I wasn't trying to imply anything that you are implying that I tried to imply. Intel writes an optimizing compiler. The compiler optimizes well for Intel hardware. I don't think that there are undocumented instructions or any other conspiracy theory. Intel would be stupid do that. It would give AMD more opportunity to whip them with programs compiled with msvc or gcc.
I do believe that Intel engineers probably have a better understanding of branch prediction and cache misses on Intel hardware.
I don't think these benchmarks give gcc a black eye at all. gcc aims to be a cross-platform compiler first, optimizing compiler second. icc aims to be an optimizing compiler first, cross-platform compiler second.
That's not a big deal. UT2K3 throws an openal.so in one of its install directories.
So just ship the lib with your package and link your app with it. And OpenAL IS really frickin cool. id always gets the kudos for supporting OpenGL, but Epic never gets kudos for supporting OpenAL.
Not trying to flamebait here. But if your boss is really technically astute, he should be able to do the research, assess the pros and cons, and make a decision.
He should be able to pick up a book, google for some benchmarks, and talk to some people either face-to-face or on Usenet and then make a decision. A manager should be able to make this decision based on the facts over the weekend.
A very good manager would be able to make the decision in an afternoon. The real difference between good management and bad management is the rate at which you can make well-informed decision.
I actually emailed it to my MP, Svend Robinson, as well. Let's see if he replies back. If he does, he definitely will raise a stink about it. He's just the type of guy that would take offense to stuff like this.
Here's the email is sent to my MP, the Industry, Heritage, and Finance Ministers. I encourage other Canadian/.ers to do the same.
Dear Sirs and Madam,
I am very concerned about the Private Copying Tariff that I am forced to pay every time that I purchase recordable media. I am enraged that the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) and the Copyright Board are proposing to increase the tariff.
First and foremost, the CPCC is responsible for collection, distribution and enforcement of this tariff. However, the CPCC is not an arm of the government and therefore is not accountable to voters and taxpayers.
Secondly, they have collected $28 million over the last few years. However, they have not distributed any of the collected monies. Furthermore, 75% of the collected levy is earmarked for publishers. These publishers do not have to be Canadian business and most likely will be large American record labels. Local artists and record companies are forced to fight over the smaller piece of the pie. This should be a great concern for the Honourable Heritage Minister.
The levy applies to all recordable media despite what said media may be used for. Whenever I archive pictures of my family, record labels benefit. Whenever I backup data, record labels benefit. This should be a great concern for the Honourable Minister of Industry. The bottom line of businesses that rely on recordable media is affected.
What is most disturbing is that I am considered a thief the moment I purchase recordable media. I am given no opportunity to present my case.
Currently, I am able to purchase a CD-R for about $0.39 retail. Of that $0.39, $0.21 of the cost is the levy. The new proposed levy is $0.59. That is absolutely ridiculous. About 75% of the cost of the CD will be the levy.
I urge all Members of Parliament to consider the effects this levy will have on Canadians and Canadian business. This levy benefits large record labels and is detrimental to average Canadians and independent artists in particular.
That is not the whole point. RTFL (Read the fucking legislation) It's called the "Private Copying Tariff".
A "private copy" is a copy of a track, or a substantial part of a track, of recorded music that is made by an individual for his or her own personal use. A compilation of favorite tracks is a good example of how people typically use private copies. In contrast, a copy made for someone else or for any purpose other than the copier's own use is not a private copy.
So I'm paying a levy because my Matt Good CD is in my CD player at home, but I have a copy sitting in my car, so I won't lose it, scratch it, etc.
And 75% of that levy is marked for "record publishers" which may be national corporations. 25% is marked for artists and local record companies. So Matt Good or Battle Axe Records won't be seeing squat compared to what Sony would get.
You live in Prince George? Ouch, that's gotta hurt. You can get 100 CDs $39 from here. These are 80min,48x CDs. Probably get the 72min cheaper elsewhere.
UBC offered a game development course taught by a bunch of guys from Radical . You may remember them as the creators of Simpson's Road Rage.
