The PS2 is hard to program because it is a *new* system and there aren't lots of experts to run to and "How to Program the PS2 for Dummies" books at Barnes & Noble.
Is DirectX easy to use from a programmer's point of view? Is the Win32 API? MFC? C++? X11? No, no, no, no, and no. The PS1 may have been a bitch at first too, but who cares when there are great games like Gran Turismo 2.
Heck, I've been doing commercial software development in Lisp in C++ on a PII 333 and have been for several years. At the time, the 333 was the fastest you can get, and I have had zero complaints about speed since then. Traditionally, Lisp is a hardcore language that eats up the cycles like there's no tomorrow.
Makes me wonder about the people who claim they need a 700 MHz to surf the web and listen to MP3s, you know?
Or, tell you what, let's have a POV-ray race. You can have a gazillion P200s, and I'll have a gazillion Alphas at 750 MHz. Now, who do you think is going to win? That's what I thought.
Do-nothing techno weenies always use the same goofy examples. You forgot "What if you need to solve systems of equations with 10,000 unknowns?" MPEG2 decoding is something that's offloaded to good video cards, and has been for years. Ray tracing is something done by, oh, 0.001% of all computer owners.
In general, people don't understand how fast, say, 400 MHz really is. You see otherwise intelligent people thinking that a 200 MHz machine would drag if it had to search a database of 10,000 items. Heck, that would be like lightning on a 4MHz Z80!
Or, tell you what, let's have a POV-ray race. You can have a gazillion P200s, and I'll have a gazillion Alphas at 750 MHz. Now, who do you think is going to win? That's what I thought.
Do-nothing techno weenies always use the same goofy examples. You forgot "What if you need to solve systems of equations with 10,000 unknowns?" MPEG2 decoding is something that's offloaded to good video cards, and has been for years. Ray tracing is something done by, oh, 0.001% of all computer owners.
In general, people don't understand how fast, say, 400 MHz really is. You see otherwise intelligent people thinking that a 200 MHz machine would drag if it had to search a database of 10,000 items. Heck, that would be like lightning on a 4MHz Z80!
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
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· Score: 5
>I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.
That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.
It was horseshit when Apple tried to say that the G3 was twice as fast as a Pentium II back in 1998. I repeat: it was bunk. But, it has turned out that a 500 MHz G4 (not G3) is remarkably fast for it's clock speed. Here's a PC-oriented benchmark site, quoted on Slashdot a few weeks back, showing that a 500 MHz G4 is only 15% slower than a 1 GHz Athlon. That's impressive, especially when you look at the huge difference in power consumption.
Perhaps the scariest things about open source software being used in critical applications are:
1. A majority of it seems to be written by newbie programmers, or at least programmers at the beginnings of their careers without significant 'real project' experience behind them.
2. Almost no open source programs have regression test suites.
If you've ever been involved in software engineering for the telecom, medical, or aerospace industries, you know that they're much, much more hardcore about testing than any open source project. The outlook that an experienced embedded system programmer has is very different from that of a desktop app programmer.
Yes, we can get better performance by throwing more transistors at a problem, increasing power consumption and heat generation, and by increasing the package size. Who cares? After about 200 MHz, speed stopped mattering much (I know, I know, someone always mentions games). I'd much prefer to see smaller CPUs, both in terms of physical size and power consumption. This pissing contest isn't proving anything.
Lots of people are blindly bashing Cracker for that comment, but think about it a minute. Napster is a corporation that's out to make profit. Acting like music should be freely passed around is their marketing angle. So while everyone rah-rahs about freedom and intellectual property and all that, money goes into Napster's pockets. This isn't some goody-goody freedom thing, it's captialism. The faux "we don't like big bad music corporations" attitude sucks in all the net hippies. So is it hippie capitalism? Sure is.
In fact, a slew of new studies document that the young are using broadband to re-shape media and the information culture. They are the gurus, visionaries, technicians and authorities on the Information Revolution.
That's BS. While there have been a notable group of high school and college students who have become successful through starting web sites (e.g. Slashdot), there's very little reason to trot out terms like "guru" and "visionary."
