No, Linux's market share is a matter of vender lockin, monopoly abuse, aligned with the fact that Linux is still quite a bit younger than windows.
I assume the "younger" comment is meant as a joke. Windows 1.0 was from 1985, 3.0 from 1990. Linux started in 1991, but uses tools and components from the 1980, and of course Linux is based on an operating system design from the 1970s.
Ultimately, the point I'm aiming at is that paying premium prices for bargain basement video really chafes my ass - if I'm going to lay down for kit that's twice the price of an equivalently powered wintel box, I'd like some name brand video and user access to all of the system memory.
Higher-end name brand video = more power consumption + more heat. Neither of these are things you want in a small form factor notebook.
I own a MacBook and I've honestly had no issues with video speed. Remember that the Intel motherboard chipset we're talking about here is NOT the same as motherboard chipsets from 6 years ago.
From QA to an assistant producer or assistant project manager position ---> common From QA to programmer or artist ---> almost never From QA to level designer or general design position ---> infrequent, but it does happen
This all depends on the skills of the person, obviously. 95% of people in QA stay in QA.
His whole push to get.net running under Linux was never well thought-out. It was clearly a follower move, one completely at-odds with non-Microsoft solutions, and he severely overestimated the "need" for alternate versions of.net. And now he wants to clone another Microsoft technology. Great. Isn't this just admitting that Microsoft is the real innovator? Wouldn't it be better to build off of existing open source technologies? Five years ago it would have been much more forward-thinking to work on getting Ruby or Python and related frameworks up to the point where they completely subsume the need for.net. Ruby on Rails was visionary. Mono was not.
What scares me is the Mac version of Firefox will act different than the normal version, and will cause a lot of problems for my web applications
I'm trying to let "normal version" slide, but I'll at least laugh at it:)
The point is I should be able to test firefox on one platform and expect it to work the same on all Firefox's on any OS it supports.
Wow, you're missing the whole point of separating presentation and functionality. What if someone increases font size? Do you handle that? And you don't care about people using other browsers like Camino that have been using native widgets for a while now? Don't design web sites that are based around these kinds of details.
Vista has a bad reputation and lots of people don't want to upgrade to it, but it's selling like crazy on new desktops and laptops. That's enough for it to sell millions of copies and be a huge success.
AMD successfully played the market well, offering very fast CPUs for cheaper than Intel could muster. But recently they dropped the ball. Not only have they not come up with an answer to Intel's Core Duo...
How does this have anything to do with listening to customers or not? Of *course* AMD wants to build a faster, cooler, cheaper CPU. That's a big "duh." But obviously it's not so simple of they'd have done it by now. There's no magic bullet that makes each generation of processors faster.
In the 1980s, there was often a direct path between the vision of the designer and the end result. Jordan Mechner, for example, not only designed Karateka, but he created every single part of the game.
When you're looking at modern games with 10+ million dollar budgets, teams of 50-100 people including a whole layer of do-nothing management, all the pressure from sales and marketing and various executives to have a mega-hit...that's hardly the same sort of creative process. The way modern games are created is insane.
As has been said in other comments, "x86" is simply the front-end to a RISC-like processor. But there's a whole of lot of trimming that could happen to that front-end if some clean-up is desired. For example:
Drop support for 16-bit mode and all the old instruction forms designed for it.
Remove some of the esoteric instructions that were rarely used even 25 years ago, like DAA and AAA. This is a trivial savings, of course.
Only support SSE for floating point and not the old floating point stack.
Remove MMX, which never caught on anyway.
All of these have backward compatibility issues. Apple had an interesting opportunity to disallow the above features when they switched to x86 chips, opening the door for Intel to finally remove some baggage, but that would have killed Windows compatibility.
The Voodoo 1 was a huge deal. It put 3D cards on the map for personal computers. All that 3D research from the 1970s and 1980s suddenly came to the forefront. There were other 3D cards at the time, but nothing so capable.
The Voodoo 2 was a tremendous leap in power. One generation of improvements and it was over 3x faster.
The Voodoo 3 was more of an incremental improvement. It was better, but not amazingly better and 3dfx was losing market to NVidia by that time.
There were lots of games *like* Dungeon Master before it, though. The whole Wizardry series, for example. Dungeon Master made it real-time instead of turn-based, but I don't think that's enough to put it into this exclusive list.
