Shouldn't Al Gore be on that list, for creating the internet?
Even so, the internet was created in the mid 1970s, not the 1990s. People making fun of Gore should at least have some basic understanding of things themselves.
There IS a difference! You can't compare 300 mhz to 1Ghz and say there is no difference! 300mhz is simply too slow to buy.
Then you are a fool. I stopped noticing speed increases after about 200MHz or so. I can't tell the difference between a 200MHz chip and a 1GHz chip, except in contrived circumstances (like running Unreal in software rendering mode).
MFC was Microsoft's attempt at making Windows applications easier to write back before better tools were available. Specifically, C++ had not been standardized yet and the Standard Template Library (STL) was neither official, widely used, nor commonly implemented by most compiler vendors. So Microsoft did a lot of what appear to be funny things, like creating their own container and string classes, and so on.
Since then, Delphi and Visual BASIC and other GUI creation tools have become available. They're much, much nicer than dealing with MFC. That's what most Windows programmers use these days. It's silly to muck around with MFC when someone can bang-out a UI with C++ Builder in much less time. Very few people like MFC. It's still used at Microsoft for legacy reasons, and you'll find some die-hards who refuse to bow down to nicer tools, but for the most part GUIs and such are done with VB, Delphi, Builder, and so on. Heck, even Microsoft uses VB to write installers and such.
Complaints about MFC are valid, just as they were valid five years ago. This is nothing new, and nothing to get all worked up about. Heck, Xlib sucks too. We all know that.
On the one hand, interesting game designs seem to have stalled for the next generation hardware. The PS2 launch titles in Japan were unexciting, generally being fancier fighters and fancier racers. It's not at all clear that more power or more polygons is going to help this.
On the other hand, there have been some pretty creative games coming out for existing systems, like Seaman, Jet Grind Radio, and Crazy Taxi (I don't own a Dreamcast, so don't label me as a Sega fanatic). As such, the tech talk from Microsoft is out of place. Fill rate and polys per second are cold measurements. I'm interested in good game design.
You're missing the point. A nice 1995 Chevy or Ford is infinitely better than a car from 1912. But does having a 500 HP Chevy mean all that much in comparison with the 1995 car? Unless you're into drag racing, no. If you compare a 300 MHz Pentium II and a 1 GHz Athlon, the differences are irrelevant. They both feel identical for everyday tasks. In fact, you couldn't figure out which was the faster machine if you were just using Windows and Word and browsing the web. Even for more advanced work you wouldn't notice the difference, except in a few cases (like rendering scenes overnight in 3DS MAX). See the point?
If you think a 333 MHz PIII is fast enough for everything you do then you're not in the high end.
Well then it's obvious that everyone needs 800+ MHz processors!
I'm doing some pretty hardcore stuff on my machine: software development in Lisp, mathematical modeling, 3D animation. Few people can say the same thing ("Uh, I'm downloading porn"). You could always come up with some extreme example ("I'm solving systems of 2 million equations"), but that's not even close to the norm.
I guess I should have seen this one coming
on
KBasic
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm...this is more evidence that Linux desktop environment authors are blindly copying everything Microsoft does. Surely there was a better choice here than BASIC. How about being a little more forward thinking than that?
The trouble with BASIC variants, including Visual BASIC and Dark BASIC and Power BASIC, is that the languages tend to grow in all directions at the same time, with whatever mish-mosh of features seem good at the moment. After a while, that's what drives people away from languages like this. You need to spend a good amount of time becoming a Visual BASIC expert, and it keeps getting more complex with each release. Eventually it's easier to go with a language with a slimmer core.
Seeing a chip like this dropped is disturbing. Two and a half years ago, I bought a Pentium II 333. At the time, it was the top of the line. The previous machine I owned was sixty some odd megahertz, which I used for software development and running a buziness, so 333 MHz seemed like lightning. I still think it's a smoking system. I use it for development, including coding in what are traditionally seen is heavy-duty processor intensive languages like Lisp. That same machine is also used for 3D modeling. The usual advice is "buy the fastest machine you can get if you are going to 3D work," and that's what I did. Everything I do on that machine is snappy. I played Unreal on it, when it was first released, in software rendering mode--because I didn't have a Glide card--and had great fun with it. I have no speed complaints whatsoever. I'm not like some guy trying to justify that this Commodore 64 is still useful; I honestly think my PC is very fast.