In the Open Source world, for example, there's much enthusiasm and idealism among young programmers, but there's also an obvious lack of software engineering principles and experience. Witness that almost no open source projects have regression test suites, save some of the old projects like gcc. And it's hard to apply to the term "visionary," to people who are mostly trying to write software that's like something available for Windows. Is Gnome visionary? Star Office? Any of the half dozen clones of Breakout announced daily at linuxgames.com?
Hmmmm...did anyone actually read the article or are they just keying off of the blurb on Slashdot? Go read it. It isn't saying quite what most people here think it is saying. It's not putting down modern games or saying that old skool games were better. It's a history of increasing game complexity and whether the escalating requirements have inherent limits, considering the goal of creating marketable and fun games.
Most of the criticism of RedHat seems to be coming from college students with a selective dislike for what they see as large, successful businesses. I say "selective" because these same critics also fawn all over corporately produced mass market products, like Mountain Dew, The Simpsons, and anything Star Wars related.
One great thing about Linux distributions is competition. Don't like RedHat? Buy SuSE or Turbo or Corel or Stampede or Debian or one of several others. If you want to jump on corporations, then there are some pharmaceutical companies and food processing companies that really need public vehement public criticism of their practices. But don't bother pointing the same kind of fire at RedHat.
("twice as fast" argument doesn't wash when clock speed is half as fast).
Benchmarks are actually showing that a 500 MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to a 1 GHz Athlon. These aren't Apple benchmarks either, but numbers from x86 oriented sites. If the 500 MHz chip uses less than half the power of the 1 GHz chip, I'm all over it. Makes you wonder what the heck Intel and AMD are doing with all that wattage.
its clear you'd rather listen to marketdrones than actually information or check it out for yourself, the G4 was shown to be faster at some very specific things, its not faster in general, and its certainly not as fast as 1ghz k7
I'm not talking about Apple's marketing nonsense, but what various hardware web sites are reporting, including one linked to on Slashdot this past Monday. Also note that they're talking about the CPU in the G4. The snail ads from 1998 were about the CPU in the G3.
The Pentium vs. Athlon battles of recent months have made a couple of things apparent.
The first is that no one cares, except for the same kind of person who insists on owning cars with 500+ horsepower. I currently do high end software development, including lots of 3D graphics work, on two machines. One of them is a 333 MHz Pentium II, the other is a 400 MHz Pentium II. This is hardcore stuff, involving several compilers and some high-end languages that don't normally get used. According to benchmarks, my machines are about 29-35% of the speed of the top of the line machines. And in all honestly I have zero complaints about speed. Both of my computers are zippy. I suppose I could try to slow them down by pointlessly including extra headers everywhere, but why? "My computer is twice as fast at handling unnecessary crap as your computer" is not impressive.
The second thing is that it's obvious that the x86 architecture is a losing battle. When Apple claimed that the PowerPC processors were equivalent to Pentiums of double the clock speed, everyone pooh-poohed them. Then, according to real benchmarks like the one mentioned on Slashdot yesterday (in a story about the Pentium III), it turns out that a 500 MHz G4 really is equivalent to a 1 GHz Athlon, and only 12% slower than a 1.1 GHz Pentium III. And the G4 uses much less power, making it a realistic choice for notebooks. I am not saying that Macs are better than PCs. I am saying that the current high-end PowerPC chips are making the Intel vs. AMD battle look pretty ridiculous. Who cares if Chevy puts an 800 HP engine in one car and then Pontiac out does them with 810 HP? Everyone is happy with inexpensive and reliable with 150 HP cars that don't need to be handled with kid gloves.
A 500 MHz G4 is twelve percent slower than a 1.1 GHz Pentium III? If that's true, then that's the real story here. Isn't this what everyone was trying to vehemently deny a while back, that a G4 is equal to a Pentium of double the clock speed?
All of these cards are blazing. As such, driver stability is much more of an issue. Matrox is pretty top notch in this department. NVidia has had it's share of problems in the past, but may be improving. I would much, much prefer to get a rock solid card and driver combination than some crazy card that goes for extra performance at all costs.