Sure it keeps getting bigger, but it's been a long time since a get together in Chris Crawford's living room.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
Game companies arent stupid. They know people are trying other OS's. Google, id software, Epic and others have moved accordingly. I'm betting that other companies are considering it.
Nonsense. Id was using OpenGL back before Direct3D was any good.
Everyone thought the DS would be gimmicky. Two screens? Stylus? Microphone? How weird!
But it has turned out to be a great system with some of the more innovative games of the last decade: Nintendogs, Kirby Canvas Curse, Brain Age, WarioWare Touched (tons better than the original), to name a few. I was pleasantly surprised, after all the ho-hum Nintendo titles for the Game Cube.
Laptops are getting to be high-powered. These are not iPods or Nintendo DSes, they're systems that need 80 watts of power all the time. Dell even sells gigantic batteries as an option, as a way to extend battery life. High-end batteries are still an odd, somewhat unpredictable technology. A downward trend in terms of power consumption would help a lot.
It's not hard to see why the Mac would be a hit with slashdotters: You get UNIX all the way down, so to speak, and you get most of the key commercial apps at the same time. UNIX/Linux/BSD certainly isn't the epitome of software design, but at least it's relatively secure and lets you easily use standard tools and OSS.
Just because you find code doesn't mean that it works as advertised, doesn't have memory leaks, buffer overruns and so on.
Code also isn't tagged with environmental issues: how much memory is used, STL or Boost requirements, what system functions are needed, library dependencies, etc.
Code is often layered on top of custom libraries. Sure, here's code to render HTML, but it needs a dozen custom data structure modules from the Netscape code base, for example.
I wonder how many of those professors had actually been misinformed. I've had a handful of professors state information that I found out later to be in disagreement with a larger community
Sure, that's true sometimes, but wikipedia is completely riddled with misinformation. The problem is that people put up what they THINK is true (because they got misinformation from someone else). An expert in a field can spot the errors a lot better than a know-it-all layman.
The Core 2 Duo has an awesome ALU, and it is definitely low power.
That's "low power" compared to other high power consumption CPUs, but hardly low power from an absolute standpoint (compare it to chips from ARM or just about any microcontroller, for example; it's out of their league by a factor of 10).
Run (insert random OS here) as root/Administrator and it's like putting a big "hack me" sign on your back.
Running as a non-admin account is painful under Windows. Even basic software like vim tries to write data to its installation folder, which is a no-no under a non-admin account. The problem is you can't tell which programs will work and which ones don't. What's really needed is a way to lock down the system folder by not Program Files.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Micro$oft as the next guy here, but let's cut back on the bullshit that Windows is not secure. It's false. For the record, I've been running on a Windows box since Windows 2000 without ever using an anti malware program. Never caught anything. Router, Windows with non root user and common sense = free from malware.
Same here, and I'm running from an admin account too. I periodically run some spyware scans just for peace of mind.
OS X is unimaginably complex. Even the 1500+ page "OS X internals" tome just scratches the surface of most things.
(Note that I own and enjoy using a MacBook, so I'm not blindly Apple-bashing.)
The complexity is the first problem. The second is that almost all of the code was written in an insecure manner. No one was doing code-level security reviews on QuickTime and Quartz and all the other bits of OS X. And even if you did, squashing all potential overflow/overwrite bugs in a language like C is essentially impossible. We'll keep living with endless exploits until more secure techniques are used for writing software.
Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more.
That was the original UNIX ideal, but it has not survived well into the modern era. Rob Pike claimed it died with Perl, and it doesn't take much looking around to realize that "big tools" are important: Inkscape, Firefox, The GIMP, Ruby, etc. Firefox is not simply and umbrella for a dozen independent command-line tools, for example. Python doesn't shell out to the "sort" utility to do sorting.
If you want something more secure and you use a particular set of apps, you use OS X.
There honestly isn't a clear reason to switch to Linux. Even open source zealotry no longer applies, because you can run The GIMP under both Windows and OS X. Ditto for Firefox, Inkscape, Wings 3D, and numerous other popular open source applications.
Windows, OS X, and Linux are generally on a convergence path. There's no big differentiator any more.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Linux's market share is a matter of vender lockin, monopoly abuse, aligned with the fact that Linux is still quite a bit younger than windows.
