hasn't been covered in computer-based strategy games yet, even though Close Combat is nearing the goal.
Ground Control is good because it focuses on tactics, and, unlike Red Alert etc, is not as much a practice in who can click the button the fastest and build the most tanks(The group I used to play with eventually only played on maps without seas, because they hated the cruisers, and couldn't handle Combined Arms warfare).
There's a much better pressrelease at http://www.playstation.com/news/press_example.asp? ReleaseID=9573
However, I would not like to see Linux on this one, and definitely not GCC either. Both suck in their MIPS-implementation. And to the one's who talked about porting Maya etc from X86 to MIPS. Why??? Maya and SoftImage already exists for SGI's MIPS-machines, and that would be MUCH more simple to port =)
Besides, one company that has already proclaimed support for this piece of hunky cool hardware is Alias|Wavefront, makers of Maya.
A REAL geek is on parties where there are girls present. A REAL geek tries to convert the girls over to geekhood. And of course getting laid. I know I do get laid and try to teach the girls the basics of computers.
And once again we thank Slashdot for a link to an article with little substance and lots of GPL/Linux-hype. End of rant.
I can't see no real reason to use Linux in a gaming console, other than to placate Linux-uber-alles-people. Having such a generalised OS such as Linux defeats the purpose of the console, which is to be a sleak and fast machine with little overhead, dedicated to a single or only a few tasks. And Linux is also too monolithic to be of use in a console. The entire system in the PS2 for example, is smaller than a minimal Linux-install with basic commands and graphics-support. It's also optimised for running the few tasks it's designed for, even though you can run other things on it(We're currently playing around with a SETI-client for it, just for fun).
And developing games for Linux? *Shudder* That's a goddamn nightmare, if you want it to run on as many potential systems as possible. Hell, on the private project I'm involved in, we've had less troubles porting from Irix to BeOS and Windows than with porting to Linux.
Heh.... That reminds me of the portables MapCom in Sweden makes. They are made for GIS and CAD. Goodies such as dual P3/P3 Xeon, Tornado 1200 or Oxygen GVX1. you can put an even faster card in it if you want to. Total possible RAM is 2Gb and you can get it with Ultra 3 SCSI etc. Fun toys....
"Yup, but some bits are more random than others. With a static camera, there will be bits that are entirely determined from variations in light and sensitivity."
Chromatic and luminicence-variations would also add to a random seed for encryption. The best would be to constantly change light- and colour-intensity, in addition to the motion of the "lava".
"There's likely to be enough bits to seed a RNG, but the extensive work I've heard of being done by eliminating impossible combinations(31 round Skipjack was defeated in greater than brute force, while official Skipjack is 32 round!) leaves me wondering."
Heh, I prefer military algorithms. FRA in Sweden has done some absolutely stunning things =)
Now to correct some errors: Part of Africa uses GSM, South Africa among them. France uses Secam, PAL is the big standard in Europe(With the best quality, I might add). I think GSM is starting to spread in Asia too, especially after Ericsson selling large amounts of cell-phone systems. Darth Shinobi, Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor of CoJ "May the dark side of the force be with you"
Recently there has been released a few cheaper boards with geometry- and Lighting-acceleration, most notably 3DLabs Oxygen GVX1, although it costs up to a $1000. Interesting to see how the GeFroce 256 can compare to the GVX1. The TNT2 sucks at OpenGL in comparison to such cards.
Darth Shinobi - Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor of CoJ "May the dark side of the force be with you"
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"1. because the source is available. They can find bugs, suggest patches, and change the code. (lesser)
2. Because in all likelyhood, the OSS guy DIDN'T MAKE ANY MONEY. "
And yet somehow I get the feeling that you think that virus coders should have to pay fines...
Something I really miss from SGI's tech spec listings nowadays are the exact capabilities. I remember the good old days when Infinite Reality came out, and they listed maximum hardware supported antialiasing(8x8 at the time, 4x4 being default). *Sighs*
Actually, Maya would be at the very top of the Ultra-High End category...
Haven't found any performance reports for that embedded processor yet...
However, check out some of Sierra-PMC's offerings.
Oops, sorry, should have taken more caffeine... Omit that stuff about UMA. My apologies
A major error: The O2 is NOT the same box as the Octane 2. The Octane Two can be maxed out with 8GB RAM, has the same graphics stuff, can have two CPU's, and has a fast memory solution as well, in the form of a fast crossbar switch. It was the O2, the little cute desktop box that had UMA, and a maximum of 1GB of RAM.
Which resolution was the "realtime" rendering done at? And did they only do an OpenGL playback of the scene, or did they actually do a full render(With special drivers and software to utilize the hardware)?
Koolt. Hälsa Eskil från Anders som var med i SUGA och gick på Mediagymnasiet =)
There's one big error in this post: The Indy is not a purplish box, it's blue. The Indigo's and Indigo 2 Impact-series were purplish
The PoV-ray benchmark is kinda f*cked up... Of course they aren't gonna notice a large difference with such a simple scene with such simple settings and such a low resolution. For a better measurement of difference, choose several different scenes of varying complexity(Some with lots of surfaces, some with lots of textures, some with complicated lights... You get the picture), run them at a high resolution. Oh, and define a baseline for the benchmark also. One test that is pretty decent is the dresser.rib scene that is included with BMRT. Simple geometry, but highly complex radiosity solution. Takes a while to render, and gives more sense of the difference between chips.