I feel compelled to respond, becuase you obviously haven't any Square games other than the Final Fantasies. I'll grant you that the plots are sometimes a bit cookie-cuttered (Final Fantasy 7's extensive backstory is an exception), but what about Square's other main development team, the Chrono/Xenogears people? Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears are all incredible games with very deep and philosophical plots.
You should think before you make broad assumptions.
I was talking about other Square games, especially Chrono Cross. That game is like a junior high philosophy dicussion gone bad.
I hope they concentrate as much on the plot as they do in the RPG's. Sure, I play them for the graphics as well, but the main point to an RPG is to lose yourself in the ever-twisting plots and sub-plots
No offense intended, but the plots in Square games are what you expect from an angst-ridden high school girl. They're so overwrought, so pointedly attempting to be all-encompassing and full of meaning, that they can only be taken seriously by people who haven't done much reading. And then actual gameplay involves pigtailed schoolgirls fighting wiggling, oversized cartoon frogs and foodstuffs, following the all the usual video game cliches (big dumb boss monster every so often, etc.).
Realistically, the Square's plots don't hold much water if you look at them outside the scope of video games.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access, why should internet access companies? I'm a real light phone user, but I don't complain about paying $30/mo because someone else is on the phone 24/7 tying up more phone bandwidth.
These schemes were cooked up based on an average call length which is no longer valid. Telephone exchanges were originally designed to handle a particular load, assuming relatively short average call times. That is, if you assume an average call length of three minutes, you can get by with a much smaller exchange than if you have to assume an average call length of two hours.
You're missing the point. It isn't about aesthetics, it's about having a solid UI that's well integrated into a system and generally consistent across major applications. UNIX window managers look superficially polished, but they fall apart very quickly. There's more to a UI than appearance.
Let me know that you have tried ALL window managers before you trash them. And also, show us your art and design background.
You're missing the point. Some WMs have good aesthetics (e.g. WindowMaker, BlackBox), but they're sorely lacking as user interfaces, from the basic "What are the standard keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste?" to generally providing a coherent system and not a mish-mosh of applications that look like they belong in different universes.
After all the moaning about the Mac in Linux forums, it's ironic that Apple has managed to put a decent face on UNIX before anyone else. That's always been the sort point about UNIX on the desktop, and has been going back to the early days of X in the 1980s. But with all the yammering about the Open Source revolution and millions of eyes, many people expected one of the various attempts at a Linux desktop to make OS X look like a sad afterthought. It hasn't happened. KDE, et al, still look like poor attempts to clone interfaces that the authors never used. If OS X is the Sgt. Pepper for some users, then it's a wake-up call for a generation for others, as was the ill-fated Stones concert at Altamont Speedway.
Very strange. Microsoft was big in the 1980s but became *huge* in the 1990s. Windows pre-3.0 was an obscure relic. MS-DOS was crusty, and kept people from becoming common household items. Windows 3.0 took off like a shot, followed quickly by 3.1. It turned into the standard operating system. Sure, Microsoft missed the rise of the web, but everyone running Navigator was running it on Windows anyway. In a nutshell, Windows became the ubiquitous operating system. Word became the standard word processor. Excel became the standard spreadsheet. Internet Explorer became the standard browser. Visual Basic became the standard enterprise application development tool. Visual C++ became the dominant commercial C/C++ compiler. You can belittle this any way you want, but that's where we are today.
IMHO, as much as dislike much of Microsft's policies, Gates certainly deserves to be listed as number one in the list... of the 80s.
You're wrong.
In the 1980s, PCs were still in a weird position. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 was released in 1990 that things went through the roof. By the late 90s, Windows-based computers were ubiquitous. Word completely trounced all competitors, too (remember, Word Perfect dominated the late 80s). Excel dominated the spreadsheet market (remember Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc?). Bill Gates wasn't personally responsible for any of this, of course, but Windows and Microsoft took over the computing world in the 1990s. The previous decade was a wind-up.
Slashdot Mirror
The PS2 is hard to program because it is a *new* system and there aren't lots of experts to run to and "How to Program the PS2 for Dummies" books at Barnes & Noble.
Is DirectX easy to use from a programmer's point of view? Is the Win32 API? MFC? C++? X11? No, no, no, no, and no. The PS1 may have been a bitch at first too, but who cares when there are great games like Gran Turismo 2.
