Actually, the Serious Engine does a pretty impressive job with both fog and flame effects. It's still a few steps away from realistic, but it does a substantially better job than the Unreal or Quake technology at the moment.
The demo versions of both Serious Sam games have a "technology test" level you can walk through in single-player mode that shows off the engine's capabilities pretty well.
perhaps you should just fork out some cash and buy Tenons Xtools X server for X
No, he shouldn't.
Tenon has all but abandoned Xtools. There hasn't been an update since last September, and the currently available version (1.0.4p1) is horribly unstable.
Xtools was useful for the 6-month window between the initial XF86 port to Darwin and the release of XFree 4.2 (which integrated the rootless quartz server into the main code tree). Since then, however, it's rotted. At this point, OroborosX is faster, better-featured, and much more stable.
The only problem is that games are not just programming. They are programming, music, art, and level design. Musicians, artists, and level designers (even hobbyist ones) are used to making money for what they do. But since the core engine of the game is GPL, no money can be made on the game.
This is completely and totally wrong. (Or it's an artfully constructed troll; can't tell which.)
You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself. If you take the Q2 engine and make a game with your own models, textures, levels and game logic, you are not required to give away the models, textures, levels and game code.
Remember, the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.
If you really need to make changes to the rendering engine itself (highly unlikely for a hobbyist game programmer) without giving away your code, consider looking at the Torque Engine, which you can license for $100 and a revenue-sharing agreement with GarageGames.
Creationism vs. Big Bang vs. ??? is a debate and no particular side is right as far as science is concerned.
Incorrect. While it is true that science does not consider the Big Bang theory to be undebatably "proven", the creationist thesis is universally held to have been disproven by the available evidence, specifically carbon dating and a number of other repeatable tests that indicate that the universe is substantially older than 6000 years.
Believe what you want, but don't pretend that science supports it in any way, 'cause it most certainly does not.
You need to learn an OS to be able to use it and understand it well.
Indeed you do. For instance, want to know how to completely kill a SCO system (and I mean "restore from installation media" kill) with a single command?
mv/opt/opt.old
Why, might a sane person ask, would renaming/opt (which we tend to assume stands for optional for some strange reason like that it's defined as such by the SVR4 spec) completely destroy a running system? Well, let's just say that SCO's idea of what comprises "optional" system components includes things like "ld.so".
I've learned many things about SCO in my time. First among them is that it will not be missed.
The faked-up bio and ghost-writing is nothing more than my own intuition based on observing the way the music industry usually generates and dumps manufactured flash-in-the-pan stars. Take it for what it's worth -- I thoroughly expect to be corroborated in a few years, but for now it's obviously just one moron's opinion.
The production team connection isn't a hidden secret or anything: the story of Suge Knight and Dr. Dre manhandling Vanilla Ice to get him to sign to Death Row records is an industry legend, and one that Van Winkle has confirmed himself. (Scroll down to the "Just Desserts" section of the linked article or search for "Suge Knight" in it.) Dr. Dre left Death Row records when Knight went to jail for racketeering, and Eminem is on Dre's new label.
You are going to run out of inodes at exactly the same time you run out of disk space, because they are one and the same thing.
No.
Running out of inodes is not the same thing as running out of space. Some of the symptoms of the two are the same ("can't create new files"), but they are completely different failure modes.
Maildir: Do you really want to clutter your system with millions of small files? That's waste of inodes, space (unless perhaps you use Linux/ReiserFS or SGi)
Psssst. It's not 1978 any more. Inodes are cheap. So is disk space. Stop spreading FUD.
and just try to open a Maildir with 1000+ mails and see how long it takes your favorite Mailprogram to only display the subjects.
Quite right. Just try it. You might be a bit surprised by the results.
[blah blah blah blah pathetic fanboy whining]...even though they have nothing in common besides skin color.
They also share a production team, a penchant for faked-up bios, and a general M.O.
