Usual pattern for Google is to get lots of feedback then ignore it. So you could view not getting the feedback in the first place as a sensible cost saving measure.
-- Posted from my xoom. The 3.2 update seems to have fixed the browser somewhat so posting to slashdot is now possible though not pleasant with per character lag over 1 second.
I think Rage is kind of the right direction away from just the traditional walk, shoot, maybe hide behind some cover paradigm.
The latest video looks just like Quake to me. I'll guess that Rage is Quake yet again with cars glued on. Not that I really care whether John puts out yet another linear, repetitive single player game with MIA story line as long as he keeps setting the standard for render tech.
PulseAudio isn't a bad concept, it's just that it doesn't work properly for far too many people.
Isn't it usually a bad idea to add a new layer of software that is not absolutely necessary? Usually that has two main results: 1) add a new layer of bugs 2) increased overhead.
But somehow, the catalyst driver *IS* crap, which is what I was responding to
Overreacting by attacking I would say. The Catalyst driver is not crap either. I have used it a lot. Its binary installer on the other hand is poor. It will neither install the Catalyst driver completely nor remove it completely, leaving you in for considerable pain especially if you do not know your way around xorg.conf and especially is you do not have a second, web-connected machine at hand to track down problems while your GUI is broken by your attempt to install catalyst.Stupid, preventable issues like mysterious driver segfault if you have run the binary installer but not yet run the control center utility. Also, segfault if you have attempted to remove catalyst and not hand edited your xorg.conf to go back to the xorg driver. You may also find DRI failing to initialize and glxinfo just segfaults uninformatively.
Sticking with the xorg driver(s) is the best way to avoid this and other pain. The vast majority of users do not need more than a fraction of the horsepower even the cheapest Radeon delivers these days. By that measure, 60-70% of the proprietary driver performance is overkill. Even the factor of three or four difference we saw a few months ago is unlikely to be noticeable except in things like high end shooters at high resolution.
It's nice to have options, don't you think? To be sure, the driver differences are not just speed, certain capabilities of the card are not implemented as well in the xorg driver as in catalyst. As of xorg 7.6, lines are antialiased by catalyst but not by xorg (3D games typically draw thin polys instead of lines so this only affects things like engineering and game development applications). Mipmap filtering is visibly better in catalyst. I am sure this is just the beginning of the list. Nonetheless, the typical user just isn't going to notice, the xorg driver is already good enough.
As for me, I am happy that both open and closed drivers are actively developed, the latter as a cooperative effort between AMD and many outside developers, both professional and volunteer. The open driver will eventually surpass the closed one if history is anything to go by, and not just for products that have been on the market for years. Kudos all round I say, two code bases would seem to be better than one.
Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver....So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
Dear troll, no it is not crap, it is running on my 4 way Phenom box right now, very nicely. I had problems with the Catalyst driver including odd behavior on reboot and horrible breakage on nearly every kernel upgrade. When I have time on my hands I will fiddle with the Catalyst driver some more and get it working again, it does have advantages. But using it does entail a certain degree of pain I am not willing to suffer at the moment. I regard the Calalyst driver as a hobby project, the open driver as my reliable work horse.
I'd rather have a constitutional form of government that guarantees my freedom regardless of what the majority decides. That of course implies democratic processes, but these aren't the ones making me free.
And neither does free/libre software directly make you free, but it is an important link in the chain. See the poster in this thread who runs ATI hardware on hardware not supported by AMD. Though it was the effort of programmers not employed by AMD that directly made that come about, however this most probably would never have happened without software freedom.
I just don't get what they are thinking. At $100-$150? yeah I could see people willing to deal with the limitations to have a "browser in a box" but $500? WTF? you can often find Atom netbooks for $250 or less, and I've seen really nice AMD netbooks for around $330. Who in their right mind would pay the price of TWO netbooks for one that is crippled and doesn't do even half of what a full netbook does?
And spending all your computer time in a web browser is a fate deserved only by whoever conceived this project.
They are TAUGHT that only this quarters results are important, that research and IT support is a waste of money and if you don't have an MBA you are a waste of company resources.
