Could we give up on the symlinks issue please? The original Slashdot mention of that was a knee-jerk reaction. Microsoft is talking about something beyond that (i.e. automatically determining when files are copies of each other and replacing one with a link to the other; think reference counting for files).
Lots of people are saying "but a virus needs root access" and so on. In the olden days of yore, only a few sysadmins had root access. Mere users had to install software in their home directories, or they had to ask a sysadmin to put it in a global location. Things are much different now, with almost every Linux user being his or her own sysadmin. Every time someone grabs a new kernel, a new version of GNOME or KDE, a new version of gcc, a new video card driver, or just about any software, that person becomes root to do the installation. It would be relatively easy to upload a trojan horse claiming to be so-and-so and thousands of people would download it, switch to root, and run it. Then something could be installed in the.bashrc file for any user--or in the crontab--for example, and only the very hardcore are going to realize it. And that's just a simple case.
UNIX is the fate we have chosen
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The End of Unix?
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UNIX was poised to die out in the late 1980s. That OS was floundering on the professional desktop in workstations--back when that meant something other than a PC--from Sun and the now-defunct Apollo. But the general UNIXy environment and Xwindows just felt so clunky next to something lighter weight; it looked like some form of personal computer was a good alternative.
Unfortunately, as personal computers became more complex, they also became more unreliable. If Windows 3.0 crashed and you could just hit a button and be back to work in three seconds, then no one would have cared. But you had to sit through an unbearable two minute boot sequence. Networking was messy. Arcane INI files were just as bad as anything from the seventies. As reliability dropped, UNIX began looking more and more attractive. It was still butt ugly, but at least it worked.
By now, we should have something better. We've had an additional ten years to deal with the problem. We should have something very small and very stable and very easy to take care of. A computer should be able to reboot as fast as a calculator. We shouldn't have to deal with driver issues and such as much as we do. But it didn't happen. PCs got faster and more varied, but nothing improved in the reliability or simplicity department. And now, to our horror, UNIX is looking like the simpler alternative. No one would have believed it.
No. If you want to record your own Dark Side of the Moon, then you get permission and pay royalties. The people who rip off game designs because they can't think of anything better don't want to do this. They just whine that they have the right to swipe the idea.
There was a video game book from 1997
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King's New eBook
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The first electronic book I ran across was Halcyon Days, back in 1997. It comes as a bundle of HTML files, but still gets sent out on diskette (which is cute in a retro sorta way:)
are we going to let mega-corps decide how the world is run, or are we going to do it ourselves.
This is fine. But if you're honest in your stand against "mega-corps" then you:
* Can't watch TV. * Can't watch movies. * Can't drink any well known soft drink (Coke, Pepsi, etc). * Can't buy most prepackaged foods. * Can't eat at fast food chains. * Can't buy clothes from a chain store. * Can't buy a car. * Can't travel by airplane. * Can't take Tylenol.
Let's look at Hasrbro's current lawsuit, in which they're cracking down on games that they see as rip offs of games they own the rights to (old Atari titles like Asteroids and Centipede and such). Ignoring the fact that those games are twenty years old, here's the general opposition to this argument seems to go:
Hasbro lawyer: Your game is a clone of Asteroids. We own the rights to that game. Please stop producing it.
Guy who wrote an Asteroids clone: You can't copyright a game concept! I wrote this game, and it's mine.
Lawyer: It's obvious that your game is indeed Asteroids and not an original work. You could have come up with any idea in the world, yet you chose Asteroids.
Guy: It's not exactly Asteroids! Look, my asteroids are textured, and I added power-ups!
Lawyer: You have a rotating ship on the screen that shoots at rocks that break up into smaller rocks when shot. When you shoot the smallest rocks they disappear. A little enemy ship comes out every so often and shoots at you; nothing else shoots in the game except you and that ship. There's a hyperspace key. You move by pressing Thrust and then you drift around. This is your design?
Guy: Information should be free!
Lawyer: Look, if you formed a band and recorded your own version of Dark Side of the Moon, track for track, do you think that's legitimate unles you get permission?
Guy: Uh, but that's different. CDs are harder to make than games.
