>>Pixar has not, however, released modeling, or
>>animation tools.
>That's because they don't make any for any
>platform, or at least nothing major. They are
>known for Renderman, their renderer.
Actually, Pixar doesn't make modeling and animation tools. They make them on Irix. They just don't sell them to anyone. What did you think Toystory was animated with? Maya?
I've noticed Broadcast 2k. It is great that it works on linux, but it looks really clunky. I wish a reliable source (say a non-geek who spends all day behind Avid, Discreet, and Adobe editing packages) would do a review of it. I downloaded the binaries, but I wasn't able to get it working. Linux Media arts (http://www.linuxmediaarts.com/) sells systems preloaded with Broadcast2k. I might buy one sometime, but for now my next purchase is probably going to be an SGI 02 with video options. Currently Broadcast2000 doesn't run on anything but linux.
I do appreciate the mpeg2 and quicktime libraries though. I plan to use their quicktime library in a project I'm working on. Initially it is an effects program, but I might expand it to be a full blown editor someday.
If not everything is based on faith, then why should I have faith in your word. To make a broad reaching statement like that, one really should offer proof.
Actually, Windows is far from the perfect OS for these people. You admitted so yourself when you said that they can't remeber where the powerpoint files were saved.
Of the currently available general computing OSs (meaning that users can control the applications installed, computer to many web set top boxes where only the manufactor can change the software), I'd say that PalmOS is closest to being perfect for the computer illiterate.
Now, if I want to make an OS for computer illiterate users, I can start from scratch (what Palm did), or I can base my new OS off Windows, Linux, or something entirely different. If I base it on windows, most likely my device will never be as easy as I would like (although I don't truly know what can be done with 2000 embeded or CE embeded). If I use BeOS, I can get good results, but I have to spend a lot of money on licensing, and hardware support will be harder to comeby.
However, if I base my new OS on the linux kernel (rember the OS is all the GNU utils, BSD utils, etc, not just the linux kernel, hence all the fuss over GNU/Linux versus just linux), I can ditch X (or maybe use TinyX) but still use hardware accelerated video with cards that the framebuffer console supports. I can have DVD support (although there would be some nasty legal issues), I can have have excelent sound support. And best of all, for the applications I present to the user, I can borrow components from existing applications. Using linux as a starting place, a small team of people with virtually no money could create a new OS that would be far superior to anything else available.
I just wish that the frame buffer console would add 3D support somehow (perhaps through a/dev/3d device). Until then, 3d support is limited to porting mesa to my custom gui.
>Does anybody think workstations running linux
>2.4 were more useful than the ones running linux
>2.2? Or 2.2 instead of 2.0? NO!
Actually, the kernel updates are still making large differences to usefullness. With kernel 2.4, USB is supported, sound support improves, I can play DVDs, AGP is better support, threading on 4 processor machines is more effecient, the ReiserFS, and scores of other things that help make linux more usefull as a workstation. Some of the are just new or improved drivers, but a lot of the changes come from re-architecting the driver sub-systems.
I guess that most people overlook these exciting changes because if they needed them they've been using patched versions of the 2.2 kernal. However, I hate dealing with kernel patches and have been doing without these improvements till the 2.4 kernel shipped.
And frankly, going from gnome 1.0 to 1.2 didn't make much of change for me (sorry, I can't comment on KDE since I don't use it. I like GNOME because it is in C rather than C++).
Well, we used to have lisp machines. So, a self booting bash would just make for a bash machine. All programs would just be bash macros that get called from the command line. All storage would be scalars, arrays, and associative arrays. For persistance, bash would need to modified to save it's state to disk, but that would probably fit on a floppy for most people.
The other day I sat down and decided to learn Xlib on a Sun from nothing but the man pages. So far I have a program that opens a windows and prints Hello World. From here, most other drawing related tasks are easy. I still haven't figured out getting events, but I haven't even looked at it yet since I just wanted to draw to a window for visualization purposes. Despite how low level Xlib is, it really was pretty easy to use.
Motif on the other hand is a real pain in the ass. I took one look at Motif on an SGI and decided to download and install GTK. It was really ugly. The only thing I know about Xt is that those two letter pop up a lot with Motif.
There's also SART, the renderer I'm working on. Its current focus is rendering, but there'll be a modeller in a, well, not too near future. Unfortunately I don't have the time to work on it as much as I'd like.
Current features are full programability (using guile), support for NURBS, blobs, parametric and implicit surfaces, volume rendering (including nonuniform textured volumes), radiosity, postprocessing. Check http://petra.zesoi.fer.hr/~silovic/sart for more info.