This semester the same course was offered at Simon Fraser University. I sat in on it throughout the semester. It was one of the best courses I've taken. A lot of profs know the theory. But having someone from industry teach a course is great since they get their hands dirty on a regular basis.
There's really not much need for 64bits even in gaming...but the 64-bitness of the chips is not at all important for games for the foreseeable future.
That's the biggest bunch of crap that I've ever heard. There are a bunch of games that do fixed point math because floating point does not give you enough accuracy.
Collision detection would certainly benefit from improved precision. Physics suck in games because it is difficult to do fast and accurate at the same time.
Epic has promised a 64bit version of games. I'm guessing they are doing so for a very good reason. And they are doing this despite the fact that they use a comparitively very robust physics engine in Karma.
I'm guessing you've never implemented a physics engine or even taken a Numerical Analysis course or read any books. So how about pulling your head out of your ass before disseminating FUD.
I'm not gonna discuss plot too much...well since it's a Bond movie and doesn't have too much of a plot. I also don't want to spoil too much.
Bond movies are known for their fancy opening scenes. I wasn't particularly impressed with this opening scene. It wasn't awful. But it wasn't memorable either.
At the start of the movie, Bond is detained in a camp in North Korea. Since he is detained for a while, he looks skanky. WTF!!! Bond is not supposed to look skanky, Bond is supposed to be slutty.
Speaking of slutty, Bond is not slutty enough in this movie. He only sleeps with two women in the whole movie. That is well below standard. I could even pull that off.
The "invisible" Aston Martin was definitly a cool special effect. The entire theatre "wowed" in unison when it made it's first appearance. The Ford Thunderbird was pretty kick ass too.
In general, Die Another Day was a decent Bond movie, but not one of the best. And Pierce Brosnan is definitely getting too old to be Bond.
Floppyfw is actually a (surprise!!) floppy based distro. But there is also an ISO image. I use it at home. I have friends that also use it for their networks. Works good. Easy to setup. From the webpage, the author claims he has used it for networks with thousands of computers. I wouldn't doubt it.
Personally I would go with a dual P4 (I'd look into AMD, but probably only go with them on single processor machines at the moment). Make sure you get a motherboard that supports AGP8x. The bandwidth from CPU to GPU is where SGI excels. In terms of video cards I would probably wait for the NV30. But take a look at the workstation GPUs available out there, such as the Quadro, FireGL, and Wildcat. I don't have too much experience with the workstation video cards.
So I'm gonna assume you will be using this machine for the next 3 years. So you can probably spend your money up front on an SGI machine or get 3 upgrades over that timespan.
In terms of Mac, I wouldn't recommend it. The advantage of x86 over SGI is the fact you can upgrade components easily. Upgrading Mac components can be somewhat of a challenge.
Re:Why not make ONE game...
on
Online Game Cluster
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That uses all CPU resources of a cluster, and leap 10 years into the future?
The same reason that game companies don't make games for machines with 8 CPUs or 4 CPUs, or even 2 CPUs. People just don't have machines out there to play the game.
You can do it server-side, because some geek just has to put together a bunch of computers. On the client-side, can you imagine that 12 year old that keeps fraggin you when you're playing RtCW online putting together a cluster of computers? (That was rhetorical)
The AI would use genetic algorithms
"True to life" AI, does not imply good "Game" AI.
the sound would have every echo and diffusion effect possible,the graphics would use real-time raytracing, and the level count would be as extreme poly as possible
The network latency would kill you. Motherboards are moving to AGP 8x so that they can get more bandwidth to the graphics card.
All of these things are handled flawlessly by Windows' multi-monitor support. The same multi-monitor support that's been there since Windows 98SE. (or was it Windows 98?) Let it do what it does best, and focus your energy somewhere less counter-productive, thanks.
OpenGL is not accelerated with Win dual-monitor support. It falls back to software rendering. I'm not sure if it is the same case with D3D.
That's what nVidia, ATI, Matrox, etc are trying to provide.
