anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
Not at all. Quadratic surfaces were a fundamentally better way of explaining what shape something was in three dimensions. The tile based rendering still has polygons, but breaks the screen up into tiles to do the final render. IIRC the optimisation runs something along the lines of "is this tile entirely covered by something, all of which has a 'nearer' Z? if so, bugger it, I won't even try".
They scale particularly well, BTW. The PowerVR chip was designed to minimise bandwidth and be scaleable to 16 ways for arcade machines. The tiles glue together in a kind of smarter SLI fashion.
There were also early PVR1 accelerators around that rendered to a lump of memory for the 2d card to then actually display. Obviously a bit flawed for today's framerates but a perfectly valid option at the time. Again, driver shiteness killed these off and I have a suspicion that NEC/Videologic signed an exclusive deal with Sega for the PVR2.
I hope they can get PVR2 accelerators together for the PC. Toms' benchmarks give the impression of an altogether more interesting approach than the Nvidia 'hit it with more grunt' thing that's oging on at the moment - and potentially a greater advantage as the number of vertices increases over sheer fillrate requirements.
Still. I'm relatively happy with a voodoo3, so don't look at me.
I had one, on a Diamond Edge2000. It shipped in a huge pile of hype about being:
(a) The first Direct3D accelerator and
(b) Compatible with the Sega Saturn.
Both of which turned out to be bullshit. While it did ship some actually quite good DirectX drivers, the direct 3d aspect of it was being "worked on". They did eventually ship some, with a huge disclaimer along the lines of "we know these things blow chunks, it's all due to this quadratic surface thing". This was all in the middle of John Carmack's big Direct3d rant on usenet ("I am looking forward to doing an apples to apples comparison of Direct3D and OpenGL" turned into "I am not going to finish, and there will never be, a Direct3d port of quake").
It also had onboard sound that was also very damn good. The MPU401 in particular was of near sound canvas quality. Unfortunately it was not sound blaster compatible and since the direct 3d port of quake was never going to happen, games basically stayed in DOS and sound effects had to be sent to a separate card.
Saturn compatibility turned into "Sega will be porting games", which of course they never bothered to do because only eight people bought the cards.
And Diamond were just shit about the whole thing. Haven't bought a thing from them since, don't know anyone else who has either.
So in essence: Great silicon, some serious forward steps were taken; Shitty marketing, I guess they learned.
Dave
BTW, while we're on the subject of bullshit graphics accelerators, did anyone ever get texture mapping going on a Millennium2?
Consultants are the least of our worries. What has always concerned me are the ethics of "time and materials" outsourcing. For those new to the gag it goes like this: Acme ask Megasoft to write them some bespoke code. Megasoft say "Sure thing, we haven't specified the project correctly yet, but I estimate it will cost seven million dollars". Acme, strangely enough, shit themselves at which point Megasoft suggest that they proceed in a more cautious manner and that Acme pay their developers per hour plus the kit needed to do it.
And it seems like a good idea.
Suckered! Now, at what point is there any onus on Megasoft to manage this project correctly? Why, exactly, should they hire developers who are any good when the crap ones take so much longer? The only dilemma Megasoft have is whether or not to hire some testers, who would be chargeable, but run the risk of preventing the project from going hugely over budget....
The real story's in the dmesg, look how many drivers they've got up:
maple0 at shb0
Dreamcast Controller at maple0 port 0 not configured
mkbd0 at maple0 port 3: US keyboard
wskbd0 at mkbd0: console keyboard
pvr0 at shb0: 640 x 480, 16bpp, NTSC, composite
wsdisplay0 at pvr0: console (80x30, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0
gdrom0 at shb0
g2bus0 at shb0
gapspci0 at g2bus0: SEGA GAPS PCI Bridge
pci0 at gapspci0 bus 0
pci0: memory space enabled
rtk0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0: SEGA Broadband Adapter
rtk0: interrupting at SH4 irq 11
rtk0: Ethernet address 00:d0:f1:02:ab:30
ukphy0 at rtk0 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x000000, model 0x0000, rev. 0
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
So: The controller, keyboard, console keyboard, the powervr2 accelerator (!), the gdrom thingy, a PCI bridge that I had no idea was in the dreamcast, the PCI bus, finally what looks like a realtek ethernet chip.
