Is it just me, or is ATI pulling a real turnaround? They used to be the underdog for so long -- their drivers weren't the greatest, their marketshare was second-fiddle, and they initially missed out on the Xbox contract. I never thought I'd see the day where nVidia, which is practically the industry standard for gaming, might be challenged on such a thing as actual performance.
Of course current ATI and nVidia cards--and truth be told the last couple of generations, too--have been total overkill in the performance department for everything except the very high end games. When you realize that those very high end games represent about 10-20% of the total PC game market, then you realize what a wash this all has become. Does it matter if you're dominating a small minority of the market, especially if you're doing it without regard to price?
We'd be much better shape if ATI and nVidia would stop jacking off the fanboys and focus on price, power consumption, and form factor. Remember, over 50% of all consumer PCs ship with motherboard 3D that doesn't even include hardware T&L.
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
And way back in the day, it was typical and expected for games on the Atari 800, Atari 2600, C64, etc., to run at 60fps (excepting faux 3D games, which ran at 5fps). Much of the angst about 60fps being excessive came from PC owners, who didn't even have the general capability to run at 60fps with VGA resolutions until 1995 or so, when we finally got away from having to push a 64K screen over an 8MHz bus. Once everyone got used to 60fps, then of course we started having the reverse angst, about games didn't run at 60+.
Back to common sense. If you put coffee in your crotch area and then proceed to drive, if the coffee spills, you deserve it all. There is a complete lack of common sense now and people make up for it by sueing a company. Now you have to cater to stupidity and can't assume that people will realize that it is wrong or stupid to drink toxic substances or put hot coffee in your crotch.
Right, and what if *after* you spilled the coffee you found out it was twice as hot as coffee you make at home? That was the issue here, even though, yes, too much money was involved.
It was the non-Sunday strips that made Bloom County--all the character interaction in those few panels a day. Breathed could set-up one situation and keep it going for days or weeks. That's much of what made Outland so stale. It tried to pack everything into a self-contained Sunday strip, and it didn't work. It wasn't cohesive, surviving solely on nostalgic Bloom County fans.
Maybe not, but you were running those programs on hardware that had a built-in disassembler. Can you imagine the ire of every software publishing company if someone started designing that in again?
MacsBug, Apple's freely available debugger for MacOS (not X), let you break into running code and disassemble it. When people write reams of C++ code, this is of little value. (And in any case you have to very dedicated to want to disassemble something that doesn't contain any symbolic information:)
I hate proprietary hardware. I like commodity hardware. I like deciding that, for this machine, the $250 gigabyte board is too much, and going with a $50 ECS. I like picking a cheaper Athlon over a P4, or a low-end videocard for workstations and a high-end card for gaming machines.
But both the P4 and Athlon are proprietary hardware, too. Or do you just like there being two to choose from? Also note that all PC video cards are proprietary.
there's been so many bad sci-fi shows on TV that maybe the audience in general feels sci-fi has little to offer. If you look at the latest crop of Sci-fi shows on TV, most of them suck. There was one good show on Showtime called Odyssey 5, but showtime cancelled the show. It might be a chicken and the egg problem, but there does seem to be a pattern.
Then it wouldn't be a new problem, though (if indeed there is a problem at all). Bad SF TV shows go back to the early 1960s.
Everyone remembers typing in sources from books and computer magazines. And I'm sure a lot of us 'escaped' programs and typed 'LIST' (on those platforms which used BASIC anyway!) and watched the source code fly up the screen.
Yes, and you could cheaply buy listings of the source for for the Atari OS and Atari DOS, for example. Who published the former? Atari! Who published the latter? The author of Atari DOS.
But let's not get overzealous. With only a handful of exceptions, you could not get the source code to commercial applications for home computers. Even early Apple II programs written in BASIC often disabled the "list" command so you couldn't see it, and you certainly couldn't get the source to those written in assembly language. (One exception was that Chris Crawford sold the code to his game "Eastern Front: 1941." At the time it was considered a cutting edge game.)
If you've ever looked at the wattage increase going from the P4 at 2.4GHz through 3.2GHz, it's pretty damn appalling. A 10% increase in raw clockspeed increase is traded for a 20% increase in power consumption. This is ridiculous, despite the fanatics who will argue to their death that they'd need that 10% even if it doubled their electricity bill.