When debugging games, graphics apps, etc. It is nice to have your game running fullscreen in one monitor, while your debugger spews stuff into the second monitor.
It's also surprising, since almost all of the major Canadian newspapers are owned by two people.
I live in British Columbia. About two years ago the Nisga'a Treaty was being heavily debated within this province and lesser so throughout the country.
A fair chunk of the newspapers in the interior of British Columbia are owned by one man (I forget his name). And he did not allow any of his editors to write editorials in favour of the Nisga'a Treaty. How is that for freedom of the press.
The survery claims to asked questions relating to state monopolies. But did they ask about monopolies in general?
When your mommy stops dressing you, you have to turn to CmdrTaco, CowboyNeal, & Co.
And your asking for fashion tips from/. Dude, I have two coding shirts that I rotate. The first one is neon orange and says, "It's my duty, to please that booty." The other one was from a Math Contest I won in high school with a Maple plot of:
If your gonna ask a fashion question on/. ask what fabrics are coke-resistant. Ask what the best way is to print off Natalie Portman pics to paste onto t-shirts. Ask how to install the Linux kernel on your zipper. Ask how to build a Beowulf cluster of leisure suits.
You think that just having to see the stuff is bad. I still have nightmares from the renderers/raytracers I've written. For some reason I'm in some post-apocalyptic world with checkerboard as far as the eye can see while being chased by teapots possesed by the devil.
For some constructive criticism. We can bitch and complain about Blender vs Moonlight and how it's KDE vs. Gnome (pick your favorite religous battle) all over again. The bottom line is that Linux needs an OpenSource 3D modelling package.
I have downloaded the source to both Blender and Moonlight. And I'm still banging my head to figure out how to compile and run the darn things. What these projects need is some good documentation and developers jumping on board working out features.
So who's with me? Here I go to join the dev maillist
[disclaimer]
Saturday night. Just got home from bar. Pissed out of my mind.
[/disclaimer]
I just recently graduated from the Comp Sci department at SFU. My impression: The business faculty is very pro-Microsoft. Everything is done using Word, PPT, IE, etc. The problem is that the people making the decisions have gained their skills on MS platforms.
A good chunk (probably about 2/3) of the professors in the Comp Sci department despise MS products and are *nix guys. In other terms, prefer to use *nix on their primary machine. But, and a big but, a lot of stuff that is taught that is platform specific, is taught with respect to MS products. For example, GUI development is taught using MFC.
And that is the problem. When general computing methodolgies/techniques are taught, they apply to *nix platforms without much tinkering. But when you try to apply techniques to MS platforms, there is a poop-load of exceptions that you have to be aware of.
For example:
This how you code in C++, but this is how VC++ implements for-scoping.
These are the techniques to design "good" user interfaces, but this is how you would
implement them in Windows.
There is a lot of pressure from industry for students to learn to be efficient on the Windows platform and other "high demand" tools/methodoligies (such as Java/extreme programming/XML/etc). What usually happens is that companies screen based on "buzz words". And there is a lot of pressure from industry to produce graduates that have training in licking the flavour of the month, rather than having solid understanding of Comp Sci principles. They seem to want MCSEs, that can get the particular task done now and do not care about the future; rather than people who understand general principles that will apply for decades to come.
For example, a local Vancouver company [cough]Crystal Decisions[/cough] did not want to hire me for a position because I had not programmed in Java. Despite the fact that I have been writing Object-Oriented C++ code for 5+ years and that I'm currently teaching my sister Java who is taking CS101.
The problem is that CS departments are very heavily influenced by industry. And who is the biggest heavy-weight in industry? (That question was rhetorical).
Slashdot Mirror
I do believe that Intel engineers probably have a better understanding of branch prediction and cache misses on Intel hardware.
I don't think these benchmarks give gcc a black eye at all. gcc aims to be a cross-platform compiler first, optimizing compiler second. icc aims to be an optimizing compiler first, cross-platform compiler second.
And chill with the conspiracy theories.
So just ship the lib with your package and link your app with it. And OpenAL IS really frickin cool. id always gets the kudos for supporting OpenGL, but Epic never gets kudos for supporting OpenAL.
