Speaking as a game programmer, I have a great sympathy for people who buy a PC for home use and want to play games on it. It's tough just to figure out which games will work on your machine, then you have to deal with patches, video driver updates, video bios updates, and so on. And even then you can end up with a game with serious graphic glitches. Tech support responds with "Do you have the latest video drivers?" but you already do. It turns out that there's only a problem with a certain video/sound/motherboard combo which your PC happens to have. And this is _typical_. Then six months later a game comes out that you have to upgrade your video card for, but when you do some of your old games stop working.
I don't know how people deal with this, I really don't.
Trying to fight Linux is like trying to fight water with your fists. You can fight the container (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.) but that just spills the water, and the well remains unaffected. (I know, it's an imperfect metaphor, so don't read TOO much into it!)
I think the Linux user base--and certainly the Linux zealots--are much more monolithic than you think. Sure, there are lots of invididuals and companies involved, but most of the zealots all have the same angle. You can play "predict the responses" before clicking on a Slashdot story and be right most of the time.
The fuss is that for the last few years ESR et al has been CathedralBazaaring (if you'll pardon my verbization) this idea that Open Source software actually makes MORE economic sense than closed source software, because you get the benefits of the "community". Source Forge has basically rejected this idea, and said "screw this ivory tower theory, it's not working and we need to make money".
In all honesty, ESR has espoused a lot of things that made for greatly entertaining presentations at technical conferences, but were still his personal views rather than what has been proven to work. Does Open Source have some advantages? Yes! But when you ignore all criticism of it and go out of your way to only see the rosy side of open source, then that's not a good thing.
It took me a while to put my finger on exactly why this article--and many of the responses to it--annoyed me, but I think I have it now.
You know that Ghandi quote that people who take Linux a bit too seriously love? The one that begins "First they laugh at you..."? The wisdom behind those words is that once you become an active participant in a so-called "battle" of this type, then you have lost. The quiet revolution is one that eventually bubbles to the surface because it is _honest_. People going about their lives, doing what they believe in, is a powerful thing. It is more powerful that calls to arms and out-and-out zealotry. In fact, the latter often tends to get people away from what it was they believed in in the first place; they get swept away by the grandeur of the "war," and no longer represent their original ideals.
Linux was interesting when it was the honest bubbling up of what was perceived as a better solution by some people. Now that there has become obvious and pointless fighting between Linux users and Microsoft, it isn't Microsoft that has lost...it is Linux. All this energy devoted toward hating Windows, talking about Microsoft, putting down XP, and as a result a large, large segement of Linux users have become these aimless zealots who don't even know why they use Linux any more other than to crush Microsoft. And as such, Linux has lost.
and has pushed "overclocking", a term which was once mysterious, into one of the big issues of modern computing
No offense intended, but it's only a big issue among the script kiddies of the computing world. Everyone else just thinks "Hmmm...I could get a 10% higher clock speed, for a total system throughput increase of 2%, and there's the chance I'll either destroy and expensive processor or gain hard to track system stability problems. Or I could just let well alone. No contest."
DirectX makes the game coder lazy (hey, why should the coder know how to draw graphics? sound? network support?)
That's just dumb. When you're writing a game you just call a "draw 3D model" function (or "draw sprite" or whatever). Even in the days of people writing assembly language texture mappers on the 486, only 1 guy on a project cared about it. The "draw 3D model" call was the same for everyone else. You don't write games at the micro-optimization level. And games, most certainly, cannot be equated with graphics engines.
To tell you the truth, the memo looks like one you would find in any major corporation.
Spot on. Most of the people get worked up over this are students without any substantial work experience. You get the same kind of stuff at just about any large company.
First people hear the initial incorrect reports (incoming flight, 767), then other people post more up to date information. Then the first wave berates the second wave for not having the correct info. Then they just look stupid for getting knee-jerk news reports anyhow.
As a game programmer, I think that games could be art, but that's not they way the are produced. Fanboys tend to think we're ivory tower geniuses, but the reality is that were almost completely driven by schedules, marking, and sales predictions. The killer is that the great, great majority of games are sold to "kids"--where "kid" means 8 to 16 or so. So most of the time you have guys in their twenties or thirties or forties trying to dumb down games so they'll appeal to the weird sort of crowd that still believes in Santa Claus (i.e. reads comic books, only likes action movies, still thinks they can make a go of professional skateboarding).
