"I don't understand why someone like you would get defensive about nVidia though. Do they send you a cheque every month?
No, no check from them, but they do make great drivers for FreeBSD, the OS that I use for my desktop. That's why I am partial to them.
"All those drivers do is subtract motivation for people to get involved in Xorg development, or Gatos, or whatever. I'm in favour of purposely breaking compatibility on a monthly basis if need be."
Well you go ahead and encourage your friends at Xorg to do that, and we'll all watch helplessly as yet another fork of X takes off.;)
Oh come on! It's time to take off the tinfoil hats guys.
Nvidia dropping support for old cards like you suggest is silly, as it would be extremely bad publicity for them, and would surely cost them sales (people would switch to ATI) from linux users.
NVidia still supports jsut about every card they've ever made, in both linux and FreeBSD.
Nvidia just dropped support for a few legacy cards in their unified driver, but say they will continue to support them in a special legacy driver release. Here are the offending cards:
From the readme:
"Below are the legacy GPUs that are no longer supported in the unified driver. These GPUs will continue to be maintained through the special legacy NVIDIA GPU driver releases."
RIVA TNT RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro RIVA TNT2 Ultra Vanta/Vanta LT RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro Aladdin TNT2 GeForce 256 GeForce DDR Quadro GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro GeForce2 Ti GeForce2 Ultra Quadro2 Pro
There are Open source drivers that work with nvidia chips anyway, so if some day Nvidia completely drops support for some old-ass graphics card, what's the big deal? Do you really want to play the lastest version of tuxracer with a seven year old graphics card?
Besides, this is commodity X86 hardware we're talking about. It's not even really designed to last more than 5 years.
May I suggest the 3ware RAID series. They handle the RAID array in hardware, which probably makes the driver less complex and less prone to breakage (although we are talking about *linux* here, so you never know) between kernel versions.
I bought one of those babies for my FreeBSD box. I love it.
Well I wouldn't know...I'm a BSD user and to be honest I havn't used linux in over two years. Are there any linux distros that distribute Nvidia's binary driver?
Assuming NVidia allows redistribution of their drivers, the entire OS could still at least be "free as in beer", and "free" software advocates such as yourself, could chose to use the OS driver instead.
Your post correctly points out some of the things FreeBSD lacks - mainly things working "out of the box". As for you not being able to get those things working, that sucks. Might have been the flakiness if the earlier 5.x releases of FreeBSD - or maybe those areas of FreeBSD just aren't up to snuff.
I do recall having some misc. problems with 5.1/5.2 releases of FreeBSD, but they seem to have finally gotten it right with 5.4, which is my current desktop at home.
Still things generally do not work out of the box. I had to load the cam kernel module and do some config editing to get K3B to work as a non-root user, I still have to mount my USB thumb drive manually, and I had to rename a config file to get ethereal to compile correctly, I had to implement a shell script to get Firebox to talk to Thunderbird, and vice versa.
But now everything just works - *beautifully* I might add. portupgrade , portmanager and portsnap together make maintaining ports as simple as running two simple commands from time to time.
It would be much easier to just install linux, but I like the feeling of BSD, and I LOVE the FreeBSD documentation. All of the issues I described above (except for the Firefox/Thunderbird issue) were covered in the documentation of either FreeBSD *or* the ports that were involved, and I've never run into a piece of BSD related documentation that I couldn't follow, or was flat out wrong.
True the graphics were...odd. And the acting was...off. But I think the main thing that limited it's popularity was the fact that it was a simulation.
Most people don't like when you get shot once and die, or when on shell takes out your tank...or you have to march 1km in real time to get to your objective.
So I think Codemasters is realizes this and will end up creating a dumbed down version of Operation Flashpoint - Flashpoint for the masses. More power to them. I'll stick to my obscure simulations.
Your point about machines being built for small gaming enviroments became very apparent to me a couple of weeks ago, when my cooworker had an uber machine in the office.
He was building a machine for a rather rich person who wanted the best possible gaming rig there was.