See, unlike you, I actually remember the early 90s, and Suge Knight's protege, Dr. Dre, is doing with Mr. Mathers exactly what his mentor did with poor old Robert Van Winkle -- right down to the crappy movie deal that's going to flush his career. I'd feel sorry for him, except that he's probably too cracked out to care. I wonder if Dre had to hold his punk ass upside down from a window to get him to sign?
Oh, and if you think Mathers writes his own material, I have a bridge to sell you.
You'll find that, in general, you'll make a complete fool of yourself if you actually read the posts that you're responding to.
The thread was about "performance competitors" to IIS. As lovely as apache is for many uses, nobody (including the apache authors) would pretend that it's anywhere near in the same performance league as IIS, Zeus or iPlanet.
And I didn't mention Apache at all in the first place.
In the absence of a cite to REAL evidence to support all of your whining, your position (however sound it may be in terms of mathematical theory or physics)
I don't know how things work on your planet, spaceman, but down here on terra, we consider "physics" to be pretty much synonymous with "REAL evidence."
TUX is a cute proof-of-concept, and if RH can get some leverage over MS by patenting it, I'm all for it. But let's not kid ourselves about who IIS' competitors are.
This is just a lot of FUD. Currently Linux Windows Managers are an easy transistion from Windows. In fact most Windows users will catch on quickly. The biggest train issue will be the Office Suite. Luckly most office suites tend to be a lot like MS Office in Menus and Commands to the move won't be as hard as expected. No retrain won't be a big problem. The problem will be the fear of moving from Windows to Linux that some of the Employees will have.
Let me guess...you're a college student, right? Probably at a technical college, even.
Have you ever tried to coach a 50-year-old secretary through just a small upgrade of one version of MS Word to another? It's a goddamn nightmare, and companies devote millions of dollars every year to retraining every time MS forces the latest version of Office and Windows down their throat. And those are incremental changes. Just because you can configure Gnome to have windows-like borders and icons does not mean that it will be an "easy" transition.
I wish I could say that I can't believe this kind of mindless cheerleading got moderated up to +5.
I would like to point out the opinion that many feel that the Athlon XP and P4 chips run much too hot to go into any rack mounted server at this time. Maybe soon they will improve upon this but for the moment you have to make do with P3's and cooler AMD chips.
I'm not sure which "many" people you're referrning to here, but it doesn't seem to include Dell, HP, Compaq, or any of the dozens of smaller companies who are shipping P4 and AthlonMP-based servers.
No, I called Steve Jobs a liar. You, I think, are just a bit too credulous for your own good.
How is excluding floating point performance relevant?
Stop right there.
Altivec is not a floating point unit. Really. Go read Motorola's own documentation if you don't believe me. The kinds of operations that Altivec can speed up are not general-usage cases, and it's fiendishly difficult to do even when the math is the right type. (The same can be said, btw, of the x86 world's SSE and SIMD units, but they get used a lot more often because Intel actually wrote their own C/C++ compiler to produce code that's automatically tuned for them. Unfortunatly for Apple, Motorola and IBM have not been quite so generous.)
The P4 and Athlon XP (especially the latter) clean the G4's clock at normal floating point ops. That's what the SPECfp benchmark measures, and the figures are in black and white.
Yes, the G4 is faster at equal clock speeds. That's nice, but not very relevant when you can buy faster Athlons at the same price point.
Stop listening to marketers and start listening to engineers. Facts are facts.
Now, the nice thing about the xServe is that it's got those huge-ass 2MB DDR L3 caches, which means that you're getting the equivilant of a P4 Xeon or a Sun UltraSparc IIIi for the price of a normal P3 server, which is a good deal. Raw CPU speed is often a secondary concern in a server environment: I/O bandwidth, context-switching speed and physical robustness can trump it in a lot of cases, and the xServe appears to be very well-positioned there.
Does Intel have APIs or anything that lets me take advantage of their architecture?
No, of course not. They add the features to their chips, then bury the specifications in a sealed lead cannister under the light of the full moon while chanting "om mane padme hum" in the hopes that this will psychically communicate the spec to their customers.
Duh, yes, Intel and AMD both provide APIs, toolkits, ample documentation and example code on how to use their chips' advanced features. Intel even provides their own custom-tuned C and C++ compiler, which is scary-fast.