Heck, I've been doing commercial software development in Lisp in C++ on a PII 333 and have been for several years. At the time, the 333 was the fastest you can get, and I have had zero complaints about speed since then. Traditionally, Lisp is a hardcore language that eats up the cycles like there's no tomorrow.
Makes me wonder about the people who claim they need a 700 MHz to surf the web and listen to MP3s, you know?
In order for encryption to protect your data, especially on a laptop, you have to do unrealistic things like:
1. Run a script that unencrypts everything you need to work with when you start up.
2. Re-encrypt everything before you shut down.
Now, really, is that a good solution? It may work, but what a tremendous pain. Does anyone actually do this?
Or, tell you what, let's have a POV-ray race. You can have a gazillion P200s, and I'll have a gazillion Alphas at 750 MHz. Now, who do you think is going to win? That's what I thought.
Do-nothing techno weenies always use the same goofy examples. You forgot "What if you need to solve systems of equations with 10,000 unknowns?" MPEG2 decoding is something that's offloaded to good video cards, and has been for years. Ray tracing is something done by, oh, 0.001% of all computer owners.
In general, people don't understand how fast, say, 400 MHz really is. You see otherwise intelligent people thinking that a 200 MHz machine would drag if it had to search a database of 10,000 items. Heck, that would be like lightning on a 4MHz Z80!
Or, tell you what, let's have a POV-ray race. You can have a gazillion P200s, and I'll have a gazillion Alphas at 750 MHz. Now, who do you think is going to win? That's what I thought.
Do-nothing techno weenies always use the same goofy examples. You forgot "What if you need to solve systems of equations with 10,000 unknowns?" MPEG2 decoding is something that's offloaded to good video cards, and has been for years. Ray tracing is something done by, oh, 0.001% of all computer owners.
In general, people don't understand how fast, say, 400 MHz really is. You see otherwise intelligent people thinking that a 200 MHz machine would drag if it had to search a database of 10,000 items. Heck, that would be like lightning on a 4MHz Z80!
>I've been told to expect twice the performance from a G3 than a similarly clocked PIII.
That is unadorned horseshit. But don't take my word for it: go to www.spec.org and check out the numbers yourself. 20-30% is more the average gain, and that's cold comfort when you can buy 1.2GHz Athlon chips for less than $500 a pop.
It was horseshit when Apple tried to say that the G3 was twice as fast as a Pentium II back in 1998. I repeat: it was bunk. But, it has turned out that a 500 MHz G4 (not G3) is remarkably fast for it's clock speed. Here's a PC-oriented benchmark site, quoted on Slashdot a few weeks back, showing that a 500 MHz G4 is only 15% slower than a 1 GHz Athlon. That's impressive, especially when you look at the huge difference in power consumption.
Perhaps the scariest things about open source software being used in critical applications are:
1. A majority of it seems to be written by newbie programmers, or at least programmers at the beginnings of their careers without significant 'real project' experience behind them.
2. Almost no open source programs have regression test suites.
If you've ever been involved in software engineering for the telecom, medical, or aerospace industries, you know that they're much, much more hardcore about testing than any open source project. The outlook that an experienced embedded system programmer has is very different from that of a desktop app programmer.
Yes, we can get better performance by throwing more transistors at a problem, increasing power consumption and heat generation, and by increasing the package size. Who cares? After about 200 MHz, speed stopped mattering much (I know, I know, someone always mentions games). I'd much prefer to see smaller CPUs, both in terms of physical size and power consumption. This pissing contest isn't proving anything.
Lots of people are blindly bashing Cracker for that comment, but think about it a minute. Napster is a corporation that's out to make profit. Acting like music should be freely passed around is their marketing angle. So while everyone rah-rahs about freedom and intellectual property and all that, money goes into Napster's pockets. This isn't some goody-goody freedom thing, it's captialism. The faux "we don't like big bad music corporations" attitude sucks in all the net hippies. So is it hippie capitalism? Sure is.
In fact, a slew of new studies document that the young are using broadband to re-shape media and the information culture. They are the gurus, visionaries, technicians and authorities on the Information Revolution.
