Well, then, I'm glad Roblimo convinced me to write it. Heh.:) (Yeah, these kinds of articles normally annoy me too. I was afraid of writing Yet Another Fluff Piece. Glad it didn't seem to come out that way.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
We showed them that they could put their trust into us. We showed them that opensource development can work, even on incredibly broken source. Maybe it helps that Civ:CTP is fun to hack on. But it also will hopefully show them that their closed-source methodologies only work when their programmers don't hate what they're doing. (One of the hidden veiled comments in the source basically boiled down to the game designer stating that he didn't like strategy games. Doesn't exactly sound like a good match, that.)
Just the potential for opensourcing from Activision isn't the whole of what made it fun, though. Did you try reading the article? It was fun to get together with 20 other people and hack, for the sheer joy of hacking. It's the embodiment of opensource in that. We weren't doing it for prizes or for money or for glory but for the sheer sake of having fun and hacking. We weren't out to destroy anyone or pretend to be uberleet or any of the things that motivate wannabes. We weren't trying to be different, or better. We were simply having fun doing something that we found to be fun.
What I did was sit down with a number of people and did some incredibly cool hacks to a non-free, closed-source program.
Isn't that exciting on its own merit? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Eh? What profile? Regardless... in person, he's a neat guy. I wish he'd drop this whole infantile vendetta against Bruce Perens, but aside from being outspoken and sticking to his convictions, he's not a bad person. Certainly not twit-ish at all. He didn't act or care to act as an important celebrity-type person. He even went out of his way to let me use his notebook when I desparately needed to access my email for some important information which I'd accidentally left at home. I'd hardly call that behavior that of 'a twit.' --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Aside from your obvious sarcasm, I'll still respond anyway.
The hacked version of the game will be available as various unsupported patches downloadable from Loki's site. Some of the hacks might be incorporated into the main game (and I know that my replacement splashscreen most likely will be). Loki will also try to assemble what Scott likes to call (in his somewhat Californian speak) a "Mondo Hack," which is as many thrown together in a single binary as possible. Hopefully most of them should work together, if not in interesting ways.:) Future plans for the hacks are unsure. Future plans for some of the presently-unemployed hackers (such as myself) should be very interesting.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, that's basically how you could describe it. A coding lanparty. It was nothing but a lot of fun and cooperation. I probably spent more time helping other people than working on my own stuff. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Basically, everyone won. The judges could only decide the five best in order (I was number five). After that they declared a formal tie. The only one with any designation (that is, getting a neat dual-processor workstation rather than some piece of hardware of the winner's choice) was Christopher Yeau (not sure about the spelling), who found and reactivated a lot of features which Activision took out for some reason, including being able to spy (in detail) on a city, various units (including killer cows), and a lot of other stuff. It didn't involve much code, but the point to the contest was to improve gameplay as much as possible, and I don't think anyone else was willing to touch Activision's disabled code with a 10-foot pole. (There must be a reason they took it out to begin with, right?:)
As far as other places, the only other one I can remember is Ryan Gordon who came in second for doing the aforementioned server-publishing hack.
BTW, I wrote this article a couple hours before winners were announced. (Roblimo put me on a pretty tight schedule.:) My attitude was unchanged after the award ceremony, except that I was disappointed that I didn't win the machine.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I agree that id's main source of income is licensing the engines. I don't really agree with that as being a valid source of income. Really, when I buy a Quake-engine game I want to buy it for the game, not for the engine behind it. I bought Quake for the game, not the technology. I haven't bought Quake2 because I don't like the game. Quake3 I might buy because deathmatch is fun, but Unreal Tournament looks like it's going to handle it better. If id didn't have the code-licensing revenue stream, they'd have to actually make a compelling game again, like they did back in the Commander Keen and Wolf3D days.
I imagine you're referring to Crystal Space regarding the full-featured rendering engine. I have some issues with that particular engine, but it can't prove itself in a commercial setting until it's had a commercial setting to be proven in, and there's a few games which are being written using it but, of course, haven't hit the shelves yet. Notice how lots of people are already waiting to pay their $50 for Quake3 and it's not even done yet? It's further along than any CrystalSpace-based game is.