Can i write an app that I compile once, and works with both chips' extra features?
I dunno man, with several million P4s and Athlons in general use right now, I can't imagine why anybody would want to do that.
Sigh. Yes, you can do that. Trivially.
The PPC universe has it much easier.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Really.
despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years
That's not a "fact". That is what we in the business like to call a "marketing claim," or what normal human beings call a "bald-faced lie."
Outside of a small number of benchmarks that make extensive use of the G4's vector units, the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are faster than the G4 at every equivilant system price point -- usually a lot faster. This is a cold, hard fact.
That's not to say that the xServe isn't a nice box. Hell, it's a great little server, and I can't wait to get my hands on one. But the reasons for that have everything to do with the OS, the case design and the management infrastructure, and nothing to do with CPU speed.
Eh, it's not that crack-addled. The 280R is the least expensive rackmount 2-CPU machine in Sun's product line, so it's a logical place to start the compairison.
The point here is that the xServe manages to hit about 50% feature parity with the 280R while staying at more or less exact price parity with the Netra T1 AC200, which is blows the doors off of in terms of features.
I manage datacenters full of Sun boxes (low and high end) for a living. Frankly, apple has a very compelling little box here, and if I were Sun I'd be taking this very seriously.
But after mid-2003 it will be biting the dust as well along with the IRIX version.
Er, no. Nobody from Steve on down has said a damn thing about the fate of Linux/Irix Shake after 2003 other than that they'll evaluate it at the time.
Apple has been pretty consistant about being willing to publish non-MacOS versions of their top-end software (ie: WebObjects) when they know that there's a demand for it. I strongly suspect that if current Shake customers make their needs known, they will be tended to.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this more or less how Ricochet used to work?
Actually, the Serious Engine does a pretty impressive job with both fog and flame effects. It's still a few steps away from realistic, but it does a substantially better job than the Unreal or Quake technology at the moment.
The demo versions of both Serious Sam games have a "technology test" level you can walk through in single-player mode that shows off the engine's capabilities pretty well.
perhaps you should just fork out some cash and buy Tenons Xtools X server for X
No, he shouldn't.
Tenon has all but abandoned Xtools. There hasn't been an update since last September, and the currently available version (1.0.4p1) is horribly unstable.
Xtools was useful for the 6-month window between the initial XF86 port to Darwin and the release of XFree 4.2 (which integrated the rootless quartz server into the main code tree). Since then, however, it's rotted. At this point, OroborosX is faster, better-featured, and much more stable.
The only problem is that games are not just programming. They are programming, music, art, and level design. Musicians, artists, and level designers (even hobbyist ones) are used to making money for what they do. But since the core engine of the game is GPL, no money can be made on the game.
This is completely and totally wrong. (Or it's an artfully constructed troll; can't tell which.)
You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself. If you take the Q2 engine and make a game with your own models, textures, levels and game logic, you are not required to give away the models, textures, levels and game code.
Remember, the engine and game logic are seperate codebases: Id Software releases the game logic seperately from the engine code, and usually years before, so that mod authors can play with it. And of course, the GPL does not "infect" anything but code: your textures, skins, models and levels remain your own no matter what.
If you really need to make changes to the rendering engine itself (highly unlikely for a hobbyist game programmer) without giving away your code, consider looking at the Torque Engine, which you can license for $100 and a revenue-sharing agreement with GarageGames.
Creationism vs. Big Bang vs. ??? is a debate and no particular side is right as far as science is concerned.
Incorrect. While it is true that science does not consider the Big Bang theory to be undebatably "proven", the creationist thesis is universally held to have been disproven by the available evidence, specifically carbon dating and a number of other repeatable tests that indicate that the universe is substantially older than 6000 years.
Believe what you want, but don't pretend that science supports it in any way, 'cause it most certainly does not.
As an owner of a tube headphone amplifier
You misspelled "sucker." Hope this helps, have a nice day.
I see the problem here. You are attempting to use Evolution when the mail client you were actually wanting to install is called "mutt".