That's BS. While there have been a notable group of high school and college students who have become successful through starting web sites (e.g. Slashdot), there's very little reason to trot out terms like "guru" and "visionary."
In the Open Source world, for example, there's much enthusiasm and idealism among young programmers, but there's also an obvious lack of software engineering principles and experience. Witness that almost no open source projects have regression test suites, save some of the old projects like gcc. And it's hard to apply to the term "visionary," to people who are mostly trying to write software that's like something available for Windows. Is Gnome visionary? Star Office? Any of the half dozen clones of Breakout announced daily at linuxgames.com?
Hmmmm...did anyone actually read the article or are they just keying off of the blurb on Slashdot? Go read it. It isn't saying quite what most people here think it is saying. It's not putting down modern games or saying that old skool games were better. It's a history of increasing game complexity and whether the escalating requirements have inherent limits, considering the goal of creating marketable and fun games.
Most of the criticism of RedHat seems to be coming from college students with a selective dislike for what they see as large, successful businesses. I say "selective" because these same critics also fawn all over corporately produced mass market products, like Mountain Dew, The Simpsons, and anything Star Wars related.
One great thing about Linux distributions is competition. Don't like RedHat? Buy SuSE or Turbo or Corel or Stampede or Debian or one of several others. If you want to jump on corporations, then there are some pharmaceutical companies and food processing companies that really need public vehement public criticism of their practices. But don't bother pointing the same kind of fire at RedHat.
("twice as fast" argument doesn't wash when clock speed is half as fast).
Benchmarks are actually showing that a 500 MHz G4 is roughly equivalent to a 1 GHz Athlon. These aren't Apple benchmarks either, but numbers from x86 oriented sites. If the 500 MHz chip uses less than half the power of the 1 GHz chip, I'm all over it. Makes you wonder what the heck Intel and AMD are doing with all that wattage.
its clear you'd rather listen to marketdrones than actually information or check it out for yourself, the G4 was shown to be faster at some very specific things, its not faster in general, and its certainly not as fast as 1ghz k7
I'm not talking about Apple's marketing nonsense, but what various hardware web sites are reporting, including one linked to on Slashdot this past Monday. Also note that they're talking about the CPU in the G4. The snail ads from 1998 were about the CPU in the G3.
The Pentium vs. Athlon battles of recent months have made a couple of things apparent.
The first is that no one cares, except for the same kind of person who insists on owning cars with 500+ horsepower. I currently do high end software development, including lots of 3D graphics work, on two machines. One of them is a 333 MHz Pentium II, the other is a 400 MHz Pentium II. This is hardcore stuff, involving several compilers and some high-end languages that don't normally get used. According to benchmarks, my machines are about 29-35% of the speed of the top of the line machines. And in all honestly I have zero complaints about speed. Both of my computers are zippy. I suppose I could try to slow them down by pointlessly including extra headers everywhere, but why? "My computer is twice as fast at handling unnecessary crap as your computer" is not impressive.
The second thing is that it's obvious that the x86 architecture is a losing battle. When Apple claimed that the PowerPC processors were equivalent to Pentiums of double the clock speed, everyone pooh-poohed them. Then, according to real benchmarks like the one mentioned on Slashdot yesterday (in a story about the Pentium III), it turns out that a 500 MHz G4 really is equivalent to a 1 GHz Athlon, and only 12% slower than a 1.1 GHz Pentium III. And the G4 uses much less power, making it a realistic choice for notebooks. I am not saying that Macs are better than PCs. I am saying that the current high-end PowerPC chips are making the Intel vs. AMD battle look pretty ridiculous. Who cares if Chevy puts an 800 HP engine in one car and then Pontiac out does them with 810 HP? Everyone is happy with inexpensive and reliable with 150 HP cars that don't need to be handled with kid gloves.
A 500 MHz G4 is twelve percent slower than a 1.1 GHz Pentium III? If that's true, then that's the real story here. Isn't this what everyone was trying to vehemently deny a while back, that a G4 is equal to a Pentium of double the clock speed?
All of these cards are blazing. As such, driver stability is much more of an issue. Matrox is pretty top notch in this department. NVidia has had it's share of problems in the past, but may be improving. I would much, much prefer to get a rock solid card and driver combination than some crazy card that goes for extra performance at all costs.
