Well, folks, *Something* happens every day of the year. This event is just a lot closer to home than most.
NOTHING in his post indicates that he had any idea what would happen. He speaks in vagaries - which is exactly how his prophecies can *come* true; with no details, anything that happens is fulfilment of the prophecy. It could have been an earthquake. It could have been something happening in Australia.
Wow, everybody seemed to miss the point. I mean, that the guy says *NT* is incapable of crashing because his *Windows 2000* box hasn't crashed. That's like saying my Windows 3.1 box is incapable of crashing because my Linux box hasn't crashed.
Clue for you:
In 1996, NT 4.0 was released.
In 1999, NT 5.0 (also known as Windows 2000) was released.
In 2001, NT 5.1 (also known as Windows XP Pro/Windows.Net Server/ etc etc) will be released.
The thing is, anyone who isn't a videophile (ie. the other 95% of people) won't care.
It amazes me when I show people things and they say "But that looks fine to me!" when I can see glitches all over it. To the untrained eye, it might well look fine.
Think about it for a minute. Video CD and Super VideoCDs compress MPEG at anywhere between 1.15 and 2.25 Mbit/s. With transport encoding, that's between 1.25 and 3.0 or so (give or take).
Now, bear in mind that they're not transmitting over the net - so there's no lag, no reassembly - they're just squirting a continuous packet stream.
28800 is about 26400 bits per second, with overhead - which is 0.03Mbit/s.
So that's a factor of 100 difference. With some clever algorithms (eg. Div-X), making use of the fact that NTSC is generally lossy (and thus letting you throw away a lot more of the signal than a videophile would like), you might get away with it. You could just about squeeze VideoCD quality down that pipe. Not bad.
... and also check the management section of this one:
http://www.xsides.com/framesets/aboutFrameset.ht ml
(particularly the Robert Steinberg bio).
... and here's the original complaint:
http://www.vaxxine.com/lawyers/articles/stac.htm l
The thing that gets me is that everyone holds this up as a truly nasty Microsoft deed...... but at the same time turn around and in the same breath say that software patents are wrong. Heheheheh.
So, check out the legal brief. It's interesting.
one of their patents is here:
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05016009__
One more time. It's not journalism it's a web log. You don't like it go somewhere else. Just because they say "news for nerds" that does not make it a newspaper nor does it make anybody here a journalist. Get over it and stop whining.
Hmmm... well, let's see:
* The comments are indeed a weblog.
* They *edit* stories, provide commentary, and publish those stories. Now, those stories might well be short, but they do publish them. This makes it journalism. What do you think reviews, Jon Katz articles, etc are? Scotch Mist? And there's a reason they call themselves *editors* of Slashdot. Jeez.
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
There's a big difference between having a closed architecture that you mandate the hardware design for and call it "Plug and Play", and having an open architecture that anyone can create any hardware for, and having it work.
The Amiga? Wow. So you could plug things in and it would work! The same applies to wall sockets. And for the same reason - they mandated how they'd work.
With the Intel version of plug and play, they had a much more difficult task - more akin to being able to plug a fork into a wall socket and still have it work without killing anyone.
That's my point. Think about why you don't get OpenGL drivers. It's because Microsoft stopped supporting OpenGL and basically forced graphics card vendors to support Direct3D.
No, they stopped providing a software-rendered version of OpenGL. Graphics card vendors currently *do* support OpenGL, regardless of Microsoft's stance on it, so I'd love to know where you get the idea that they were 'forced'.
ATI provide OpenGL drivers.
nVidia provide OpenGL drivers.
However, there's lots of cheap cards that don't.
It's not anti-MS FUD, the guy just wants to know why everybody limits the portability, and therefore possible marketshare, of their games by using platform-limiting products like DirectX. If you have a choice between something portable and forward-thinking, or something tied strongly to one system (even a very widely-used system), the intelligent thing would be to leave all possibilities open and not get tied down yourselves, since it doesn't affect your sales to the larger group and serves the smaller group better as well.