In my experience, sysadmins "sell" Linux in their organizations
Sysadmins do whatever it takes to *support* the people doing the actual work that keeps the business afloat. If they do graphic design using Photoshop and Illustrator, for example, then Windows or MacOS is the correct choice.
Re:KDE is the environment of choice
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 2
It's configurable. That means it can be made to look like windows. That's very different from saying it "does look like windows".
I don't mean the "skin" so much as I mean the choice of UI gadgets and the way they are arranged. Although some graphics are obviously Microsoft-influenced, like a picture of a wizard in a dialog that is certainly something attempting to be like Microsoft's "Wizards" feature (something I thought that was generally ill-thought of by usability experts, so I'm surprised to see it reproduced).
Re:KDE is the environment of choice
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 2
Repeating these lies that KWM (not KDE, which, AGAIN, is not a Window Manager) "looks like Windows" won't make them come true.
But it *does* look like Windows! Just looks at the screenshots of KDE 2.x at kde.org!
I used to have a Macintosh, so when everyone was talking about Duke Nukem and Quake and all that I was left out in the cold, but then Marathon came along.
There's a funny thing about Marathon:
1. Macintosh gamers worship it.
2. PC owners either have never heard of it or write it off as Yet Another Doom clone.
When Marathon was released for the Mac, you couldn't even get *Wolfenstein* for that machine. So it was the first introduction to the FPS for Mac owners. A good game? Yes! But hardly the revolution that Mac owners want it to be. If it had been released on the PC first it would have been lost in all the other Doomalikes that were released back then (everyone remembers Rise of the Triad, but what about all the others, like Lethal Tender, Strife, and Radix: Beyond the Void?).
Marathon II *was* released for the PC, where it seems to have sold about 6 copies.
Honestly, the fall from a multiplayer, persistant, war story of epic proportions down to a simple action shoot-em-up with a hint of multiplayer is truly a fall form grace.
Quite likely it had nothing to do with Microsoft. This looks like a classic case of a game developer promising too much--a game that would require 10 years to implement properly--and having to scale back in order to actually finish the thing without going out of business. This is very common. It's easy to talk about or show movies of games that would never really work.
At least two years ago, when I first saw movies of Halo, it looked like a surreal version of Tribes with bang-up art direction and a wonderful mood. The movies shown at E3 in 2000 were...odd. It was obvious that they weren't showing gameplay footage, as the camera did all sorts of fancy cuts to multiple things happening simultaneously.
The most recent movies are certainly not of the same game people started drooling over in 1999. The indoor stuff looks like Yet Another Quake/Unreal game, though with higher polygon counts. The outdoor stuff is spastic and pretty much Unreal Outdoors (tm), with terrain replacing corridors. In the end, Halo has become a lightweight evolution over previous games, and certainly much more of a genre title than anyone expected. This is a far cry from the original hype that made the game seem to burst out all over in new directions.
Halo does seem to have found a niche among zealots who passionately dislike Sony and Nintendo, though. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I don't live in a major metropolitan area. Broadband just came to my town earlier this year, but there was too much demand, a long waiting list, and only certain geographical areas had service. Then with @home in trouble, they stopped signing up new customers. So there was only a brief respite from modem use for some people.
I sincerely do not mean this as a troll. I am both a user of Windows and Linux, and I don't lean zealously in either direction.
If nothing else, at least with Windows there's a large company with financial interest behind it all. Sure, Windows sucks in lots of ways, but at least you won't find them generally working toward what customers want.
With Linux, it's a bit scarier. Not so much with the kernel as with desktop environments and applications. With WordPerfect for Linux, I felt like I was just being used as a pawn by Corel to get a foothold in a new market, and the quality of the software was secondary. Miguel, of Gnome fame, often sounds an overly idealistic college student. It makes me stop and think "Should I really be letting this guy determine the direction of the software my company uses?" Sure, you can pick and choose different products, but with Windows you don't have to. If you go with Windows 2000 or XP and Microsoft Office (or just Word) then you don't have to worry about making the wrong choice. There's often too much personal agenda behind open source software for Linux.
Note: I have a B.S. in computer science, a solid understanding of hardware issues, and have been programming for 19 years.
When I read articles like this, there's so much detail that I find myself--even willingly--losing sight of the big picture. Sure, you could read a detailed write-up about Toyota's new engine, but those details don't really matter much unless you've just made a hobby of knowing about engines. Realistically, you'll have a hard time connecting those details to your driving experience. Heck, someone could put in a different engine, tell you that its a Toyota, and you'd be saying things like "Oh, yes, this feels just like a Toyota, I can tell that the designers did blah and blah."