Why do all these libre 3D packages try to do everything. If someone would take the time to do a renderer that was as good as BMRT (or better yet, PRMan) as GPL'ed software, I'd be so happy. I do not need another program that is a poor modeler, worse animator, and average renderer. I need a program that accells at one of those areas and can easily work with other programs in the other areas. BMRT is an excelent renderer. It doesn't even try to do animation, but that's OK because I can export animation from Max or Blender to BMRT.
BTW, the key to making a renderer that is better than BMRT is to make it a scanline renderer that looks just as good. That is the approach that PRMan takes.
>If you were to actually support this statment, I
>might give it some thought. After getting used
>to the interface of Blender, I've found that
>it's rather usable. Although I haven't used
>other 3D modeling interfaces (and perhaps for
>that reason), I generally don't find myself
>wishing that anything about Blender's interface
>was different. However, if the interface "plain
>out sucks" as you claim, this shouldn't be
>happening, and I should be finding annoyances on
>a regular basis. That's simply not happening.
Personally, I find the whole gesture system for moving, scaling, and rotating objects to be rather annoying, and those three equivalent keyboard shortcuts always escape my memory. Also, I hated the rotating (or spinning, or whatever) buttons, although 2.04 seems to have reworked how they are handled. Finally, I wish for a plainer interface. I've used 3Ds max, Lightwave, and Softimage 3d. Of those three programs, my favorite two are Lightwave and SI, both of which use a rather plane, non-windows like interface. I'm working at designing my own animation package, and the interfaces that I'm drawing on paper tend to look like a cross between Softimage and Inferno (a 2d effects system). Code for this animation system hasn't yet begun, but code for my 2d effects system has. Don't know when I'll have something to show though.
Let's settle this like civilised people. We will write a tux vs daemon fighting game ala Tekken that runs of both platforms, then settle our differences in that (perhaps include Jobs and Gates as well).
Houdini on Linux isn't for general sale yet. Last I heard they were still sorting out OpenGL support problems (as in there aren't very many opengl implementations for linux that are good enough), and MIDI support (MIDI controllers are popular for controlling variables). That said, they are releasing the Linux version of Houdini to some of their established customers.
Likewise, Softimage says that their linux version is currently being beta tested by some of their established custommers.
I don't really know anything about the Maya linux port.
My understanding is that IBM's AIX machines are still popular in CAD and solid modelling markets. Like SGI, IBM workstations all seem to be aimed a graphics use rather than web or server development. I base this on the fact that most references that I see to IBM machines are with reguards to their usage running CATIA or other cad systems, while most of the Suns I see out there are for web or server development. HP also seems to emphasize the CAD market with their unix workstations.
At this point, I'd love an entry level SGI, or an entry level HP or IBM (as long as the IBM had a least a GXT2000P instead of the 2D only board), but to be happy with a Sun I'd require at least a high end Ultra 10. The particularly appealing thing about the IBMs are the cool black cases, but practically speaking, linux or SGI would be more practical.
Maybe you can get all the features working on Windows in under an hour, but what I learned when I tried to do that is my family found it too complex to use and thus didn't.
I stripped the machine back to only playing DVDs for the time being, but soon I intend to make i a dual boot machine to put linux on. The plan from there is to use something like SDL to integrate the sound mixing, DVD playing, CD playing, and MP3 playing together. And of course TV viewing, record, etc, once I get a tv-tunner card that can do decent capturing. Unfortunatly, I'm broke so it ain't likely to happen soon.
The problem with buying the cheap equipment is that some of us also want high quality. I suppose that it should always be possible to hack the cheap DVD players to get better video and audio signals out.
Re:Byte-for-byte copying may be fair use here
on
Dreamcast Runs Linux
·
· Score: 1
Even if you were correct (and I'm not sure you are), whose has the money to spend on lawyers to stand up to Sega in court?
Personally, I think that end user requirements aren't that hard to determine. Like Allen Cooper focuses on in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, the key is to focus not just on what the user has to accomplish with your software, but to also think about what they want out of life. Specifically, to be happy, and to not have in-animate objects make them look stupid.
So, if for some reason I can't make my software bug-free, fast, or keep it from asking stupid questions, I can at least make it take the blame and be ammusing about it. The greatly helps the clerk that has to use it because now they aren't being force to feel stupid when my software does dumb things. Now, making the software pretty in this way doesn't help totally make up for bugs, etc, but it does make the inevitable bugs easier to swallow.
Some of us feel cowardly about talking to the actually developers because we can't reproduce reliably a bug, and because we have a hard time adequately describing it.