Since I bought my machine, the bus speed jumped from 66 to 100 to 133 MHz. Processor speed went to 350, 400, 450, until the low end machine you can get from mail order catalogs is around 633. High end close to twice that. The Pentium III and Athlon became available, with better throughput and more cache. At the same time, video cards progressed from the then-new Voodoo 2 to the TNT, TNT 2, Rage 128, Matrox G400, GeForce, and GeForce 2. Take a low end machine out of all these specs, say a 600 MHz machine with a 100 MHz bus and a TNT 2. That's at least twice the performance of my machine. And in all honesty, I don't know what to do with all the power of my current set-up.
These low-end chips that get kicked around, like those from Transmeta, are still more powerful than what I currently have. And yet the constant wisdom that is spouted is "there's no market at the low end."
I cracked open my machine yesterday to add a new card, and it really struck me how much junk there is in the average PC. Mine must weight 30 pounds. There are a couple of fans, and two absolutely enormous heat sinks. It bothers me to see people tossing these out and buying new machines, just so they can surf the web, listen to MP3s, run Office, and play horribly broken game demos (that is, game demos that don't look like anyone gave a moment's thought to making them run fast on more than reasonable machines). Nobody cares about power consumption or form factor either, just so-called "performance." Even if you need a car battery to power a video card, some people don't care. "My bubble sort is too slow! I need an Athlon!" At some point, this has to stop. People don't realize how much they're being suckered here, which is surprising for the typical anti-corporate college student geek.
Do you really believe that the Lynx is more technologically advanced than the handhelds today?
Did you ever go through the Lynx tech docs? It was miles ahead of the Game Boy and Game Gear, even ahead of the Game Boy Advance in many ways. So, yes:)
The problem here is that I can come up with a dozen examples, and you'll discount them all because you're looking at the current PC video card and CPU markets, which are as cutthroat as you can get. Getting back to Transmeta, the catch is that in several years, CPU manufacturers may discover that a "code morphing" style of architecture is the way to go, because CPU architectures are too disparate and expensive to design. If that turns out to be the case, then Transmeta will have been way ahead of everyone.
Back in the mid 1980s, IBM was ahead of everyone with the RISC processor based IBM PC RT. Acorn had their ARM, too. But look how long CISC hung on after that. It wasn't until Apple started using PowerPC chips in 1994 that RISC on the desktop became mainstream. It is possible that Transmeta is in the same boat that IBM was in 1985.
This is interesting, I would have thought Sony would make a BIG debut for the holiday season. You know pump out lots of machines, advertise like mad, and generally saturate the minds of the populace with PS2.
Even with the so-called "scaled back" launch, the PS2 is still going to be the biggest console introduction ever. This is mentioned in most of the articles talking about the scaled back launch. 1.3 million consoles by Christmas as 3 million in six months is not something I'd call a botched launch, you know?
The term "Luddite" gets thrown around whenever someone isn't all gung-ho about the latest technology. That's a warping of the term. The key is that progress for the sake of progress isn't always a good thing. For example, a lot of people like to play the upgrade game. They buy new CPUs, they buy new video cards, they recompile new kernels, they upgrade their applications and utilities whenever a new X.0Y verion is released.
For the most part, I don't get involved in this sort of thing. I keep puttering away, working on projects and code. There are excellent computer science books that could keep you busy for decades, yet they're not based around DirectX 8 or the capabilities of the GeForce 2. By general web-oriented terminology, I'm a Luddite, because I'm not obsessed with the latest and greatest. Perhaps a new term is needed here, something that means "is not interested in constant faux-improvements driven by people who have made a hobby of buying the fanciest consumer tech."
Ok, I'm game. List one piece of consumer computer
hardware that has been released where competition
to 5 years to catch up?
1. Wave-table sound. Standard on the Amiga in 1985, but took until 1991 to be available on the PC (Gravis UltraSound).
2. Hardware 3D transformation. Standard on the Playstation, released in 1994 in Japan, but took until 1999 to show up on the PC (Nvidia TNT).
3. Color, handheld game system with ability to draw (flat shaded) polygons in hardware. First available in Atari Lynx, circa 1991. Still not available in other systems.
However, consumers typically don't buy CPU's for their design -- they buy strictly on price/performance.