Lawyer: Legal issues aside, the bottom line here is that you need to think for yourself. You could write lots of games about asteroids and space ships and such without being Asteroids. There are unlimited ideas out there, why did you have to pick the one that's obviously been done by someone else? The web is full of people who think they have the right to publish their own Star Trek novelizations and create CG South Park episodes. Why? Wouldn't it just be better to do your own thing?
Guy: But I'm just a coder who doesn't have any good ideas!
Right here. Scroll down a bit for Pi, musical compositions based on pi (or down a little bit more for "Two Works"). No kidding. This is from an underground Seattle musician, so you'll be the only person in town with it:) I heard it a few years ago; tis good. Odd, yes, but good.
As always, the justification of "everyone should own everything" comes across mostly as "I deserve to get everything free." When someone rails against music publishers, the underlying goal is to be able to get music without having to pay $15 for a CD. When someone rails against look and feel copyrights, it's usually because he or she wants someone to be able to write a freebie clone of the same thing. When a game author decries Hasbro's recent lawsuit, it's because he or she wants to be able to write an Asteroids rip-off and be able to stake a claim as rightful author.
I agree, software patents are goofy. DIVX was dumb. DVD encryption annoying. But remember, the point of opposing such things is not to get free stuff. Yeah! Movies should be free! Comics should be free! Books should be free! These are the cries of college students without much money, not well thought out opinions. They *could* be well thought out opinions, but that's not what they come across as.
In principle you're right, but not in this case. The features of flashy video cards and CPUs are only providing a perceived benefit for a small minority (mostly hardcore game players that like to upgrade), and even in those cases the benefit may be non-existent. The Katmai instructions of the Pentium III are not doing *anything* for most PC owners except increasing the power consumption. You could replace 90% of all CPUs that are faster than 200 MHz with 200 MHz CPUs and the owners would not notice the difference. Games, high-end rendering packages, and highly intensive numerical applications (i.e. solving huge systems of equations, breaking encryption), are exceptions. So the bottom line is that we're greatly increasing power consumption for the benefit of a few. In that case, it makes sense to bend games to fit the norm, instead of taking a peculiar case and making it the norm.
There are great advantages to having a 200MHz 32-bit CPU over a 4MHz 8-bit CPU in terms of ease of development. But those same advantages are not true of going from 200MHz to 800MHz. If you're hungry, you'd rather have a good meal than a twinkie. But there's no sense in ordering three times more food than you can possibly eat. That's the point we're at with CPUs.
The reason I can believe that a Bill Joy scenario could occur is that the technology age has, in many ways, eradicated common sense beliefs of the past. People are making mistakes on a grand scale all the time, but it's excusable because, hey, it's technology! We need to advance at any cost!
Consider the fanaticism a huge number of people show for upcoming CPUs and video cards--e.g. Athlon, GeForce, etc. These fans don't really have a deep understanding of where the performance is coming from, or to what extent a current CPU or video card can or has been pushed. The view is "newer = better," and that's enough to fuel raging passion. This is causing people to upgrade left and right and increase the base level of machines available. Now we have 500 MHz Pentium III machines with ATI Rage 128 video cards being used for airline scheduling where a 486 would be sufficient. For absolutely no benefit, power consumption is maybe 10-50x higher than it needs to be. So even in this era of supposedly increased conservation and environmental awareness, we're just pointlessly wasting power and don't care.
That's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you without realizing it. Twenty years ago, no one would have believed such gross negligence would have been possible. The core of most "technology will doom us" arguments is that we advance without thinking. And that's exactly what we've proven ourselves to do, especially in recent years.
I understand that Scott doesn't want to talk about exact sales figures and such, but have this strong suspcion that they're very low. His avoidance of this issue only makes this more apparent. I'll say up front and repeat myself later that this isn't a bad thing, but it puts the Linux game market into a better perspective.
Most games for Windows sell a whole lot fewer copies than most people realize. Yes, Unreal and Quake 3 and Who Wants to be a Millionaire do very well, but even games that seem to be high profile--by getting endless mentions at Blue's News for example--often have numbers that may be shockingly low if you're not expecting it. Selling less than 30,000 copies of something with a lot of press isn't at all uncommon. Heck, if something sells more than 50,000 then it's doing incredibly well. So let's consider something that gets good reviews and lots of press and sells 30,000 copies. This is with ads in all the PC magazines and lots of web presence. How many copies do you think are going to be sold for Linux? Yes, there are many people using Linux, but remember that a good portion of them are either of the "software should be free" school or else they're literally in school and would rather get free stuff than pay $50 for a boxed game. Even aside, I think that if an average Loki title sells a thousand copies than that would be surprisingly good. Loki small; that will keep them in business; but the Linux game market may not bursting at the seams in the way that many people think it is.