Writing a decent rendering engine really isn't that hard. Portal engines can be downright easy, especially when done in OpenGL by a competent programmer. (Hint: render the camera-containing room and the objects in it, use the feedback mode to render the portal surfaces, and then recursively render the visible portal surfaces. Not That Hard.) The only real purpose I can see for licensing someone else's engine is for a software renderer, and in that case, you can use something like, say, Project Spandex as your rendering backend and use the exact same engine that you use with OpenGL. Again, Not That Hard.
Having the code for a licensed engine available does enable the developer to be creative. Having the code for an opensource engine available also enables the developer to be creative, except then the developer doesn't have to shell out millions of bucks in licensing fees and so they can be creative with even more higher-quality artists which they can now afford to hire.
I was referring to the previous comment, which was asking if the boxed set would support anything other than Intel. Yes, many people have gotten boxed Debian. That's what this article was about. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:Open-source the rebuilding of your house
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Hemos is Homeless
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That's actually somewhat how Habitat for Humanities (I might have the plural backwards on that) works. People volunteer their time and a bit of money to all pool together and build a house for someone who desparately needs it. I think they tend towards helping people who have suddenly hit on hard times, such as, well, their houses burning down and their insurance not being able to get them back in a home again. Hopefully Hemos's insurance will cover the partial damage which occured, though. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Gee, I don't know about that. It looks like they posted to Everything while waiting for the fire trucks to arrive.
They're at ALS damnit! Jeeze. They're great people. You should meet Taco and Malda in person. They were great fun to hang out with. No pretentions at all, they're just normal people trying to be friendly and run a good site for everyone. They were happy to chat with people and got annoyed when they were treated like celebrities. There is no reason to ridicule them for being unable to do anything when they're not even there. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
(Pascal Q. Porcupine == Magenta Hari Nezumi == Joshua Shagam, as I've pointed out in each of my various posts so far. I'll point it out again.:)
Yeah, it was mostly header parsing and linking which took the long bits of time. The whole contest, people were whining about gcc's lack of incremental linking or compiled headers.:) It's the one point everyone could agree on where MSVC was actually better than gcc/egcs.
So, I take it you're one of the original Activision programmers?:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, since we weren't allowed to take any of the code out of the room, we'd have to recode it anyway, making it a moot point. As far as the algorithms/concepts/ideas used in building that code, no, Activision doesn't own any of that either. Technically, Loki and the various hackers own the modifications to the code, but since the code is mostly derived from Activision's code, we're not allowed to release any of that. (One of the programs which I hacked up was for converting PPMs to CTP's proprietary internal image format so that I could add in my civ's diplomat image, and that was completely Loki's code, but it does no good outside of the proprietary context.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
That is correct. (I'm the author of the article. Roblimo mismatched the pronouns and name for the context. Oh well.) We're only restricted to using/distributing the physical code for the next five years. Since we weren't allowed to make any printouts or otherwise get any code out of the room in the first place, this is a moot point. The NDA specifically allowed for usage of what we remembered. The NDA was basically a giant loophole which was only in place to keep Activision's lawyers happy. Loki flaunted this fact.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I've been working on such a system in my spare time. Things have interestingly turned out in such a way that I might be getting paid to do it eventually.:) (I'm the author of this article. I don't want to say too much, but one of the other consequences of this contest is that I have some interesting job leads now.) In any case, my idea for the system is very MUCK-like; open system, all server-side actions (it's not for realtime gaming, but for action-oriented such as in, well, a MUCK). Some people have the ability to write scripts (which will be C or something C-like compiled on the server), the scripts can have certain permission levels, and really the client will be a glorified text parser which ends up rendering a 3D representation of the current visible state. (I'm oversimplifying, of course.) I plan on making it entirely opensource. Such a project could be funded through a variety of means:
Content - for the base content to properly connect to a server (prefabs, standard character models, etc.), the server owners sell a CD for, say, $5 which is the price of admission.
Caching - one of the potential features of my architecture will be distributed storage, but there will still need, for practicality purposes, to be a server-side repository of cached player information. $1/MB/month for such a cache seems reasonable; you can play without it, but it'll annoy other users when they keep seeing placeholder graphics instead of your custom avatar and environments while it takes forever to download your real data. (Of course, if you use only prefabs, rental of a cache will be completely unnecessary. Also, it'd be very possible to specify a different source for the data, so if you already have a high-bandwidth webserver, the cache would also be unneeded.)