They buy mostly on price. Nobody knows what performance means any more There are plenty of crazy fanboys who buy high-end processors for pr0n browsing and MP3 playing. An intelligent person needing to do web surfing and word processing would buy the lowest end CPU possible, because even a 200 MHz Pentium is more than enough in such cases (and you can't even buy such a "slow" CPU in 2000). Remember, only a few years ago developers were using 200 MHz Pentiums for software development and 3D modeling. Most people don't have good perspective on performance.
A language with concurrency as part of the language itself. That is, there are built-in constructs for managing applications that are divided into lots of concurrently executing parts, rather than simply using an external thread library and semaphore calls. Examples: Erlang, Concurrent ML, Occam.
Everyone is making comments about online books and ebooks, which aren't the same as Open Source books. Or maybe this was just an error in the headline.
An open source book means that anyone can contribute and/or edit. That's not necessarily a good thing. Boooks are written by experts in a field. The net is crawling with "experts" which are hardly the same thing.
This is a luidicrous statement. No technology is that much ahead.
How about garbage collected languages? It took thirty years before they became mainstream (Java). What about Smalltalk? It was developed in the mid 1970s, and is still ahead of C++ in some ways. What about vector processing (i.e. SIMD)? It was a supercomputer feature over twenty years ago, and yet it only starting showing up in commodity CPUs in the mid 1990s. What about concurrent object-oriented languages? Even C++ doesn't have native concurrency, yet Simula did in the 60s. And so on and so on. If you are simply a fanboy of whatever is marketed as current tech, then you have a narrow view.
If you keep a positive outlook towards everything, stress should not be too much of a problem, and you suddenly find that your problems become much easier to solve
That post should be moderated up. There's much self-induced stress among geek techs. Not only do you have a job to do, but you have to defend 3dfx from NVidia advocates, be on the lookout for slanderous comments about Linux, advocate your pet software design methodology, and make sure that annoying fringe groups like Mac owners and Java programmers don't gain any ground. Life is much easier if you do what you enjoy, and live and let live.
Nothing's wrong with the Geforce 2 or its drivers, the problem is with the game. Deus Ex is based on the Unreal engine, which is glide-centric and was glide-only when it first came out.
It's not just Deus Ex. In general, the GeForce 2 drivers seems to be wackier than those for other cards. I've seen cases where installing newer drivers trashes your machine in weird ways--ways you wouldn't expect to be related to video card drivers. There's a good list of games with GeForce 2 trouble. Great card, but the drivers were released much too early. Don't let devotion to Nvidia blind you here.
In case I look like a pro-3dfx zealot, I'm not happy with the recent Voodoo cards either. The power consumption is about 4x what is should be. Good grief.
Is Linux really your primary angle or is that simply what Linux zealots are reading into it? I ask because OS choice is not even in the top ten reasons why someone would pick one game console over another, yet every article about Indrema fixates on Linux being the focus of the console.
The speed complaints need to be taken with a grain of salt. The comments are mostly from people with 500 horsepower cars, complaining that 300 horsepower cars are slow and worthless.
Stop and consider some of the most impressive high-tech games of the 1990s: Quake, Flight Unlimited, Mario 64, System Shock. Now look back at what kind of top of the line machines were being used for the development of those games. Quake was wrapped up when 90 and 120 MHz Pentiums were the best you could get, for example. Now suppose you could have told the developers of these games about a chip with:
* A raw clock speed 3.5 times higher.
* A much faster bus (100 vs. 66 MHz).
* A much larger cache.
* A significantly better processor design featuring out of order execution and less need to pipeline by hand.
* 3D video cards at least 5x faster than what was being sold in $100,000 SGI machines in 1995. (Remember, in 1995 software rendering was the norm.)
That machine is a 333 MHz Pentium II with a Voodoo 2 card. Can you imagine the power? Wow, could you develop some mind boggling games on such a box. And most people are just surfing, downloading porn and MP3s, and using Word. Fast forward, and now we have people putting down 400-500MHz as "slow crap." Personally, I'd take a Crusoe that gave equivalent performance to such a machine, especially considering that it would be cheaper and use much less power. Blindly going for more megahertz is not the way to progress.
The immediate problem with is that this is being called "the Linux-based console." Mentioning Linux is completely irrelevant, as would marketing Excel as "the Spreadsheet written in C++." Nobody cares that it runs Linux.