He went all out.. Athlon64 FX55/2GB CAS2 RAM/ SATA RAID/ and some $600 GeForce card. The entire machine came in at around $6000.00.
I was curious how it would handle OFP...particularly high viewdistances. I tested it with my little OFPMark mission, and it didn't do much better than the best machines from almost two years ago.
It's very risky to come out with a game that breaks the mold, but every once in awhile some upstart crack team of developers comes out with a game that doesn't quite fit into any of the pre-defined Genres, and becomes very popular.
Flashpoint took away three solid years of my life, and nothing has been able to even come close to matching up with it since its release.
Now Codemasters, the company who distributed Operation Flashpoint has become impatient with the developers of Operation Flashpoint, so they have decided to hire their own developers to write the sequel - Operation Flashpoint 2. Since Codemasters' contract gave them the rights to the Operation Flashpoint name, BIS, the original developers of Operation Flashpoint have been forced to change the name of the sequel they are working on and find another distributor.
The original Operation Flashpoint actually took four years to develop and was continually patched and updated for another three years after its release.
Codemasters is sure to develop their sequel in a quarter of the time, which will inevitably lead a sequel that is complete and utter rubbish - probably just another battlefield 1942 rip-off.
Many will end up buying Operation Flashpoint 2 without realizing that the game isn't made by the same people that made the first one. The core Operation Flashpoint fan base has already made their views know on the itnernet - they won't be buying Codemaster's sequel.
"If you do a fresh install of Windows XP, I guarantee that no hardware accelerated OpenGL games such as Quake 3 will run. Microsoft only ships video drivers with OpenGL support removed, in an attempt to lock game developers into using DirectX."
Wrong.
Microsoft supplied video drivers do not feature *any* form of Hardware 3D acceleration support.
"Look at the typical junkie on the street. He's be happy to rob a bank. But the bank's security system is beyond his capabilities to SUCCESSFULLY attack.
So he picks easier targets with LOWER payoffs (mugging pedestrians)."
We're talking about desktop systems here, right? I fail to see how owning a Windows box would be considered a "lower payoff" over owning a linux/bsd/whatever box, considering the use (spam/DoS bots) owned boxes are put to. IF anything a WIndows box would be more valuable, as the owner would probably be less likely to discover that they've been owned.
"No. While it is more "convenient", that is NOT the reason that IE is subject to all the attacks."
Do you seriously believe that marketshare and userbase have nothing to do with it?
"The reason is that the level of skill/intelligence required to successfully attack IE is SO VERY LOW. ANYONE with a bit of programming skill can write an exploit for IE."
Oh really? Can you link me to some of the exploits you've written?
"Again, it isn't about the POTENTIAL targets.
It's all about the AVAILABLE targets in your SKILL RANGE."
And there are hundreds of millions of more targets which use Internet Explorer. This leads to many more unpatched IE's poking around the net. The fact that you and others see marketshare as a non-contributory issue is mind boggling.
"Which is why Open Source has such a great security rep. There aren't any market forces or deadlines to deal with. It's ready when it is ready."
Oh no. The OSS talking points are starting to come out now.
"Yeah. You'd have thunk that the people writing the code would have managed to PATCH that flaw by now, wouldn't you?"
The viruses you are talking about (the ones with multiple "revisions") cannot just be "patched". If you weren't so incredibly partisan on the issue you would realize that you can't "patch" for a worm that requires a user to 1) Download a zip file attachment 2) Open the attachment 3) Execute the file inside
Hell, sometimes these worm even require the viction to type in a password to open the file becuase it's encrypted. How do you patch ignorance?
" Ummmm.... no they don't. I have to download new datafiles every day to stay current just BECAUSE they can't recognize them."
AI has progressed enough so that AV could be made to recognize unknown threats, but people don't want this, as it would take up too much of their CPU.
"We block ANY file attachments with VBScript because the anti-virus systems CANNOT tell a harmful script from a safe script."