Not trying to flamebait here. But if your boss is really technically astute, he should be able to do the research, assess the pros and cons, and make a decision.
He should be able to pick up a book, google for some benchmarks, and talk to some people either face-to-face or on Usenet and then make a decision. A manager should be able to make this decision based on the facts over the weekend.
A very good manager would be able to make the decision in an afternoon. The real difference between good management and bad management is the rate at which you can make well-informed decision.
That's probably because of the NV30 emulation. It's gonna take a poopload of software to emulate a whole video card.
I actually emailed it to my MP, Svend Robinson, as well. Let's see if he replies back. If he does, he definitely will raise a stink about it. He's just the type of guy that would take offense to stuff like this.
Any idea how much they are at Costco?
A "private copy" is a copy of a track, or a substantial part of a track, of recorded music that is made by an individual for his or her own personal use. A compilation of favorite tracks is a good example of how people typically use private copies. In contrast, a copy made for someone else or for any purpose other than the copier's own use is not a private copy.
So I'm paying a levy because my Matt Good CD is in my CD player at home, but I have a copy sitting in my car, so I won't lose it, scratch it, etc.
And 75% of that levy is marked for "record publishers" which may be national corporations. 25% is marked for artists and local record companies. So Matt Good or Battle Axe Records won't be seeing squat compared to what Sony would get.
You live in Prince George? Ouch, that's gotta hurt. You can get 100 CDs $39 from here. These are 80min,48x CDs. Probably get the 72min cheaper elsewhere.
This semester the same course was offered at Simon Fraser University. I sat in on it throughout the semester. It was one of the best courses I've taken. A lot of profs know the theory. But having someone from industry teach a course is great since they get their hands dirty on a regular basis.
That's the biggest bunch of crap that I've ever heard. There are a bunch of games that do fixed point math because floating point does not give you enough accuracy.
Collision detection would certainly benefit from improved precision. Physics suck in games because it is difficult to do fast and accurate at the same time.
Epic has promised a 64bit version of games. I'm guessing they are doing so for a very good reason. And they are doing this despite the fact that they use a comparitively very robust physics engine in Karma.
I'm guessing you've never implemented a physics engine or even taken a Numerical Analysis course or read any books. So how about pulling your head out of your ass before disseminating FUD.
Bond movies are known for their fancy opening scenes. I wasn't particularly impressed with this opening scene. It wasn't awful. But it wasn't memorable either.
At the start of the movie, Bond is detained in a camp in North Korea. Since he is detained for a while, he looks skanky. WTF!!! Bond is not supposed to look skanky, Bond is supposed to be slutty.
Speaking of slutty, Bond is not slutty enough in this movie. He only sleeps with two women in the whole movie. That is well below standard. I could even pull that off.
The "invisible" Aston Martin was definitly a cool special effect. The entire theatre "wowed" in unison when it made it's first appearance. The Ford Thunderbird was pretty kick ass too.
In general, Die Another Day was a decent Bond movie, but not one of the best. And Pierce Brosnan is definitely getting too old to be Bond.
Has anyone attempted to compile the kernel with the Intel Compiler?
Floppyfw is actually a (surprise!!) floppy based distro. But there is also an ISO image. I use it at home. I have friends that also use it for their networks. Works good. Easy to setup. From the webpage, the author claims he has used it for networks with thousands of computers. I wouldn't doubt it.
I don't think so Tim
Any chance Qt or GTK or motif will be ported to picoGUI?
So I'm gonna assume you will be using this machine for the next 3 years. So you can probably spend your money up front on an SGI machine or get 3 upgrades over that timespan.
In terms of Mac, I wouldn't recommend it. The advantage of x86 over SGI is the fact you can upgrade components easily. Upgrading Mac components can be somewhat of a challenge.
The same reason that game companies don't make games for machines with 8 CPUs or 4 CPUs, or even 2 CPUs. People just don't have machines out there to play the game.
