I'd have to say no. These systems are known to not be reliable -- many Xbox harddrives have failed, dvd drives have failed, but the loss isn't too great.. would you expect the same from your own PC -- losing all your data? I think not.
And PCs have been known to have hard drives and DVD drives fail too. Your point is...?
As opposed to back then, when you had people writing big applications in interpreted languages like BASIC, UCSD Pascal, and Lisp?
On circa 1990 PCs, fairly rarely.
It's surprising to me how many people seem to thing of Python as a great, independent language, and fight so hard to deny that it has roots in BASIC.:p
Did I say it was great? If anything Python has roots in Lisp. At least you have Lisp experts like Norvig and Graham promoting Python as a reasonable alternative to Lisp.
Personally, I don't see much connection between Python and BASIC. If anything hurts Python, it's being overly object-oriented.
I know many in the Linux community like to paint Mr. Tanenbaum as a bitter lunatic, but this is a great article, one that every Linux user/zealot should read.
First, he goes into the history of why people were souring on UNIX and the various independently-written UNIXalikes. These were mostly individual projects, which really sets the record straight for the people who seem to think that Linus was the first person to do this, and that Linus was somehow the only person intelligent and manly enough to write his own kernel.
At the same time, he lays out the history of UNIX clones, of which Linux was definitely one. It's surprising to me how many people seem to think of Linux as a great, independent OS, and fight so hard to deny that it has roots in UNIX. Of course these people are mostly young and don't know much about computer history. In that respect, this is an educational article.
And, yes, he does talk about the micro vs. monolithic kernel issue, but he does so without fanaticism, and, you know, what he says is generally correct. He's all for small and reliable software, which is something that UNIX was originally but rapidly became the antithesis of. Performance issues, back when people were using 4.77 and 8 MHz desktop processors, well, let's just say that things were different then. Now you have people writing big applications in Python. The real reason Linux ended up with a monolithic kernel is because that's what Linus understood and it was easier for him to write that way.
Too much blind anti-american sentiment
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
I see a lot of anti-American sentiments here. Some of this is well-placed, I admit, but let's not go overboard, okay?
Gas prices were up near the two dollar limit just 4-5 years ago. Similarly, there were huge shortages of oil in both the 1970s and 80s. Seriously, in the early 1980s there was gasoline rationing, during which only people with odd numbered license plates (at least in some states), could only get gas on odd numbered days. It was common to have to wait in a long line at the gas station.
Now, yes, people forgetting about all of this and buying vehicles with terrible fuel mileage is inexcusable. Don't just blindly say "SUV," though. Small so-called SUV's are cars with different bodies. They get comparable gas mileage. Also note that most pickups are as bad as or worse than large SUVs, with MPGs in the mid teens. Rather railing against SUVs, it's more accurate to talk about veicles with excessively large engines (which these days means anything more than four cylinders). Some vehicles, like Suburbans and Grand Cherokees, are absolutely huge and have eight-cylinder engines in them. Why do people need vehicles that have engines twice the size of what's necessary, excepting people who need to haul cement and so on?
Really, I see hundreds of great sites in a year. There are more great sites than I know what to do with. Picking *one*, one that is the top of the heap in a hugely broad category? What's the point?
Remember, there may be several thousand CDs released in a year, but there are millions of new websites. It just seems pointless and silly.
For city drivers, you get the recharge while braking and it makes for very efficient energy consumption. Just my 3 cents.
You get the recharge, and then you it up again, plus additional power, when accelerating back to normal speed. Remember, accelerating requires much more power than driving at a constant speed. You're trying to say that stop/start driving is still more efficient than driving at a constant rate? That's simply not the case. Sure, a hybrid can make stop/start driving more efficient than in other cars, but no way should it more efficient than constant speed driving.
Hmm, Doom 3 makes extensive use of both - that's fairly current tech eh?:)
Doom 3 does not use BSP trees for rendering. Neither did Quake 3. It uses BSP trees for other things, like collision detection.
