What is the biggest hurdle, in your opinion, for Linux to be on everyone's desktop?
Yes, yes, yes, I am going to be marked as a troll. Sigh.
Ask yourself this question: "Why should Linux be on everyone's desktop?" The usual reasons are (1) that it's open source and (2) that it's more secure than Windows. Those are legitimate points; many other such arguments are more vague and harder to objectively back-up. But even though those points are good, is this a legitimate basis for making the Linux kernel + X11 + KDE + GNU tools a desktop standard? It's still a configuration nightmare, it's still a very complex system, it's still rooted in old tech and very slow to move forward (witness any discussion about getting rid of X11, for example). At the same time, lightweight mobile systems have getting very popular and are making do without most of the baggage that Linux and Windows bring along. At some point, something like "Palm on your desktop" isn't going to be such a bad idea.
I'm not anti-Linux or Windows by any means, but they're both lumbering behemoths from another age. Maybe they're good for some uses, but as a desktop standard? It's time to move on.
I used PC to mean "PC architecture." No one calls a Mac a "PC," for example, even though technically they could. The term "PC" has been completely ruined.
Shouldn't need to be like this
on
Family Tech Support
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Everyone's making fun of non-techie computer owners, but cup-holders aside, most of the problems that people have with their computers are because of how complex PCs have become. No one has this kind of trouble with cell phones, game consoles, or DVD players. All this fiddling with BIOS settings, re-installing operating systems, trying to get video cards to work...it's all so baroque and 1970s.
Maybe, just maybe, PCs have reached the end of their useful lifecycle. If you work for a corporation and have on-site tech support, then okay, but not at home. And the alternative doesn't need to be a dumb e-terminal thing either. Anyone who thinks that is narrow minded.
Keen was fun, yes, but it has gotten misappropriated status as one of the landmarks in PC gaming. At the time, similarly styled platform games had been beaten into the ground for 4 years already. Games running on the much slower SEGA Genesis were more impressive than Keen. To me, Keen is a wash in terms of concept and design, but it's the first PC platform game to have a legitimate console feel. Had Keen been released on the Genesis, it would have been completely forgotten, as 98% of all platformers were.
The posting you refer to is dated September 17th 2001. So that's 1000 units over what... less than 60 days assuming the sales figures are exact as of the date of the posting?
Traditionally, commercial games sell the majority of their units within the first 60 days of release. I know you wish Loki were more successful, but they just weren't moving many units.
Bad management == thinking you can run a game company on a game buying public of about 1500 people.
Exactly. Mod that man up. The sales figures on Loki's games were appalling beyond belief. Crappy shareware Notepad replacements for Windows have sold better.
My argument is that to the consumers, 64-bits *will* be free. AMD is making the chips, and if they want to move them into the main stream, they'll have to price them as such. So for most people, there will be between 0 and x% benefit (where x is a positive number), and the additional cost over a competing cpu will be close to 0.
Eventually this may be true, if you ignore the increased power consumption that will undoubtedly go with it. Until then, there will be cost resulting from all the incremental improvements that will occur along the road to to 64-bits, just as the road to AGP 4x took years and years and countless motherboard revisions. Consumers who get machines in mid-transition will almost certainly end up with PCs with shorter lifecycles.
So, without seeing any benchmarks, or having (I'm guessing) an intimate knowledge of this all, you already know:
a) the actual cost b) the actual benefits c) that the preferences for all users are such that the combination of a and b are not financially feasible.
Stop and think about it. How often is 64-bit integer math needed? Sometimes it is, yes, but I think the general consensus is that it is fairly uncommon. Everything from Word to The Sims to Doom 3 is not reliant on 64-bit integers in any kind of fundamental way. And for those applications that do need 64-bit integers, you can do 64-bit math right now by doing the it in multiple steps (so it takes a few cycles instead of one). You'd have to be doing a tremendous amount of 64-bit math for the difference to be significant.