That's very long term thinking. Which is great if you can afford to do that. But typically, developing for portability will increase your development time by 25%-33% - sometimes more. Which means that it costs that much more... and makes it much LESS likely to do it. If marketing can't see a reason to release on X Y and Z platforms, then they'll recommend only releasing it for platform X and keeping the rest of the money for yachts and booze.
(Ultimately, in today's climate, portability is not a compelling argument for development teams to take to upper management - the profit margin's too low - remember; dev time is the most expensive part of making a game)
People are picking DirectX because that's what Microsoft has decreed to be the standard, what they are pushing, and what they are supporting. Technically, DirectX still sucks; it's another one of a long line of Microsoft "me-too" products that Microsoft pushed on the market using their near-monopoly power.
No, it's because you can guarantee that someone has a DirectX-supporting graphics card. You can't guarantee that someone has an OpenGL-supporting graphics card. Also, Direct3D is easier to program on Windows than OpenGL. (IMHO)
I don't write in DX8. I'm not saying it's not good. I'm not saying it is good. I don't have any experience with programming for it. What I'm trying to prove is that while P implies Q, Q does not necessarily imply P. Simple logic.
The point of the post I responded to tried to claim that volume implied great quality, which it does not. If it did, then betamax would VHS is superior.
Of course, in cases of x86, and VHS, they won out to strong user bases, and marketing (and in the case of x86, very strong engineering to get around some of the issues). I'm not saying DX is crap. I was saying that the post that got a high moderating did nothing to prove the claim.
Actually, VHS didn't win because of marketing. They won because the recording length of the tapes was longer, while sacrificing image quality. Ends up that people wanted to be able to record more data, over losing 1/2 of the resolution of the signal, and this is why Betamax died.
P.S. (offtopic) How do WINE developers get away with what they are doing without having the holy hand of Microsoft come down upon them? Does anyone have any information about the legality of reimplementing the Win32 API?
Bill Gates was once quoted in an interview as saying (paraphrasing massively) "feel free - go to town!... and good luck:-)"
Microsoft thinks to itself ~if we change it these ways, and don't point out what we changed, lots of people won't notice they're writing "Java" that runs only on our systems~ (this is documented in the antitrust findings of fact)
If you can't tell what's MS-only and what's common to all JVM's, you shouldn't be allowed to write code. What are we doing? Treating programmers as idiots who can't even tie their shoes?
Contrast this with D3D in DX8. If the hardware doesn't support acceleration of this feature, would it do it in software? If it did, would users want it? Is there a way to choose that if a feature is implemented only in software, that it not be used at all?
It depends; yes, you can tell it not to do it if you want, programmatically. But ultimately, this is why games have render engine feature options screens. So you can turn off stuff your system can't handle, or handles badly.
Of course, you have to design for it - and this is NOT a problem that is DirectX specific - the same issues also apply to OpenGl.
Then, there's this very nice company called EpicGames. It created Unreal and Unreal Tournament (while trying to push Glide) and are now doing Unreal Warfare. These guys provide nice competition to ID Software and YES, they use Direct3D. Now take a modern computer with an NVIDIA card (chances are you already have one anyways) and play some Quake2 and Quake3...See the framerates ? OK... Now start up Unreal/UT, select D3D as the renderer and...do I really have to tell you how low will your FPS go ?
The fact is, the renderer in UT produces much better looking results than in Quake, and is designed for larger maps too. It also handles mirrors, etc. much better. It even has procedural texturing built in. So this isn't a valid comparison; UT runs slower because it does MORE. (And looks better for it)
Start-up Half-Life, the most popular online 3D FPS game at the moment (due to CS), try switching back and forth between the OpenGL and D3D renderers and compare the framerates. I know some of you are going to scream that HL is based on the Quake engine, etc, but just to let you know, only 20% of the HL engine code come from Quake.