On top of that, when we do send feed back to developers, it is often hard to see the effect. I always use the talkback version of mozilla and do my best to explain what I was doing at the time of the crash, but I don't see much improvement in the past few versions I've tried. Then, when I complain that it is unreasonably slow on my machine, I'm just told to upgrade.
Actually, the Sega Saturn used Hitachi cpus (two of them, part of why programmers disliked it so).
Also, to my understanding, the MIPS cpu in the PS2 is mainly there for playing PS1 games, and maybe for offloading slower processing tasks to (like sound). I've never heard of an r3k chip at faster than 75mhz, yet the rest of the PS2 runs at 300mhz, so the r3k can't be doing much.
While hybrid games is a cool idea, I don't think that it is possible. The regular PSX can only use CDs, while the PS2 probably requires that it's games only come on DVDs (to prevent piracy). Besides, and supplemental materials packed onto a single CD aren't going to be that great. Better to just make two versions of the same game.
As to the PSX++ development system, I think the PSX and PS2 are too different for anything more than superficial similarities in the libraries, but I'm not a PS2 developer, so I couldn't comment.
They do offer something that Nvidea doesn't. The voodoo5 line (and maybe the voodoo3 line) offer a T-buffer. The gives us FSAA, motion blur, and focal depth. Of those features, only FSAA is possible on Nvidia cards. And personally, I'd rather have those features be put to use over the T&L.
Also, the Voodoo3 and voodoo5 lines offer two three stage texturing units, compared to Nvidia's 2 or 4 two stage units. Current games are optimized for two stages, but more effects and speed could be achieved if people were to optimize for 3 stages. Until then, Nvidia's faster at texturing for most games.
Actually, the Voodoo3 3000 has TV-Out and DVD decoding. The only thing it is missing is the TV tuner (which comes with the 3500). And, at the computer shows that come near my house, the 3000 is available for well under $100. I haven't seen any 3500s recently, so I can't comment on their price. What disappoints me is that I can't get TV in on any 3dfx card faster than the 3500.
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>>Pixar has not, however, released modeling, or
>>animation tools.
>That's because they don't make any for any
>platform, or at least nothing major. They are
>known for Renderman, their renderer.
Actually, Pixar doesn't make modeling and animation tools. They make them on Irix. They just don't sell them to anyone. What did you think Toystory was animated with? Maya?
I've noticed Broadcast 2k. It is great that it works on linux, but it looks really clunky. I wish a reliable source (say a non-geek who spends all day behind Avid, Discreet, and Adobe editing packages) would do a review of it. I downloaded the binaries, but I wasn't able to get it working. Linux Media arts (http://www.linuxmediaarts.com/) sells systems preloaded with Broadcast2k. I might buy one sometime, but for now my next purchase is probably going to be an SGI 02 with video options. Currently Broadcast2000 doesn't run on anything but linux.
I do appreciate the mpeg2 and quicktime libraries though. I plan to use their quicktime library in a project I'm working on. Initially it is an effects program, but I might expand it to be a full blown editor someday.
People keep talking about how /. karma has no value. It always makes me want to open a store just so that I can offer a discount to /.ers w/ high karma.
If not everything is based on faith, then why should I have faith in your word. To make a broad reaching statement like that, one really should offer proof.
Actually, Windows is far from the perfect OS for these people. You admitted so yourself when you said that they can't remeber where the powerpoint files were saved.
/dev/3d device). Until then, 3d support is limited to porting mesa to my custom gui.
Of the currently available general computing OSs (meaning that users can control the applications installed, computer to many web set top boxes where only the manufactor can change the software), I'd say that PalmOS is closest to being perfect for the computer illiterate.
Now, if I want to make an OS for computer illiterate users, I can start from scratch (what Palm did), or I can base my new OS off Windows, Linux, or something entirely different. If I base it on windows, most likely my device will never be as easy as I would like (although I don't truly know what can be done with 2000 embeded or CE embeded). If I use BeOS, I can get good results, but I have to spend a lot of money on licensing, and hardware support will be harder to comeby.
However, if I base my new OS on the linux kernel (rember the OS is all the GNU utils, BSD utils, etc, not just the linux kernel, hence all the fuss over GNU/Linux versus just linux), I can ditch X (or maybe use TinyX) but still use hardware accelerated video with cards that the framebuffer console supports. I can have DVD support (although there would be some nasty legal issues), I can have have excelent sound support. And best of all, for the applications I present to the user, I can borrow components from existing applications. Using linux as a starting place, a small team of people with virtually no money could create a new OS that would be far superior to anything else available.