Realtek? Shit, they must've been reckoning on cashing in big time here. Ten brownie points for anyone making a 'make yerself a sega broadband connector for only $5' webpage.
Anyway, immense kudos to the NetBSD team (@shagedelic.org ??). If this is for real, I'm well impressed guys.
I know I'm late to the fight, and can only cite the fact the earth is more or less spherical and rotates as a reason, but...
This pissed me off:
Miller also believes that Linux has hidden costs, something he believes is particularly true in the embedded device market, where developers need to get their products to the market fast.
"Using Linux does not help the developer deliver their product faster," Miller said. "In fact, it can actually take longer due to platform development work that would not be necessary with a platform like CE."
Look, I develop embedded software using BSD. There is NO FUCKING WAY it would even be POSSIBLE under CE. None. Forget it.
Java was never a language for application development anyhow. You want to develop applications under Windows? Go get a copy of Visual C++.
As you may have noticed, applications development is on the point of being wiped out completely anyway. The ubiquitous browser (in its' various forms) needs connecting to a webserver, some business logic and database. Increasingly the only question being asked about this architecture is "do we use jsp or asp?".
Java will continue to be supported on Windows NT. Sun will make sure of it. And IBM, curiously, seem to have the edge over Sun in this area.
Don't fret. Nothing's changed, it's just PHB fodder.
But it seems fine to me. OpenSSL is released under a variant of the BSD licence (enforced credit-where-it's-due), which is more or less carte blanche to do what you like provided you put some thank you's in the appropriate pages. Apart from that, fine, tunnel what you like. Try hacking around with stunnel first (/usr/ports/security/stunnel/).
This throws a lot of stuff out the window. I'm completely blown away that Sun have done this.
Say you're putting together a hosting provider or other such consumer of rackmounted gear. Go to your boss and suggest you either buy:
a, VALinux 1120's for $1400 each.
b, BSDi 1210's for $1300 each.
c, 'Proper' sun boxes for $1000 each.
No brainer, particularly with Sun's excellent reputation.
And before you start flaming away, consider what this does to 1U dell boxes running win2k server... like, two and a half grand? BWaaaahahahahahaaa! Fuck you Bill!
They're going to sell millions of these things. And do not, for one second, underestimate the good this is going to do Unix.
It would be, just, the greatest thing. Unix/Linux/BSD could get on with what they were designed to do, be a multiuser operating system. We could all concentrate fully and properly on what ought to be everyone's number one concern: Making DAMN CERTAIN Win2K server/advanced server/datacentre server never gets a foothold. Keep that damn thing on the desktop, at most.
Use all these vast quantities of effort currently going into, well: making X do things it was not designed to do; trying to get open source drivers for video cards and having to reverse engineer things; ditto sound cards; in fact anything to do with persuading very good server operating systems to work on the desktop.... And point it towards doing great things server side. Let's see a damn good debugger for Zope; Some clever stuff to do with hot swap PCI; Lots of top notch hardware failure tolerant work; Innovate, dammit, you know you can.
And with the people that want to squeeze that last 5 fps? Or those who want to make nano-small virtual machines for running applets etc. Fine. Good. Great even. Use something that was designed for it from the ground up.
I guess that's the point. An open source Be would be just wonderful on the desktop. Unix is just wonderful on the server. Wouldn't it be great to use the right tool for the job?
Apologies for the ObAOL, "me too", but I've been using a deeply old Dell PPro180 with FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x for around a year now. And you know what? It goes like a rocket.