Good job Captain Obvious. Mail admins with a clue have been doing this for years. Since 99% of email viruses are in zip form today, do you block all zip attachments too? This would limit the avenues of infection to much greater degree than blocking vbs files.
"FireFox's problems are only "news" because the "journalists" want to write the story about how it failed to live up to the "hype".
If a Linux worm infected 10 servers in the wild, it would get the same attention.
But a Windows exploit that cracks a few thousand boxes? Nothing. People didn't even care about the latest Sober version until it started spewing German spam."
Agian, you bring up worms like Sober, which require several steps of user interaction to propogate. No current desktop OS will protect users from this degree of ignorance. The spread of Sober has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with markethare and userbase.
"#1. Security depends upon limiting the avenues of attack."
Totally agree.
"#2. Security depends upon hardening the remaining avenues beyond the attacker's ability to successfully attack."
Again, I agree.
"#3. The media attention focused on a vulnerability does NOT reflect the severity of that vulnerability."
Of course not. It reflects the potential "ratings" the story will get.
Machine polish, and a high speed rotary polisher for cars (not the $29.00 walmart kind) can transform a CD from unreadable to perfect condition...as long as there are no scratches on the non-data side of the disc.
Oops. It appears I didn't 'RTFP'. You allready mentioned that it was a standard.
Anyhow, the onboard sound on my Asus MB is no worse than my Sound Blaster Live was. I actually used it to transfer a couple of old vinyl records and had a pretty good result.
AC'97 is just a standard for building sound chipsets on a motherboard. It has little to do with the quality or performance of the components that use it.
"I long for the good old days when something had to be scientifically proven before it was considered fact, when all the data was used and you didn't throw out the data points that didn't fit your outcome."
The theory of evolution is not considered a fact. It is a widely accepted theory. Intelligent design, by definition, cannot be proven one way or another, and therefore is a matter of faith.
Are you advocating that we treat Intelligent design as a scientific theory when, by it's own definition, it is not?
"This is all the world class scientists are trying to do, they want science to be good science and conduct itself in a respectable manner exploring all the data to come up with the most plausible out come, not providing the answer and then torturing the data to get the desired outcome.",
I assure you, "world class scientists" are not the ones proposing these changes in Kansas.
With one ATI product, I ran into drivers that would not uninstall - period. I tried to remove them manually, but ATI's driver installer had integrated them into the WinXP driver.cab file, and registered all of the files with Windows built in system file protection mechanism.
Uninstalling the driver from the device manager did no good, as the device would be automatically reinstalled using the same driver the next time windows scanned for new hardware. I tried deleting all of the.inf/sys/dll files manually, but windows system file protection would instantly recreate them from the driver.cab file. I also tried opening up the driver.cab file and removing them, but windows would detect this too and repopulate the cab file with the files in the system32 folder. By changing a few file permissions, (so the SYSTEM account couldn't touch the driver.cab) file, I managed to remove the files from the driver.cab file and delete the driver files from the Windows directory, but alas, Windows still insisted that it install that particular version of the driver! Obviously, I missed something, but I had had enough. I dumped my files and settings onto a second PC and reinstalled.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't understand why someone like you would get defensive about nVidia though. Do they send you a cheque every month?
;)
No, no check from them, but they do make great drivers for FreeBSD, the OS that I use for my desktop. That's why I am partial to them.
"All those drivers do is subtract motivation for people to get involved in Xorg development, or Gatos, or whatever. I'm in favour of purposely breaking compatibility on a monthly basis if need be."
Well you go ahead and encourage your friends at Xorg to do that, and we'll all watch helplessly as yet another fork of X takes off.
Oh come on! It's time to take off the tinfoil hats guys.
Nvidia dropping support for old cards like you suggest is silly, as it would be extremely bad publicity for them, and would surely cost them sales (people would switch to ATI) from linux users.
NVidia still supports jsut about every card they've ever made, in both linux and FreeBSD.