Linux is successful because it went with the tried and true solutions rather than attempting to be innovative. If Linus had done something experimental and wacky, then he wouldn't have been able to leverage off of twenty years of UNIX tool development. Other people have written their own operating systems, or are attempting to, but in general you never hear about them because, while they may have technically succeeded, they don't have gcc and vi and emacs and Ghostscript and LaTeX and Xwindows and Mozilla and such.
Most high profile Linux-based open source projects are attempts to bring something from Windows or the Macintosh over to Linux. KDE and Gnome are heavily influenced by Windows. The Free Pascal and Lazarus projects have been attempting to clone Delphi. The Gimp is an attempt to outdo Photoshop. There are several projects trying to clone Microsoft Office. Code Crusader is cloning the CodeWarrior-style IDE. There are attempts to clone games like Civilization and old retro classics. None of this is bad! But almost never do you run across an open source developer with his own concept of what the future will be like. In some ways I find that fascinating, that the opportunities of a free operating system and open source haven't brought forth any Alan Kays or Charles Moores or Jef Raskins. I give Stallman credit for following his own vision with Emacs, but admittedly that project was started well over a decade before the Linux kernel was written.
It is also worth noting that the emotion engine contains three complete processors that can run in parallel, plus another two lesser processing units that aren't counted in this total of three. That's all on one chip. This isn't counting the graphics chip at all.
The crash of 1984 wasn't just a console crash. It brought down home computers with it and just about killed the coin-op market. The only home computer to really survive was the C64, and it was pretty wobbly for a while, but managed to come into its own a few years later.
An excellent, excellent piece. This is one of those articles that cuts through the all the rah-rah nonsense and puts forth a truthful view of Linux and the community surrounding it. I've never understood why anything less than "We're the best! Bill Gates is gonna go down!" isn't tolerated, but it certainly should be.
Perhaps his best point is why it's important for Linux advocates to learn their history. The peculiar dichotomy is that Linux is viewed as the up and coming technology for the techno-savy generation, but in actuality:
1. Linux is really just a whole lot like UNIX, which people in their fifties were programming 20+ years ago.
2. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the entire UNIX bulkiness and clunkiness were on their way out. UNIX was on all the "What's out for the nineties" lists. And there was a reason for that: hacks like Xwindows and csh just felt so backward at the time, especially next to an Amiga or Macintosh.
I'm not anti-Linux. I run RedHat 5.2 at home, and I read Slashdot daily. But I'm honest about Linux, and I also use Windows (and a Mac). Getting sucked into the "Linux will rock your world!" mentality is a bad thing. Linux is better than some things, worse than others. You have to be truthful about that or you'll turn into a raving loon.
Many posters are making a fundamental mistake in thinking that ease of use is something that's needed for "average folks" (i.e. grandma and grandpa). Thing is, tech-heads want ease of use too. Maybe 3r33t MP3 collektorz think that arcane is better, but most intelligent computer users and coders would rather have something that's easier to use as well. We can only fool ourselves for so long into thinking that 1970s sysadmin tech is where it's at.
Speaking as a game programmer, these advances are coming so fast that there's no time to concentrate on (1) pushing the limits of what a current generation of cards can do, and (2) dealing with card-specific features.
On the first point, there's not enough time to sit down and focus on where all the rendering time is going in a complex game. Well, more like there are so many card and driver combos out there that the best we can do is try to write generic code and have it work across the board. If we could focus on one card, say a Voodoo 2, then we could push the limits of that chipset out beyond what people only expect from a GeForce. But there's no time for that, so we plow ahead using about 50% of each card's capabilities for the three month window until the next card comes along.