However, you also have your fair share of good ideas, such as the Harrier and the Tornado. And the Apache that will be license-built in the UK is gonna go through a certain amount of upgrades also.
Heh, about tanks: The US M1 series are dependant upon the British Chobham armor for their survivability. Even the upgraded version for the M1A2's were made in the UK. The REALLY fun part is that the British more or less gave away the Chobham armor to the US(1 million dollars for armor like that is just peanuts) in the 70's, which shows pretty clearly that you have better stuff in the UK(For example the Challenger 2, which with it's upgrades has all the features of a fully tricked out M1A2, plus better range, better armor and a better cannon) For more information, read through the only objective sources about military hardware available to the public, the publications from Jane's, in this case 'Armored Fighting Vehicles of the World'.
You forget something. In real war, the commander(If he can see the threat) only issues an order to the relevant unit to take care of the threat bearing down on him, then he moves on to looking over the situation again. Say, for example, a major, commander of an armour battalion sees an enemy armour company bearing down on one of his companies. He then orders one of his aides to issue a warning of the threat and perhaps an order to that unit to meet and take care of that threat. The actual implementation of the orders are up to the captain commanding the company in question.
The above hasn't been covered in computer-based strategy games yet, even though Close Combat is nearing the goal.
Ground Control is good because it focuses on tactics, and, unlike Red Alert etc, is not as much a practice in who can click the button the fastest and build the most tanks(The group I used to play with eventually only played on maps without seas, because they hated the cruisers, and couldn't handle Combined Arms warfare).
"Imagine if you type 'ln -s /etc/foo.cfg .foorc' and you see a red line appear in a GUI reflecting the symlink"
Actually, displaying symlinks with a line in the GUI is already available if you use IRIX/4DWM.
Heh, it's funny to see people discussing integrating CLI and GUI. Something that was available already in 1985, if you used Amiga's
One factor is performance. The method you propose is definitely not fast enough for games, and even less so back in 1993...
Heh, the word betaware has been used in the RPG Shadowrun, for Cybertech that is of higher quality than ordinary cybertech
There's a much better pressrelease at http://www.playstation.com/news/press_example.asp? ReleaseID=9573
However, I would not like to see Linux on this one, and definitely not GCC either. Both suck in their MIPS-implementation. And to the one's who talked about porting Maya etc from X86 to MIPS. Why??? Maya and SoftImage already exists for SGI's MIPS-machines, and that would be MUCH more simple to port =)
Besides, one company that has already proclaimed support for this piece of hunky cool hardware is Alias|Wavefront, makers of Maya.
A REAL geek is on parties where there are girls present. A REAL geek tries to convert the girls over to geekhood. And of course getting laid. I know I do get laid and try to teach the girls the basics of computers.
And once again we thank Slashdot for a link to an article with little substance and lots of GPL/Linux-hype. End of rant.
I can't see no real reason to use Linux in a gaming console, other than to placate Linux-uber-alles-people. Having such a generalised OS such as Linux defeats the purpose of the console, which is to be a sleak and fast machine with little overhead, dedicated to a single or only a few tasks. And Linux is also too monolithic to be of use in a console. The entire system in the PS2 for example, is smaller than a minimal Linux-install with basic commands and graphics-support. It's also optimised for running the few tasks it's designed for, even though you can run other things on it(We're currently playing around with a SETI-client for it, just for fun).
And developing games for Linux? *Shudder* That's a goddamn nightmare, if you want it to run on as many potential systems as possible. Hell, on the private project I'm involved in, we've had less troubles porting from Irix to BeOS and Windows than with porting to Linux.
Heh.... That reminds me of the portables MapCom in Sweden makes. They are made for GIS and CAD. Goodies such as dual P3/P3 Xeon, Tornado 1200 or Oxygen GVX1. you can put an even faster card in it if you want to. Total possible RAM is 2Gb and you can get it with Ultra 3 SCSI etc. Fun toys....
"Yup, but some bits are more random than others. With a static camera, there will be bits that are entirely determined from variations in light and sensitivity."
Chromatic and luminicence-variations would also add to a random seed for encryption. The best would be to constantly change light- and colour-intensity, in addition to the motion of the "lava".
"There's likely to be enough bits to seed a RNG, but the extensive work I've heard of being done by eliminating impossible combinations(31 round Skipjack was defeated in greater than brute force, while official Skipjack is 32 round!) leaves me wondering."
Heh, I prefer military algorithms. FRA in Sweden has done some absolutely stunning things =)
Actually, they use 3 lavalamps standing together, and 3 cameras, in one implementation Ive seen used.
Now to correct some errors: Part of Africa uses GSM, South Africa among them. France uses Secam, PAL is the big standard in Europe(With the best quality, I might add). I think GSM is starting to spread in Asia too, especially after Ericsson selling large amounts of cell-phone systems. Darth Shinobi, Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor of CoJ "May the dark side of the force be with you"
Recently there has been released a few cheaper boards with geometry- and Lighting-acceleration, most notably 3DLabs Oxygen GVX1, although it costs up to a $1000. Interesting to see how the GeFroce 256 can compare to the GVX1. The TNT2 sucks at OpenGL in comparison to such cards.
Darth Shinobi - Champion of Lady weeanna, Inquisitor of CoJ
"May the dark side of the force be with you"