Speaking of which, which of the two pull lower CPU utilization? As in would somebody be completely out of their mind to try high end video tricks on a USB 2.0 device?
Do you work for Intel? Had the 'silicon industry' been this averse to changing equipment to accomodate new materials how do you explain the quick proliferation of copper and SOI chips? Every fab takes a risk of screwing their production up with each process shrink, but they have to to stay competitive.
Don't even try to match it on all fronts, IMHO. As much as MS would have it otherwise, most Office users are only using a very small subset of the functionality available.
This kind of thinking really worries me.
If you can support bulletproof import/export of simple Word documents, with basic things like the formatting, cross-references, tables and so on working reliably, you've got 99% of the portability problems solved. The big issue is the number of documents that already exist in Word format, which people will continue to need to read/edit in whatever new format they're stored. Most of those documents don't use super-advanced VBA scripts, half a million text boxes and WordArt.
These complex documents are the only kind that matter though. Any 3rd rate filter can convert basic formatting, or the user could just cut and paste. The big problem with trying to replace Office is that most people know that those big, important, hellishly complicated files won't work with anything but the genuine article.
Most businesses care a lot about backwards compatibility, which Word doesn't seem that great with. Now if you could advertise better compatibility with ancient versions of Word and WordPerfect, that would make great strides in weakening Microsoft's hold in the business market(and let's face it, that's pretty much the only one that matters).
Have you benchmarked this or anything? I heard unreal was supposed to be faster, but that was because of poorly written directx stuff. I have bought Quake 3, Sim City 3k, and Descent 3, all of which were slower and less stable than their windows counterparts.
Quake 3 is horrid, I mean truthfully, how long have we been stuck on 1.27g now? It's a great deal less stable than the latest win2k release, and only now just catching up in speed with xfree 4.1 (no thanks to loki). I had to wait 3 months after ordering Sim City to get my copy, and another two after that to get a patch that would make it actually run on my system. Even after all that, it still has a rather vicious memory leak that won't let me play for more than an hour straight (with 256 megs of ram even!). The video is also slower than the windows version. I don't have many complaints about descent actually, but it is still a bit slower than its windows counterpart.
Also, if you want to see companies that do a good job porting things, I suggest you look at the mac ports of these games (cept sim city, that was ass on mac too).
Before a company like Loki can succeed, I think that there needs to be:
1. A larger Linux userbase.
2. Simultaneous releases across platforms.
3. An easier way for Windows users to switch to the Linux version, than trying to return their Windows version of the game and get their money back.
I disagree, for a linux porting company to succeed, the conditions are fine as they stand, Loki was just horribly incompetent from day one.
First of all, they were WAY overextended in their efforts. Had they had the common sense to pick one or two popular titles a year to port, and put all of their resources into porting and actually maintaining these releases, they would have done fine. Instead they had five or six ports a year, all of which are slower and less stable than their windows counterparts and never saw any maintenance for more than a month or so after release.
Secondly, for the privilege of using an exact copy of a game that just sucked more than the windows version (which you could have been playing for a few months now), you got to pay the same price that the windows people did six months ago when the game came out.
Then, just to show you their grandiose lack of business sense, Loki lets people download the binaries from their biggest money maker (q3) which worked with windows data files, effectively giving away all the work that they had done to port and maintain it.
Re:TV over Internet still a fair ways away
on
HDTV Over IP
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· Score: 1
Just think about it, a T1 is 1.5 Mbps, my cable modem max's out at 2.9 Mbps (not that I ever see that.) These bandwidth hungry applications are still a long way away, at least until the next Internet revolution when we all have fiber to the home...
I can't help but think that a lot of undue emphasis is being placed on installing faster internet links. I can remember when RealVideo was shiny and new, and people complained that streaming video wasn't watchable even over a T1. Today this isn't the case, but this is because of the increased complexity of the encoding and not the speed of the link. Lots of current DSL and cable lines are more than fast enough to replace broadcast quality NTSC signals, but only using very recent compression schemes like Sorenson or OpenDivx.
Next generation encoding methods will be commoditized and moved into the mainstream long before fiber in the home becomes a reality and will yeild much better video quality than current standards could even with a ten fold bandwidth advantage.