Clue; most of that 20% is the RENDERING CODE, which is still largely OpenGL based. They have a wrapper layer between OpenGL and DirectX for the DirectX output. That's where the slowdown comes in. (For example, surfaces don't have to be decomposed into triangles in OpenGl; in DirectX they have to be... and in HalfLife, none of the surfaces are decomposed into triangles by preprocessing the data - which is why it's slower; OpenGL drivers are optimized for this kind of work... but they're doing the conversion themselves).
By using DX8 instead of OpenGL you know that effects designed for the NVidia pixel shader will magically just work on the next-generation Radeons. At the same time, you're handing over control of the whole API to Microsoft, which does not make 3D chipsets, and you're stuck with their idea of how the pixel shader ought to work, as opposed to an API for it designed by the company that makes the chipsets, and then later (if it's successful), reviewed and revised by everyone important in the industry. I won't even start on the cross-platform issues.
Actually, it's devised by several companies that make chipsets, who Microsoft works with closely to ensure that (a) desired, and (b) feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he didn't predict this.
He predicted that *something* would happen.
Well, folks, *Something* happens every day of the year. This event is just a lot closer to home than most.
NOTHING in his post indicates that he had any idea what would happen. He speaks in vagaries - which is exactly how his prophecies can *come* true; with no details, anything that happens is fulfilment of the prophecy. It could have been an earthquake. It could have been something happening in Australia.
Simon
1. I'm not an MS apologist.
2. NT and Windows 2000 are the SAME GODDAMN THING, just one version removed. You don't call Linux something else when you rev the kernel.
What *was* your point? Because it seemed to be hidden.
Wow, everybody seemed to miss the point. I mean, that the guy says *NT* is incapable of crashing because his *Windows 2000* box hasn't crashed. That's like saying my Windows 3.1 box is incapable of crashing because my Linux box hasn't crashed.
.Net Server/ etc etc) will be released.
Clue for you:
In 1996, NT 4.0 was released.
In 1999, NT 5.0 (also known as Windows 2000) was released.
In 2001, NT 5.1 (also known as Windows XP Pro/Windows
So your analogy is false.
Simon
The thing is, anyone who isn't a videophile (ie. the other 95% of people) won't care.
It amazes me when I show people things and they say "But that looks fine to me!" when I can see glitches all over it. To the untrained eye, it might well look fine.
Think about it for a minute. Video CD and Super VideoCDs compress MPEG at anywhere between 1.15 and 2.25 Mbit/s. With transport encoding, that's between 1.25 and 3.0 or so (give or take).
Now, bear in mind that they're not transmitting over the net - so there's no lag, no reassembly - they're just squirting a continuous packet stream.
28800 is about 26400 bits per second, with overhead - which is 0.03Mbit/s.
So that's a factor of 100 difference. With some clever algorithms (eg. Div-X), making use of the fact that NTSC is generally lossy (and thus letting you throw away a lot more of the signal than a videophile would like), you might get away with it. You could just about squeeze VideoCD quality down that pipe. Not bad.
Simon
Yeah... check this out:
t ac .html
t ml
m l
... but at the same time turn around and in the same breath say that software patents are wrong. Heheheheh.
http://www.base.com/software-patents/articles/s
... and also check the management section of this one:
http://www.xsides.com/framesets/aboutFrameset.h
(particularly the Robert Steinberg bio).
... and here's the original complaint:
http://www.vaxxine.com/lawyers/articles/stac.ht
The thing that gets me is that everyone holds this up as a truly nasty Microsoft deed...
So, check out the legal brief. It's interesting.
one of their patents is here:
http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US05016009__
... I've not tracked down the others.
Simon
How about stealing from Stak? At least they got caught on that one.
They infringed a patent. They didn't steal ANYTHING.
You know what a patent is? That thingy that Slashdot users get railed up against because they tend to be overly broad?
Well, Stak had a patent on compressing data on a hard-drive. Microsoft infringed it by doing the same thing.
So there you go. They didn't steal *anything*.
This is such a lame copy of OS X, maybe you should wait until the full port of OS X is on intel.
The difference being that XP is an enterprise class OS... while OSX... isn't.