Having received my MBA, I can say you are full of shit...
Repectfully, you yourself would appear to be the turd-containing entity in this discussion. Interesting you mentioned Google, which has currently worked itself into a pretty bad state in terms of erosion of engineering culture, in favor of gaggles of MBA toting facetimers.
But like the summary and article note, that requires rewriting the whole codebase.
So? The original codebase was written on a shoestring by some college kids. The available budget for a rewrite is now millions to say it conservatively. Get started, do it. It's not like the current code base is a model of great design anyway.
Use Postgres. It costs the same as MySQL $0 and is a 100 times the DB.
I think you need a few more zeros on your multiplier. MySQL is not ACID, so for an enterprise to rely on it for anything important is just pure idiocy. Not that Facebook people are the only idiots in this respect, a certain large search company said to only hire smart people also relies on MySQL for its critical infrastructure.
When you talk like this out in the "real world", don't you ever wonder why people don't take you seriously?
People pay for things they enjoy and that meet their needs. Jails are things that people do not like to be in and are rather unenjoyable. iPads are things people seek out to buy and use, and are quite enjoyable. Well over 20 million of them have been bought to date, all voluntarily.
My mother got an iPad because she was told it would meet her needs, by some Apple fans. She was not told about the jail. Now she knows and she doesn't like it. And because the iPad doesn't support flash, a lot of sites don't work, particularly the ones her granddaughter wants to go to. As a consequence, her iPad is sitting gathering dust right now.
Meanwhile, my Xoom is getting plenty of use. Because it runs the flash sites my daughter goes to, it is considered a real computer, whereas the iPad is considered a doorstop. The USB port makes it easy for me to load lots of pdf files from all sorts of devices without needing to get both machines connected to the net first. I consider the USB port essential, I consider a mobile device without a USB port a doorstop. So there you have it, two votes in my immediate family for "iPad is a doorstop" and one grandmother annoyed at having been mislead about the iPad.
Java has random pauses due to garbage collection, which are bad for games or audio software. Also, garbage collection interacts badly with memory-hungry programs which might hit the swap.
And don't forget JIT compiling which causes massive lag on startup or when the application hits a previously unused code path. Aso consumes large amounts of memory.
Table[t]s and phones will replace dedicated gaming when they do the stuff dedicated gaming does
Phones never will, the screen is just too small. Phones will run phone games. Tablets will eventually supersede dedicated gaming rigs numerically, but never in raw throughput. Simple laws of physics dictate that a bigger box with a bigger power draw equals more and better graphics. High end gaming will remain the province of the standalone computer rig.
What I question in the coming generation is the continued viability of dedicated consoles. Consoles will be squeezed between the tablet form factor, which is more flexible, and stand alone gaming boxes, on which cutting edge releases will appear. The concept of high end console already hit the wall in the last generation when both Sony and Microsoft took massive losses that they have little to no hope of recovering. Nintendo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a console needs to be small and cheap to make money. For the moment that spells a revival of high end PC games on Windows the landscape is going to change there too. My crystal ball shows an invasion of the PC space by boxes that used to be ARM based tablets and are now fire breathing x86 boxes running Android (aka Linux) and IOS (aka BSD). With a wealth of dumbed down toss off games written for tablets arriving to seed the market, AAA releases will soon follow, and so will proper controllers.
He still does, most definitely. However he also appears to have staged a creeping takeover of creative control at ID, and he just isn't artistically creative. The result is the same game written over and over with engine upgrades. I have no doubt that Rage will prove to be Doom with cars. I don't know about you, but there is a limit to my fascination with monsters jumping at my face. And the hard core fragfest segment is not the market driver it used to be. I really have to ask why John cares about hitting 60 frames/second when relaxing that would allow a huge increase in dynamic content. You know, the sort of thing that contributes to fun as opposed to a display of graphics engineering prowess. Obviously, Bethesda's strategy of licensing a much less than perfect engine while sinking their own resources into building a compelling simulation won out commercially.