Nvidia just dropped support for a few legacy cards in their unified driver, but say they will continue to support them in a special legacy driver release. Here are the offending cards:
From the readme:
"Below are the legacy GPUs that are no longer supported in the unified driver.
These GPUs will continue to be maintained through the special legacy NVIDIA
GPU driver releases."
RIVA TNT
RIVA TNT2/TNT2 Pro
RIVA TNT2 Ultra
Vanta/Vanta LT
RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro
Aladdin TNT2
GeForce 256
GeForce DDR
Quadro
GeForce2 GTS/GeForce2 Pro
GeForce2 Ti
GeForce2 Ultra
Quadro2 Pro
There are Open source drivers that work with nvidia chips anyway, so if some day Nvidia completely drops support for some old-ass graphics card, what's the big deal? Do you really want to play the lastest version of tuxracer with a seven year old graphics card?
Besides, this is commodity X86 hardware we're talking about. It's not even really designed to last more than 5 years.
May I suggest the 3ware RAID series. They handle the RAID array in hardware, which probably makes the driver less complex and less prone to breakage (although we are talking about *linux* here, so you never know) between kernel versions.
I bought one of those babies for my FreeBSD box. I love it.
Well I wouldn't know...I'm a BSD user and to be honest I havn't used linux in over two years. Are there any linux distros that distribute Nvidia's binary driver?
Assuming NVidia allows redistribution of their drivers, the entire OS could still at least be "free as in beer", and "free" software advocates such as yourself, could chose to use the OS driver instead.
"the core value of Linux"
I thought the core value of linux was to have a free, stable, fast, powerfull UNIX-like OS?
Perhaps you confusing 'the core value of linux' with 'the core value of Richard Stallman and his army of anti-capitalist minions'?
Go ahead and mod me a troll. I've got Karma to burn.
The common good cannot be served if everyone isn't included.
Your post correctly points out some of the things FreeBSD lacks - mainly things working "out of the box". As for you not being able to get those things working, that sucks. Might have been the flakiness if the earlier 5.x releases of FreeBSD - or maybe those areas of FreeBSD just aren't up to snuff.
I do recall having some misc. problems with 5.1/5.2 releases of FreeBSD, but they seem to have finally gotten it right with 5.4, which is my current desktop at home.
Still things generally do not work out of the box. I had to load the cam kernel module and do some config editing to get K3B to work as a non-root user, I still have to mount my USB thumb drive manually, and I had to rename a config file to get ethereal to compile correctly, I had to implement a shell script to get Firebox to talk to Thunderbird, and vice versa.
But now everything just works - *beautifully* I might add. portupgrade , portmanager and portsnap together make maintaining ports as simple as running two simple commands from time to time.
It would be much easier to just install linux, but I like the feeling of BSD, and I LOVE the FreeBSD documentation. All of the issues I described above (except for the Firefox/Thunderbird issue) were covered in the documentation of either FreeBSD *or* the ports that were involved, and I've never run into a piece of BSD related documentation that I couldn't follow, or was flat out wrong.
/*completely offtopic
Your sig is broke. I've fixed it for you.
completely offtopic*/
I would recommend anyone who uses FreeBSD to give portmanger (/ports/sysutils/portmanager) and portsnap (/ports/sysutils/portsnap) a try.
I never had any big problems with the portupgrade/cvsup method myself, but portmanager is MUCH easier to use.
I use portmanger in place of portupgrade and portsnap in place of cvsup now, and updating has never been easier.
Dinger!
True the graphics were...odd. And the acting was...off. But I think the main thing that limited it's popularity was the fact that it was a simulation.
Most people don't like when you get shot once and die, or when on shell takes out your tank...or you have to march 1km in real time to get to your objective.
So I think Codemasters is realizes this and will end up creating a dumbed down version of Operation Flashpoint - Flashpoint for the masses. More power to them. I'll stick to my obscure simulations.
Your point about machines being built for small gaming enviroments became very apparent to me a couple of weeks ago, when my cooworker had an uber machine in the office.
He was building a machine for a rather rich person who wanted the best possible gaming rig there was.
