Windows programmers talk about ZeroMemory and FillMemory, not memset. In drivers, that would be RtlZeroMemory and RtlFillMemory. memset exists for compatibility, but it's just a wrapper around FillMemory.
memset is a standard C library function. Here's a hint: the standard C library exists under Windows, too. I have never called ZeroMemory or FillMemory, period.
The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:
Wow, the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
The criticism that Open Source is always copying is highly unfair. It is unfair because Open Source is in many ways still catching up to closed source. Many of the tools are growing stronger, but are still lagging a little bit behind. Once that gap is filled I expect the Open Source community will boldly go on to create new and innovative features.
The problem is that most open source developers are not forward thinking enough. For example, look all the thousands of man years that have gone into creating KDE (for example!). And what have they done? Essentially caught up to Microsoft. That's good, but Microsoft has already been working on their next generation stuff, and when it comes out in a few years, the KDE people will scramble to copy it. But there's no reason the KDE developers couldn't innovate themselves. The difference is that they're looking at a Windows-type interface as the goal, letting Microsoft do all the innovation.
This happens again and again with different technologies. The OS/FS advocates take the conservative route, thinking that the current state of things is the best, and then they are caught off-guard and left with a dated product. Not always, but often enough to be a trend.
No lets hope that developers pop there minds out of the linear programming concept for a while.
That would be great, but that's not what I meant. If amazing parallel performance comes at the expense of having to write games entirely in hand-pipelined code for RISC vector processors with 256 registers, then that's not a win.
The PS3 is slated to come out in a hazy period when everyone in the US is *supposed* to switch to HDTV, but obviously the majority of people aren't going to. If the PS2 is HDTV-only, then that's great in a lot of ways, but it's also going to limit market. Heck, I have a 12 year old TV that suits me just fine, and I still buy new consoles. That same TV has lasted me through the Genesis, PS1 and PS2 (and probably a Game Cube one of these days).
I could see Sony delaying the PS3 until HDTV has taken over a majority of the market.
Remember the cinematic effects rendering and the 'groundbreaking emotion engine' in the PS2 up till its launch? And then it barely leapfrogged the Dreamcast in terms of performance.
It was actually *much* better than the Dreamcast, but it required a different mindset in order to work with the hardware. The graphics hardware in the Dreamcast was very similar to that of the PC, whereas that of the PS2 was much stranger to the uninitiated.
Here's hoping that Sony funnels a reasonable percentage of the PS3's power toward making thing headache-free for developers, instead of even more complex.
These crazy solutions to hot running computers show that we've reached the point of diminishing returns as far as current PC technology goes. All this active cooling nonsense and five fans per box and so on is getting silly. The upcoming NVidia cards even require external power supplies. Here's hoping that someone goes off in a different direction and breaks the trend. I'm all for faster computers, but not at any expense.
This is not predicting the death of Moores's Law!
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Did anyone actually read the damn article?
It's about how the entire concept of Moore's Law is vague and has been applied to all sorts of other things exhibiting exponential growth, even though Moore was not referring to them. And specifically Moore never gave the time frame of "18 months." He said "1 year" one time, then later said "2 years." And if you look at the data, the transistor count of chips doubles roughly every 26 months, not 18. The point of the article is that Moore's Law is more of a hazy myth than anything else.
Every six month's some pundit will predict that reached have reached the end of Moore's Law
I know, you're being funny, but I think the difference this time around is that we're in the land of Monster Heat Sinks, Active Cooling, and 70W CPUs. Chip designers *know* how to make things go faster, at the expense of more transistors, but it's the power consumption and heat dissipation problems that are stopping them.
Between 30 and 60fps the human eye can not see the difference, this means that if you display 60 different frames per second you can only see the difference between half of them.
This myth needs to be put to rest already. It's trivially easy to tell the difference between 30 and 60fps. Period. It has always been this way. And 60fps is much nicer for very high-speed action games (it doesn't matter in other cases). Beyond 60fps, though, diminishing returns kick in very quickly.
And realize that this is a *benchmark*, not insistence that 300fps is better than 290.