Now admittedly it hasn't been too badly abused, it runs headless for a start and I suspect that helps a lot. I also do a lot of work with networks, so disk IO is neither here nor there.
But I do munch a lot of integer numbers (the processor gets really quite hot), and suspect the memory bandwidth gets caned quite heavily. And also beat on the network cards which, incidentally, are i82559's connected via 33MHz PCI. As opposed to that horrendously old fashioned i82557's connected via 33Mhz PCI. Yay progress!
The point is..... there is no point, this is a me too. The PPro was a fundamentally good chip. It still is, and when you bear in mind the not spectacular advances in (for example) system busses and the still earth-shattering cost of gig ethernet, it's a pretty hard business case to push anything with much more power.
"The evolution of the home entertainment system will see the eventual extinction of proprietary 'black boxes'"
and
"The GPU and frame buffer memory reside on the IES Slide Bay, a proprietary technology"
One the one page, in adjacent paragraphs. Thank you, and goodnight.
Dave:)
Different kinds of Deathmarch.
on
Death March
·
· Score: 2
I think the one thing that interested me about the book was that he didn't just do the normal deathmarch (i.e. late, architected by morons and knee deep in paperwork). He also dealt with the "way ambitious, it'll never work, BANZAI!" projects that end up with everyone killed.
Read it. Don't buy it. If you live near me, give me a mail and borrow my copy.
Dave:)
Re:A good complement would be
on
Death March
·
· Score: 2
I believe the correct version of this is "Adding more programmers to a late project is like putting petrol on a fire", which somehow seems to get the picture across better.
You should read "Rapid Development" by Steve McConnell (pub. Evil bastards in Redmond). Takes what Fred Brooks was doing a step further.
Dave:)
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
I'm not employing you. Never. Not that I'm in a position to employ or not *right*now*, but that doesn't change a thing. These people pay you a fortune to do the best job you can, and seriously failing to give a shit about the health of the project, well, not on my project you're not.
Mind you, a few months back I had to quit a job I had tried seriously hard to like even though the project was fundamentally fucked. Couldn't like it, couldn't do a good job, had to quit.
Hang on, didn't Be go from software (mac) to software (x86) to software (embedded) and get eaten? And NeXT were screwed fundamentally from the overpriced outset.. and Acorn went back to hardware, changed their name to ARM and are doing just fine.
L is for lightweight in the protocol, not the backend. And the lightweight is only in comparison to X500.
Dave:)
Re:Minor Rant - Conversion of options on buy up.
on
Sizing Up a Start-Up
·
· Score: 2
Thanks (no direct reply email).
Dave:)
Re:Minor Rant - Conversion of options on buy up.
on
Sizing Up a Start-Up
·
· Score: 2
Interesting figures, I just can't work out where they came from. Can I request a minor tutorial-ette on calculating what happens to stock options when purchased by a larger company, both publicly traded and privately held?
I'm currently putting together the business plan for a company whose basic idea is to get lots of top notch intellectual capital together then get bought. Cisco fodder, in other words. So you can see the interest.
There's a few things I don't get about this, like how *big* is it? Are we looking at something the size of a large ashtray, or would I have difficulty stepping over the thing?
Anyway, since no-one else has done it I'm posting a link to deep video imaging (http://www.deepvideo.com/) who make 'actual depth' flat monitors. And besides, they're based in Christchurch - Go Kiwis!!
Slashdot Mirror
The impression you got from the linked article was right. The impression I got from Diamond's marketing was wrong. GGNNNNNN!
I guess the idea was that you could buy one card and have all your gaming video/sound/control needs taken care of.
More or less, in theory. In practice of course, none of the games I wanted to play on it ran on DirectX. Oh well.
Dave
anyone know how similiar that is to what NVIDIA tried with quadratic surfaces?