If you don't like GNOME and GTK+, for the love of pete don't use a mailer that says in big flaming letters "I am a GNOME program!".
You need to learn an OS to be able to use it and understand it well.
/opt /opt.old
/opt (which we tend to assume stands for optional for some strange reason like that it's defined as such by the SVR4 spec) completely destroy a running system? Well, let's just say that SCO's idea of what comprises "optional" system components includes things like "ld.so".
Indeed you do. For instance, want to know how to completely kill a SCO system (and I mean "restore from installation media" kill) with a single command?
mv
Why, might a sane person ask, would renaming
I've learned many things about SCO in my time. First among them is that it will not be missed.
The faked-up bio and ghost-writing is nothing more than my own intuition based on observing the way the music industry usually generates and dumps manufactured flash-in-the-pan stars. Take it for what it's worth -- I thoroughly expect to be corroborated in a few years, but for now it's obviously just one moron's opinion.
The production team connection isn't a hidden secret or anything: the story of Suge Knight and Dr. Dre manhandling Vanilla Ice to get him to sign to Death Row records is an industry legend, and one that Van Winkle has confirmed himself. (Scroll down to the "Just Desserts" section of the linked article or search for "Suge Knight" in it.) Dr. Dre left Death Row records when Knight went to jail for racketeering, and Eminem is on Dre's new label.
You are going to run out of inodes at exactly the same time you run out of disk space, because they are one and the same thing.
No.
Running out of inodes is not the same thing as running out of space. Some of the symptoms of the two are the same ("can't create new files"), but they are completely different failure modes.
Consult your local man pages for further details.
Quite right. Just try it. You might be a bit surprised by the results.
[blah blah blah blah pathetic fanboy whining]...even though they have nothing in common besides skin color.
They also share a production team, a penchant for faked-up bios, and a general M.O.
See, unlike you, I actually remember the early 90s, and Suge Knight's protege, Dr. Dre, is doing with Mr. Mathers exactly what his mentor did with poor old Robert Van Winkle -- right down to the crappy movie deal that's going to flush his career. I'd feel sorry for him, except that he's probably too cracked out to care. I wonder if Dre had to hold his punk ass upside down from a window to get him to sign?
Oh, and if you think Mathers writes his own material, I have a bridge to sell you.
Geeze, I'll bet you still have your autographed copy of the "Cool as Ice" video too.
You'll find that, in general, you'll make a complete fool of yourself if you actually read the posts that you're responding to.
The thread was about "performance competitors" to IIS. As lovely as apache is for many uses, nobody (including the apache authors) would pretend that it's anywhere near in the same performance league as IIS, Zeus or iPlanet.
And I didn't mention Apache at all in the first place.
In the absence of a cite to REAL evidence to support all of your whining, your position (however sound it may be in terms of mathematical theory or physics)
I don't know how things work on your planet, spaceman, but down here on terra, we consider "physics" to be pretty much synonymous with "REAL evidence."
TUX is the main performance competitor to IIS.
Uh, no. That would be iPlanet, thttpd and Zeus.. Especially Zeus.
TUX is a cute proof-of-concept, and if RH can get some leverage over MS by patenting it, I'm all for it. But let's not kid ourselves about who IIS' competitors are.
This is just a lot of FUD. Currently Linux Windows Managers are an easy transistion from Windows. In fact most Windows users will catch on quickly. The biggest train issue will be the Office Suite. Luckly most office suites tend to be a lot like MS Office in Menus and Commands to the move won't be as hard as expected. No retrain won't be a big problem. The problem will be the fear of moving from Windows to Linux that some of the Employees will have.
Let me guess...you're a college student, right? Probably at a technical college, even.
Have you ever tried to coach a 50-year-old secretary through just a small upgrade of one version of MS Word to another? It's a goddamn nightmare, and companies devote millions of dollars every year to retraining every time MS forces the latest version of Office and Windows down their throat. And those are incremental changes. Just because you can configure Gnome to have windows-like borders and icons does not mean that it will be an "easy" transition.
I wish I could say that I can't believe this kind of mindless cheerleading got moderated up to +5.