Subscriptions - maybe a player just needs to pay $5/month to be allowed to use the service, or otherwise just use a guest account with a maximum number of guest connections at any given time. Of course, other people could run services out of the kindness of their hearts (look at dyndns.org vs. dyndns.com). It'll all be open, and people can run servers however they see fit.
So yes, I think something much, much grander than EverQuest could easily be both opensource and a commercial success. Hopefully I'll be able to actually get started on writing up initial specifications soon.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
(at the risk of having my various identities all exposed in tandem, I'm the person who wrote the article.)
This is exactly what I was thinking after the contest, and exactly what I was chatting about most with Scott and other various Loki folks... basically, a game's sourcecode should be free, while the content can be commercial. I have no problem with paying for the package of the binaries and the game data, but if I could fix the problems in Quake 2, for example, I would. Someone who pays $50 for a RedHat or Debian box pays mostly for the manual and tech support, not for the media it comes on. Similarly, I think a game's content is the part which is really the creative aspect which requires protection; these days, most games would be so much better if they could just build on other peoples' engines, rather than having to reinvent the wheel constantly. That is, of course, the whole ideal behind opensource software. If the source is open, everyone benefits, but if it's closed, very few people do.
Maybe I'm just a pinko leftwing communist hippie at heart, but I believe that opensource is the way to go in almost every situation. (Granted, there are many cases where the ideal breaks down, such as the case of console gaming where the hardware is sold well below cost and the manufacturer makes up for it in licensing the development kits and publication.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
(Note: at the risk of now having my three different identities tacked together, I'll state that I'm the one who wrote the article, though I had asked Roblimo to use my real name throughout the post...)
ESR was unable and unprepared to do any of that hack. It wasn't due to his level of skill, but due to the fact that he spent probably a total of 4 hours in the hack room.:) Instead, he ended up just fine-tuning the existing civilizations, specifically fixing various inaccuracies in the real civs' city names. There was a nice while where we were having an impromptu capitol city quiz while he was trying to get as many real cities in the database as possible.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, I don't know about the boxed set, but here at ALS the Debian Project was giving out free CDs of all the different architectures. Every single one was snatched up within the first few hours of the show, even 68k. I was going to grab a copy of 68k and get an old Mac to put it on, but wasn't sure, and figured they'd still be there when I came back later. Bad move on my part. I seem to have trouble with realizing supply/demand scenarios from the consumer standpoint... same thing happened with me and Dreamcast VMUs.:)
Regardless, the interest in the various Debian architectures is definitely there. Hopefully the folks putting out the Debian boxed set wil realize this.
BTW, at my local Microcenter they already have a quite sizeable "Other OS" shelf. It's mostly Linux, but there's plenty of FreeBSD and BeOS stuff there as well. Very cool. Also, their books section is full of lots of Linux stuff. I even picked up a copy of TeX Unleashed (or something like that, one of those TeX books) for $3...:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ah, my friend, you're forgetting several things: (and I'm going to sound like a broken-record Stallman pundit now, but hey...)
1. 'Free' does not mean 'for free,' but rather 'with freedom.' Think free speech, not free beer. You have to pay to attend ALS and listen to the speeches, but you're free to use the information you learn at it as you see fit. (Whereas afterwards, you get lots of free beer at the party they throw. After last night I've found out that 2 bottles of beer is more than enough for me.:)
2. Not just opensource zealots use Debian. Debian is a great distribution which stands on its own merits. Its configuration and administration is much more easy and powerful than any other distro I've used (disclaimer: I've never used SuSE, which I've heard is comparable, but Debian beats the pants off of RedHat and Slackware, especially if you have a large cluster of machines to configure identically). It's easy to install software, easy to keep it completely up-to-date, and easy to remove software. To upgrade your installation to the newest stable release, you must simply run, as root:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Also, Corel's working on a to-be-opensourced Qt-based package manager system which is far superior, interface-wise, to dselect (Debian's built-in package manager)... I saw it here at ALS and nearly hugged the Corel representatives.:) Not that dselect is bad, it's actually very powerful, but the interface is a bit yucky.