I feel compelled to respond, becuase you obviously haven't any Square games other than the Final Fantasies. I'll grant you that the plots are sometimes a bit cookie-cuttered (Final Fantasy 7's extensive backstory is an exception), but what about Square's other main development team, the Chrono/Xenogears people? Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears are all incredible games with very deep and philosophical plots.
You should think before you make broad assumptions.
I was talking about other Square games, especially Chrono Cross. That game is like a junior high philosophy dicussion gone bad.
I hope they concentrate as much on the plot as they do in the RPG's. Sure, I play them for the graphics as well, but the main point to an RPG is to lose yourself in the ever-twisting plots and sub-plots
No offense intended, but the plots in Square games are what you expect from an angst-ridden high school girl. They're so overwrought, so pointedly attempting to be all-encompassing and full of meaning, that they can only be taken seriously by people who haven't done much reading. And then actual gameplay involves pigtailed schoolgirls fighting wiggling, oversized cartoon frogs and foodstuffs, following the all the usual video game cliches (big dumb boss monster every so often, etc.).
Realistically, the Square's plots don't hold much water if you look at them outside the scope of video games.
Local phone companies don't charge metered rates for phone access, why should internet access companies? I'm a real light phone user, but I don't complain about paying $30/mo because someone else is on the phone 24/7 tying up more phone bandwidth.
These schemes were cooked up based on an average call length which is no longer valid. Telephone exchanges were originally designed to handle a particular load, assuming relatively short average call times. That is, if you assume an average call length of three minutes, you can get by with a much smaller exchange than if you have to assume an average call length of two hours.
BS
Aqua is still second at most
You're missing the point. It isn't about aesthetics, it's about having a solid UI that's well integrated into a system and generally consistent across major applications. UNIX window managers look superficially polished, but they fall apart very quickly. There's more to a UI than appearance.
Let me know that you have tried ALL window managers before you trash them. And also, show us your art and design background.
You're missing the point. Some WMs have good aesthetics (e.g. WindowMaker, BlackBox), but they're sorely lacking as user interfaces, from the basic "What are the standard keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste?" to generally providing a coherent system and not a mish-mosh of applications that look like they belong in different universes.
Aesthetics are not the issue here.
After all the moaning about the Mac in Linux forums, it's ironic that Apple has managed to put a decent face on UNIX before anyone else. That's always been the sort point about UNIX on the desktop, and has been going back to the early days of X in the 1980s. But with all the yammering about the Open Source revolution and millions of eyes, many people expected one of the various attempts at a Linux desktop to make OS X look like a sad afterthought. It hasn't happened. KDE, et al, still look like poor attempts to clone interfaces that the authors never used. If OS X is the Sgt. Pepper for some users, then it's a wake-up call for a generation for others, as was the ill-fated Stones concert at Altamont Speedway.
In the 90s, Microsoft just played catch up
Very strange. Microsoft was big in the 1980s but became *huge* in the 1990s. Windows pre-3.0 was an obscure relic. MS-DOS was crusty, and kept people from becoming common household items. Windows 3.0 took off like a shot, followed quickly by 3.1. It turned into the standard operating system. Sure, Microsoft missed the rise of the web, but everyone running Navigator was running it on Windows anyway. In a nutshell, Windows became the ubiquitous operating system. Word became the standard word processor. Excel became the standard spreadsheet. Internet Explorer became the standard browser. Visual Basic became the standard enterprise application development tool. Visual C++ became the dominant commercial C/C++ compiler. You can belittle this any way you want, but that's where we are today.
IMHO, as much as dislike much of Microsft's policies, Gates certainly deserves to be listed as number one in the list ... of the 80s.
You're wrong.
In the 1980s, PCs were still in a weird position. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 was released in 1990 that things went through the roof. By the late 90s, Windows-based computers were ubiquitous. Word completely trounced all competitors, too (remember, Word Perfect dominated the late 80s). Excel dominated the spreadsheet market (remember Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc?). Bill Gates wasn't personally responsible for any of this, of course, but Windows and Microsoft took over the computing world in the 1990s. The previous decade was a wind-up.