I would like to point out the opinion that many feel that the Athlon XP and P4 chips run much too hot to go into any rack mounted server at this time. Maybe soon they will improve upon this but for the moment you have to make do with P3's and cooler AMD chips.
I'm not sure which "many" people you're referrning to here, but it doesn't seem to include Dell, HP, Compaq, or any of the dozens of smaller companies who are shipping P4 and AthlonMP-based servers.
You called me a liar in your response.
No, I called Steve Jobs a liar. You, I think, are just a bit too credulous for your own good.
How is excluding floating point performance relevant?
Stop right there.
Altivec is not a floating point unit. Really. Go read Motorola's own documentation if you don't believe me. The kinds of operations that Altivec can speed up are not general-usage cases, and it's fiendishly difficult to do even when the math is the right type. (The same can be said, btw, of the x86 world's SSE and SIMD units, but they get used a lot more often because Intel actually wrote their own C/C++ compiler to produce code that's automatically tuned for them. Unfortunatly for Apple, Motorola and IBM have not been quite so generous.)
The P4 and Athlon XP (especially the latter) clean the G4's clock at normal floating point ops. That's what the SPECfp benchmark measures, and the figures are in black and white.
Yes, the G4 is faster at equal clock speeds. That's nice, but not very relevant when you can buy faster Athlons at the same price point.
Stop listening to marketers and start listening to engineers. Facts are facts.
Now, the nice thing about the xServe is that it's got those huge-ass 2MB DDR L3 caches, which means that you're getting the equivilant of a P4 Xeon or a Sun UltraSparc IIIi for the price of a normal P3 server, which is a good deal. Raw CPU speed is often a secondary concern in a server environment: I/O bandwidth, context-switching speed and physical robustness can trump it in a lot of cases, and the xServe appears to be very well-positioned there.
Duh, yes, Intel and AMD both provide APIs, toolkits, ample documentation and example code on how to use their chips' advanced features. Intel even provides their own custom-tuned C and C++ compiler, which is scary-fast.I dunno man, with several million P4s and Athlons in general use right now, I can't imagine why anybody would want to do that.
Sigh. Yes, you can do that. Trivially.You have no idea what you're talking about. Really.
despite the fact that the powerPC has been beating the pentium in every reasonable performace comparison for years
That's not a "fact". That is what we in the business like to call a "marketing claim," or what normal human beings call a "bald-faced lie."
Outside of a small number of benchmarks that make extensive use of the G4's vector units, the Athlon XP and Pentium 4 are faster than the G4 at every equivilant system price point -- usually a lot faster. This is a cold, hard fact.
That's not to say that the xServe isn't a nice box. Hell, it's a great little server, and I can't wait to get my hands on one. But the reasons for that have everything to do with the OS, the case design and the management infrastructure, and nothing to do with CPU speed.
Man, the crack in Cupertino must be good.
Eh, it's not that crack-addled. The 280R is the least expensive rackmount 2-CPU machine in Sun's product line, so it's a logical place to start the compairison.
The point here is that the xServe manages to hit about 50% feature parity with the 280R while staying at more or less exact price parity with the Netra T1 AC200, which is blows the doors off of in terms of features.
I manage datacenters full of Sun boxes (low and high end) for a living. Frankly, apple has a very compelling little box here, and if I were Sun I'd be taking this very seriously.
Well, we now have a new operational definition of stupid. And that would be: "Eating a $150 restocking fee rather than Reading the Fucking Manual."
But after mid-2003 it will be biting the dust as well along with the IRIX version.
Er, no. Nobody from Steve on down has said a damn thing about the fate of Linux/Irix Shake after 2003 other than that they'll evaluate it at the time.
Apple has been pretty consistant about being willing to publish non-MacOS versions of their top-end software (ie: WebObjects) when they know that there's a demand for it. I strongly suspect that if current Shake customers make their needs known, they will be tended to.
Okay, suddenly the whole "32MB GPU RAM, 2X AGP required" thing makes a whole lot more sense. Dear god in heaven that's badass...