Is making a processor 64-bits free? Of course not. You essentially have double the sizes of (a) all registers, (b) all internal data paths, (c) the ALU.
I get the feeling that a lot of people are fantasizing about what 64-bit processors will give them, and they're not looking at it from any kind of realistic angle. No one wants to hear that 64-bit isn't an across the board magic bullet.
1. There are some applications that can make good use of having 64-bit integer registers (remember that FP registers are already 80-bit), but it tends to be a small, specialized set of applications in certain fields.
2. Doubling the size of integer registers is non-trivial in terms of transistor count, die space, and power consumption.
3. You can do 64-bit integer math on existing hardware at a good clip. It takes two instructions to do an add instead of one. Hardcore techies will call this "slow," but that's using a crazy frame of reference. Remember, you already can do 80-bit floating point math all all existing x86 processors.
Conclusion: The benefits of moving from 32 to 64 bit integer operations are not worth the cost.
Don't like the annoying tag-lines eh? Well then maybe YOU should submit some news. Seeing as I submitted this one and I made the oh so annoying tag line, I guess that makes me the enemy?
I've submitted stories before, and they've been run. No big deal. But it is best not to contaminate news stories with your own personal biases. Leave that for editorial pieces.
Read the article and you will notice that this is actually another example of AMD one-upping INTEL.
You're an AMD fan, I see that. But if you read other comments you'll that a number of people picked apart that comment already. In summary, it's funny to say "another example of AMD one-upping INTEL," when in fact Intel has been the one with the upper hand for the last year or so.
Slashdot editors need to stick to the news and stop appending those stupid, trolling taglines. Once you start noticing them, they're really annoying.
Wow...innovation with a bang
on
Opencroquet
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· Score: 1
In all non-trolling seriousness, this kind of thing puts all the didling "innovation" in desktop environments, and all the bickering between KDE and Gnome, into sharp perspective. Gotta give Mr. Kay credit for being focused on action and not just talking himself up.
Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww
Good grief, we just don't know what to do with all the cycles we have these days. We really don't. Windows runs at the same speed at 500MHz as it does at 3GHz. The video hardware is doing more work than the processor. Smalltalk being slow is a red herring. There will always be someone, when we have 500GHz processors, saying that all Perl scripts should be rewritten in C to make them faster.
Somebody will have to start a underground/independent game label, just like some people do in the record industry when they get fed up with the big labels crappy attitude towards alternative music.
The problem is that it takes a week to record a CD, plus the time it takes one or two people to write songs (let's say a year). But it takes 30-50 people 2 to 3 years to create a high-end game. There's no indie group capable of this, just as there's no indie group capable of creating a movie like Saving Private Ryan.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Greg likes to bring up Snood and Bejeweled and other me-too remakes of many other me-too remakes. Simple games. Ones that could be written for a class project in college. But those games are only one segment of the market. If high-end games collapse, then there's nothing to fill the void. Trifles like Bejeweled may each have their niche, but that's generally not what the people who buy Metroid Prime, Diablo 2, Halo, or even The Sims, are looking for.
I've made the mistake of donating to some charities, and now I get hammered with the charity telemarketers. They're just as bad as the credit card and long distance people.
It's sad that charities have been reduced to this.
It routinely takes a team of 30 or more people 24-30 months to create a single, high-end game, one that isn't even of Triple-A quality. And it is getting worse. Games are getting shorter, while budgets are skyrocketing. The trouble is that you have to devote all your time and all your money to creating one game, and then you have your company riding on that game. If it results in mediocre sales, then you have to fold up shop. Very few games make any kind of profit.
Two options are:
1. Come up with a way to make games with fewer people, in less time, but leveraging technology to keep the quality high. Don't use languages as low-level as C++. Use existing graphics engines and tool pipelines. Avoid cutscenes, voice acting, and other huge time sinks.