"Portals" used to mean something other than it does now. You used to clip polygons against a portal, because this was faster in software. Now you just say "please draw the rooms adjacent to the current room." The "clipping" happens automatically on the GPU. "Room based rendering" would be a better term than "portal." There's no magic to this at all. It's just simple and common sense.
Ok, and what does the GPU do? Let me guess... maybe using one of the well known algorithms? Ah, no, can't be, they are all outdated... Ah I know: The GPU just throws it at the GPU...
The GPU just transforms vertices and draws triangles, plus it runs per-vertex and per-pixel shaders. It does nothing involving scene representation or high-level culling. It just draws everything you throw at it.
BSP trees--for rendering--were useful back when there was a massive expensive involved in rasterizing each triangle on the CPU. You never wanted to draw a triangle, then have another one completely obscure it. But with modern graphics cards this is irrelevant. You just pass a bunch of pre-packaged vertices to the graphics card and it does the rest. You never want to break things down into individual triangles.
So, no, the GPU doesn't use one of these "well known algorithms."
This stuff isn't advanced, it's basic. It's more a refresher course on fundamental methods of organizing scenes. There's nothing difficult or amazing about portals, for example. In fact, much of the tech outlined in the article is outdated. Portals and BSPs (for rendering, not collision detection) are of much less use than they used to be. This quote shows that the author is just reiterating Quake-era views and hasn't written a modern renderer: "BSP trees are supremely efficient in rendering indoor environments." This is completely wrong. On a modern graphics card, it's much faster to throw the scene at the GPU and it let it render it all than it is to iterate through a BSP. Much faster.
I honestly can't think of a single (modern) piece of software that hasn't been stagnant, at least in terms of core features, for a good chunk of that time (well, maybe apache?), nor any project that has evolved so fast without major forking issues.
Nonsense! There are tons of examples: Windows, Word, Excel, Photoshop, 3D Studio / 3D Studio MAX, Mac OS. And then you can throw in lots of open source examples, like Python, Perl, the first decade of Emacs, etc. Also consider the huge embedded systems you don't know about, like those running in telephone exchanges, those at JPL, and so on. Or for a more graspable example, look at Google.
You know, despite the fact that these specs don't wow the average desktop gamer, after seeing this 96kb first-person shooter, I think the sky's the limit as long as they've got competent programmers.
That shooter is a 96K executable. When run, it procedurally generates textures and geometry and ends up using many, many megabytes of memory for what's essentially a tiny level. That's hardly the same thing as writing a shooter that runs in 96K total.
Linus Torvalds - I don't need to say who he is - but why isn't he there either.
Now I can guarantee that I'll be modded down for this, but it's hard to put Linux in the same category as some of the people already on the list.
Clive Sinclair, for example, was a real innovator. He followed his own path and went off in bold directions. Ditto for Jay Miner. And Dennis Ritchie. But Linus, while an absolutely brilliant hacker, essentially started cloning Minix, then later decided to turn it into a full-blown UNIX kernel. Thompson, Kernighan, Ritchie, and others get credit for UNIX. And Tannenbaum gets credit for Minix. Linus's claim to fame is that Linux merged with the free software movement started by Stallman, and the result is that such software (under the monicker "open source"), became more commonplace. But again, Linus didn't come up with this. The gnu project was started eight years before Linux did.
The bottom line is that Linus is an excellent programmer and architect and he wrote a great piece code. But if he gets in the museum, then so should the Microsoft Excel team (which essentially copied earlier spreadsheets).
Desktops have been in trouble for a while. A new CPU comes out with an 8% higher clockspeed, and then it uses 15% more power. Obviously there was a limit to how long that could continue, especially as those diddly performance increases weren't providing tangible benefits (compare an 8% clockspeed increase with switching to a dual core processor, for example). And at the same time the desktop market has been being heavily outpaced by laptops and mobile devices.