I just wish that the frame buffer console would add 3D support somehow (perhaps through a
>Does anybody think workstations running linux
>2.4 were more useful than the ones running linux
>2.2? Or 2.2 instead of 2.0? NO!
Actually, the kernel updates are still making large differences to usefullness. With kernel 2.4, USB is supported, sound support improves, I can play DVDs, AGP is better support, threading on 4 processor machines is more effecient, the ReiserFS, and scores of other things that help make linux more usefull as a workstation. Some of the are just new or improved drivers, but a lot of the changes come from re-architecting the driver sub-systems.
I guess that most people overlook these exciting changes because if they needed them they've been using patched versions of the 2.2 kernal. However, I hate dealing with kernel patches and have been doing without these improvements till the 2.4 kernel shipped.
And frankly, going from gnome 1.0 to 1.2 didn't make much of change for me (sorry, I can't comment on KDE since I don't use it. I like GNOME because it is in C rather than C++).
Well, we used to have lisp machines. So, a self booting bash would just make for a bash machine. All programs would just be bash macros that get called from the command line. All storage would be scalars, arrays, and associative arrays. For persistance, bash would need to modified to save it's state to disk, but that would probably fit on a floppy for most people.
The other day I sat down and decided to learn Xlib on a Sun from nothing but the man pages. So far I have a program that opens a windows and prints Hello World. From here, most other drawing related tasks are easy. I still haven't figured out getting events, but I haven't even looked at it yet since I just wanted to draw to a window for visualization purposes. Despite how low level Xlib is, it really was pretty easy to use.
Motif on the other hand is a real pain in the ass. I took one look at Motif on an SGI and decided to download and install GTK. It was really ugly. The only thing I know about Xt is that those two letter pop up a lot with Motif.
There's also SART, the renderer I'm working on. Its current focus is rendering, but there'll be a modeller in a, well, not too near future. Unfortunately I don't have the time to work on it as much as I'd like.
Current features are full programability (using guile), support for NURBS, blobs, parametric and implicit surfaces, volume rendering (including nonuniform textured volumes), radiosity, postprocessing. Check http://petra.zesoi.fer.hr/~silovic/sart for more info.
Why do all these libre 3D packages try to do everything. If someone would take the time to do a renderer that was as good as BMRT (or better yet, PRMan) as GPL'ed software, I'd be so happy. I do not need another program that is a poor modeler, worse animator, and average renderer. I need a program that accells at one of those areas and can easily work with other programs in the other areas. BMRT is an excelent renderer. It doesn't even try to do animation, but that's OK because I can export animation from Max or Blender to BMRT.
BTW, the key to making a renderer that is better than BMRT is to make it a scanline renderer that looks just as good. That is the approach that PRMan takes.
> the UI plain out sucks.
>If you were to actually support this statment, I
>might give it some thought. After getting used
>to the interface of Blender, I've found that
>it's rather usable. Although I haven't used
>other 3D modeling interfaces (and perhaps for
>that reason), I generally don't find myself
>wishing that anything about Blender's interface
>was different. However, if the interface "plain
>out sucks" as you claim, this shouldn't be
>happening, and I should be finding annoyances on
>a regular basis. That's simply not happening.
Personally, I find the whole gesture system for moving, scaling, and rotating objects to be rather annoying, and those three equivalent keyboard shortcuts always escape my memory. Also, I hated the rotating (or spinning, or whatever) buttons, although 2.04 seems to have reworked how they are handled. Finally, I wish for a plainer interface. I've used 3Ds max, Lightwave, and Softimage 3d. Of those three programs, my favorite two are Lightwave and SI, both of which use a rather plane, non-windows like interface. I'm working at designing my own animation package, and the interfaces that I'm drawing on paper tend to look like a cross between Softimage and Inferno (a 2d effects system). Code for this animation system hasn't yet begun, but code for my 2d effects system has. Don't know when I'll have something to show though.
Let's settle this like civilised people. We will write a tux vs daemon fighting game ala Tekken that runs of both platforms, then settle our differences in that (perhaps include Jobs and Gates as well).
Houdini on Linux isn't for general sale yet. Last I heard they were still sorting out OpenGL support problems (as in there aren't very many opengl implementations for linux that are good enough), and MIDI support (MIDI controllers are popular for controlling variables). That said, they are releasing the Linux version of Houdini to some of their established customers. Likewise, Softimage says that their linux version is currently being beta tested by some of their established custommers. I don't really know anything about the Maya linux port.