You can do it server-side, because some geek just has to put together a bunch of computers. On the client-side, can you imagine that 12 year old that keeps fraggin you when you're playing RtCW online putting together a cluster of computers? (That was rhetorical)
The AI would use genetic algorithms
"True to life" AI, does not imply good "Game" AI.
the sound would have every echo and diffusion effect possible,the graphics would use real-time raytracing, and the level count would be as extreme poly as possible
The network latency would kill you. Motherboards are moving to AGP 8x so that they can get more bandwidth to the graphics card.
OpenGL is not accelerated with Win dual-monitor support. It falls back to software rendering. I'm not sure if it is the same case with D3D. That's what nVidia, ATI, Matrox, etc are trying to provide.
When debugging games, graphics apps, etc. It is nice to have your game running fullscreen in one monitor, while your debugger spews stuff into the second monitor.
I live in British Columbia. About two years ago the Nisga'a Treaty was being heavily debated within this province and lesser so throughout the country.
A fair chunk of the newspapers in the interior of British Columbia are owned by one man (I forget his name). And he did not allow any of his editors to write editorials in favour of the Nisga'a Treaty. How is that for freedom of the press.
The survery claims to asked questions relating to state monopolies. But did they ask about monopolies in general?
And your asking for fashion tips from /. Dude, I have two coding shirts that I rotate. The first one is neon orange and says, "It's my duty, to please that booty." The other one was from a Math Contest I won in high school with a Maple plot of:
tubeplot([3*cos(2*t) + cos(3*t), -3*sin(2*t) + sin(3*t), 1.2*sin(5*t)], t=0..2*Pi, radius=0.6);
If your gonna ask a fashion question on /. ask what fabrics are coke-resistant. Ask what the best way is to print off Natalie Portman pics to paste onto t-shirts. Ask how to install the Linux kernel on your zipper. Ask how to build a Beowulf cluster of leisure suits.
You think that just having to see the stuff is bad. I still have nightmares from the renderers/raytracers I've written. For some reason I'm in some post-apocalyptic world with checkerboard as far as the eye can see while being chased by teapots possesed by the devil.
I have downloaded the source to both Blender and Moonlight. And I'm still banging my head to figure out how to compile and run the darn things. What these projects need is some good documentation and developers jumping on board working out features.
So who's with me? Here I go to join the dev maillist
I just recently graduated from the Comp Sci department at SFU. My impression: The business faculty is very pro-Microsoft. Everything is done using Word, PPT, IE, etc. The problem is that the people making the decisions have gained their skills on MS platforms.
A good chunk (probably about 2/3) of the professors in the Comp Sci department despise MS products and are *nix guys. In other terms, prefer to use *nix on their primary machine. But, and a big but, a lot of stuff that is taught that is platform specific, is taught with respect to MS products. For example, GUI development is taught using MFC.
And that is the problem. When general computing methodolgies/techniques are taught, they apply to *nix platforms without much tinkering. But when you try to apply techniques to MS platforms, there is a poop-load of exceptions that you have to be aware of.
For example:
This how you code in C++, but this is how VC++ implements for-scoping.
These are the techniques to design "good" user interfaces, but this is how you would implement them in Windows.
There is a lot of pressure from industry for students to learn to be efficient on the Windows platform and other "high demand" tools/methodoligies (such as Java/extreme programming/XML/etc). What usually happens is that companies screen based on "buzz words". And there is a lot of pressure from industry to produce graduates that have training in licking the flavour of the month, rather than having solid understanding of Comp Sci principles. They seem to want MCSEs, that can get the particular task done now and do not care about the future; rather than people who understand general principles that will apply for decades to come.
For example, a local Vancouver company [cough]Crystal Decisions[/cough] did not want to hire me for a position because I had not programmed in Java. Despite the fact that I have been writing Object-Oriented C++ code for 5+ years and that I'm currently teaching my sister Java who is taking CS101.
The problem is that CS departments are very heavily influenced by industry. And who is the biggest heavy-weight in industry? (That question was rhetorical).
Yeah, now all we need is a distributed method to launch OpenOffice.