2. Admit that shooting for high-end extravaganza games is a losing battle, and refocus your efforts elsewhere. There has to be a medium between games like Halo (the fluke success that fanboys think is the norm) and crappy shocwave retro-remakes.
C is a horrible match for the 6502. This is a processor with a 256 byte stack and no stack frame support. In my experience with C compilers for the 6502, they were barely usable as toys. Now someone is claiming to have written a 42K OS package including a webserver that runs on 1MHz chips? Even in assembly language that would be amazing, but in C? I have serious doubts, unless this guy wrote his own C compiler that's geared toward this application.
If developers haven't heard of the PS3 yet, and the average game development time these days is two years, then this rumor is unlikely to be true. Sony could pull a Nintendo and release a handful of internally developed games at launch, followed by a long drought, but that's about it.
The PlayStation 2 has been truly 64-bit since its release in 2000. You can load and store 64-bit values directly, registers hold 64-bits, etc. Actually, integer registers hold 128 bits but you can't perform all operations on 128-bit values (as you can with 64-bit quantities). There's only 32 MB of memory, so 64-bit addressing is a non-issue, but it's a true 64-bit system otherwise.
Metroid Prime is solidly implemented and sure looks and sounds good, but it is very middle of the road otherwise. It has some atrocious die/retry loops very early on. It hits all the big cliches, like a reactor that's going to blow in N seconds, and you have to get out before it goes. I have a hard time coming up with much of anything about the game that's fresh or not done completely by the book. Hmmm...turning into a ball is fun, but that still doesn't push this into "Game of the Year" territory by any means.
I'm not knocking Metroid. It's a decently fun game, especially for the traditional "kids with lots of free time" market. But just because a movie is solid and safe doesn't mean it should win an Oscar for best picture.
...this is the dumbest yet. Usually the misguided, personal agenda laden slap is tacked on at the end of a long story, and isn't the entire story itself.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the biggest hurdle, in your opinion, for Linux to be on everyone's desktop?
Yes, yes, yes, I am going to be marked as a troll. Sigh.
Ask yourself this question: "Why should Linux be on everyone's desktop?" The usual reasons are (1) that it's open source and (2) that it's more secure than Windows. Those are legitimate points; many other such arguments are more vague and harder to objectively back-up. But even though those points are good, is this a legitimate basis for making the Linux kernel + X11 + KDE + GNU tools a desktop standard? It's still a configuration nightmare, it's still a very complex system, it's still rooted in old tech and very slow to move forward (witness any discussion about getting rid of X11, for example). At the same time, lightweight mobile systems have getting very popular and are making do without most of the baggage that Linux and Windows bring along. At some point, something like "Palm on your desktop" isn't going to be such a bad idea.
I'm not anti-Linux or Windows by any means, but they're both lumbering behemoths from another age. Maybe they're good for some uses, but as a desktop standard? It's time to move on.
I used PC to mean "PC architecture." No one calls a Mac a "PC," for example, even though technically they could. The term "PC" has been completely ruined.
Everyone's making fun of non-techie computer owners, but cup-holders aside, most of the problems that people have with their computers are because of how complex PCs have become. No one has this kind of trouble with cell phones, game consoles, or DVD players. All this fiddling with BIOS settings, re-installing operating systems, trying to get video cards to work...it's all so baroque and 1970s.
Maybe, just maybe, PCs have reached the end of their useful lifecycle. If you work for a corporation and have on-site tech support, then okay, but not at home. And the alternative doesn't need to be a dumb e-terminal thing either. Anyone who thinks that is narrow minded.
Keen was fun, yes, but it has gotten misappropriated status as one of the landmarks in PC gaming. At the time, similarly styled platform games had been beaten into the ground for 4 years already. Games running on the much slower SEGA Genesis were more impressive than Keen. To me, Keen is a wash in terms of concept and design, but it's the first PC platform game to have a legitimate console feel. Had Keen been released on the Genesis, it would have been completely forgotten, as 98% of all platformers were.