The irony of the Death of 3dfx is that 3D cards in general have been in a downward slide for several years now, with the last great cards being based on Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee. The TNT came the following summer (and remember, we're only talking about 1998 here), and brought driver instability to new lows. Before the problems were ironed out, the TNT2 was released and continued NVidia's reputation as the poorest drivers writers in the industry. The GeForce and GeForce 2 have the same general troubles. Bought Deus Ex and have a GeForce 2? Gotta wait for the patch. Same goes for many games. I want NVidia to get this right, but they're obviously focusing elsewhere.
The downfall of 3DFX was the fanboy cry of "16 bits per pixel sucks!" which is something that was picked up from interviews with John Carmack. 16 bits per pixel *can* suck, depending on what you want to do. If you're doing half a dozen passes per triangle, then, yes, you need more color resolution. If you're not, then there's no issue. This is a good example of fanboy-oriented web journalism running amok and having real consequences.
In truth, many developers, including myself, really like 3dfx cards. The drivers are rock solid. Glide is the most predictable 3D API. Yes, OpenGL, blah, blah, blah, but Glide is number one in terms of stability.
In commercial software houses, changes are made all the time by people who don't understand the code. Often times, the person who wrote the code left several years ago, and noone is really even sure it works completely with the latest library versions. However, with free software, projects tend to be much smaller, and so figuring out what is going on is fairly trivial
Sorry, that's wishful thinking. In a commercial development house, there are people who work with the codebase day in and day out. Even if the original author has left (very common), there's always someone who can scribble on a white board for 10 minutes to set you straight. Often what looks like an obvious fix turns out to be incorrect, making you glad you had that 10 minutes of scribbling. Maybe the biggest problem with fixes to OSS is that you don't know the reputation of the person making the fix. Maybe it's from a careless programmer. Maybe it's from someone who can program but doesn't understand the importance of thorough testing. Who knows?
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Shouldn't Al Gore be on that list, for creating the internet?
Even so, the internet was created in the mid 1970s, not the 1990s. People making fun of Gore should at least have some basic understanding of things themselves.
There IS a difference! You can't compare 300 mhz to 1Ghz and say there is no difference! 300mhz is simply too slow to buy.
Then you are a fool. I stopped noticing speed increases after about 200MHz or so. I can't tell the difference between a 200MHz chip and a 1GHz chip, except in contrived circumstances (like running Unreal in software rendering mode).
MFC was Microsoft's attempt at making Windows applications easier to write back before better tools were available. Specifically, C++ had not been standardized yet and the Standard Template Library (STL) was neither official, widely used, nor commonly implemented by most compiler vendors. So Microsoft did a lot of what appear to be funny things, like creating their own container and string classes, and so on.
Since then, Delphi and Visual BASIC and other GUI creation tools have become available. They're much, much nicer than dealing with MFC. That's what most Windows programmers use these days. It's silly to muck around with MFC when someone can bang-out a UI with C++ Builder in much less time. Very few people like MFC. It's still used at Microsoft for legacy reasons, and you'll find some die-hards who refuse to bow down to nicer tools, but for the most part GUIs and such are done with VB, Delphi, Builder, and so on. Heck, even Microsoft uses VB to write installers and such.
Complaints about MFC are valid, just as they were valid five years ago. This is nothing new, and nothing to get all worked up about. Heck, Xlib sucks too. We all know that.
On the one hand, interesting game designs seem to have stalled for the next generation hardware. The PS2 launch titles in Japan were unexciting, generally being fancier fighters and fancier racers. It's not at all clear that more power or more polygons is going to help this.
On the other hand, there have been some pretty creative games coming out for existing systems, like Seaman, Jet Grind Radio, and Crazy Taxi (I don't own a Dreamcast, so don't label me as a Sega fanatic). As such, the tech talk from Microsoft is out of place. Fill rate and polys per second are cold measurements. I'm interested in good game design.
you can get by with a 386
but why would you?
You're missing the point. A nice 1995 Chevy or Ford is infinitely better than a car from 1912. But does having a 500 HP Chevy mean all that much in comparison with the 1995 car? Unless you're into drag racing, no. If you compare a 300 MHz Pentium II and a 1 GHz Athlon, the differences are irrelevant. They both feel identical for everyday tasks. In fact, you couldn't figure out which was the faster machine if you were just using Windows and Word and browsing the web. Even for more advanced work you wouldn't notice the difference, except in a few cases (like rendering scenes overnight in 3DS MAX). See the point?