He went all out.. Athlon64 FX55/2GB CAS2 RAM/ SATA RAID/ and some $600 GeForce card. The entire machine came in at around $6000.00.
I was curious how it would handle OFP...particularly high viewdistances. I tested it with my little OFPMark mission, and it didn't do much better than the best machines from almost two years ago.
Just ask Codemasters.
It's very risky to come out with a game that breaks the mold, but every once in awhile some upstart crack team of developers comes out with a game that doesn't quite fit into any of the pre-defined Genres, and becomes very popular.
Case in point - Operation Flashpoint
Flashpoint took away three solid years of my life, and nothing has been able to even come close to matching up with it since its release.
Now Codemasters, the company who distributed Operation Flashpoint has become impatient with the developers of Operation Flashpoint, so they have decided to hire their own developers to write the sequel - Operation Flashpoint 2. Since Codemasters' contract gave them the rights to the Operation Flashpoint name, BIS, the original developers of Operation Flashpoint have been forced to change the name of the sequel they are working on and find another distributor.
The original Operation Flashpoint actually took four years to develop and was continually patched and updated for another three years after its release.
Codemasters is sure to develop their sequel in a quarter of the time, which will inevitably lead a sequel that is complete and utter rubbish - probably just another battlefield 1942 rip-off.
Many will end up buying Operation Flashpoint 2 without realizing that the game isn't made by the same people that made the first one. The core Operation Flashpoint fan base has already made their views know on the itnernet - they won't be buying Codemaster's sequel.
Armed Assault it is!
...s**t.
That's all I have to say about that.
ding! ding! ding! ding! ding! We have a winner!
I was burned badly by that card.
I agree.
When we were expecting our first child we simply chose not to have those tests done.
Will this one will actually work with NT based OSs?
(bonus points for anyone who 'gets this')
"If you do a fresh install of Windows XP, I guarantee that no hardware accelerated OpenGL games such as Quake 3 will run. Microsoft only ships video drivers with OpenGL support removed, in an attempt to lock game developers into using DirectX."
Wrong.
Microsoft supplied video drivers do not feature *any* form of Hardware 3D acceleration support.
"Look at the typical junkie on the street. He's be happy to rob a bank. But the bank's security system is beyond his capabilities to SUCCESSFULLY attack.
So he picks easier targets with LOWER payoffs (mugging pedestrians)."
We're talking about desktop systems here, right? I fail to see how owning a Windows box would be considered a "lower payoff" over owning a linux/bsd/whatever box, considering the use (spam/DoS bots) owned boxes are put to. IF anything a WIndows box would be more valuable, as the owner would probably be less likely to discover that they've been owned.
"No. While it is more "convenient", that is NOT the reason that IE is subject to all the attacks."
Do you seriously believe that marketshare and userbase have nothing to do with it?
"The reason is that the level of skill/intelligence required to successfully attack IE is SO VERY LOW. ANYONE with a bit of programming skill can write an exploit for IE."
Oh really? Can you link me to some of the exploits you've written?
"Again, it isn't about the POTENTIAL targets.
It's all about the AVAILABLE targets in your SKILL RANGE."
And there are hundreds of millions of more targets which use Internet Explorer. This leads to many more unpatched IE's poking around the net. The fact that you and others see marketshare as a non-contributory issue is mind boggling.
"Which is why Open Source has such a great security rep. There aren't any market forces or deadlines to deal with. It's ready when it is ready."
Oh no. The OSS talking points are starting to come out now.
"Yeah. You'd have thunk that the people writing the code would have managed to PATCH that flaw by now, wouldn't you?"
The viruses you are talking about (the ones with multiple "revisions") cannot just be "patched". If you weren't so incredibly partisan on the issue you would realize that you can't "patch" for a worm that requires a user to 1) Download a zip file attachment 2) Open the attachment 3) Execute the file inside
Hell, sometimes these worm even require the viction to type in a password to open the file becuase it's encrypted. How do you patch ignorance?