3. As far as newbies, the box comes with a manual, which is the point to paying $x0 for a boxed distribution rather than $3 for a generic CD or $bandwidth for downloading it yourself.
Also, I don't know what you're talking about with Debian's install process being anti-newbie. It's certainly easier than, say, RedHat's. It's no WinLinux, granted, and it could really use a nice X configuration tool, but you never have to see dselect, and it's got a relatively nice fdisk frontend. The only real shortcoming in 2.1 is that LILO configuration is non-intuitive; IIRC, it doesn't give you any means of automagically setting up inferior^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hother operating systems to boot from; you have to actually know how to add an entry to lilo.conf. However, the boxed set's manual may include this, and IMO it's rather nice to force the newbie into learning how to use Linux well enough to get back into Windows.:)
All that Debian's lacking is a nice pre-configured desktop environment, and that's where Corel's distribution comes in. Also, once Qt2 comes out and KDE's been ported to it, we'll finally have an available desktop other than Gnome. (Note: I don't use either Gnome or KDE. When it comes down to it, I prefer KDE, but I prefer to just run a highly-customized fvwm2 setup. I've invested lots of time in my fvwm2 setup.:)
Er, wow, shoulda tried waking up first before rambling. The bus isn't a bottleneck *yet*, but hardware T&L will make it one. The CPU is still a major bottleneck, though, and still can't do vertex processing fast enough to send twice the vertex data to the card. The whole point to hardware T&L is because of the fact that the CPU is the limit to the framerate, not the graphics card. Fillrate is no longer an important consideration. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They claim that this card is the first parallel-processing 64MB card for gamers. Well, that's somewhat true. There have been plenty of parallel-processing cards in the past (the Voodoo2 is basically two Voodoo1s on a card, and as many others have pointed out, you can SLI multiple Voodoo2s together, and others have pointed out Quantum3D's high-end massively-parallel voodoo-based arcade rendering boards), and plenty of 64MB cards (SGIs have been known to have well over 256MB of texture RAM alone), but never has there been, exactly word-for-word, a 64MB parallel-processing gamer-oriented video card.
I don't know what exactly their patent is trying to cover. It looks like it's trying to cover distributed, rather than parallel, rendering; that is, in triple-buffering, have one chip handle the first backbuffer and the other chip handle the second backbuffer. The law of diminishing returns would definitely apply right away. Right now one of the big bottlenecks in 3D cards is the speed at which the bus can send rendering commands to it. Also, the time it takes to send a rendering command is often longer than the time it takes to execute it on the card; unless each chip is storing a complete displaylist and then post-rendering it (and there's not really much point to that, either), the overlap between the chips' rendering times will be minimal, at best. At the absolute best you could get a doubling in framerate, but the latency would still be just as high, and latency is the real killer in 3D games, not framerate (it's just that framerate is easier to measure and easier to explain).
Perhaps some of their patented work involves trying to 'interpolate' between frames. If that's the case, then that really is a quite difficult problem, and I'd be tempted to say they deserve any patent they get in that area. However, I seriously doubt that's the case.
Basically, this seems like another case of Exxtreme Marketing[tm]. ATI seems to have taken a page out of 3Dfx's book. (I'm sorry, but the Tbuffer is nothing revolutionary - it's a crippled accumulation buffer being marketed as revolutionary, when the TNT and Rage and Savage and the like have had a full accumulation buffer for a couple years now.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, I don't know about RC5, but it's possible to implement Conway's Game of Life using the stencil buffer on newer 3D cards (i.e. anything not put out by 3Dfx). There's a wonderful description of it in the back of the OpenGL ARB Redbook. RC5 is probably a bit too complicated to do properly with graphics operations, though... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Except that the Windows EULA says otherwise, as does past history regarding PCs. I know, it's wishy-washy and inconsistent, but there's nothing much better you can say, really. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, it was this post, which is definitely by an AC and definitely not saying anything logically connected to my post, which I was referring to. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then, I'm glad Roblimo convinced me to write it. Heh. :) (Yeah, these kinds of articles normally annoy me too. I was afraid of writing Yet Another Fluff Piece. Glad it didn't seem to come out that way.)