Not at all. Quadratic surfaces were a fundamentally better way of explaining what shape something was in three dimensions. The tile based rendering still has polygons, but breaks the screen up into tiles to do the final render. IIRC the optimisation runs something along the lines of "is this tile entirely covered by something, all of which has a 'nearer' Z? if so, bugger it, I won't even try".
They scale particularly well, BTW. The PowerVR chip was designed to minimise bandwidth and be scaleable to 16 ways for arcade machines. The tiles glue together in a kind of smarter SLI fashion.
There were also early PVR1 accelerators around that rendered to a lump of memory for the 2d card to then actually display. Obviously a bit flawed for today's framerates but a perfectly valid option at the time. Again, driver shiteness killed these off and I have a suspicion that NEC/Videologic signed an exclusive deal with Sega for the PVR2.
I hope they can get PVR2 accelerators together for the PC. Toms' benchmarks give the impression of an altogether more interesting approach than the Nvidia 'hit it with more grunt' thing that's oging on at the moment - and potentially a greater advantage as the number of vertices increases over sheer fillrate requirements.
Still. I'm relatively happy with a voodoo3, so don't look at me.
Dave
I had one, on a Diamond Edge2000. It shipped in a huge pile of hype about being:
(a) The first Direct3D accelerator and
(b) Compatible with the Sega Saturn.
Both of which turned out to be bullshit. While it did ship some actually quite good DirectX drivers, the direct 3d aspect of it was being "worked on". They did eventually ship some, with a huge disclaimer along the lines of "we know these things blow chunks, it's all due to this quadratic surface thing". This was all in the middle of John Carmack's big Direct3d rant on usenet ("I am looking forward to doing an apples to apples comparison of Direct3D and OpenGL" turned into "I am not going to finish, and there will never be, a Direct3d port of quake").
It also had onboard sound that was also very damn good. The MPU401 in particular was of near sound canvas quality. Unfortunately it was not sound blaster compatible and since the direct 3d port of quake was never going to happen, games basically stayed in DOS and sound effects had to be sent to a separate card.
Saturn compatibility turned into "Sega will be porting games", which of course they never bothered to do because only eight people bought the cards.
And Diamond were just shit about the whole thing. Haven't bought a thing from them since, don't know anyone else who has either.
So in essence: Great silicon, some serious forward steps were taken; Shitty marketing, I guess they learned.
Dave
BTW, while we're on the subject of bullshit graphics accelerators, did anyone ever get texture mapping going on a Millennium2?
Consultants are the least of our worries. What has always concerned me are the ethics of "time and materials" outsourcing. For those new to the gag it goes like this: Acme ask Megasoft to write them some bespoke code. Megasoft say "Sure thing, we haven't specified the project correctly yet, but I estimate it will cost seven million dollars". Acme, strangely enough, shit themselves at which point Megasoft suggest that they proceed in a more cautious manner and that Acme pay their developers per hour plus the kit needed to do it.
And it seems like a good idea.
Suckered! Now, at what point is there any onus on Megasoft to manage this project correctly? Why, exactly, should they hire developers who are any good when the crap ones take so much longer? The only dilemma Megasoft have is whether or not to hire some testers, who would be chargeable, but run the risk of preventing the project from going hugely over budget....
Yeah, I have a problem with this whole situation.
Dave
The real story's in the dmesg, look how many drivers they've got up:
:)
maple0 at shb0
Dreamcast Controller at maple0 port 0 not configured
mkbd0 at maple0 port 3: US keyboard
wskbd0 at mkbd0: console keyboard
pvr0 at shb0: 640 x 480, 16bpp, NTSC, composite
wsdisplay0 at pvr0: console (80x30, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0
gdrom0 at shb0
g2bus0 at shb0
gapspci0 at g2bus0: SEGA GAPS PCI Bridge
pci0 at gapspci0 bus 0
pci0: memory space enabled
rtk0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0: SEGA Broadband Adapter
rtk0: interrupting at SH4 irq 11
rtk0: Ethernet address 00:d0:f1:02:ab:30
ukphy0 at rtk0 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x000000, model 0x0000, rev. 0
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto
So: The controller, keyboard, console keyboard, the powervr2 accelerator (!), the gdrom thingy, a PCI bridge that I had no idea was in the dreamcast, the PCI bus, finally what looks like a realtek ethernet chip.