After the Pentium II generation of CPUs, things have gotten very, very muddled. Amazing features that are supposed to increase performance don't always do so. Sometimes they make things worse. Little compiler tweaks can make one program be twice as fast as another, given the same hardware. Chips with higher clock rates can be significantly slower than chips with 20% slower clocks. Certain applications run much faster than on previous chips, but there are others that show no increase.
It's all very chaotic and confusing, even for people in the know. I suspect that if you took a program that people claimed to need a P4 or Athlon for--something very performance sensitive--and set yourself the task of making it run faster on a PII than an Athlon, you could do it. But that doesn't matter, as everyone seems to be clamoring for newer chips.
For their time, nothing comes close to Commodore computers
It's completely nerdy to bring this up, but you can't forget about the Atari 800 and friends. They were released three years before the C64 and were much better in some ways (color, interrupts, overall architecture) and poorer in others (sound, sprites). But I never met anyone with extensive experience on both machines who didn't tip his hat toward the Atari. You could either spend a week writing perfectly timed raster interrupts on the C64, or just use the supplied hardware on the 800 (sort of like the Amiga's copper).
I'm curious to know why this is such a lost art. Could it be due to the fact that most engines are proprietary code?
If you want to find out how to write optimized software rasterizers, you can easily get the information from books and the web. This is old news. Everyone was into this back in 1995 and 1996, and in the end there was one generally accepted, close to optimal inner loop that was used in most texture mappers. It was published in Game Developer magazine and is available for free on the web.
He co-designed the 3DO and Atari Lynx, plus was an OS guy for the Amiga (note that he did not design the Amiga hardware; that was Jay Miner). And now he's the lead tech guy at Fathammer.
Of course in this case it is debatable whether the best games for a system such as the iPaq should be hardcore 3D. If you take that route, then 98% of the processor time immediately goes out the window.
Slashdot Mirror
The PC makes a great platform
Speaking as a game programmer, I have a great sympathy for people who buy a PC for home use and want to play games on it. It's tough just to figure out which games will work on your machine, then you have to deal with patches, video driver updates, video bios updates, and so on. And even then you can end up with a game with serious graphic glitches. Tech support responds with "Do you have the latest video drivers?" but you already do. It turns out that there's only a problem with a certain video/sound/motherboard combo which your PC happens to have. And this is _typical_. Then six months later a game comes out that you have to upgrade your video card for, but when you do some of your old games stop working.
I don't know how people deal with this, I really don't.
Trying to fight Linux is like trying to fight water with your fists. You can fight the container (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc.) but that just spills the water, and the well remains unaffected. (I know, it's an imperfect metaphor, so don't read TOO much into it!)
I think the Linux user base--and certainly the Linux zealots--are much more monolithic than you think. Sure, there are lots of invididuals and companies involved, but most of the zealots all have the same angle. You can play "predict the responses" before clicking on a Slashdot story and be right most of the time.
The fuss is that for the last few years ESR et al has been CathedralBazaaring (if you'll pardon my verbization) this idea that Open Source software actually makes MORE economic sense than closed source software, because you get the benefits of the "community". Source Forge has basically rejected this idea, and said "screw this ivory tower theory, it's not working and we need to make money".
In all honesty, ESR has espoused a lot of things that made for greatly entertaining presentations at technical conferences, but were still his personal views rather than what has been proven to work. Does Open Source have some advantages? Yes! But when you ignore all criticism of it and go out of your way to only see the rosy side of open source, then that's not a good thing.
What sort of work do you think SysAdmins do, that leads you to believe they'd use photoshop or illustrator?
Reading comprehension: F
It took me a while to put my finger on exactly why this article--and many of the responses to it--annoyed me, but I think I have it now.
You know that Ghandi quote that people who take Linux a bit too seriously love? The one that begins "First they laugh at you..."? The wisdom behind those words is that once you become an active participant in a so-called "battle" of this type, then you have lost. The quiet revolution is one that eventually bubbles to the surface because it is _honest_. People going about their lives, doing what they believe in, is a powerful thing. It is more powerful that calls to arms and out-and-out zealotry. In fact, the latter often tends to get people away from what it was they believed in in the first place; they get swept away by the grandeur of the "war," and no longer represent their original ideals.