The only CPU roadmap that even shows these, let alone within the next 2-3 years, is the PowerPC. With the Xbox2 going PowerPC, and.net being CPU indepdendent...nah.
running at 4 to 6GHz
We'll have CPUs at this speed on the desktop, but not laptops. And the desktop CPUs with these chips are going to suck massive power and need massive cooling solutions. Yikes.
a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM
RAM quantity has been slowing down. Dell still ships 256MB in most of their PCs. 2 GB is an 8x increase. The trouble here is that massive increases at these levels don't scale nearly as nicely as increases did in the past. At these levels, there are noticible power consumption increases from adding more memory. And memory prices have leveled off, with price hikes expected. We'll need to see some pretty drastic price decreases for 2GB to be the norm.
up to a terabyte of storage
Believable. Backing it all up will still be an issue.
a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link
Believable.
a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
No, sorry. ~35% of all PCs still ship with motherboard graphics that aren't even to the level of a GeForce 2 (e.g. no hardware T&L pipeline). Maybe the specs mean 3x the power of one of these? But if we're talking 3x a Radeon 9800, then no, it won't happen. We're getting huge boosts in graphics card power with the new offerings from ATI and nVidia, but at the same time the power consumption and cooling problems are increasing TREMENDOUSLY (i.e. you need a 480W power supply to use the new nVidia cards). These are not consumer level cards. None of these cards are anywhere near suitable for a laptop either, which is where the market is moving.
what Dell's next step would be. I heard they have an exclusive contract with Intel till 2006 (correct me if I'm wrong), but they can't ignore the fact that AMD is rocking the CPU market now.
Only on desktops. Intel still owns the laptop market by a wide margin, especially as AMD is completely ignoring the low-power market. Remember, laptops are now over 50% of all PC sales.
By-the-numbers being no prayer or teaching of creation?
No. I find it bizarre that you're jumping to that conclusion. By-the-numbers meaning one teacher for 28 students who has to follow a preset list of state-prescribed units with little time for instruction geared toward what individual students are attracted to.
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment)
But you're assuming the primary reason people homeschool their kids is religious in nature. I've never heard this. Usually it's to avoid a by-the-numbers education.
Back to the post, when I used Windows regularly it was about once a month before I needed a clean install.
Then in all honesty, you were doing something wrong. Seriously. The only reason you'd ever need to reinstall Windows that often is if you go in and intentionally break things, possibly the result of misguided configuration attempts.
It's like saying "I installed Linux, and I went in and screwed around with all this stuff to 'tweak' it, but I ended up having to reinstall."
I've used many flavors of Windows, even the much maligned ME, and I install and uninstall software all the time, and I've only ever had to reinstall Windows once. That was because a 3dfx driver didn't support Windows ME. If I had been running System Restore--a tool that elite people always turn off--then I would have been fine even in that case. I've used Windows 2000 for *years* on the same machine, throughout several hardcore software development projects, with no problems at all.
If games are art then sitcoms are art
on
Videogames as Art
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· Score: 0, Informative
You might think video games are art, but once you've seen how they're developed then you'll change your mind. Video games are more like TV sitcoms: a bunch of marketing people and executives making calls on what they think will sell. There's almost no "do the right thing" aspect to it. There's zero interest in innovating or following a distinct vision. The popular myth is that video games have the equivalent of a director, like Spielberg or Peter Jackson, but they really don't. The designer is just a pawn. The writers are just pawns. There are a few game designers with well-known names, like Will Wright and Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto, but realize that these guys are just executive producers. Miyamoto hasn't done any art or level design or game design in a decade. He just supervises a dozen projects at once and makes a fuss when one is going off track. He's a manager.
Of *course* this is true!
on
Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Megapixels mattered when you couldn't even get a good 5x7 print. Then it still mattered when you couldn't even get a good 8x10 print. At that point they stopped mattering for everyone except professional photographers who need to shoot for ads and posters and so on.
And of course realize that if you take printing out of the picture and just keep everything digital, then 1 megapixel is fine for 80% of all uses. 2 megapixels covers the rest.
The huge downside is more megapixels is that, well, the images are huge, so you spend more time tranferring them and backing them up, you get fewer images on a CD, you need larger and more expensive memory cards, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to say no. These systems are known to not be reliable -- many Xbox harddrives have failed, dvd drives have failed, but the loss isn't too great .. would you expect the same from your own PC -- losing all your data? I think not.
And PCs have been known to have hard drives and DVD drives fail too. Your point is...?