An eye-opening comparison is to look at the kind of PCs major 3D game developers had on their desks in, say, 1997. It was typically a 333MHz P2. And now you have people complaining that a 2GHz Celeron is "too slow" for anything. And Dell should be seriously fined for tagging such "low end" processors as being suitable for "home office applications", but nothing more.
Sorry, when you use Perl on a non-free operating system, it is still dependent on black-box system calls that behave not according to they should do, but according to what Microsoft decided that they should do.
My sincerere apologies, but that's a ridiculous statement.
That doesn't really matter though, does it? Linux is clearly not a huge leap forward (well, not yet, but hey, the sky is the limit when you have all the code) - but ultimately what people are interested in is the story of how it was made, and the ideas that led to its creation. That is what makes Linux so interesting, so different.
In all honesty, that's not true. Look at the huge backlash to the GNU/Linux nonsense, even though Stallman was right in this case: the Linux kernel was a key piece in a puzzle started many years earlier.
This could be the first major way to reach out to normal users and explain the benefits of open source and Linux
This is a very tough sell, IMO. I'll also add that lumping the two together--"open source" and "Linux"--maybe isn't a good idea.
With perfect honesty, as someone who has used and programmed various OSes and hardware, the differences between Linux and Windows are few. Both are hugely complex from the user's point of view, and both are arguably incomprehensible on the source level. (Remember, you can't just talk about the Linux kernel, but the entire package including XFree86, drivers, the window manager, KDE, etc.) So it's not like either one is a clear winner in terms of ease-of-use or architectural cleanliness. It used to be that Linux was more stable, but with Windows 2000 that's no longer true. UNIX-alikes are generally more virus resistant than Windows, but that's a tough reason to insist that someone change all of his or her work habits and software. Remember, too, that patches for the recent Windows virii were available before infections started. Proper system administration (sadly!) plays a big role in security.
On the "open source" angle, I think that too much of an association with Linux is hurting the term. The Linux kernel is open source, yes, but we need to stop acting like you have to have one in order to have the other. There is a lot of open source software for Windows, for example. The "Chandler" email program, which is attempting to replace Outlook and Exchange, is going to run under Windows. Heck, Emacs and gcc both run under Windows. So do all of the GNU utilities. And Perl. And Python. And Tk.
As much as we all like to think we have the inside track on the superior OS--and, indeed, it may still be slightly superior--it's a case of it not being so far and away superior that it's clearly so.
When I saw the term "code generation," I immediately expected it to be about compilers. That's how the term has been used for, hmmm, 40+ years now. And it kinda is about compilers, sorta, in a bizarre, "charts & diagrams" software engineering kind of way. But you have to hunt to find a solid definition of the modern buzzword "code generation" that doesn't reference other unexplained acronyms and terms. And the review doesn't explain it either!
This is one of those depressing, faux engineering, topics like "patterns" and "factoring." Once you dig behind all the buzz and feelgood articles, you find out that it's simply a popular renaming of what's been standard practice since before most of us were born. ("Factoring" was a key topic in most Forth books from the early 1980s, but it has been reinvented and rebranded as a cool 21st century thing.)
We want faster processors and more memory at all costs. If there's an environmental or human toll caused by getting a new CPU and video card every year so I can play the k00lest new gamez, then I say screw 'em:P
I think its pretty 'shallow' of them to bring people to court over this issue. How do they know you don't legally own all the MP3s or movies you are downloading?...
Computer and console game sales just recently surpassed the film industry in gross sales.
A popular, but incorrect assumption. Video games have passed the gross sales of tickets at the BOX OFFICE. If you include DVD and VHS sales and rental then the movie industry is much larger than games.
cars that drive themselves - well honda's already park themselves. darpa is holding an unmanned vehicle race through the desert - i can't imagine commercial applications will take too much longer.
And now you've fallen into the trap that the original article was about. Going from either of the applications you listed to "cars that drive themselves on arbitrary roads" is a huge, huge, leap. Come back in 20 years and see if we're they're. I strongly suspect we won't be.
The physical internet is not dying, of course. That's just silly. But some internet services--especially email and the web--have been abused to the point where the benefits are cloudy.