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Just the potential for opensourcing from Activision isn't the whole of what made it fun, though. Did you try reading the article? It was fun to get together with 20 other people and hack, for the sheer joy of hacking. It's the embodiment of opensource in that. We weren't doing it for prizes or for money or for glory but for the sheer sake of having fun and hacking. We weren't out to destroy anyone or pretend to be uberleet or any of the things that motivate wannabes. We weren't trying to be different, or better. We were simply having fun doing something that we found to be fun.
What I did was sit down with a number of people and did some incredibly cool hacks to a non-free, closed-source program.
Isn't that exciting on its own merit?
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I can't speak for everyone, but I'm still recovering from that first 48. :)
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Eh? What profile? Regardless... in person, he's a neat guy. I wish he'd drop this whole infantile vendetta against Bruce Perens, but aside from being outspoken and sticking to his convictions, he's not a bad person. Certainly not twit-ish at all. He didn't act or care to act as an important celebrity-type person. He even went out of his way to let me use his notebook when I desparately needed to access my email for some important information which I'd accidentally left at home. I'd hardly call that behavior that of 'a twit.'
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The hacked version of the game will be available as various unsupported patches downloadable from Loki's site. Some of the hacks might be incorporated into the main game (and I know that my replacement splashscreen most likely will be). Loki will also try to assemble what Scott likes to call (in his somewhat Californian speak) a "Mondo Hack," which is as many thrown together in a single binary as possible. Hopefully most of them should work together, if not in interesting ways. :) Future plans for the hacks are unsure. Future plans for some of the presently-unemployed hackers (such as myself) should be very interesting. :)
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Yeah, that's basically how you could describe it. A coding lanparty. It was nothing but a lot of fun and cooperation. I probably spent more time helping other people than working on my own stuff.
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As far as other places, the only other one I can remember is Ryan Gordon who came in second for doing the aforementioned server-publishing hack.
BTW, I wrote this article a couple hours before winners were announced. (Roblimo put me on a pretty tight schedule. :) My attitude was unchanged after the award ceremony, except that I was disappointed that I didn't win the machine. :)
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I imagine you're referring to Crystal Space regarding the full-featured rendering engine. I have some issues with that particular engine, but it can't prove itself in a commercial setting until it's had a commercial setting to be proven in, and there's a few games which are being written using it but, of course, haven't hit the shelves yet. Notice how lots of people are already waiting to pay their $50 for Quake3 and it's not even done yet? It's further along than any CrystalSpace-based game is.
Writing a decent rendering engine really isn't that hard. Portal engines can be downright easy, especially when done in OpenGL by a competent programmer. (Hint: render the camera-containing room and the objects in it, use the feedback mode to render the portal surfaces, and then recursively render the visible portal surfaces. Not That Hard.) The only real purpose I can see for licensing someone else's engine is for a software renderer, and in that case, you can use something like, say, Project Spandex as your rendering backend and use the exact same engine that you use with OpenGL. Again, Not That Hard.
Having the code for a licensed engine available does enable the developer to be creative. Having the code for an opensource engine available also enables the developer to be creative, except then the developer doesn't have to shell out millions of bucks in licensing fees and so they can be creative with even more higher-quality artists which they can now afford to hire.
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I was referring to the previous comment, which was asking if the boxed set would support anything other than Intel. Yes, many people have gotten boxed Debian. That's what this article was about.
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That's actually somewhat how Habitat for Humanities (I might have the plural backwards on that) works. People volunteer their time and a bit of money to all pool together and build a house for someone who desparately needs it. I think they tend towards helping people who have suddenly hit on hard times, such as, well, their houses burning down and their insurance not being able to get them back in a home again. Hopefully Hemos's insurance will cover the partial damage which occured, though.
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They're at ALS damnit! Jeeze. They're great people. You should meet Taco and Malda in person. They were great fun to hang out with. No pretentions at all, they're just normal people trying to be friendly and run a good site for everyone. They were happy to chat with people and got annoyed when they were treated like celebrities. There is no reason to ridicule them for being unable to do anything when they're not even there.
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Yeah, it was mostly header parsing and linking which took the long bits of time. The whole contest, people were whining about gcc's lack of incremental linking or compiled headers. :) It's the one point everyone could agree on where MSVC was actually better than gcc/egcs.