As opposed to back then, when you had people writing big applications in interpreted languages like BASIC, UCSD Pascal, and Lisp?
:p
On circa 1990 PCs, fairly rarely.
It's surprising to me how many people seem to thing of Python as a great, independent language, and fight so hard to deny that it has roots in BASIC.
Did I say it was great? If anything Python has roots in Lisp. At least you have Lisp experts like Norvig and Graham promoting Python as a reasonable alternative to Lisp.
Personally, I don't see much connection between Python and BASIC. If anything hurts Python, it's being overly object-oriented.
I know many in the Linux community like to paint Mr. Tanenbaum as a bitter lunatic, but this is a great article, one that every Linux user/zealot should read.
First, he goes into the history of why people were souring on UNIX and the various independently-written UNIXalikes. These were mostly individual projects, which really sets the record straight for the people who seem to think that Linus was the first person to do this, and that Linus was somehow the only person intelligent and manly enough to write his own kernel.
At the same time, he lays out the history of UNIX clones, of which Linux was definitely one. It's surprising to me how many people seem to think of Linux as a great, independent OS, and fight so hard to deny that it has roots in UNIX. Of course these people are mostly young and don't know much about computer history. In that respect, this is an educational article.
And, yes, he does talk about the micro vs. monolithic kernel issue, but he does so without fanaticism, and, you know, what he says is generally correct. He's all for small and reliable software, which is something that UNIX was originally but rapidly became the antithesis of. Performance issues, back when people were using 4.77 and 8 MHz desktop processors, well, let's just say that things were different then. Now you have people writing big applications in Python. The real reason Linux ended up with a monolithic kernel is because that's what Linus understood and it was easier for him to write that way.
I see a lot of anti-American sentiments here. Some of this is well-placed, I admit, but let's not go overboard, okay?
Gas prices were up near the two dollar limit just 4-5 years ago. Similarly, there were huge shortages of oil in both the 1970s and 80s. Seriously, in the early 1980s there was gasoline rationing, during which only people with odd numbered license plates (at least in some states), could only get gas on odd numbered days. It was common to have to wait in a long line at the gas station.
Now, yes, people forgetting about all of this and buying vehicles with terrible fuel mileage is inexcusable. Don't just blindly say "SUV," though. Small so-called SUV's are cars with different bodies. They get comparable gas mileage. Also note that most pickups are as bad as or worse than large SUVs, with MPGs in the mid teens. Rather railing against SUVs, it's more accurate to talk about veicles with excessively large engines (which these days means anything more than four cylinders). Some vehicles, like Suburbans and Grand Cherokees, are absolutely huge and have eight-cylinder engines in them. Why do people need vehicles that have engines twice the size of what's necessary, excepting people who need to haul cement and so on?
Really, I see hundreds of great sites in a year. There are more great sites than I know what to do with. Picking *one*, one that is the top of the heap in a hugely broad category? What's the point?
Remember, there may be several thousand CDs released in a year, but there are millions of new websites. It just seems pointless and silly.
For city drivers, you get the recharge while braking and it makes for very efficient energy consumption. Just my 3 cents.
You get the recharge, and then you it up again, plus additional power, when accelerating back to normal speed. Remember, accelerating requires much more power than driving at a constant speed. You're trying to say that stop/start driving is still more efficient than driving at a constant rate? That's simply not the case. Sure, a hybrid can make stop/start driving more efficient than in other cars, but no way should it more efficient than constant speed driving.
Hmm, Doom 3 makes extensive use of both - that's fairly current tech eh? :)
Doom 3 does not use BSP trees for rendering. Neither did Quake 3. It uses BSP trees for other things, like collision detection.
"Portals" used to mean something other than it does now. You used to clip polygons against a portal, because this was faster in software. Now you just say "please draw the rooms adjacent to the current room." The "clipping" happens automatically on the GPU. "Room based rendering" would be a better term than "portal." There's no magic to this at all. It's just simple and common sense.
Ok, and what does the GPU do? Let me guess ... maybe using one of the well known algorithms? Ah, no, can't be, they are all outdated ... Ah I know: The GPU just throws it at the GPU ...