If you think a 333 MHz PIII is fast enough for everything you do then you're not in the high end.
Well then it's obvious that everyone needs 800+ MHz processors!
I'm doing some pretty hardcore stuff on my machine: software development in Lisp, mathematical modeling, 3D animation. Few people can say the same thing ("Uh, I'm downloading porn"). You could always come up with some extreme example ("I'm solving systems of 2 million equations"), but that's not even close to the norm.
Hmmm...this is more evidence that Linux desktop environment authors are blindly copying everything Microsoft does. Surely there was a better choice here than BASIC. How about being a little more forward thinking than that?
The trouble with BASIC variants, including Visual BASIC and Dark BASIC and Power BASIC, is that the languages tend to grow in all directions at the same time, with whatever mish-mosh of features seem good at the moment. After a while, that's what drives people away from languages like this. You need to spend a good amount of time becoming a Visual BASIC expert, and it keeps getting more complex with each release. Eventually it's easier to go with a language with a slimmer core.
Seeing a chip like this dropped is disturbing. Two and a half years ago, I bought a Pentium II 333. At the time, it was the top of the line. The previous machine I owned was sixty some odd megahertz, which I used for software development and running a buziness, so 333 MHz seemed like lightning. I still think it's a smoking system. I use it for development, including coding in what are traditionally seen is heavy-duty processor intensive languages like Lisp. That same machine is also used for 3D modeling. The usual advice is "buy the fastest machine you can get if you are going to 3D work," and that's what I did. Everything I do on that machine is snappy. I played Unreal on it, when it was first released, in software rendering mode--because I didn't have a Glide card--and had great fun with it. I have no speed complaints whatsoever. I'm not like some guy trying to justify that this Commodore 64 is still useful; I honestly think my PC is very fast.
Since I bought my machine, the bus speed jumped from 66 to 100 to 133 MHz. Processor speed went to 350, 400, 450, until the low end machine you can get from mail order catalogs is around 633. High end close to twice that. The Pentium III and Athlon became available, with better throughput and more cache. At the same time, video cards progressed from the then-new Voodoo 2 to the TNT, TNT 2, Rage 128, Matrox G400, GeForce, and GeForce 2. Take a low end machine out of all these specs, say a 600 MHz machine with a 100 MHz bus and a TNT 2. That's at least twice the performance of my machine. And in all honesty, I don't know what to do with all the power of my current set-up.
These low-end chips that get kicked around, like those from Transmeta, are still more powerful than what I currently have. And yet the constant wisdom that is spouted is "there's no market at the low end."
I cracked open my machine yesterday to add a new card, and it really struck me how much junk there is in the average PC. Mine must weight 30 pounds. There are a couple of fans, and two absolutely enormous heat sinks. It bothers me to see people tossing these out and buying new machines, just so they can surf the web, listen to MP3s, run Office, and play horribly broken game demos (that is, game demos that don't look like anyone gave a moment's thought to making them run fast on more than reasonable machines). Nobody cares about power consumption or form factor either, just so-called "performance." Even if you need a car battery to power a video card, some people don't care. "My bubble sort is too slow! I need an Athlon!" At some point, this has to stop. People don't realize how much they're being suckered here, which is surprising for the typical anti-corporate college student geek.
Do you really believe that the Lynx is more technologically advanced than the handhelds today?
:)
Did you ever go through the Lynx tech docs? It was miles ahead of the Game Boy and Game Gear, even ahead of the Game Boy Advance in many ways. So, yes
The problem here is that I can come up with a dozen examples, and you'll discount them all because you're looking at the current PC video card and CPU markets, which are as cutthroat as you can get. Getting back to Transmeta, the catch is that in several years, CPU manufacturers may discover that a "code morphing" style of architecture is the way to go, because CPU architectures are too disparate and expensive to design. If that turns out to be the case, then Transmeta will have been way ahead of everyone.