So, I take it you're one of the original Activision programmers? :)
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Well, since we weren't allowed to take any of the code out of the room, we'd have to recode it anyway, making it a moot point. As far as the algorithms/concepts/ideas used in building that code, no, Activision doesn't own any of that either. Technically, Loki and the various hackers own the modifications to the code, but since the code is mostly derived from Activision's code, we're not allowed to release any of that. (One of the programs which I hacked up was for converting PPMs to CTP's proprietary internal image format so that I could add in my civ's diplomat image, and that was completely Loki's code, but it does no good outside of the proprietary context.)
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That is correct. (I'm the author of the article. Roblimo mismatched the pronouns and name for the context. Oh well.) We're only restricted to using/distributing the physical code for the next five years. Since we weren't allowed to make any printouts or otherwise get any code out of the room in the first place, this is a moot point. The NDA specifically allowed for usage of what we remembered. The NDA was basically a giant loophole which was only in place to keep Activision's lawyers happy. Loki flaunted this fact. :)
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Oh, were you at the contest too? ;)
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- Content - for the base content to properly connect to a server (prefabs, standard character models, etc.), the server owners sell a CD for, say, $5 which is the price of admission.
- Caching - one of the potential features of my architecture will be distributed storage, but there will still need, for practicality purposes, to be a server-side repository of cached player information. $1/MB/month for such a cache seems reasonable; you can play without it, but it'll annoy other users when they keep seeing placeholder graphics instead of your custom avatar and environments while it takes forever to download your real data. (Of course, if you use only prefabs, rental of a cache will be completely unnecessary. Also, it'd be very possible to specify a different source for the data, so if you already have a high-bandwidth webserver, the cache would also be unneeded.)
- Subscriptions - maybe a player just needs to pay $5/month to be allowed to use the service, or otherwise just use a guest account with a maximum number of guest connections at any given time. Of course, other people could run services out of the kindness of their hearts (look at dyndns.org vs. dyndns.com). It'll all be open, and people can run servers however they see fit.
So yes, I think something much, much grander than EverQuest could easily be both opensource and a commercial success. Hopefully I'll be able to actually get started on writing up initial specifications soon.---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This is exactly what I was thinking after the contest, and exactly what I was chatting about most with Scott and other various Loki folks... basically, a game's sourcecode should be free, while the content can be commercial. I have no problem with paying for the package of the binaries and the game data, but if I could fix the problems in Quake 2, for example, I would. Someone who pays $50 for a RedHat or Debian box pays mostly for the manual and tech support, not for the media it comes on. Similarly, I think a game's content is the part which is really the creative aspect which requires protection; these days, most games would be so much better if they could just build on other peoples' engines, rather than having to reinvent the wheel constantly. That is, of course, the whole ideal behind opensource software. If the source is open, everyone benefits, but if it's closed, very few people do.
Maybe I'm just a pinko leftwing communist hippie at heart, but I believe that opensource is the way to go in almost every situation. (Granted, there are many cases where the ideal breaks down, such as the case of console gaming where the hardware is sold well below cost and the manufacturer makes up for it in licensing the development kits and publication.)
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ESR was unable and unprepared to do any of that hack. It wasn't due to his level of skill, but due to the fact that he spent probably a total of 4 hours in the hack room. :) Instead, he ended up just fine-tuning the existing civilizations, specifically fixing various inaccuracies in the real civs' city names. There was a nice while where we were having an impromptu capitol city quiz while he was trying to get as many real cities in the database as possible. :)
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Regardless, the interest in the various Debian architectures is definitely there. Hopefully the folks putting out the Debian boxed set wil realize this.