Realtek? Shit, they must've been reckoning on cashing in big time here. Ten brownie points for anyone making a 'make yerself a sega broadband connector for only $5' webpage.
Anyway, immense kudos to the NetBSD team (@shagedelic.org ??). If this is for real, I'm well impressed guys.
Dave
I know I'm late to the fight, and can only cite the fact the earth is more or less spherical and rotates as a reason, but...
This pissed me off:
Miller also believes that Linux has hidden costs, something he believes is particularly true in the embedded device market, where developers need to get their products to the market fast.
"Using Linux does not help the developer deliver their product faster," Miller said. "In fact, it can actually take longer due to platform development work that would not be necessary with a platform like CE."
Look, I develop embedded software using BSD. There is NO FUCKING WAY it would even be POSSIBLE under CE. None. Forget it.
Do not fret.
:)
Java was never a language for application development anyhow. You want to develop applications under Windows? Go get a copy of Visual C++.
As you may have noticed, applications development is on the point of being wiped out completely anyway. The ubiquitous browser (in its' various forms) needs connecting to a webserver, some business logic and database. Increasingly the only question being asked about this architecture is "do we use jsp or asp?".
Java will continue to be supported on Windows NT. Sun will make sure of it. And IBM, curiously, seem to have the edge over Sun in this area.
Don't fret. Nothing's changed, it's just PHB fodder.
Dave
Don't worry. It's all part of Microsoft's cunning plan to move everyone over to Unix. Oh, hang on...
AFAIK, IANAL and all that.
You'll be wanting to read the OpenSSL licence then?
But it seems fine to me. OpenSSL is released under a variant of the BSD licence (enforced credit-where-it's-due), which is more or less carte blanche to do what you like provided you put some thank you's in the appropriate pages. Apart from that, fine, tunnel what you like. Try hacking around with stunnel first (/usr/ports/security/stunnel/).
Dave
US.
This throws a lot of stuff out the window. I'm completely blown away that Sun have done this.
:)
Say you're putting together a hosting provider or other such consumer of rackmounted gear. Go to your boss and suggest you either buy:
a, VALinux 1120's for $1400 each.
b, BSDi 1210's for $1300 each.
c, 'Proper' sun boxes for $1000 each.
No brainer, particularly with Sun's excellent reputation.
And before you start flaming away, consider what this does to 1U dell boxes running win2k server... like, two and a half grand? BWaaaahahahahahaaa! Fuck you Bill!
They're going to sell millions of these things. And do not, for one second, underestimate the good this is going to do Unix.
Dave
OK. Flame retardant suit on.
:)
It would be, just, the greatest thing. Unix/Linux/BSD could get on with what they were designed to do, be a multiuser operating system. We could all concentrate fully and properly on what ought to be everyone's number one concern: Making DAMN CERTAIN Win2K server/advanced server/datacentre server never gets a foothold. Keep that damn thing on the desktop, at most.
Use all these vast quantities of effort currently going into, well: making X do things it was not designed to do; trying to get open source drivers for video cards and having to reverse engineer things; ditto sound cards; in fact anything to do with persuading very good server operating systems to work on the desktop.... And point it towards doing great things server side. Let's see a damn good debugger for Zope; Some clever stuff to do with hot swap PCI; Lots of top notch hardware failure tolerant work; Innovate, dammit, you know you can.
And with the people that want to squeeze that last 5 fps? Or those who want to make nano-small virtual machines for running applets etc. Fine. Good. Great even. Use something that was designed for it from the ground up.