Linux was interesting when it was the honest bubbling up of what was perceived as a better solution by some people. Now that there has become obvious and pointless fighting between Linux users and Microsoft, it isn't Microsoft that has lost...it is Linux. All this energy devoted toward hating Windows, talking about Microsoft, putting down XP, and as a result a large, large segement of Linux users have become these aimless zealots who don't even know why they use Linux any more other than to crush Microsoft. And as such, Linux has lost.
and has pushed "overclocking", a term which was once mysterious, into one of the big issues of modern computing
No offense intended, but it's only a big issue among the script kiddies of the computing world. Everyone else just thinks "Hmmm...I could get a 10% higher clock speed, for a total system throughput increase of 2%, and there's the chance I'll either destroy and expensive processor or gain hard to track system stability problems. Or I could just let well alone. No contest."
DirectX makes the game coder lazy (hey, why should the coder know how to draw graphics? sound? network support?)
That's just dumb. When you're writing a game you just call a "draw 3D model" function (or "draw sprite" or whatever). Even in the days of people writing assembly language texture mappers on the 486, only 1 guy on a project cared about it. The "draw 3D model" call was the same for everyone else. You don't write games at the micro-optimization level. And games, most certainly, cannot be equated with graphics engines.
To tell you the truth, the memo looks like one you would find in any major corporation.
Spot on. Most of the people get worked up over this are students without any substantial work experience. You get the same kind of stuff at just about any large company.
First people hear the initial incorrect reports (incoming flight, 767), then other people post more up to date information. Then the first wave berates the second wave for not having the correct info. Then they just look stupid for getting knee-jerk news reports anyhow.
Slow down, don't post so damn quick.
Buying an Athlon gives you that fuzzy feeling that you're supporting the underdog.
Technically, yes, AMD is the underdog. But they're both hulking corporations with budgets in the billions, so the difference is moot.
As a game programmer, I think that games could be art, but that's not they way the are produced. Fanboys tend to think we're ivory tower geniuses, but the reality is that were almost completely driven by schedules, marking, and sales predictions. The killer is that the great, great majority of games are sold to "kids"--where "kid" means 8 to 16 or so. So most of the time you have guys in their twenties or thirties or forties trying to dumb down games so they'll appeal to the weird sort of crowd that still believes in Santa Claus (i.e. reads comic books, only likes action movies, still thinks they can make a go of professional skateboarding).
In my experience, sysadmins "sell" Linux in their organizations
Sysadmins do whatever it takes to *support* the people doing the actual work that keeps the business afloat. If they do graphic design using Photoshop and Illustrator, for example, then Windows or MacOS is the correct choice.
It's configurable. That means it can be made to look like windows. That's very different from saying it "does look like windows".
I don't mean the "skin" so much as I mean the choice of UI gadgets and the way they are arranged. Although some graphics are obviously Microsoft-influenced, like a picture of a wizard in a dialog that is certainly something attempting to be like Microsoft's "Wizards" feature (something I thought that was generally ill-thought of by usability experts, so I'm surprised to see it reproduced).
Repeating these lies that KWM (not KDE, which, AGAIN, is not a Window Manager) "looks like Windows" won't make them come true.
But it *does* look like Windows! Just looks at the screenshots of KDE 2.x at kde.org!
I used to have a Macintosh, so when everyone was talking about Duke Nukem and Quake and all that I was left out in the cold, but then Marathon came along.
There's a funny thing about Marathon:
1. Macintosh gamers worship it.
2. PC owners either have never heard of it or write it off as Yet Another Doom clone.
When Marathon was released for the Mac, you couldn't even get *Wolfenstein* for that machine. So it was the first introduction to the FPS for Mac owners. A good game? Yes! But hardly the revolution that Mac owners want it to be. If it had been released on the PC first it would have been lost in all the other Doomalikes that were released back then (everyone remembers Rise of the Triad, but what about all the others, like Lethal Tender, Strife, and Radix: Beyond the Void?).
Marathon II *was* released for the PC, where it seems to have sold about 6 copies.
Honestly, the fall from a multiplayer, persistant, war story of epic proportions down to a simple action shoot-em-up with a hint of multiplayer is truly a fall form grace.
Quite likely it had nothing to do with Microsoft. This looks like a classic case of a game developer promising too much--a game that would require 10 years to implement properly--and having to scale back in order to actually finish the thing without going out of business. This is very common. It's easy to talk about or show movies of games that would never really work.
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a hunch that this might take off the same way Doom did sometime back?
Doom was a revolution. Halo, sadly, is Another Quake/Unreal type game with slightly better graphics. Business as usual.