Back in the mid 1980s, IBM was ahead of everyone with the RISC processor based IBM PC RT. Acorn had their ARM, too. But look how long CISC hung on after that. It wasn't until Apple started using PowerPC chips in 1994 that RISC on the desktop became mainstream. It is possible that Transmeta is in the same boat that IBM was in 1985.
This is interesting, I would have thought Sony would make a BIG debut for the holiday season. You know pump out lots of machines, advertise like mad, and generally saturate the minds of the populace with PS2.
Even with the so-called "scaled back" launch, the PS2 is still going to be the biggest console introduction ever. This is mentioned in most of the articles talking about the scaled back launch. 1.3 million consoles by Christmas as 3 million in six months is not something I'd call a botched launch, you know?
The term "Luddite" gets thrown around whenever someone isn't all gung-ho about the latest technology. That's a warping of the term. The key is that progress for the sake of progress isn't always a good thing. For example, a lot of people like to play the upgrade game. They buy new CPUs, they buy new video cards, they recompile new kernels, they upgrade their applications and utilities whenever a new X.0Y verion is released.
For the most part, I don't get involved in this sort of thing. I keep puttering away, working on projects and code. There are excellent computer science books that could keep you busy for decades, yet they're not based around DirectX 8 or the capabilities of the GeForce 2. By general web-oriented terminology, I'm a Luddite, because I'm not obsessed with the latest and greatest. Perhaps a new term is needed here, something that means "is not interested in constant faux-improvements driven by people who have made a hobby of buying the fanciest consumer tech."
Ok, I'm game. List one piece of consumer computer
hardware that has been released where competition
to 5 years to catch up?
1. Wave-table sound. Standard on the Amiga in 1985, but took until 1991 to be available on the PC (Gravis UltraSound).
2. Hardware 3D transformation. Standard on the Playstation, released in 1994 in Japan, but took until 1999 to show up on the PC (Nvidia TNT).
3. Color, handheld game system with ability to draw (flat shaded) polygons in hardware. First available in Atari Lynx, circa 1991. Still not available in other systems.
The fact is at no point in the comsumer hardware industry has anyone released a tech that was 5 years ahead of its time
Hmmm...not sure where to begin with that one. I suspect you're just saying that because you want it to be true, but counterexamples are easy.
However, consumers typically don't buy CPU's for their design -- they buy strictly on price/performance.
They buy mostly on price. Nobody knows what performance means any more There are plenty of crazy fanboys who buy high-end processors for pr0n browsing and MP3 playing. An intelligent person needing to do web surfing and word processing would buy the lowest end CPU possible, because even a 200 MHz Pentium is more than enough in such cases (and you can't even buy such a "slow" CPU in 2000). Remember, only a few years ago developers were using 200 MHz Pentiums for software development and 3D modeling. Most people don't have good perspective on performance.
What is native concurrency?
A language with concurrency as part of the language itself. That is, there are built-in constructs for managing applications that are divided into lots of concurrently executing parts, rather than simply using an external thread library and semaphore calls. Examples: Erlang, Concurrent ML, Occam.
Everyone is making comments about online books and ebooks, which aren't the same as Open Source books. Or maybe this was just an error in the headline.
An open source book means that anyone can contribute and/or edit. That's not necessarily a good thing. Boooks are written by experts in a field. The net is crawling with "experts" which are hardly the same thing.
This is a luidicrous statement. No technology is that much ahead.
How about garbage collected languages? It took thirty years before they became mainstream (Java). What about Smalltalk? It was developed in the mid 1970s, and is still ahead of C++ in some ways. What about vector processing (i.e. SIMD)? It was a supercomputer feature over twenty years ago, and yet it only starting showing up in commodity CPUs in the mid 1990s. What about concurrent object-oriented languages? Even C++ doesn't have native concurrency, yet Simula did in the 60s. And so on and so on. If you are simply a fanboy of whatever is marketed as current tech, then you have a narrow view.
If you keep a positive outlook towards everything, stress should not be too much of a problem, and you suddenly find that your problems become much easier to solve
That post should be moderated up. There's much self-induced stress among geek techs. Not only do you have a job to do, but you have to defend 3dfx from NVidia advocates, be on the lookout for slanderous comments about Linux, advocate your pet software design methodology, and make sure that annoying fringe groups like Mac owners and Java programmers don't gain any ground. Life is much easier if you do what you enjoy, and live and let live.