It would be wonderful for a small, understandable home computer to hit the market again. Windows and Linux PCs are more like having a VAX in your bedroom, not something that gives you the warm, "I can understand all of this!" feeling you got with almost all 8-bit home computers. I'd drop evertything for something with:
* fixed and unchanging hardware * relatively modern technology * some nifty graphics and sound features that are more than just the OpenGL or DirectX API.
"Fixed and unchanging hardware" sounds harsh, but I'd much rather be able to understand a system for a decade, rather than having to throw out everything for a new version of DirectX or Windows or KDE or whatever.
I know you're trying to be funny, but Forth does get quite a bit of use in certain embedded control circles. That kind of thing is far outside the Slashdot realm of Perl vs. Python kind of programming discussions, though.
I know I'm going to get blasted for being a Luddite, but try to read more into this than a rehash of "640K is more than anyone will ever need." Please?
First, PC video has gotten very fragmented in terms of capability. Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) first appeared in the GeForce 1 several years ago. The follow up, the GeForce 2 became a very popular, almost standard, card. But there are still major PC retailers that ship with motherboard video, such as Intel's extreme-whatsit and so on. These chipsets are not T&L capable. Still, several years after the first T&L cards appeared, there is a huge segment of the market that doesn't have hardware T&L. These are fast machines in every other respect (bottom end these days is 1.8GHz), just not T&L accelerated 3D.
Of course the hot video feature these days is programmable shader logic. But realistically what percentage of very capable PCs support this? 10%?
Second, the bottom has fallen out of 3D gaming on the PC. The sales figures of games that are perceived as Big Hits, like No One Lives Forever 2, are, in reality, abysmal. We're talking under 50,000 copies. There are some 3D games that are doing well, but it's a small, small handful. Just that "Oh yeah, what about Doom 3?" comes up in these discussions shows how weak the market is.
My point is that video cards keep improving, but at the same time, there's no market for these features, nor is there a market for the features of cards two generations back. I don't like this, but that doesn't change anything. Certainly it's fun to write shaders and to be able to buy something for $400 that's significantly better than $100,000 hardware from just a few years ago, but that's looking at the situtation from a "look at what I have in MY computer" perspective, not something I can realistically expect to be in most of the PCs out there.
Six of the games on the list were released before 1985.
Of the remaining four, three were Super Nintendo games (one of which was also released for the Genesis).
The one remaining game was for the Nintendo 64.
Nothing for the PC or a console released in the last five years? Or even the PlayStation? It's one thing to make fun of an old Atari 2600 game written by one person in three months, but projects with multi-million dollar budgets and teams of 10-30 tend to be much more spectacular when they crash and burn. I'm sure everyone is thinking "Daikatana," but that's just a popular scapegoat. There have been some huge failures and truly awful games made in the last ten years.
How about "Loadstar," for example? It had a large budget, endless hype behind the company (Rocket Science), and was designed by one of the most well-respected game designers out there, Brian Moriarty. The game ended up being little more than an FMV rail shooter. On that note, there are at least a dozen FMV games from the mid-1990s that are worse than Atari 2600 Pac-Man (which sure looked lame, but it was kinda fun).
Comparing a 32-bit cpu with a 64-bit cpu with half the mhz rating is roughly like comparing a 10k rpm, 4-cylinder motorcycle engine to a 5k rpm v-8.
This is a silly analogy that only shows that you don't understand what you are talking about. You don't magically get more per instruction with a 64-bit CPU, unless you have an application that really needs to do lots of 64-bit math. But if you *don't* then a 64-bit CPU can actually be slower because 64-bit pointers take up more space, so you increase the chance of cache misses.
Note that we're not talking about a 64-bit bus as opposed to a 32-bit bus. Pentium's have had 64-bit busses from the get-go.
The bottom line is that there's no magical speed-up from going to 64-bits.
You'll notice that more and more games are resembling big hollywood productions, with multi-year engaments, and dozens of contributors. This has come about because users expect photo-realistic graphics, and true-to-real physics engines.
First, this is not new. Games have been requiring huge teams for six or more years now. Even many games from the 1980s were developed by teams of 5 or more.