Imagine a random person who buys a computer and gets connected to the internet. Within a few months she gets more spam and virus emails than regular mail. Some of them contain pornographic images, many appear to be from people she knows, because their PCs are infected. Some are just plain misleading, such as a message from someone who says he has the information she requested. One is a message that appears to be from eBay, asking to confirm her userid and password. Sometimes she emails friends, but they are incorrectly deleted because her friends get so much spam too. She clicks on the wrong link in a Google search and gets a site that opens 20+ full screen windows and has to kill the browser to get rid of them. Sites contain misleading popups and ads about security vulnerabilities and potential viruses and system updates. Instant messaging windows with ads pop up every fifteen minutes or so. Clicking on the wrong button is a dialog--or misunderstanding what is being asked--results in some spyware being installed that pops up messages even when off-line.
You can fix all of these things. You can learn what to avoid. You can become horribly paranoid about everything. But most people don't want to be a system administrator that has to keep up with all of this nonsense.
But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years
It doesn't matter. Even if you had the DOOM 3 engine you couldn't do it alone. 80% of the work in a game like that is art, sound, and level design.
When Opterons start showing up in that context, running Windows, then they'll be comparable stories.
Unless you start looking at power consumption and heat dissipation, in which case the G5s will walk all over Intel. I'm not going to buy a Mac, so I really with this wasn't true, but it is.
People who follow hardware fanboy sites, buy $400 video cards, love throwaway games that you "win" once then never want to play again yet still complain that the games were too short, only play games fitting a narrow genre of 3D polygonal action...these are the hardcore game players. Hardcore games can be big, as witnessed by GTA3 and GTA:VC (over 5 million copies sold of each), but those are the exception. When you realize that the endlessly hyped Quake 3 only sold ~160,000 copies, then you realize what a slim and fickle market this is.
Hell, I'd be happy if their OS didn't crash, even if the applications did from time to time.
Sigh. I have never had a single crash using Windows 2000 for over two years. Not one. Ever. Windows really sucked back with Windows 95/98/98SE/ME, but not with 2000 and XP. You can bring down XP with some really weird video driver problems (as I've also had happen with X Windows), but otherwise OS-level crashes are a thing of the past. Heck, I've had Linux crash a couple of times--seriously--which is more than Windows 2000.
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Is it just me, or is ATI pulling a real turnaround? They used to be the underdog for so long -- their drivers weren't the greatest, their marketshare was second-fiddle, and they initially missed out on the Xbox contract. I never thought I'd see the day where nVidia, which is practically the industry standard for gaming, might be challenged on such a thing as actual performance.
Of course current ATI and nVidia cards--and truth be told the last couple of generations, too--have been total overkill in the performance department for everything except the very high end games. When you realize that those very high end games represent about 10-20% of the total PC game market, then you realize what a wash this all has become. Does it matter if you're dominating a small minority of the market, especially if you're doing it without regard to price?
We'd be much better shape if ATI and nVidia would stop jacking off the fanboys and focus on price, power consumption, and form factor. Remember, over 50% of all consumer PCs ship with motherboard 3D that doesn't even include hardware T&L.
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
And way back in the day, it was typical and expected for games on the Atari 800, Atari 2600, C64, etc., to run at 60fps (excepting faux 3D games, which ran at 5fps). Much of the angst about 60fps being excessive came from PC owners, who didn't even have the general capability to run at 60fps with VGA resolutions until 1995 or so, when we finally got away from having to push a 64K screen over an 8MHz bus. Once everyone got used to 60fps, then of course we started having the reverse angst, about games didn't run at 60+.
Back to common sense. If you put coffee in your crotch area and then proceed to drive, if the coffee spills, you deserve it all. There is a complete lack of common sense now and people make up for it by sueing a company. Now you have to cater to stupidity and can't assume that people will realize that it is wrong or stupid to drink toxic substances or put hot coffee in your crotch.
Right, and what if *after* you spilled the coffee you found out it was twice as hot as coffee you make at home? That was the issue here, even though, yes, too much money was involved.
It was the non-Sunday strips that made Bloom County--all the character interaction in those few panels a day. Breathed could set-up one situation and keep it going for days or weeks. That's much of what made Outland so stale. It tried to pack everything into a self-contained Sunday strip, and it didn't work. It wasn't cohesive, surviving solely on nostalgic Bloom County fans.
Maybe not, but you were running those programs on hardware that had a built-in disassembler. Can you imagine the ire of every software publishing company if someone started designing that in again?
:)
MacsBug, Apple's freely available debugger for MacOS (not X), let you break into running code and disassemble it. When people write reams of C++ code, this is of little value. (And in any case you have to very dedicated to want to disassemble something that doesn't contain any symbolic information
I hate proprietary hardware. I like commodity hardware. I like deciding that, for this machine, the $250 gigabyte board is too much, and going with a $50 ECS. I like picking a cheaper Athlon over a P4, or a low-end videocard for workstations and a high-end card for gaming machines.