The GPU just transforms vertices and draws triangles, plus it runs per-vertex and per-pixel shaders. It does nothing involving scene representation or high-level culling. It just draws everything you throw at it.
BSP trees--for rendering--were useful back when there was a massive expensive involved in rasterizing each triangle on the CPU. You never wanted to draw a triangle, then have another one completely obscure it. But with modern graphics cards this is irrelevant. You just pass a bunch of pre-packaged vertices to the graphics card and it does the rest. You never want to break things down into individual triangles.
So, no, the GPU doesn't use one of these "well known algorithms."
This stuff isn't advanced, it's basic. It's more a refresher course on fundamental methods of organizing scenes. There's nothing difficult or amazing about portals, for example. In fact, much of the tech outlined in the article is outdated. Portals and BSPs (for rendering, not collision detection) are of much less use than they used to be. This quote shows that the author is just reiterating Quake-era views and hasn't written a modern renderer: "BSP trees are supremely efficient in rendering indoor environments." This is completely wrong. On a modern graphics card, it's much faster to throw the scene at the GPU and it let it render it all than it is to iterate through a BSP. Much faster.
I honestly can't think of a single (modern) piece of software that hasn't been stagnant, at least in terms of core features, for a good chunk of that time (well, maybe apache?), nor any project that has evolved so fast without major forking issues.
Nonsense! There are tons of examples: Windows, Word, Excel, Photoshop, 3D Studio / 3D Studio MAX, Mac OS. And then you can throw in lots of open source examples, like Python, Perl, the first decade of Emacs, etc. Also consider the huge embedded systems you don't know about, like those running in telephone exchanges, those at JPL, and so on. Or for a more graspable example, look at Google.
You know, despite the fact that these specs don't wow the average desktop gamer, after seeing this 96kb first-person shooter, I think the sky's the limit as long as they've got competent programmers.
That shooter is a 96K executable. When run, it procedurally generates textures and geometry and ends up using many, many megabytes of memory for what's essentially a tiny level. That's hardly the same thing as writing a shooter that runs in 96K total.
Linus Torvalds - I don't need to say who he is - but why isn't he there either.
Now I can guarantee that I'll be modded down for this, but it's hard to put Linux in the same category as some of the people already on the list.
Clive Sinclair, for example, was a real innovator. He followed his own path and went off in bold directions. Ditto for Jay Miner. And Dennis Ritchie. But Linus, while an absolutely brilliant hacker, essentially started cloning Minix, then later decided to turn it into a full-blown UNIX kernel. Thompson, Kernighan, Ritchie, and others get credit for UNIX. And Tannenbaum gets credit for Minix. Linus's claim to fame is that Linux merged with the free software movement started by Stallman, and the result is that such software (under the monicker "open source"), became more commonplace. But again, Linus didn't come up with this. The gnu project was started eight years before Linux did.
The bottom line is that Linus is an excellent programmer and architect and he wrote a great piece code. But if he gets in the museum, then so should the Microsoft Excel team (which essentially copied earlier spreadsheets).
Then we can have giant software monoculture based on Linux instead of Windows :P
What does "US" mean in this case? It's not like there aren't already American people and companies using Linux. Does he mean the US government?
Desktops have been in trouble for a while. A new CPU comes out with an 8% higher clockspeed, and then it uses 15% more power. Obviously there was a limit to how long that could continue, especially as those diddly performance increases weren't providing tangible benefits (compare an 8% clockspeed increase with switching to a dual core processor, for example). And at the same time the desktop market has been being heavily outpaced by laptops and mobile devices.
I still have a couple Pentium I with MMX running and without a hitch. How much longer are you talking about?
That was back when Intel x86 chip ran fairly cool. The real question is "how long does a Prescott-level P4 chip last?"
a dual-core CPU
.net being CPU indepdendent...nah.