Seriously man, it's called proof reading. You'll have to do it no matter how you enter your text. I assume you'll also be promptly giving up that damn computer of yours with its feeble 99.99% uptime too.
Well, this is a bit different than the "Apple is dying!" deal. If Apple dies, the Mac dies as well. Linux is in no danger, only one company which supplies hardware that runs it. Personally, as necessary as the contributions of large corporations may be to the future of Linux, I get rather nervous when any one company gains as much influence in the community as VA has. They may be a great resource, but they are also a huge liability, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
I believe Alphas did something like this. The only real problem is that unless the underlying hardware is very much like that on the software's native platform, the os likely won't boot. To make stuff like this work you'd either have to do the whole motherboard in software (like virtualpc) or sell it as an add-on(orangemicro and apple used to do this), neither solution offers comperable performance to native hardware.
Nope - but then it runs Windows (all flavors), BSD (all flavors), Solaris, BeOS, OS/2, Athos and bunch of others... and even MacOS X as it seems Apple has an in-house x86 version running:)
True, but none of those are serious contenders to be future desktop operating systems('cept windows of course, but we're not going there:), and Aqua on x86 will never see the light of day unless Apple is really screwed on their own platform.
Yep - that's what MMX, SSE 1 & 2 and 3DNow! really are. Altivec is just the Motorola equivalent of those (it's nice, but then so is SSE 2).
Once again, not nearly as good. Current G4's ship with dual Altivec units, both of which do a good deal more than SSE2. Altivec is also universally accepted, the same can only be said for the rather inadequate MMX on intel hardware.
Let's see: Good Macintosh; $2000. Good x86; $1000.
Gag me. Does x86 hardware run MacOSX? Or do fast vector processing? Though not. When you shell out $2000 for that Macintosh, odds are you're either an idiot or you want something from the platform that you can't buy in a PC. This whole test is kind of silly though, as Linux and especially gcc don't do well outside of x86 hardware.
Depends really on what you are doing. Of course, most/. readers already know this. Integer-based calculations are in the majority of programs out there. Period. Few programs are heavy floating-point calculations, such as video and image editing. So it makes it seem that the Macintosh is this "supercomputer". Why? Adobe Photoshop 6.0??? You can't judge a computer's overall performance by one application!
Once again, who said this computer was put on earth to do your desktop stuff? The Slashdot crowd seems to believe that every piece of hardware ever made was designed solely for their consumption. Wake up children, very few people care about you. Lots more money can be made in the low end consumer and corporate markets, which is primarily where Apple is aiming with its current hardware offerings. And yes you can judge the performance of a computer by Photoshop scores, at least as far as many of Apple's largest customers are concerned.
Though, dear Mac fans, don't bark yet that the whole thing is a sham. There is still some creditability in the whole thing and it needs to be looked in to... prove you're better; don't flame!
Ack. And for their next trick the mac users will prove their god real and yours fake. Apple hardware will never run Linux better than x86, but it doesn't mean it is completely without purpose in life.
If these two companies join forces with one of the baby bells, or if they figure out some other way to get to the broadband access user base as well, then they will be unbeatable.
Sorry, they beat you to it. You can get AOL over RoadRunner (at least in the central florida area), it does cost more though, so all they really would have to do is start loss leading to smash the telcos. Scary, scary stuff.
I think part of the purpose of this is to combat the creation of free service clones. Yeah, sure you could make your own set of actalikes for free, but mickeysoft name still controls the authentication infrastructure(M$ will probably establish a great deal of brand name credibility with all the phb's here) so they would actually save money if someone started maintaining the clients for them. It also gives them a lot of room integrate, copyright, patent, etc. the competition out of existance if and when they choose.
A better way to combat this might be to offer higher quality services which are incompatible, at least at the authentication level.
Seeing as how the Xbox will most likely play the majority of existing PC games, they'll have at least 10% right out of the gate.
None of which the average console user would care to play, mind you. I mean seriously, given the average learning curve of most of the better PC games (Deus Ex, Black & White, custom Q3 bindings anyone?) how many of the drunken fratboy/10-year-old market do you think will take interest? I seriously wonder how well a lot of the newer titles would fly at >640x480 too.
By the end of 2002 I estimate that over 50% of released titles wil be playable on the Xbox.