I guess that's the point. An open source Be would be just wonderful on the desktop. Unix is just wonderful on the server. Wouldn't it be great to use the right tool for the job?
Here comes the napalm....
Dave
Apologies for the ObAOL, "me too", but I've been using a deeply old Dell PPro180 with FreeBSD 3.x and 4.x for around a year now. And you know what? It goes like a rocket.
:)
Now admittedly it hasn't been too badly abused, it runs headless for a start and I suspect that helps a lot. I also do a lot of work with networks, so disk IO is neither here nor there.
But I do munch a lot of integer numbers (the processor gets really quite hot), and suspect the memory bandwidth gets caned quite heavily. And also beat on the network cards which, incidentally, are i82559's connected via 33MHz PCI. As opposed to that horrendously old fashioned i82557's connected via 33Mhz PCI. Yay progress!
The point is..... there is no point, this is a me too. The PPro was a fundamentally good chip. It still is, and when you bear in mind the not spectacular advances in (for example) system busses and the still earth-shattering cost of gig ethernet, it's a pretty hard business case to push anything with much more power.
Dave
Likewise, I don't see /. charging being even remotely feasible. Them selling our link histories? Yeah, probably. Probably do the referrers too.
:)
Dave
Javascript, isn't that ECMA 262 in open source parlance?
:)
Dave
I wonder how they defend against an attack from multiple machines without refusing new connections or RST'ing the wrong ones?
From my experience of load testing NT4 boxes, it refuses new connections, basically.
Or however you spell it.
:)
From the 'under the hood' bit:
"The evolution of the home entertainment system will see the eventual extinction of proprietary 'black boxes'"
and
"The GPU and frame buffer memory reside on the IES Slide Bay, a proprietary technology"
One the one page, in adjacent paragraphs. Thank you, and goodnight.
Dave
I think the one thing that interested me about the book was that he didn't just do the normal deathmarch (i.e. late, architected by morons and knee deep in paperwork). He also dealt with the "way ambitious, it'll never work, BANZAI!" projects that end up with everyone killed.
:)
Read it. Don't buy it. If you live near me, give me a mail and borrow my copy.
Dave
I believe the correct version of this is "Adding more programmers to a late project is like putting petrol on a fire", which somehow seems to get the picture across better.
:)
You should read "Rapid Development" by Steve McConnell (pub. Evil bastards in Redmond). Takes what Fred Brooks was doing a step further.
Dave
I'm not employing you. Never. Not that I'm in a position to employ or not *right*now*, but that doesn't change a thing. These people pay you a fortune to do the best job you can, and seriously failing to give a shit about the health of the project, well, not on my project you're not.
Mind you, a few months back I had to quit a job I had tried seriously hard to like even though the project was fundamentally fucked. Couldn't like it, couldn't do a good job, had to quit.
Attitude. Seriously.
Dave
Hang on, didn't Be go from software (mac) to software (x86) to software (embedded) and get eaten? And NeXT were screwed fundamentally from the overpriced outset.. and Acorn went back to hardware, changed their name to ARM and are doing just fine.
:)
What?
dave
L is for lightweight in the protocol, not the backend. And the lightweight is only in comparison to X500.
:)
Dave
Thanks (no direct reply email).
:)
Dave
Interesting figures, I just can't work out where they came from. Can I request a minor tutorial-ette on calculating what happens to stock options when purchased by a larger company, both publicly traded and privately held?
:)
I'm currently putting together the business plan for a company whose basic idea is to get lots of top notch intellectual capital together then get bought. Cisco fodder, in other words. So you can see the interest.
Cheers,
Dave
There's a few things I don't get about this, like how *big* is it? Are we looking at something the size of a large ashtray, or would I have difficulty stepping over the thing?
:)
Anyway, since no-one else has done it I'm posting a link to deep video imaging (http://www.deepvideo.com/) who make 'actual depth' flat monitors. And besides, they're based in Christchurch - Go Kiwis!!
Dave