Second, it's not about the "photorealistic graphics" (Why do so many people have the misconception that 90% of the work has to do with the graphics engine?). It's that games have become very large, requiring dozens of huge levels, 75 or more character models, and *thousands* of animations. Creating one level can easily take a month or more. Now multiply that by 30, and that's just the level art budget.
See the problem is people don't have the initative to sit down and write the graphics algorithms.
Less than 20% of the work involved in writing a game is about "graphics algorithms." The point of the original article, BTW, was that indies could use the practically free Torque engine for graphics:P
Purhaps this will lead to a better game play and new ideas instead of the rehash we keep getting
Sadly, indie game developers are just as bad about this, if not worse. At least you don't see commercial developers writing Yet Another Arkanoid and such.
The article focuses on Garage Games's Torque engine being priced for the little guy, which it certainly is. But a so-called "engine", even when priced at $200,000 is only roughly 2-5% of the cost of a commercial game. Seriously.
On another note, indie game development won't really take off until it has some kind of real soul behind it, not just the blatant me-tooism that's been fueling hobbyist development (clones of Boulder Dash, clones of Arkanoid, clones of Tetris, etc).
Unfortunately that's what managers who build their prototypes with Access over the weekend think.
You're trying too hard to disprove this. The majority of new software these days is in so-called "enterprise applications." In a nutshell, this is stuff that runs on the company intranet or desktop applications that let the user interact with a database. They don't need to scale up larger than the company. Sure, GE or Chrysler or MegaCorporation X may be huge, but for a typical business of 100-300, you're completely fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows programmers talk about ZeroMemory and FillMemory, not memset. In drivers, that would be RtlZeroMemory and RtlFillMemory.
memset exists for compatibility, but it's just a wrapper around FillMemory.
memset is a standard C library function. Here's a hint: the standard C library exists under Windows, too. I have never called ZeroMemory or FillMemory, period.
The reason why you don't see more Pascal development, at least in Unix world is probably this:
Wow, the close-mindedness of that piece is wonderfully hilarious! I'm getting tired of seeing Kernighan's paper cited. Of *course* the developer of a competing language doesn't like his competition!
The criticism that Open Source is always copying is highly unfair. It is unfair because Open Source is in many ways still catching up to closed source. Many of the tools are growing stronger, but are still lagging a little bit behind. Once that gap is filled I expect the Open Source community will boldly go on to create new and innovative features.
The problem is that most open source developers are not forward thinking enough. For example, look all the thousands of man years that have gone into creating KDE (for example!). And what have they done? Essentially caught up to Microsoft. That's good, but Microsoft has already been working on their next generation stuff, and when it comes out in a few years, the KDE people will scramble to copy it. But there's no reason the KDE developers couldn't innovate themselves. The difference is that they're looking at a Windows-type interface as the goal, letting Microsoft do all the innovation.
This happens again and again with different technologies. The OS/FS advocates take the conservative route, thinking that the current state of things is the best, and then they are caught off-guard and left with a dated product. Not always, but often enough to be a trend.
The PS2 has no dedicated VRAM
So by that you mean that the dedicated VRAM in the PS2 is somehow now, um, dedicated VRAM?
No lets hope that developers pop there minds out of the linear programming concept for a while.
That would be great, but that's not what I meant. If amazing parallel performance comes at the expense of having to write games entirely in hand-pipelined code for RISC vector processors with 256 registers, then that's not a win.
The PS3 is slated to come out in a hazy period when everyone in the US is *supposed* to switch to HDTV, but obviously the majority of people aren't going to. If the PS2 is HDTV-only, then that's great in a lot of ways, but it's also going to limit market. Heck, I have a 12 year old TV that suits me just fine, and I still buy new consoles. That same TV has lasted me through the Genesis, PS1 and PS2 (and probably a Game Cube one of these days).
I could see Sony delaying the PS3 until HDTV has taken over a majority of the market.
Remember the cinematic effects rendering and the 'groundbreaking emotion engine' in the PS2 up till its launch? And then it barely leapfrogged the Dreamcast in terms of performance.