My understanding is that IBM's AIX machines are still popular in CAD and solid modelling markets. Like SGI, IBM workstations all seem to be aimed a graphics use rather than web or server development. I base this on the fact that most references that I see to IBM machines are with reguards to their usage running CATIA or other cad systems, while most of the Suns I see out there are for web or server development. HP also seems to emphasize the CAD market with their unix workstations. At this point, I'd love an entry level SGI, or an entry level HP or IBM (as long as the IBM had a least a GXT2000P instead of the 2D only board), but to be happy with a Sun I'd require at least a high end Ultra 10. The particularly appealing thing about the IBMs are the cool black cases, but practically speaking, linux or SGI would be more practical.
Maybe you can get all the features working on Windows in under an hour, but what I learned when I tried to do that is my family found it too complex to use and thus didn't.
I stripped the machine back to only playing DVDs for the time being, but soon I intend to make i a dual boot machine to put linux on. The plan from there is to use something like SDL to integrate the sound mixing, DVD playing, CD playing, and MP3 playing together. And of course TV viewing, record, etc, once I get a tv-tunner card that can do decent capturing. Unfortunatly, I'm broke so it ain't likely to happen soon.
The problem with buying the cheap equipment is that some of us also want high quality. I suppose that it should always be possible to hack the cheap DVD players to get better video and audio signals out.
Even if you were correct (and I'm not sure you are), whose has the money to spend on lawyers to stand up to Sega in court?
Hmm, good point. I'd consider suing, but none of my code appears in the kernal, so I have no right to sue.
Personally, I think that end user requirements aren't that hard to determine. Like Allen Cooper focuses on in his book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, the key is to focus not just on what the user has to accomplish with your software, but to also think about what they want out of life. Specifically, to be happy, and to not have in-animate objects make them look stupid.
So, if for some reason I can't make my software bug-free, fast, or keep it from asking stupid questions, I can at least make it take the blame and be ammusing about it. The greatly helps the clerk that has to use it because now they aren't being force to feel stupid when my software does dumb things. Now, making the software pretty in this way doesn't help totally make up for bugs, etc, but it does make the inevitable bugs easier to swallow.
Some of us feel cowardly about talking to the actually developers because we can't reproduce reliably a bug, and because we have a hard time adequately describing it.
On top of that, when we do send feed back to developers, it is often hard to see the effect. I always use the talkback version of mozilla and do my best to explain what I was doing at the time of the crash, but I don't see much improvement in the past few versions I've tried. Then, when I complain that it is unreasonably slow on my machine, I'm just told to upgrade.
I'd be happy to do the port if someone wants to donate the dreamcast hardware.
So, if you use the C libraries, which chip runs int main(){;}? Also, is the IOP the chip that boots the system?
Or can't you comment on that.
Actually, the Sega Saturn used Hitachi cpus (two of them, part of why programmers disliked it so). Also, to my understanding, the MIPS cpu in the PS2 is mainly there for playing PS1 games, and maybe for offloading slower processing tasks to (like sound). I've never heard of an r3k chip at faster than 75mhz, yet the rest of the PS2 runs at 300mhz, so the r3k can't be doing much. While hybrid games is a cool idea, I don't think that it is possible. The regular PSX can only use CDs, while the PS2 probably requires that it's games only come on DVDs (to prevent piracy). Besides, and supplemental materials packed onto a single CD aren't going to be that great. Better to just make two versions of the same game. As to the PSX++ development system, I think the PSX and PS2 are too different for anything more than superficial similarities in the libraries, but I'm not a PS2 developer, so I couldn't comment.
IBM also provides documentation in their developerworks web site on tweaking the linux kernel for better java performance.
They do offer something that Nvidea doesn't. The voodoo5 line (and maybe the voodoo3 line) offer a T-buffer. The gives us FSAA, motion blur, and focal depth. Of those features, only FSAA is possible on Nvidia cards. And personally, I'd rather have those features be put to use over the T&L. Also, the Voodoo3 and voodoo5 lines offer two three stage texturing units, compared to Nvidia's 2 or 4 two stage units. Current games are optimized for two stages, but more effects and speed could be achieved if people were to optimize for 3 stages. Until then, Nvidia's faster at texturing for most games.
Actually, the Voodoo3 3000 has TV-Out and DVD decoding. The only thing it is missing is the TV tuner (which comes with the 3500). And, at the computer shows that come near my house, the 3000 is available for well under $100. I haven't seen any 3500s recently, so I can't comment on their price. What disappoints me is that I can't get TV in on any 3dfx card faster than the 3500.