On the other hand, John is such a huge driver of graphics technology that I selfishly hope he just keeps doing it. Whether the end product is fun or not, I do expect Rage to be a feast for the eyes, and once again to raise the bar for everyone else. But there is a fly in the ointment: Tech 5 is not oriented to huge open worlds, it renders a limited size arena, so it isn't useful as is for Bethesda's open world games. Fixing that means another long development wait and Bethesda isn't waiting, they already built their own engine for ES5. A merge with ID tech thus looks far in the future at best, or never if John keeps writing Doom over and over again. Not that I would mind, it's a great way to advance rendering technology and nothing says I have to play it.
First of all, I don't buy this guy's claims. They seem to stem from a combination of sour grapes and self promotion. He strikes me as a dishonorable twat.
Your posts (long string of them) amount to nothing more than a series of content-free ad hominum attacks. If you are a Googler, you discredit the organization.
For what it is worth, author's observations mirror my own, particularly in regard to the inbred culture of turf defense. At Google, endless tweaking is the order of the day and shiny trumps substance. This seems to be some sort of main sequence for technology companies. It is rooted in the belief that "we're making more billions than ever before therefore everything we're doing must be right". Logical fallacy, I hope you see it. (Answer: this argument discounts the importance of future billions.)
Slashdot Mirror
Usual pattern for Google is to get lots of feedback then ignore it. So you could view not getting the feedback in the first place as a sensible cost saving measure.
--
Posted from my xoom.
20% time went away long ago.
--
Posted from my xoom.
The 3.2 update seems to have fixed the browser somewhat so posting to slashdot is now possible though not pleasant with per character lag over 1 second.
I think Rage is kind of the right direction away from just the traditional walk, shoot, maybe hide behind some cover paradigm.
The latest video looks just like Quake to me. I'll guess that Rage is Quake yet again with cars glued on. Not that I really care whether John puts out yet another linear, repetitive single player game with MIA story line as long as he keeps setting the standard for render tech.
PulseAudio isn't a bad concept, it's just that it doesn't work properly for far too many people.
Isn't it usually a bad idea to add a new layer of software that is not absolutely necessary? Usually that has two main results: 1) add a new layer of bugs 2) increased overhead.
But somehow, the catalyst driver *IS* crap, which is what I was responding to
Overreacting by attacking I would say. The Catalyst driver is not crap either. I have used it a lot. Its binary installer on the other hand is poor. It will neither install the Catalyst driver completely nor remove it completely, leaving you in for considerable pain especially if you do not know your way around xorg.conf and especially is you do not have a second, web-connected machine at hand to track down problems while your GUI is broken by your attempt to install catalyst.Stupid, preventable issues like mysterious driver segfault if you have run the binary installer but not yet run the control center utility. Also, segfault if you have attempted to remove catalyst and not hand edited your xorg.conf to go back to the xorg driver. You may also find DRI failing to initialize and glxinfo just segfaults uninformatively.
Sticking with the xorg driver(s) is the best way to avoid this and other pain. The vast majority of users do not need more than a fraction of the horsepower even the cheapest Radeon delivers these days. By that measure, 60-70% of the proprietary driver performance is overkill. Even the factor of three or four difference we saw a few months ago is unlikely to be noticeable except in things like high end shooters at high resolution.
It's nice to have options, don't you think? To be sure, the driver differences are not just speed, certain capabilities of the card are not implemented as well in the xorg driver as in catalyst. As of xorg 7.6, lines are antialiased by catalyst but not by xorg (3D games typically draw thin polys instead of lines so this only affects things like engineering and game development applications). Mipmap filtering is visibly better in catalyst. I am sure this is just the beginning of the list. Nonetheless, the typical user just isn't going to notice, the xorg driver is already good enough.
As for me, I am happy that both open and closed drivers are actively developed, the latter as a cooperative effort between AMD and many outside developers, both professional and volunteer. The open driver will eventually surpass the closed one if history is anything to go by, and not just for products that have been on the market for years. Kudos all round I say, two code bases would seem to be better than one.