It was actually *much* better than the Dreamcast, but it required a different mindset in order to work with the hardware. The graphics hardware in the Dreamcast was very similar to that of the PC, whereas that of the PS2 was much stranger to the uninitiated.
Here's hoping that Sony funnels a reasonable percentage of the PS3's power toward making thing headache-free for developers, instead of even more complex.
TV sets are limited to 640x480 and 24 fps
Uh, I don't know what kind of TV you have, but analog TV has always run at 60fps interlaced for NTSC and 50fps for PAL.
So will the principled slashdotters put their money with their mouths are and not buy a PS3?
Or a PS2, as there's been Rambus tech in there from day 1.
The very problem with the foundering game industry is that it's run by, well, let's just say the people who were picked last in kickball.
At least they're not going by goofy nicknames...oh, wait...
These crazy solutions to hot running computers show that we've reached the point of diminishing returns as far as current PC technology goes. All this active cooling nonsense and five fans per box and so on is getting silly. The upcoming NVidia cards even require external power supplies. Here's hoping that someone goes off in a different direction and breaks the trend. I'm all for faster computers, but not at any expense.
Did anyone actually read the damn article?
It's about how the entire concept of Moore's Law is vague and has been applied to all sorts of other things exhibiting exponential growth, even though Moore was not referring to them. And specifically Moore never gave the time frame of "18 months." He said "1 year" one time, then later said "2 years." And if you look at the data, the transistor count of chips doubles roughly every 26 months, not 18. The point of the article is that Moore's Law is more of a hazy myth than anything else.
Every six month's some pundit will predict that reached have reached the end of Moore's Law
I know, you're being funny, but I think the difference this time around is that we're in the land of Monster Heat Sinks, Active Cooling, and 70W CPUs. Chip designers *know* how to make things go faster, at the expense of more transistors, but it's the power consumption and heat dissipation problems that are stopping them.
Between 30 and 60fps the human eye can not see the difference, this means that if you display 60 different frames per second you can only see the difference between half of them.
This myth needs to be put to rest already. It's trivially easy to tell the difference between 30 and 60fps. Period. It has always been this way. And 60fps is much nicer for very high-speed action games (it doesn't matter in other cases). Beyond 60fps, though, diminishing returns kick in very quickly.
And realize that this is a *benchmark*, not insistence that 300fps is better than 290.
It would be wonderful for a small, understandable home computer to hit the market again. Windows and Linux PCs are more like having a VAX in your bedroom, not something that gives you the warm, "I can understand all of this!" feeling you got with almost all 8-bit home computers. I'd drop evertything for something with:
* fixed and unchanging hardware
* relatively modern technology
* some nifty graphics and sound features that are more than just the OpenGL or DirectX API.
"Fixed and unchanging hardware" sounds harsh, but I'd much rather be able to understand a system for a decade, rather than having to throw out everything for a new version of DirectX or Windows or KDE or whatever.
forth use = if unemployed then
I know you're trying to be funny, but Forth does get quite a bit of use in certain embedded control circles. That kind of thing is far outside the Slashdot realm of Perl vs. Python kind of programming discussions, though.
I know I'm going to get blasted for being a Luddite, but try to read more into this than a rehash of "640K is more than anyone will ever need." Please?
First, PC video has gotten very fragmented in terms of capability. Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) first appeared in the GeForce 1 several years ago. The follow up, the GeForce 2 became a very popular, almost standard, card. But there are still major PC retailers that ship with motherboard video, such as Intel's extreme-whatsit and so on. These chipsets are not T&L capable. Still, several years after the first T&L cards appeared, there is a huge segment of the market that doesn't have hardware T&L. These are fast machines in every other respect (bottom end these days is 1.8GHz), just not T&L accelerated 3D.
Of course the hot video feature these days is programmable shader logic. But realistically what percentage of very capable PCs support this? 10%?
Second, the bottom has fallen out of 3D gaming on the PC. The sales figures of games that are perceived as Big Hits, like No One Lives Forever 2, are, in reality, abysmal. We're talking under 50,000 copies. There are some 3D games that are doing well, but it's a small, small handful. Just that "Oh yeah, what about Doom 3?" comes up in these discussions shows how weak the market is.