Simon
just about 6 mos (?) after the 64-bit linux stuff was announced. It's incredible how much progress you can make with billions of $$s backing you up.
What's more impressive is that it'll run most existing Windows software *without needing a recompile*.
One more time. It's not journalism it's a web log. You don't like it go somewhere else. Just because they say "news for nerds" that does not make it a newspaper nor does it make anybody here a journalist. Get over it and stop whining.
Hmmm... well, let's see:
* The comments are indeed a weblog.
* They *edit* stories, provide commentary, and publish those stories. Now, those stories might well be short, but they do publish them. This makes it journalism. What do you think reviews, Jon Katz articles, etc are? Scotch Mist? And there's a reason they call themselves *editors* of Slashdot. Jeez.
Try pulling your head out of your ass.
I take it that journalistic integrity means nothing to you then?
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
There's a big difference between having a closed architecture that you mandate the hardware design for and call it "Plug and Play", and having an open architecture that anyone can create any hardware for, and having it work.
The Amiga? Wow. So you could plug things in and it would work! The same applies to wall sockets. And for the same reason - they mandated how they'd work.
With the Intel version of plug and play, they had a much more difficult task - more akin to being able to plug a fork into a wall socket and still have it work without killing anyone.
Simon
When did anyone ever suggest that Slashdot is, or should be, impartial?
When they said that they provided "News for Nerds".
News should always be impartial.
Not to mention that even that title is wrong; it should be "Opinions for Open Source Advocates".
*shrugs* Your mileage may vary.
Simon
So, the bigger point is this: which do I, as an informed and newsreading consumer, trust? Slashdot, which is an arm of VA Linux, or MSNBC?
MSNBC have proven themselves to be pretty damn impartial. Slashdot cannot claim that. At all.
Simon
Please join with me in wishing cancer on Mr. Gates.
Speaking as someone whose mother died of cancer, please, everyone else, join me in beating this asshole to a pulp.
Get a freaking grip. It's just software.
Don't worry,IE6 lost the QT plug-in but is likely to have gained the QT active-x component
It's already done - just go to the Apple quicktime site, and it'll pop up an ActiveX install box.
That's my point. Think about why you don't get OpenGL drivers. It's because Microsoft stopped supporting OpenGL and basically forced graphics card vendors to support Direct3D.
No, they stopped providing a software-rendered version of OpenGL. Graphics card vendors currently *do* support OpenGL, regardless of Microsoft's stance on it, so I'd love to know where you get the idea that they were 'forced'.
ATI provide OpenGL drivers.
nVidia provide OpenGL drivers.
However, there's lots of cheap cards that don't.
Simon
It's not anti-MS FUD, the guy just wants to know why everybody limits the portability, and therefore possible marketshare, of their games by using platform-limiting products like DirectX. If you have a choice between something portable and forward-thinking, or something tied strongly to one system (even a very widely-used system), the intelligent thing would be to leave all possibilities open and not get tied down yourselves, since it doesn't affect your sales to the larger group and serves the smaller group better as well.
That's very long term thinking. Which is great if you can afford to do that. But typically, developing for portability will increase your development time by 25%-33% - sometimes more. Which means that it costs that much more... and makes it much LESS likely to do it. If marketing can't see a reason to release on X Y and Z platforms, then they'll recommend only releasing it for platform X and keeping the rest of the money for yachts and booze.
(Ultimately, in today's climate, portability is not a compelling argument for development teams to take to upper management - the profit margin's too low - remember; dev time is the most expensive part of making a game)
Simon
People are picking DirectX because that's what Microsoft has decreed to be the standard, what they are pushing, and what they are supporting. Technically, DirectX still sucks; it's another one of a long line of Microsoft "me-too" products that Microsoft pushed on the market using their near-monopoly power.