I'd believe it, but playable != prefferable. The Sega Genesis is an excellent case study, very few Super Nintendo games ported to it well. I can't imagine that the gigantic bloated crap monster that is DirectX is doing it any favors in the performance arena either.
I've heard of a good deal of these being implemented in Macintosh contextual menus. One thing that Linux would definitely be better for is a file manager that makes heavy use of shell scripts through contextual menus, it would really be the best of both worlds.
Even presuming that they can double the density every 9 months, they will be making 512kB chips in 2004
Ack, no, no... these are fabbed using a.2 micron process, which is rather large by today's standards. They assume that the shipping model would use less space per kb than flash.
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Speaking of which, which of the two pull lower CPU utilization? As in would somebody be completely out of their mind to try high end video tricks on a USB 2.0 device?
Do you work for Intel? Had the 'silicon industry' been this averse to changing equipment to accomodate new materials how do you explain the quick proliferation of copper and SOI chips? Every fab takes a risk of screwing their production up with each process shrink, but they have to to stay competitive.
This kind of thinking really worries me.
If you can support bulletproof import/export of simple Word documents, with basic things like the formatting, cross-references, tables and so on working reliably, you've got 99% of the portability problems solved. The big issue is the number of documents that already exist in Word format, which people will continue to need to read/edit in whatever new format they're stored. Most of those documents don't use super-advanced VBA scripts, half a million text boxes and WordArt.
These complex documents are the only kind that matter though. Any 3rd rate filter can convert basic formatting, or the user could just cut and paste. The big problem with trying to replace Office is that most people know that those big, important, hellishly complicated files won't work with anything but the genuine article.
Most businesses care a lot about backwards compatibility, which Word doesn't seem that great with. Now if you could advertise better compatibility with ancient versions of Word and WordPerfect, that would make great strides in weakening Microsoft's hold in the business market(and let's face it, that's pretty much the only one that matters).
Quake 3 is horrid, I mean truthfully, how long have we been stuck on 1.27g now? It's a great deal less stable than the latest win2k release, and only now just catching up in speed with xfree 4.1 (no thanks to loki). I had to wait 3 months after ordering Sim City to get my copy, and another two after that to get a patch that would make it actually run on my system. Even after all that, it still has a rather vicious memory leak that won't let me play for more than an hour straight (with 256 megs of ram even!). The video is also slower than the windows version. I don't have many complaints about descent actually, but it is still a bit slower than its windows counterpart.
Also, if you want to see companies that do a good job porting things, I suggest you look at the mac ports of these games (cept sim city, that was ass on mac too).
1. A larger Linux userbase.
2. Simultaneous releases across platforms.
3. An easier way for Windows users to switch to the Linux version, than trying to return their Windows version of the game and get their money back.
I disagree, for a linux porting company to succeed, the conditions are fine as they stand, Loki was just horribly incompetent from day one.
First of all, they were WAY overextended in their efforts. Had they had the common sense to pick one or two popular titles a year to port, and put all of their resources into porting and actually maintaining these releases, they would have done fine. Instead they had five or six ports a year, all of which are slower and less stable than their windows counterparts and never saw any maintenance for more than a month or so after release.
Secondly, for the privilege of using an exact copy of a game that just sucked more than the windows version (which you could have been playing for a few months now), you got to pay the same price that the windows people did six months ago when the game came out.
Then, just to show you their grandiose lack of business sense, Loki lets people download the binaries from their biggest money maker (q3) which worked with windows data files, effectively giving away all the work that they had done to port and maintain it.
I can't help but think that a lot of undue emphasis is being placed on installing faster internet links. I can remember when RealVideo was shiny and new, and people complained that streaming video wasn't watchable even over a T1. Today this isn't the case, but this is because of the increased complexity of the encoding and not the speed of the link. Lots of current DSL and cable lines are more than fast enough to replace broadcast quality NTSC signals, but only using very recent compression schemes like Sorenson or OpenDivx. Next generation encoding methods will be commoditized and moved into the mainstream long before fiber in the home becomes a reality and will yeild much better video quality than current standards could even with a ten fold bandwidth advantage.
Seriously man, it's called proof reading. You'll have to do it no matter how you enter your text. I assume you'll also be promptly giving up that damn computer of yours with its feeble 99.99% uptime too.
Heh, try a retirement community (beach town) in central florida. The old folks don't even get off the road to stop.