But both the P4 and Athlon are proprietary hardware, too. Or do you just like there being two to choose from? Also note that all PC video cards are proprietary.
there's been so many bad sci-fi shows on TV that maybe the audience in general feels sci-fi has little to offer. If you look at the latest crop of Sci-fi shows on TV, most of them suck. There was one good show on Showtime called Odyssey 5, but showtime cancelled the show. It might be a chicken and the egg problem, but there does seem to be a pattern.
Then it wouldn't be a new problem, though (if indeed there is a problem at all). Bad SF TV shows go back to the early 1960s.
Everyone remembers typing in sources from books and computer magazines. And I'm sure a lot of us 'escaped' programs and typed 'LIST' (on those platforms which used BASIC anyway!) and watched the source code fly up the screen.
Yes, and you could cheaply buy listings of the source for for the Atari OS and Atari DOS, for example. Who published the former? Atari! Who published the latter? The author of Atari DOS.
But let's not get overzealous. With only a handful of exceptions, you could not get the source code to commercial applications for home computers. Even early Apple II programs written in BASIC often disabled the "list" command so you couldn't see it, and you certainly couldn't get the source to those written in assembly language. (One exception was that Chris Crawford sold the code to his game "Eastern Front: 1941." At the time it was considered a cutting edge game.)
If you've ever looked at the wattage increase going from the P4 at 2.4GHz through 3.2GHz, it's pretty damn appalling. A 10% increase in raw clockspeed increase is traded for a 20% increase in power consumption. This is ridiculous, despite the fanatics who will argue to their death that they'd need that 10% even if it doubled their electricity bill.
An eye-opening comparison is to look at the kind of PCs major 3D game developers had on their desks in, say, 1997. It was typically a 333MHz P2. And now you have people complaining that a 2GHz Celeron is "too slow" for anything. And Dell should be seriously fined for tagging such "low end" processors as being suitable for "home office applications", but nothing more.
Sorry, when you use Perl on a non-free operating system, it is still dependent on black-box system calls that behave not according to they should do, but according to what Microsoft decided that they should do.
My sincerere apologies, but that's a ridiculous statement.
That doesn't really matter though, does it? Linux is clearly not a huge leap forward (well, not yet, but hey, the sky is the limit when you have all the code) - but ultimately what people are interested in is the story of how it was made, and the ideas that led to its creation. That is what makes Linux so interesting, so different.
In all honesty, that's not true. Look at the huge backlash to the GNU/Linux nonsense, even though Stallman was right in this case: the Linux kernel was a key piece in a puzzle started many years earlier.
This could be the first major way to reach out to normal users and explain the benefits of open source and Linux
This is a very tough sell, IMO. I'll also add that lumping the two together--"open source" and "Linux"--maybe isn't a good idea.
With perfect honesty, as someone who has used and programmed various OSes and hardware, the differences between Linux and Windows are few. Both are hugely complex from the user's point of view, and both are arguably incomprehensible on the source level. (Remember, you can't just talk about the Linux kernel, but the entire package including XFree86, drivers, the window manager, KDE, etc.) So it's not like either one is a clear winner in terms of ease-of-use or architectural cleanliness. It used to be that Linux was more stable, but with Windows 2000 that's no longer true. UNIX-alikes are generally more virus resistant than Windows, but that's a tough reason to insist that someone change all of his or her work habits and software. Remember, too, that patches for the recent Windows virii were available before infections started. Proper system administration (sadly!) plays a big role in security.
On the "open source" angle, I think that too much of an association with Linux is hurting the term. The Linux kernel is open source, yes, but we need to stop acting like you have to have one in order to have the other. There is a lot of open source software for Windows, for example. The "Chandler" email program, which is attempting to replace Outlook and Exchange, is going to run under Windows. Heck, Emacs and gcc both run under Windows. So do all of the GNU utilities. And Perl. And Python. And Tk.
As much as we all like to think we have the inside track on the superior OS--and, indeed, it may still be slightly superior--it's a case of it not being so far and away superior that it's clearly so.
When I saw the term "code generation," I immediately expected it to be about compilers. That's how the term has been used for, hmmm, 40+ years now. And it kinda is about compilers, sorta, in a bizarre, "charts & diagrams" software engineering kind of way. But you have to hunt to find a solid definition of the modern buzzword "code generation" that doesn't reference other unexplained acronyms and terms. And the review doesn't explain it either!