At least two years ago, when I first saw movies of Halo, it looked like a surreal version of Tribes with bang-up art direction and a wonderful mood. The movies shown at E3 in 2000 were...odd. It was obvious that they weren't showing gameplay footage, as the camera did all sorts of fancy cuts to multiple things happening simultaneously.
The most recent movies are certainly not of the same game people started drooling over in 1999. The indoor stuff looks like Yet Another Quake/Unreal game, though with higher polygon counts. The outdoor stuff is spastic and pretty much Unreal Outdoors (tm), with terrain replacing corridors. In the end, Halo has become a lightweight evolution over previous games, and certainly much more of a genre title than anyone expected. This is a far cry from the original hype that made the game seem to burst out all over in new directions.
Halo does seem to have found a niche among zealots who passionately dislike Sony and Nintendo, though. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
I don't live in a major metropolitan area. Broadband just came to my town earlier this year, but there was too much demand, a long waiting list, and only certain geographical areas had service. Then with @home in trouble, they stopped signing up new customers. So there was only a brief respite from modem use for some people.
I sincerely do not mean this as a troll. I am both a user of Windows and Linux, and I don't lean zealously in either direction.
If nothing else, at least with Windows there's a large company with financial interest behind it all. Sure, Windows sucks in lots of ways, but at least you won't find them generally working toward what customers want.
With Linux, it's a bit scarier. Not so much with the kernel as with desktop environments and applications. With WordPerfect for Linux, I felt like I was just being used as a pawn by Corel to get a foothold in a new market, and the quality of the software was secondary. Miguel, of Gnome fame, often sounds an overly idealistic college student. It makes me stop and think "Should I really be letting this guy determine the direction of the software my company uses?" Sure, you can pick and choose different products, but with Windows you don't have to. If you go with Windows 2000 or XP and Microsoft Office (or just Word) then you don't have to worry about making the wrong choice. There's often too much personal agenda behind open source software for Linux.
...but wouldn't it.. explode?
Oh, _that's_ why we haven't been using gasoline and natural gas for energy!
Note: I have a B.S. in computer science, a solid understanding of hardware issues, and have been programming for 19 years.
When I read articles like this, there's so much detail that I find myself--even willingly--losing sight of the big picture. Sure, you could read a detailed write-up about Toyota's new engine, but those details don't really matter much unless you've just made a hobby of knowing about engines. Realistically, you'll have a hard time connecting those details to your driving experience. Heck, someone could put in a different engine, tell you that its a Toyota, and you'd be saying things like "Oh, yes, this feels just like a Toyota, I can tell that the designers did blah and blah."
After the Pentium II generation of CPUs, things have gotten very, very muddled. Amazing features that are supposed to increase performance don't always do so. Sometimes they make things worse. Little compiler tweaks can make one program be twice as fast as another, given the same hardware. Chips with higher clock rates can be significantly slower than chips with 20% slower clocks. Certain applications run much faster than on previous chips, but there are others that show no increase.
It's all very chaotic and confusing, even for people in the know. I suspect that if you took a program that people claimed to need a P4 or Athlon for--something very performance sensitive--and set yourself the task of making it run faster on a PII than an Athlon, you could do it. But that doesn't matter, as everyone seems to be clamoring for newer chips.
For their time, nothing comes close to Commodore computers
It's completely nerdy to bring this up, but you can't forget about the Atari 800 and friends. They were released three years before the C64 and were much better in some ways (color, interrupts, overall architecture) and poorer in others (sound, sprites). But I never met anyone with extensive experience on both machines who didn't tip his hat toward the Atari. You could either spend a week writing perfectly timed raster interrupts on the C64, or just use the supplied hardware on the 800 (sort of like the Amiga's copper).
I'm curious to know why this is such a lost art. Could it be due to the fact that most engines are proprietary code?
If you want to find out how to write optimized software rasterizers, you can easily get the information from books and the web. This is old news. Everyone was into this back in 1995 and 1996, and in the end there was one generally accepted, close to optimal inner loop that was used in most texture mappers. It was published in Game Developer magazine and is available for free on the web.
He co-designed the 3DO and Atari Lynx, plus was an OS guy for the Amiga (note that he did not design the Amiga hardware; that was Jay Miner). And now he's the lead tech guy at Fathammer.
Of course in this case it is debatable whether the best games for a system such as the iPaq should be hardcore 3D. If you take that route, then 98% of the processor time immediately goes out the window.