Well, this is a bit different than the "Apple is dying!" deal. If Apple dies, the Mac dies as well. Linux is in no danger, only one company which supplies hardware that runs it. Personally, as necessary as the contributions of large corporations may be to the future of Linux, I get rather nervous when any one company gains as much influence in the community as VA has. They may be a great resource, but they are also a huge liability, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has noticed this.
I believe Alphas did something like this. The only real problem is that unless the underlying hardware is very much like that on the software's native platform, the os likely won't boot. To make stuff like this work you'd either have to do the whole motherboard in software (like virtualpc) or sell it as an add-on(orangemicro and apple used to do this), neither solution offers comperable performance to native hardware.
True, but none of those are serious contenders to be future desktop operating systems('cept windows of course, but we're not going there:), and Aqua on x86 will never see the light of day unless Apple is really screwed on their own platform.
Yep - that's what MMX, SSE 1 & 2 and 3DNow! really are. Altivec is just the Motorola equivalent of those (it's nice, but then so is SSE 2).
Once again, not nearly as good. Current G4's ship with dual Altivec units, both of which do a good deal more than SSE2. Altivec is also universally accepted, the same can only be said for the rather inadequate MMX on intel hardware.
Gag me. Does x86 hardware run MacOSX? Or do fast vector processing? Though not. When you shell out $2000 for that Macintosh, odds are you're either an idiot or you want something from the platform that you can't buy in a PC. This whole test is kind of silly though, as Linux and especially gcc don't do well outside of x86 hardware.
Depends really on what you are doing. Of course, most /. readers already know this. Integer-based calculations are in the majority of programs out there. Period. Few programs are heavy floating-point calculations, such as video and image editing. So it makes it seem that the Macintosh is this "supercomputer". Why? Adobe Photoshop 6.0??? You can't judge a computer's overall performance by one application!
Once again, who said this computer was put on earth to do your desktop stuff? The Slashdot crowd seems to believe that every piece of hardware ever made was designed solely for their consumption. Wake up children, very few people care about you. Lots more money can be made in the low end consumer and corporate markets, which is primarily where Apple is aiming with its current hardware offerings. And yes you can judge the performance of a computer by Photoshop scores, at least as far as many of Apple's largest customers are concerned.
Though, dear Mac fans, don't bark yet that the whole thing is a sham. There is still some creditability in the whole thing and it needs to be looked in to... prove you're better; don't flame!
Ack. And for their next trick the mac users will prove their god real and yours fake. Apple hardware will never run Linux better than x86, but it doesn't mean it is completely without purpose in life.
Sorry, they beat you to it. You can get AOL over RoadRunner (at least in the central florida area), it does cost more though, so all they really would have to do is start loss leading to smash the telcos. Scary, scary stuff.
I think part of the purpose of this is to combat the creation of free service clones. Yeah, sure you could make your own set of actalikes for free, but mickeysoft name still controls the authentication infrastructure(M$ will probably establish a great deal of brand name credibility with all the phb's here) so they would actually save money if someone started maintaining the clients for them. It also gives them a lot of room integrate, copyright, patent, etc. the competition out of existance if and when they choose.
A better way to combat this might be to offer higher quality services which are incompatible, at least at the authentication level.
None of which the average console user would care to play, mind you. I mean seriously, given the average learning curve of most of the better PC games (Deus Ex, Black & White, custom Q3 bindings anyone?) how many of the drunken fratboy/10-year-old market do you think will take interest? I seriously wonder how well a lot of the newer titles would fly at >640x480 too.
By the end of 2002 I estimate that over 50% of released titles wil be playable on the Xbox.
I'd believe it, but playable != prefferable. The Sega Genesis is an excellent case study, very few Super Nintendo games ported to it well. I can't imagine that the gigantic bloated crap monster that is DirectX is doing it any favors in the performance arena either.
because the people that brought us the pinto, the festiva, the .com revolution, and the intel only desktop line, they don't fuck up
I've heard of a good deal of these being implemented in Macintosh contextual menus. One thing that Linux would definitely be better for is a file manager that makes heavy use of shell scripts through contextual menus, it would really be the best of both worlds.
Ack, no, no... these are fabbed using a .2 micron process, which is rather large by today's standards. They assume that the shipping model would use less space per kb than flash.