BTW, at my local Microcenter they already have a quite sizeable "Other OS" shelf. It's mostly Linux, but there's plenty of FreeBSD and BeOS stuff there as well. Very cool. Also, their books section is full of lots of Linux stuff. I even picked up a copy of TeX Unleashed (or something like that, one of those TeX books) for $3... :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
1. 'Free' does not mean 'for free,' but rather 'with freedom.' Think free speech, not free beer. You have to pay to attend ALS and listen to the speeches, but you're free to use the information you learn at it as you see fit. (Whereas afterwards, you get lots of free beer at the party they throw. After last night I've found out that 2 bottles of beer is more than enough for me. :)
2. Not just opensource zealots use Debian. Debian is a great distribution which stands on its own merits. Its configuration and administration is much more easy and powerful than any other distro I've used (disclaimer: I've never used SuSE, which I've heard is comparable, but Debian beats the pants off of RedHat and Slackware, especially if you have a large cluster of machines to configure identically). It's easy to install software, easy to keep it completely up-to-date, and easy to remove software. To upgrade your installation to the newest stable release, you must simply run, as root:
- apt-get update
Also, Corel's working on a to-be-opensourced Qt-based package manager system which is far superior, interface-wise, to dselect (Debian's built-in package manager)... I saw it here at ALS and nearly hugged the Corel representatives.apt-get upgrade
3. As far as newbies, the box comes with a manual, which is the point to paying $x0 for a boxed distribution rather than $3 for a generic CD or $bandwidth for downloading it yourself.
Also, I don't know what you're talking about with Debian's install process being anti-newbie. It's certainly easier than, say, RedHat's. It's no WinLinux, granted, and it could really use a nice X configuration tool, but you never have to see dselect, and it's got a relatively nice fdisk frontend. The only real shortcoming in 2.1 is that LILO configuration is non-intuitive; IIRC, it doesn't give you any means of automagically setting up inferior^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hother operating systems to boot from; you have to actually know how to add an entry to lilo.conf. However, the boxed set's manual may include this, and IMO it's rather nice to force the newbie into learning how to use Linux well enough to get back into Windows. :)
All that Debian's lacking is a nice pre-configured desktop environment, and that's where Corel's distribution comes in. Also, once Qt2 comes out and KDE's been ported to it, we'll finally have an available desktop other than Gnome. (Note: I don't use either Gnome or KDE. When it comes down to it, I prefer KDE, but I prefer to just run a highly-customized fvwm2 setup. I've invested lots of time in my fvwm2 setup. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Er, wow, shoulda tried waking up first before rambling. The bus isn't a bottleneck *yet*, but hardware T&L will make it one. The CPU is still a major bottleneck, though, and still can't do vertex processing fast enough to send twice the vertex data to the card. The whole point to hardware T&L is because of the fact that the CPU is the limit to the framerate, not the graphics card. Fillrate is no longer an important consideration.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I don't know what exactly their patent is trying to cover. It looks like it's trying to cover distributed, rather than parallel, rendering; that is, in triple-buffering, have one chip handle the first backbuffer and the other chip handle the second backbuffer. The law of diminishing returns would definitely apply right away. Right now one of the big bottlenecks in 3D cards is the speed at which the bus can send rendering commands to it. Also, the time it takes to send a rendering command is often longer than the time it takes to execute it on the card; unless each chip is storing a complete displaylist and then post-rendering it (and there's not really much point to that, either), the overlap between the chips' rendering times will be minimal, at best. At the absolute best you could get a doubling in framerate, but the latency would still be just as high, and latency is the real killer in 3D games, not framerate (it's just that framerate is easier to measure and easier to explain).
Perhaps some of their patented work involves trying to 'interpolate' between frames. If that's the case, then that really is a quite difficult problem, and I'd be tempted to say they deserve any patent they get in that area. However, I seriously doubt that's the case.
Basically, this seems like another case of Exxtreme Marketing[tm]. ATI seems to have taken a page out of 3Dfx's book. (I'm sorry, but the Tbuffer is nothing revolutionary - it's a crippled accumulation buffer being marketed as revolutionary, when the TNT and Rage and Savage and the like have had a full accumulation buffer for a couple years now.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, I don't know about RC5, but it's possible to implement Conway's Game of Life using the stencil buffer on newer 3D cards (i.e. anything not put out by 3Dfx). There's a wonderful description of it in the back of the OpenGL ARB Redbook. RC5 is probably a bit too complicated to do properly with graphics operations, though...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Except that the Windows EULA says otherwise, as does past history regarding PCs. I know, it's wishy-washy and inconsistent, but there's nothing much better you can say, really.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, it was this post, which is definitely by an AC and definitely not saying anything logically connected to my post, which I was referring to.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.