The only CPU roadmap that even shows these, let alone within the next 2-3 years, is the PowerPC. With the Xbox2 going PowerPC, and
running at 4 to 6GHz
We'll have CPUs at this speed on the desktop, but not laptops. And the desktop CPUs with these chips are going to suck massive power and need massive cooling solutions. Yikes.
a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM
RAM quantity has been slowing down. Dell still ships 256MB in most of their PCs. 2 GB is an 8x increase. The trouble here is that massive increases at these levels don't scale nearly as nicely as increases did in the past. At these levels, there are noticible power consumption increases from adding more memory. And memory prices have leveled off, with price hikes expected. We'll need to see some pretty drastic price decreases for 2GB to be the norm.
up to a terabyte of storage
Believable. Backing it all up will still be an issue.
a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link
Believable.
a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
No, sorry. ~35% of all PCs still ship with motherboard graphics that aren't even to the level of a GeForce 2 (e.g. no hardware T&L pipeline). Maybe the specs mean 3x the power of one of these? But if we're talking 3x a Radeon 9800, then no, it won't happen. We're getting huge boosts in graphics card power with the new offerings from ATI and nVidia, but at the same time the power consumption and cooling problems are increasing TREMENDOUSLY (i.e. you need a 480W power supply to use the new nVidia cards). These are not consumer level cards. None of these cards are anywhere near suitable for a laptop either, which is where the market is moving.
what Dell's next step would be. I heard they have an exclusive contract with Intel till 2006 (correct me if I'm wrong), but they can't ignore the fact that AMD is rocking the CPU market now.
Only on desktops. Intel still owns the laptop market by a wide margin, especially as AMD is completely ignoring the low-power market. Remember, laptops are now over 50% of all PC sales.
Yet another virus is causing problems with Internet Explorer
Does it have anything to do with Internet Explorer? Neither of the links provided mentioned anything at all about IE.
By-the-numbers being no prayer or teaching of creation?
No. I find it bizarre that you're jumping to that conclusion. By-the-numbers meaning one teacher for 28 students who has to follow a preset list of state-prescribed units with little time for instruction geared toward what individual students are attracted to.
homeschooling is NOT the answer. homeschooled children either come out academically great (and/or religiously brainwashed to hell, but i'll say no more about that aspect of it for the moment)
But you're assuming the primary reason people homeschool their kids is religious in nature. I've never heard this. Usually it's to avoid a by-the-numbers education.
Back to the post, when I used Windows regularly it was about once a month before I needed a clean install.
Then in all honesty, you were doing something wrong. Seriously. The only reason you'd ever need to reinstall Windows that often is if you go in and intentionally break things, possibly the result of misguided configuration attempts.
It's like saying "I installed Linux, and I went in and screwed around with all this stuff to 'tweak' it, but I ended up having to reinstall."
I've used many flavors of Windows, even the much maligned ME, and I install and uninstall software all the time, and I've only ever had to reinstall Windows once. That was because a 3dfx driver didn't support Windows ME. If I had been running System Restore--a tool that elite people always turn off--then I would have been fine even in that case. I've used Windows 2000 for *years* on the same machine, throughout several hardcore software development projects, with no problems at all.
You might think video games are art, but once you've seen how they're developed then you'll change your mind. Video games are more like TV sitcoms: a bunch of marketing people and executives making calls on what they think will sell. There's almost no "do the right thing" aspect to it. There's zero interest in innovating or following a distinct vision. The popular myth is that video games have the equivalent of a director, like Spielberg or Peter Jackson, but they really don't. The designer is just a pawn. The writers are just pawns. There are a few game designers with well-known names, like Will Wright and Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto, but realize that these guys are just executive producers. Miyamoto hasn't done any art or level design or game design in a decade. He just supervises a dozen projects at once and makes a fuss when one is going off track. He's a manager.
How about "weaker" :P
Megapixels mattered when you couldn't even get a good 5x7 print. Then it still mattered when you couldn't even get a good 8x10 print. At that point they stopped mattering for everyone except professional photographers who need to shoot for ads and posters and so on.
And of course realize that if you take printing out of the picture and just keep everything digital, then 1 megapixel is fine for 80% of all uses. 2 megapixels covers the rest.
The huge downside is more megapixels is that, well, the images are huge, so you spend more time tranferring them and backing them up, you get fewer images on a CD, you need larger and more expensive memory cards, etc.