I assume the "younger" comment is meant as a joke. Windows 1.0 was from 1985, 3.0 from 1990. Linux started in 1991, but uses tools and components from the 1980, and of course Linux is based on an operating system design from the 1970s.
Ultimately, the point I'm aiming at is that paying premium prices for bargain basement video really chafes my ass - if I'm going to lay down for kit that's twice the price of an equivalently powered wintel box, I'd like some name brand video and user access to all of the system memory.
Higher-end name brand video = more power consumption + more heat. Neither of these are things you want in a small form factor notebook.
I own a MacBook and I've honestly had no issues with video speed. Remember that the Intel motherboard chipset we're talking about here is NOT the same as motherboard chipsets from 6 years ago.
From QA to an assistant producer or assistant project manager position ---> common
From QA to programmer or artist ---> almost never
From QA to level designer or general design position ---> infrequent, but it does happen
This all depends on the skills of the person, obviously. 95% of people in QA stay in QA.
His whole push to get .net running under Linux was never well thought-out. It was clearly a follower move, one completely at-odds with non-Microsoft solutions, and he severely overestimated the "need" for alternate versions of .net. And now he wants to clone another Microsoft technology. Great. Isn't this just admitting that Microsoft is the real innovator? Wouldn't it be better to build off of existing open source technologies? Five years ago it would have been much more forward-thinking to work on getting Ruby or Python and related frameworks up to the point where they completely subsume the need for .net. Ruby on Rails was visionary. Mono was not.
Create a crap OS.
Oh come on. If it really were crap, then you wouldn't have 99% of major commercial software vendors targeting it as a primary platform.
What scares me is the Mac version of Firefox will act different than the normal version, and will cause a lot of problems for my web applications
:)
I'm trying to let "normal version" slide, but I'll at least laugh at it
The point is I should be able to test firefox on one platform and expect it to work the same on all Firefox's on any OS it supports.
Wow, you're missing the whole point of separating presentation and functionality. What if someone increases font size? Do you handle that? And you don't care about people using other browsers like Camino that have been using native widgets for a while now? Don't design web sites that are based around these kinds of details.
Vista has a bad reputation and lots of people don't want to upgrade to it, but it's selling like crazy on new desktops and laptops. That's enough for it to sell millions of copies and be a huge success.
AMD successfully played the market well, offering very fast CPUs for cheaper than Intel could muster. But recently they dropped the ball. Not only have they not come up with an answer to Intel's Core Duo...
How does this have anything to do with listening to customers or not? Of *course* AMD wants to build a faster, cooler, cheaper CPU. That's a big "duh." But obviously it's not so simple of they'd have done it by now. There's no magic bullet that makes each generation of processors faster.
In the 1980s, there was often a direct path between the vision of the designer and the end result. Jordan Mechner, for example, not only designed Karateka, but he created every single part of the game.
When you're looking at modern games with 10+ million dollar budgets, teams of 50-100 people including a whole layer of do-nothing management, all the pressure from sales and marketing and various executives to have a mega-hit...that's hardly the same sort of creative process. The way modern games are created is insane.
- Drop support for 16-bit mode and all the old instruction forms designed for it.
- Remove some of the esoteric instructions that were rarely used even 25 years ago, like DAA and AAA. This is a trivial savings, of course.
- Only support SSE for floating point and not the old floating point stack.
- Remove MMX, which never caught on anyway.
All of these have backward compatibility issues. Apple had an interesting opportunity to disallow the above features when they switched to x86 chips, opening the door for Intel to finally remove some baggage, but that would have killed Windows compatibility.The Voodoo 1 was a huge deal. It put 3D cards on the map for personal computers. All that 3D research from the 1970s and 1980s suddenly came to the forefront. There were other 3D cards at the time, but nothing so capable.
The Voodoo 2 was a tremendous leap in power. One generation of improvements and it was over 3x faster.
The Voodoo 3 was more of an incremental improvement. It was better, but not amazingly better and 3dfx was losing market to NVidia by that time.
There were lots of games *like* Dungeon Master before it, though. The whole Wizardry series, for example. Dungeon Master made it real-time instead of turn-based, but I don't think that's enough to put it into this exclusive list.
Sure it keeps getting bigger, but it's been a long time since a get together in Chris Crawford's living room.
Game companies arent stupid. They know people are trying other OS's.