Nothing's wrong with the Geforce 2 or its drivers, the problem is with the game. Deus Ex is based on the Unreal engine, which is glide-centric and was glide-only when it first came out.
It's not just Deus Ex. In general, the GeForce 2 drivers seems to be wackier than those for other cards. I've seen cases where installing newer drivers trashes your machine in weird ways--ways you wouldn't expect to be related to video card drivers. There's a good list of games with GeForce 2 trouble. Great card, but the drivers were released much too early. Don't let devotion to Nvidia blind you here.
In case I look like a pro-3dfx zealot, I'm not happy with the recent Voodoo cards either. The power consumption is about 4x what is should be. Good grief.
Is Linux really your primary angle or is that simply what Linux zealots are reading into it? I ask because OS choice is not even in the top ten reasons why someone would pick one game console over another, yet every article about Indrema fixates on Linux being the focus of the console.
The speed complaints need to be taken with a grain of salt. The comments are mostly from people with 500 horsepower cars, complaining that 300 horsepower cars are slow and worthless.
Stop and consider some of the most impressive high-tech games of the 1990s: Quake, Flight Unlimited, Mario 64, System Shock. Now look back at what kind of top of the line machines were being used for the development of those games. Quake was wrapped up when 90 and 120 MHz Pentiums were the best you could get, for example. Now suppose you could have told the developers of these games about a chip with:
* A raw clock speed 3.5 times higher.
* A much faster bus (100 vs. 66 MHz).
* A much larger cache.
* A significantly better processor design featuring out of order execution and less need to pipeline by hand.
* 3D video cards at least 5x faster than what was being sold in $100,000 SGI machines in 1995. (Remember, in 1995 software rendering was the norm.)
That machine is a 333 MHz Pentium II with a Voodoo 2 card. Can you imagine the power? Wow, could you develop some mind boggling games on such a box. And most people are just surfing, downloading porn and MP3s, and using Word. Fast forward, and now we have people putting down 400-500MHz as "slow crap." Personally, I'd take a Crusoe that gave equivalent performance to such a machine, especially considering that it would be cheaper and use much less power. Blindly going for more megahertz is not the way to progress.
The immediate problem with is that this is being called "the Linux-based console." Mentioning Linux is completely irrelevant, as would marketing Excel as "the Spreadsheet written in C++." Nobody cares that it runs Linux.
The irony of the Death of 3dfx is that 3D cards in general have been in a downward slide for several years now, with the last great cards being based on Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee. The TNT came the following summer (and remember, we're only talking about 1998 here), and brought driver instability to new lows. Before the problems were ironed out, the TNT2 was released and continued NVidia's reputation as the poorest drivers writers in the industry. The GeForce and GeForce 2 have the same general troubles. Bought Deus Ex and have a GeForce 2? Gotta wait for the patch. Same goes for many games. I want NVidia to get this right, but they're obviously focusing elsewhere.
The downfall of 3DFX was the fanboy cry of "16 bits per pixel sucks!" which is something that was picked up from interviews with John Carmack. 16 bits per pixel *can* suck, depending on what you want to do. If you're doing half a dozen passes per triangle, then, yes, you need more color resolution. If you're not, then there's no issue. This is a good example of fanboy-oriented web journalism running amok and having real consequences.
In truth, many developers, including myself, really like 3dfx cards. The drivers are rock solid. Glide is the most predictable 3D API. Yes, OpenGL, blah, blah, blah, but Glide is number one in terms of stability.
With PS2 being delayed into oblivion
Delayed? It's already been out six months in Japan. It was never scheduled to be released before the Dreamcast.
In commercial software houses, changes are made all the time by people who don't understand the code. Often times, the person who wrote the code left several years ago, and noone is really even sure it works completely with the latest library versions. However, with free software, projects tend to be much smaller, and so figuring out what is going on is fairly trivial
Sorry, that's wishful thinking. In a commercial development house, there are people who work with the codebase day in and day out. Even if the original author has left (very common), there's always someone who can scribble on a white board for 10 minutes to set you straight. Often what looks like an obvious fix turns out to be incorrect, making you glad you had that 10 minutes of scribbling. Maybe the biggest problem with fixes to OSS is that you don't know the reputation of the person making the fix. Maybe it's from a careless programmer. Maybe it's from someone who can program but doesn't understand the importance of thorough testing. Who knows?