This is one of those depressing, faux engineering, topics like "patterns" and "factoring." Once you dig behind all the buzz and feelgood articles, you find out that it's simply a popular renaming of what's been standard practice since before most of us were born. ("Factoring" was a key topic in most Forth books from the early 1980s, but it has been reinvented and rebranded as a cool 21st century thing.)
We want faster processors and more memory at all costs. If there's an environmental or human toll caused by getting a new CPU and video card every year so I can play the k00lest new gamez, then I say screw 'em :P
I think its pretty 'shallow' of them to bring people to court over this issue. How do they know you don't legally own all the MP3s or movies you are downloading?...
Oh, come on, _really_.
Computer and console game sales just recently surpassed the film industry in gross sales.
A popular, but incorrect assumption. Video games have passed the gross sales of tickets at the BOX OFFICE. If you include DVD and VHS sales and rental then the movie industry is much larger than games.
cars that drive themselves - well honda's already park themselves. darpa is holding an unmanned vehicle race through the desert - i can't imagine commercial applications will take too much longer.
And now you've fallen into the trap that the original article was about. Going from either of the applications you listed to "cars that drive themselves on arbitrary roads" is a huge, huge, leap. Come back in 20 years and see if we're they're. I strongly suspect we won't be.
There's a short list of subjects that anybody could rattle off that someone who calls him/herself a "geek" would be interested in.
Computers.
Science fiction (Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix)
Fantasy (Lord of the Rings, D&D)
Video Games.
Comic Books.
Apparently "geek" is a much more insulting term than I realized.
Let's not overgeneralize the geeks & comic books thing, okay? I read a few when I was a kid, but have no interest at all now.
The physical internet is not dying, of course. That's just silly. But some internet services--especially email and the web--have been abused to the point where the benefits are cloudy.
Imagine a random person who buys a computer and gets connected to the internet. Within a few months she gets more spam and virus emails than regular mail. Some of them contain pornographic images, many appear to be from people she knows, because their PCs are infected. Some are just plain misleading, such as a message from someone who says he has the information she requested. One is a message that appears to be from eBay, asking to confirm her userid and password. Sometimes she emails friends, but they are incorrectly deleted because her friends get so much spam too. She clicks on the wrong link in a Google search and gets a site that opens 20+ full screen windows and has to kill the browser to get rid of them. Sites contain misleading popups and ads about security vulnerabilities and potential viruses and system updates. Instant messaging windows with ads pop up every fifteen minutes or so. Clicking on the wrong button is a dialog--or misunderstanding what is being asked--results in some spyware being installed that pops up messages even when off-line.
You can fix all of these things. You can learn what to avoid. You can become horribly paranoid about everything. But most people don't want to be a system administrator that has to keep up with all of this nonsense.
But as a small developer, I cannot possibly break into this market when I'm competing with people who are evolving and reusing code that they've had for years
It doesn't matter. Even if you had the DOOM 3 engine you couldn't do it alone. 80% of the work in a game like that is art, sound, and level design.
When Opterons start showing up in that context, running Windows, then they'll be comparable stories.
Unless you start looking at power consumption and heat dissipation, in which case the G5s will walk all over Intel. I'm not going to buy a Mac, so I really with this wasn't true, but it is.
His name is Clippy, and I hate him.
Why doesn't someone write an agent to predict what the replies will be to a given Slashdot story? It could be done as an elementary school project.
People who follow hardware fanboy sites, buy $400 video cards, love throwaway games that you "win" once then never want to play again yet still complain that the games were too short, only play games fitting a narrow genre of 3D polygonal action...these are the hardcore game players. Hardcore games can be big, as witnessed by GTA3 and GTA:VC (over 5 million copies sold of each), but those are the exception. When you realize that the endlessly hyped Quake 3 only sold ~160,000 copies, then you realize what a slim and fickle market this is.
Hell, I'd be happy if their OS didn't crash, even if the applications did from time to time.
Sigh. I have never had a single crash using Windows 2000 for over two years. Not one. Ever. Windows really sucked back with Windows 95/98/98SE/ME, but not with 2000 and XP. You can bring down XP with some really weird video driver problems (as I've also had happen with X Windows), but otherwise OS-level crashes are a thing of the past. Heck, I've had Linux crash a couple of times--seriously--which is more than Windows 2000.