No, it's because you can guarantee that someone has a DirectX-supporting graphics card. You can't guarantee that someone has an OpenGL-supporting graphics card. Also, Direct3D is easier to program on Windows than OpenGL. (IMHO)
Simon
I don't write in DX8. I'm not saying it's not good. I'm not saying it is good. I don't have any experience with programming for it. What I'm trying to prove is that while P implies Q, Q does not necessarily imply P. Simple logic.
The point of the post I responded to tried to claim that volume implied great quality, which it does not. If it did, then betamax would VHS is superior.
Of course, in cases of x86, and VHS, they won out to strong user bases, and marketing (and in the case of x86, very strong engineering to get around some of the issues). I'm not saying DX is crap. I was saying that the post that got a high moderating did nothing to prove the claim.
Actually, VHS didn't win because of marketing. They won because the recording length of the tapes was longer, while sacrificing image quality. Ends up that people wanted to be able to record more data, over losing 1/2 of the resolution of the signal, and this is why Betamax died.
Simon
P.S. (offtopic) How do WINE developers get away with what they are doing without having the holy hand of Microsoft come down upon them? Does anyone have any information about the legality of reimplementing the Win32 API?
:-)"
Bill Gates was once quoted in an interview as saying (paraphrasing massively) "feel free - go to town!... and good luck
Whether that would stick legally though...
Microsoft thinks to itself ~if we change it these ways, and don't point out what we changed, lots of people won't notice they're writing "Java" that runs only on our systems~ (this is documented in the antitrust findings of fact)
If you can't tell what's MS-only and what's common to all JVM's, you shouldn't be allowed to write code. What are we doing? Treating programmers as idiots who can't even tie their shoes?
Simon
Contrast this with D3D in DX8. If the hardware doesn't support acceleration of this feature, would it do it in software? If it did, would users want it? Is there a way to choose that if a feature is implemented only in software, that it not be used at all?
It depends; yes, you can tell it not to do it if you want, programmatically. But ultimately, this is why games have render engine feature options screens. So you can turn off stuff your system can't handle, or handles badly.
Of course, you have to design for it - and this is NOT a problem that is DirectX specific - the same issues also apply to OpenGl.
Simon
Then, there's this very nice company called EpicGames. It created Unreal and Unreal Tournament (while trying to push Glide) and are now doing Unreal Warfare. These guys provide nice competition to ID Software and YES, they use Direct3D. Now take a modern computer with an NVIDIA card (chances are you already have one anyways) and play some Quake2 and Quake3...See the framerates ? OK... Now start up Unreal/UT, select D3D as the renderer and...do I really have to tell you how low will your FPS go ?
The fact is, the renderer in UT produces much better looking results than in Quake, and is designed for larger maps too. It also handles mirrors, etc. much better. It even has procedural texturing built in. So this isn't a valid comparison; UT runs slower because it does MORE. (And looks better for it)
Start-up Half-Life, the most popular online 3D FPS game at the moment (due to CS), try switching back and forth between the OpenGL and D3D renderers and compare the framerates. I know some of you are going to scream that HL is based on the Quake engine, etc, but just to let you know, only 20% of the HL engine code come from Quake.
Clue; most of that 20% is the RENDERING CODE, which is still largely OpenGL based. They have a wrapper layer between OpenGL and DirectX for the DirectX output. That's where the slowdown comes in. (For example, surfaces don't have to be decomposed into triangles in OpenGl; in DirectX they have to be... and in HalfLife, none of the surfaces are decomposed into triangles by preprocessing the data - which is why it's slower; OpenGL drivers are optimized for this kind of work... but they're doing the conversion themselves).
Simon
By using DX8 instead of OpenGL you know that effects designed for the NVidia pixel shader will magically just work on the next-generation Radeons. At the same time, you're handing over control of the whole API to Microsoft, which does not make 3D chipsets, and you're stuck with their idea of how the pixel shader ought to work, as opposed to an API for it designed by the company that makes the chipsets, and then later (if it's successful), reviewed and revised by everyone important in the industry. I won't even start on the cross-platform issues.
Actually, it's devised by several companies that make chipsets, who Microsoft works with closely to ensure that (a) desired, and (b) feasible.