Wewt! I can get speed improvements! Now, at their current rate or increase, it will only take 5 years for the driver to be able to perform at the same level as the proprietary driver....So, a product which is developed for years and has only recently achieved 60% of what the commercial driver can do *isnt* crap.
Dear troll, no it is not crap, it is running on my 4 way Phenom box right now, very nicely. I had problems with the Catalyst driver including odd behavior on reboot and horrible breakage on nearly every kernel upgrade. When I have time on my hands I will fiddle with the Catalyst driver some more and get it working again, it does have advantages. But using it does entail a certain degree of pain I am not willing to suffer at the moment. I regard the Calalyst driver as a hobby project, the open driver as my reliable work horse.
I'd rather have a constitutional form of government that guarantees my freedom regardless of what the majority decides. That of course implies democratic processes, but these aren't the ones making me free.
And neither does free/libre software directly make you free, but it is an important link in the chain. See the poster in this thread who runs ATI hardware on hardware not supported by AMD. Though it was the effort of programmers not employed by AMD that directly made that come about, however this most probably would never have happened without software freedom.
...it's only advantage is being Open?
I can see how many people may not see a great cost/benefits ratio there...
Nice troll. You could also say "the only advantage of living in a democracy is being free".
I just don't get what they are thinking. At $100-$150? yeah I could see people willing to deal with the limitations to have a "browser in a box" but $500? WTF? you can often find Atom netbooks for $250 or less, and I've seen really nice AMD netbooks for around $330. Who in their right mind would pay the price of TWO netbooks for one that is crippled and doesn't do even half of what a full netbook does?
And spending all your computer time in a web browser is a fate deserved only by whoever conceived this project.
For personal reasons, I am now in management...
Would you please let me know the name of the company, so that I may have nothing to do with it?
They are TAUGHT that only this quarters results are important, that research and IT support is a waste of money and if you don't have an MBA you are a waste of company resources.
Having received my MBA, I can say you are full of shit...
Repectfully, you yourself would appear to be the turd-containing entity in this discussion. Interesting you mentioned Google, which has currently worked itself into a pretty bad state in terms of erosion of engineering culture, in favor of gaggles of MBA toting facetimers.
Google also uses MySQL for a lot of things.
So if Google does it then it couldn't possibly be stupid, right?
And, to add to that, Facebook is insane if they didn't implement what is commonly called an "access layer" for abstraction...
A large company could do something insane at the expense of security and profitability? Please tell me it ain't so.
But like the summary and article note, that requires rewriting the whole codebase.
So? The original codebase was written on a shoestring by some college kids. The available budget for a rewrite is now millions to say it conservatively. Get started, do it. It's not like the current code base is a model of great design anyway.
Use Postgres.
It costs the same as MySQL $0 and is a 100 times the DB.
I think you need a few more zeros on your multiplier. MySQL is not ACID, so for an enterprise to rely on it for anything important is just pure idiocy. Not that Facebook people are the only idiots in this respect, a certain large search company said to only hire smart people also relies on MySQL for its critical infrastructure.
When you talk like this out in the "real world", don't you ever wonder why people don't take you seriously?
People pay for things they enjoy and that meet their needs. Jails are things that people do not like to be in and are rather unenjoyable. iPads are things people seek out to buy and use, and are quite enjoyable. Well over 20 million of them have been bought to date, all voluntarily.
My mother got an iPad because she was told it would meet her needs, by some Apple fans. She was not told about the jail. Now she knows and she doesn't like it. And because the iPad doesn't support flash, a lot of sites don't work, particularly the ones her granddaughter wants to go to. As a consequence, her iPad is sitting gathering dust right now.
Meanwhile, my Xoom is getting plenty of use. Because it runs the flash sites my daughter goes to, it is considered a real computer, whereas the iPad is considered a doorstop. The USB port makes it easy for me to load lots of pdf files from all sorts of devices without needing to get both machines connected to the net first. I consider the USB port essential, I consider a mobile device without a USB port a doorstop. So there you have it, two votes in my immediate family for "iPad is a doorstop" and one grandmother annoyed at having been mislead about the iPad.