" Ummmm.... no they don't. I have to download new datafiles every day to stay current just BECAUSE they can't recognize them."
AI has progressed enough so that AV could be made to recognize unknown threats, but people don't want this, as it would take up too much of their CPU.
"We block ANY file attachments with VBScript because the anti-virus systems CANNOT tell a harmful script from a safe script."
Good job Captain Obvious. Mail admins with a clue have been doing this for years. Since 99% of email viruses are in zip form today, do you block all zip attachments too? This would limit the avenues of infection to much greater degree than blocking vbs files.
"FireFox's problems are only "news" because the "journalists" want to write the story about how it failed to live up to the "hype".
If a Linux worm infected 10 servers in the wild, it would get the same attention.
But a Windows exploit that cracks a few thousand boxes? Nothing. People didn't even care about the latest Sober version until it started spewing German spam."
Agian, you bring up worms like Sober, which require several steps of user interaction to propogate. No current desktop OS will protect users from this degree of ignorance. The spread of Sober has nothing to do with Windows, and everything to do with markethare and userbase.
"#1. Security depends upon limiting the avenues of attack."
Totally agree.
"#2. Security depends upon hardening the remaining avenues beyond the attacker's ability to successfully attack."
Again, I agree.
"#3. The media attention focused on a vulnerability does NOT reflect the severity of that vulnerability."
Of course not. It reflects the potential "ratings" the story will get.
"Anyways, yes, they're wiping out the XP installs on these machines (Dell Optiplex 270's) and installing Win 98 SE on them."
Ouch. You have my condolences.
Windows 98? Computers are not sold with Windows 98 any more. Where is your boss getting these "PCs running Windows 98" for audio editing.
If you're *not* lying, then your boss is an absolute retard. At least use an NT based flavor of windows if you're going to do audio editing.
Machine polish, and a high speed rotary polisher for cars (not the $29.00 walmart kind) can transform a CD from unreadable to perfect condition...as long as there are no scratches on the non-data side of the disc.
link
Download the 'bootonly' ISO image.
Oops. It appears I didn't 'RTFP'. You allready mentioned that it was a standard.
Anyhow, the onboard sound on my Asus MB is no worse than my Sound Blaster Live was. I actually used it to transfer a couple of old vinyl records and had a pretty good result.
AC'97 is just a standard for building sound chipsets on a motherboard. It has little to do with the quality or performance of the components that use it.
"I long for the good old days when something had to be scientifically proven before it was considered fact, when all the data was used and you didn't throw out the data points that didn't fit your outcome."
The theory of evolution is not considered a fact. It is a widely accepted theory. Intelligent design, by definition, cannot be proven one way or another, and therefore is a matter of faith.
Are you advocating that we treat Intelligent design as a scientific theory when, by it's own definition, it is not?
"This is all the world class scientists are trying to do, they want science to be good science and conduct itself in a respectable manner exploring all the data to come up with the most plausible out come, not providing the answer and then torturing the data to get the desired outcome.",
I assure you, "world class scientists" are not the ones proposing these changes in Kansas.
With one ATI product, I ran into drivers that would not uninstall - period. I tried to remove them manually, but ATI's driver installer had integrated them into the WinXP driver.cab file, and registered all of the files with Windows built in system file protection mechanism.
.inf/sys/dll files manually, but windows system file protection would instantly recreate them from the driver.cab file. I also tried opening up the driver.cab file and removing them, but windows would detect this too and repopulate the cab file with the files in the system32 folder. By changing a few file permissions, (so the SYSTEM account couldn't touch the driver.cab) file, I managed to remove the files from the driver.cab file and delete the driver files from the Windows directory, but alas, Windows still insisted that it install that particular version of the driver! Obviously, I missed something, but I had had enough. I dumped my files and settings onto a second PC and reinstalled.
Uninstalling the driver from the device manager did no good, as the device would be automatically reinstalled using the same driver the next time windows scanned for new hardware. I tried deleting all of the
ATI can suck my balls.