The posting you refer to is dated September 17th 2001. So that's 1000 units over what ... less than 60 days assuming the sales figures are exact as of the date of the posting?
Traditionally, commercial games sell the majority of their units within the first 60 days of release. I know you wish Loki were more successful, but they just weren't moving many units.
Bad management == thinking you can run a game company on a game buying public of about 1500 people.
Exactly. Mod that man up. The sales figures on Loki's games were appalling beyond belief. Crappy shareware Notepad replacements for Windows have sold better.
Since when does slashdot post game updates?
Especially updates of games released in 1998!
My argument is that to the consumers, 64-bits *will* be free. AMD is making the chips, and if they want to move them into the main stream, they'll have to price them as such. So for most people, there will be between 0 and x% benefit (where x is a positive number), and the additional cost over a competing cpu will be close to 0.
Eventually this may be true, if you ignore the increased power consumption that will undoubtedly go with it. Until then, there will be cost resulting from all the incremental improvements that will occur along the road to to 64-bits, just as the road to AGP 4x took years and years and countless motherboard revisions. Consumers who get machines in mid-transition will almost certainly end up with PCs with shorter lifecycles.
So, without seeing any benchmarks, or having (I'm guessing) an intimate knowledge of this all, you already know:
a) the actual cost
b) the actual benefits
c) that the preferences for all users are such that the combination of a and b are not financially feasible.
Stop and think about it. How often is 64-bit integer math needed? Sometimes it is, yes, but I think the general consensus is that it is fairly uncommon. Everything from Word to The Sims to Doom 3 is not reliant on 64-bit integers in any kind of fundamental way. And for those applications that do need 64-bit integers, you can do 64-bit math right now by doing the it in multiple steps (so it takes a few cycles instead of one). You'd have to be doing a tremendous amount of 64-bit math for the difference to be significant.
Is making a processor 64-bits free? Of course not. You essentially have double the sizes of (a) all registers, (b) all internal data paths, (c) the ALU.
I get the feeling that a lot of people are fantasizing about what 64-bit processors will give them, and they're not looking at it from any kind of realistic angle. No one wants to hear that 64-bit isn't an across the board magic bullet.
It comes down to this:
1. There are some applications that can make good use of having 64-bit integer registers (remember that FP registers are already 80-bit), but it tends to be a small, specialized set of applications in certain fields.
2. Doubling the size of integer registers is non-trivial in terms of transistor count, die space, and power consumption.
3. You can do 64-bit integer math on existing hardware at a good clip. It takes two instructions to do an add instead of one. Hardcore techies will call this "slow," but that's using a crazy frame of reference. Remember, you already can do 80-bit floating point math all all existing x86 processors.
Conclusion: The benefits of moving from 32 to 64 bit integer operations are not worth the cost.
Come on, it's more of an art. What's better than constructing an elegantly written piece of code.
But at the end of the day, you get paid for code that works, not code that's artsy.
Don't like the annoying tag-lines eh? Well then maybe YOU should submit some news. Seeing as I submitted this one and I made the oh so annoying tag line, I guess that makes me the enemy?
I've submitted stories before, and they've been run. No big deal. But it is best not to contaminate news stories with your own personal biases. Leave that for editorial pieces.
Read the article and you will notice that this is actually another example of AMD one-upping INTEL.
You're an AMD fan, I see that. But if you read other comments you'll that a number of people picked apart that comment already. In summary, it's funny to say "another example of AMD one-upping INTEL," when in fact Intel has been the one with the upper hand for the last year or so.
Slashdot editors need to stick to the news and stop appending those stupid, trolling taglines. Once you start noticing them, they're really annoying.
In all non-trolling seriousness, this kind of thing puts all the didling "innovation" in desktop environments, and all the bickering between KDE and Gnome, into sharp perspective. Gotta give Mr. Kay credit for being focused on action and not just talking himself up.
Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww
Good grief, we just don't know what to do with all the cycles we have these days. We really don't. Windows runs at the same speed at 500MHz as it does at 3GHz. The video hardware is doing more work than the processor. Smalltalk being slow is a red herring. There will always be someone, when we have 500GHz processors, saying that all Perl scripts should be rewritten in C to make them faster.
Somebody will have to start a underground/independent game label, just like some people do in the record industry when they get fed up with the big labels crappy attitude towards alternative music.
The problem is that it takes a week to record a CD, plus the time it takes one or two people to write songs (let's say a year). But it takes 30-50 people 2 to 3 years to create a high-end game. There's no indie group capable of this, just as there's no indie group capable of creating a movie like Saving Private Ryan.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, Greg likes to bring up Snood and Bejeweled and other me-too remakes of many other me-too remakes. Simple games. Ones that could be written for a class project in college. But those games are only one segment of the market. If high-end games collapse, then there's nothing to fill the void. Trifles like Bejeweled may each have their niche, but that's generally not what the people who buy Metroid Prime, Diablo 2, Halo, or even The Sims, are looking for.
I've made the mistake of donating to some charities, and now I get hammered with the charity telemarketers. They're just as bad as the credit card and long distance people.
It's sad that charities have been reduced to this.
It routinely takes a team of 30 or more people 24-30 months to create a single, high-end game, one that isn't even of Triple-A quality. And it is getting worse. Games are getting shorter, while budgets are skyrocketing. The trouble is that you have to devote all your time and all your money to creating one game, and then you have your company riding on that game. If it results in mediocre sales, then you have to fold up shop. Very few games make any kind of profit.
Two options are:
1. Come up with a way to make games with fewer people, in less time, but leveraging technology to keep the quality high. Don't use languages as low-level as C++. Use existing graphics engines and tool pipelines. Avoid cutscenes, voice acting, and other huge time sinks.
2. Admit that shooting for high-end extravaganza games is a losing battle, and refocus your efforts elsewhere. There has to be a medium between games like Halo (the fluke success that fanboys think is the norm) and crappy shocwave retro-remakes.
C is a horrible match for the 6502. This is a processor with a 256 byte stack and no stack frame support. In my experience with C compilers for the 6502, they were barely usable as toys. Now someone is claiming to have written a 42K OS package including a webserver that runs on 1MHz chips? Even in assembly language that would be amazing, but in C? I have serious doubts, unless this guy wrote his own C compiler that's geared toward this application.
If developers haven't heard of the PS3 yet, and the average game development time these days is two years, then this rumor is unlikely to be true. Sony could pull a Nintendo and release a handful of internally developed games at launch, followed by a long drought, but that's about it.
The PlayStation 2 has been truly 64-bit since its release in 2000. You can load and store 64-bit values directly, registers hold 64-bits, etc. Actually, integer registers hold 128 bits but you can't perform all operations on 128-bit values (as you can with 64-bit quantities). There's only 32 MB of memory, so 64-bit addressing is a non-issue, but it's a true 64-bit system otherwise.
Metroid Prime is solidly implemented and sure looks and sounds good, but it is very middle of the road otherwise. It has some atrocious die/retry loops very early on. It hits all the big cliches, like a reactor that's going to blow in N seconds, and you have to get out before it goes. I have a hard time coming up with much of anything about the game that's fresh or not done completely by the book. Hmmm...turning into a ball is fun, but that still doesn't push this into "Game of the Year" territory by any means.
I'm not knocking Metroid. It's a decently fun game, especially for the traditional "kids with lots of free time" market. But just because a movie is solid and safe doesn't mean it should win an Oscar for best picture.
...this is the dumbest yet. Usually the misguided, personal agenda laden slap is tacked on at the end of a long story, and isn't the entire story itself.
less so for awkward geeks...or pretty much anyone who isn't a hot chick.
I'm hoping you're a bot, because the predictability of that response is 100%.