My point is that video cards keep improving, but at the same time, there's no market for these features, nor is there a market for the features of cards two generations back. I don't like this, but that doesn't change anything. Certainly it's fun to write shaders and to be able to buy something for $400 that's significantly better than $100,000 hardware from just a few years ago, but that's looking at the situtation from a "look at what I have in MY computer" perspective, not something I can realistically expect to be in most of the PCs out there.
Six of the games on the list were released before 1985.
Of the remaining four, three were Super Nintendo games (one of which was also released for the Genesis).
The one remaining game was for the Nintendo 64.
Nothing for the PC or a console released in the last five years? Or even the PlayStation? It's one thing to make fun of an old Atari 2600 game written by one person in three months, but projects with multi-million dollar budgets and teams of 10-30 tend to be much more spectacular when they crash and burn. I'm sure everyone is thinking "Daikatana," but that's just a popular scapegoat. There have been some huge failures and truly awful games made in the last ten years.
How about "Loadstar," for example? It had a large budget, endless hype behind the company (Rocket Science), and was designed by one of the most well-respected game designers out there, Brian Moriarty. The game ended up being little more than an FMV rail shooter. On that note, there are at least a dozen FMV games from the mid-1990s that are worse than Atari 2600 Pac-Man (which sure looked lame, but it was kinda fun).
Comparing a 32-bit cpu with a 64-bit cpu with half the mhz rating is roughly like comparing a 10k rpm, 4-cylinder motorcycle engine to a 5k rpm v-8.
This is a silly analogy that only shows that you don't understand what you are talking about. You don't magically get more per instruction with a 64-bit CPU, unless you have an application that really needs to do lots of 64-bit math. But if you *don't* then a 64-bit CPU can actually be slower because 64-bit pointers take up more space, so you increase the chance of cache misses.
Note that we're not talking about a 64-bit bus as opposed to a 32-bit bus. Pentium's have had 64-bit busses from the get-go.
The bottom line is that there's no magical speed-up from going to 64-bits.
Mod this up please! This is dead-on correct. The original article--and oh so many of the replies--are completely off-base.
You'll notice that more and more games are resembling big hollywood productions, with multi-year engaments, and dozens of contributors. This has come about because users expect photo-realistic graphics, and true-to-real physics engines.
First, this is not new. Games have been requiring huge teams for six or more years now. Even many games from the 1980s were developed by teams of 5 or more.
Second, it's not about the "photorealistic graphics" (Why do so many people have the misconception that 90% of the work has to do with the graphics engine?). It's that games have become very large, requiring dozens of huge levels, 75 or more character models, and *thousands* of animations. Creating one level can easily take a month or more. Now multiply that by 30, and that's just the level art budget.
See the problem is people don't have the initative to sit down and write the graphics algorithms.
:P
Less than 20% of the work involved in writing a game is about "graphics algorithms." The point of the original article, BTW, was that indies could use the practically free Torque engine for graphics
Purhaps this will lead to a better game play and new ideas instead of the rehash we keep getting
Sadly, indie game developers are just as bad about this, if not worse. At least you don't see commercial developers writing Yet Another Arkanoid and such.
The article focuses on Garage Games's Torque engine being priced for the little guy, which it certainly is. But a so-called "engine", even when priced at $200,000 is only roughly 2-5% of the cost of a commercial game. Seriously.
On another note, indie game development won't really take off until it has some kind of real soul behind it, not just the blatant me-tooism that's been fueling hobbyist development (clones of Boulder Dash, clones of Arkanoid, clones of Tetris, etc).
Unfortunately that's what managers who build their prototypes with Access over the weekend think.
You're trying too hard to disprove this. The majority of new software these days is in so-called "enterprise applications." In a nutshell, this is stuff that runs on the company intranet or desktop applications that let the user interact with a database. They don't need to scale up larger than the company. Sure, GE or Chrysler or MegaCorporation X may be huge, but for a typical business of 100-300, you're completely fine.