RIM could look at two options: 1) introduce an Android Blackberry or 2) slowly wither and die. Bifurcation, you bet.
Java has random pauses due to garbage collection, which are bad for games or audio software. Also, garbage collection interacts badly with memory-hungry programs which might hit the swap.
And don't forget JIT compiling which causes massive lag on startup or when the application hits a previously unused code path. Aso consumes large amounts of memory.
Rewriting from scratch is bad.
Never rewriting anything is far, far worse.
Tweaking something that works is good.
Not when structural problems remained unfixed because of that.
Platitudes like the ones you offer are part of the explanation why Google's engineering culture has weakened.
and the news is that somebody just discovered unity?
For me, the news about 11.04 is that KDE just works. Call me a happy camper.
Table[t]s and phones will replace dedicated gaming when they do the stuff dedicated gaming does
Phones never will, the screen is just too small. Phones will run phone games. Tablets will eventually supersede dedicated gaming rigs numerically, but never in raw throughput. Simple laws of physics dictate that a bigger box with a bigger power draw equals more and better graphics. High end gaming will remain the province of the standalone computer rig.
What I question in the coming generation is the continued viability of dedicated consoles. Consoles will be squeezed between the tablet form factor, which is more flexible, and stand alone gaming boxes, on which cutting edge releases will appear. The concept of high end console already hit the wall in the last generation when both Sony and Microsoft took massive losses that they have little to no hope of recovering. Nintendo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a console needs to be small and cheap to make money. For the moment that spells a revival of high end PC games on Windows the landscape is going to change there too. My crystal ball shows an invasion of the PC space by boxes that used to be ARM based tablets and are now fire breathing x86 boxes running Android (aka Linux) and IOS (aka BSD). With a wealth of dumbed down toss off games written for tablets arriving to seed the market, AAA releases will soon follow, and so will proper controllers.
Carmack used to lead the 3D Engine sector around
He still does, most definitely. However he also appears to have staged a creeping takeover of creative control at ID, and he just isn't artistically creative. The result is the same game written over and over with engine upgrades. I have no doubt that Rage will prove to be Doom with cars. I don't know about you, but there is a limit to my fascination with monsters jumping at my face. And the hard core fragfest segment is not the market driver it used to be. I really have to ask why John cares about hitting 60 frames/second when relaxing that would allow a huge increase in dynamic content. You know, the sort of thing that contributes to fun as opposed to a display of graphics engineering prowess. Obviously, Bethesda's strategy of licensing a much less than perfect engine while sinking their own resources into building a compelling simulation won out commercially.
On the other hand, John is such a huge driver of graphics technology that I selfishly hope he just keeps doing it. Whether the end product is fun or not, I do expect Rage to be a feast for the eyes, and once again to raise the bar for everyone else. But there is a fly in the ointment: Tech 5 is not oriented to huge open worlds, it renders a limited size arena, so it isn't useful as is for Bethesda's open world games. Fixing that means another long development wait and Bethesda isn't waiting, they already built their own engine for ES5. A merge with ID tech thus looks far in the future at best, or never if John keeps writing Doom over and over again. Not that I would mind, it's a great way to advance rendering technology and nothing says I have to play it.
Smartphones aren't good for gaming for one simple reason: the controls suck
So that totally explains why nobody plays Angry Birds.
if this attitude is as pervasive as it's claimed, I can see it being incredibly frustrating to work there as an engineer
It is, and it was.
First of all, I don't buy this guy's claims. They seem to stem from a combination of sour grapes and self promotion. He strikes me as a dishonorable twat.
Your posts (long string of them) amount to nothing more than a series of content-free ad hominum attacks. If you are a Googler, you discredit the organization.
For what it is worth, author's observations mirror my own, particularly in regard to the inbred culture of turf defense. At Google, endless tweaking is the order of the day and shiny trumps substance. This seems to be some sort of main sequence for technology companies. It is rooted in the belief that "we're making more billions than ever before therefore everything we're doing must be right". Logical fallacy, I hope you see it. (Answer: this argument discounts the importance of future billions.)