Google, id software, Epic and others have moved accordingly.
I'm betting that other companies are considering it.
Nonsense. Id was using OpenGL back before Direct3D was any good.
Um...it was fun to play with while it was free. $50/year for these toys is a bit much.
$50 is, what, less than a single month of broadband internet and cable in the US?
DS: gimmicky
Everyone thought the DS would be gimmicky. Two screens? Stylus? Microphone? How weird!
But it has turned out to be a great system with some of the more innovative games of the last decade: Nintendogs, Kirby Canvas Curse, Brain Age, WarioWare Touched (tons better than the original), to name a few. I was pleasantly surprised, after all the ho-hum Nintendo titles for the Game Cube.
Laptops are getting to be high-powered. These are not iPods or Nintendo DSes, they're systems that need 80 watts of power all the time. Dell even sells gigantic batteries as an option, as a way to extend battery life. High-end batteries are still an odd, somewhat unpredictable technology. A downward trend in terms of power consumption would help a lot.
It's not hard to see why the Mac would be a hit with slashdotters: You get UNIX all the way down, so to speak, and you get most of the key commercial apps at the same time. UNIX/Linux/BSD certainly isn't the epitome of software design, but at least it's relatively secure and lets you easily use standard tools and OSS.
Just because you find code doesn't mean that it works as advertised, doesn't have memory leaks, buffer overruns and so on.
Code also isn't tagged with environmental issues: how much memory is used, STL or Boost requirements, what system functions are needed, library dependencies, etc.
Code is often layered on top of custom libraries. Sure, here's code to render HTML, but it needs a dozen custom data structure modules from the Netscape code base, for example.
I wonder how many of those professors had actually been misinformed. I've had a handful of professors state information that I found out later to be in disagreement with a larger community
Sure, that's true sometimes, but wikipedia is completely riddled with misinformation. The problem is that people put up what they THINK is true (because they got misinformation from someone else). An expert in a field can spot the errors a lot better than a know-it-all layman.
The Core 2 Duo has an awesome ALU, and it is definitely low power.
That's "low power" compared to other high power consumption CPUs, but hardly low power from an absolute standpoint (compare it to chips from ARM or just about any microcontroller, for example; it's out of their league by a factor of 10).
Run (insert random OS here) as root/Administrator and it's like putting a big "hack me" sign on your back.
Running as a non-admin account is painful under Windows. Even basic software like vim tries to write data to its installation folder, which is a no-no under a non-admin account. The problem is you can't tell which programs will work and which ones don't. What's really needed is a way to lock down the system folder by not Program Files.
Don't get me wrong, I hate Micro$oft as the next guy here, but let's cut back on the bullshit that Windows is not secure. It's false. For the record, I've been running on a Windows box since Windows 2000 without ever using an anti malware program. Never caught anything. Router, Windows with non root user and common sense = free from malware.
Same here, and I'm running from an admin account too. I periodically run some spyware scans just for peace of mind.
OS X is unimaginably complex. Even the 1500+ page "OS X internals" tome just scratches the surface of most things.
(Note that I own and enjoy using a MacBook, so I'm not blindly Apple-bashing.)
The complexity is the first problem. The second is that almost all of the code was written in an insecure manner. No one was doing code-level security reviews on QuickTime and Quartz and all the other bits of OS X. And even if you did, squashing all potential overflow/overwrite bugs in a language like C is essentially impossible. We'll keep living with endless exploits until more secure techniques are used for writing software.
Linux is closer to the Unix ideal of MANY MANY MANY tools that do one thing really well and need to be intertwined with other things to do more.
That was the original UNIX ideal, but it has not survived well into the modern era. Rob Pike claimed it died with Perl, and it doesn't take much looking around to realize that "big tools" are important: Inkscape, Firefox, The GIMP, Ruby, etc. Firefox is not simply and umbrella for a dozen independent command-line tools, for example. Python doesn't shell out to the "sort" utility to do sorting.
If you want the apps and games, you use Windows.
If you want something more secure and you use a particular set of apps, you use OS X.
There honestly isn't a clear reason to switch to Linux. Even open source zealotry no longer applies, because you can run The GIMP under both Windows and OS X. Ditto for Firefox, Inkscape, Wings 3D, and numerous other popular open source applications.
Windows, OS X, and Linux are generally on a convergence path. There's no big differentiator any more.