On the second point, 3dfx, Nvidia, Matrox and ATI (and S3, and...) are all branching out into odd and card specific feature sets. 3dfx has their T-buffer. Nvidia has "8 lights per triangle hardware lighting." Matrox has a certain kind of hardware bump-mapping. ATI has all sorts of wacky stuff. The bottom line becomes "Do we want to just focus on writing a great game, or do we want to spend an extra six months of development so we can support special features of all these cards that were considered hot eight months ago when we were still pre-beta?" And tacking in special Matrox-only support, for example, is hell on QA. It makes a lot of sense to ignore such features, unless we're getting a bundle from the card company to cover us for the trouble.
Any game that uses OpenGL for more than a rasterization-only API automatically uses geometry acceleration on cards/drivers that support it.
Realistically, the boost is less than you may think. An average game doesn't spend more than 15% of a frame doing transformation. So the Ultra-Fast-Geometry-Accelerator-of-the-Future is going to buy you a 15% speedup in that case. The other issue is that geometry acceleration is only useful when you pump the data straight to the card and don't want or need intermediate results. For example, you'll have to transform points (one way or another) to do collision detection against instanced objects. But you can't use the geometry acceleration in that case, because the CPU needs the results.
Geometry acceleration is good, but it's not the panacea that many people are expecting it to be.
The issue as I see it is not hardware support and what not but the user. Not everyone should own a computer. It's that simple. Some people can't drive. I don't want these people using a computer. Give them a limited function internet appliance and let them be on their way. In those cases, the hardware is tuned to work explicitly before it goes out the door of the factory. I think it's wonderful that computers have been pushed into the mainstream and that people WANT to use them but as much as apple or microsoft or even the eazel people would have you believe, a better interface isn't the answer. The desktop interface paradigm may change and SHOULD change but we need better educated users.
This is completely off base. On a superficial level, your analogy is wrong. Most anyone can drive, but it isn't necessary to know how to replace a fuel injector or a muffler in order to do so. Some people can, but does that mean that other people are stupid and shouldn't drive?
More fundamentally, you're dividing the world into techies and grandmas and are focused on the different ways each of those groups uses computers. That's not the issue. The point is that Linux is still too much hassle for the techies who don't want to waste their time in that way. Car enthusiasts may like to fiddle, but that doesn't mean they want to own cars that are more difficult to maintain than everyone else, just to show how cool they are. And yet that's the Linux philosophy.
Look, there's a *reason* that in any group of knowledgable tech-heads that most of them would rather just work with Windows--and this is even though they don't like Windows. It's because all the sysadmin headaches of Linux, all the do-it-yourself issues, all the compatibility problems, they just don't seem worth it for a lot of people. These people are not stupid; they're quite often brilliant. It Linux *were* clearly superior to Windows then the techies would be switching over just for the sheer joy of it, and you'd never find a hardcore programming shop using anything but Linux. But this isn't the case. Linux is only worth it if you want to make a hobby of twiddling and downloading and configuring instead of writing code. That's something that you can do if you're a student, or if you just like the twiddling, but it's a deterrent otherwise. Let me clarify that this isn't the "keep away the computer newbies" barrier everyone seems so fond of, but something that's keeping away great technical minds. That's the hurdle Linux can't get over; that's why it isn't taking over the desktop. It's a weird philisophical issue that's at fault, not the underlying technology.
While a port of Office would be fine, there's much work to be done before the typical Linux environment is as comfortable as Windows. I have to admit that while I love the stability of Linux, it still makes me feel like I'm living in the 1970s. That's how I felt almost ten years ago when I used UNIX workstations during the day, and the general consensus was "UNIX is a dying dinosaur."
I'm still unable to get sound working on my Dell machine running RedHat 5.2. I still get "pixel trash" using the latest Bashee driver for X that I can find. And I've started tiring of having to spend hours grabbing constanst updates for this part of the system and that. I would much prefer using Linux all the time, but it isn't there yet. I'd run a web site on a Linux server in a minute, but I sheepishly have to admit that it's still a clunker as an alternative to Windows for most everyday tasks.
Yes, Intel is a Big Bad Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation. And the x86 archietecture has had a deservedly bad reputation since before most Slashdotters were born. What's humorous to me is that the teeming geek masses have gotten behind the AMD like it's a real alternative to the situation. AMD is not exactly some guy hacking hardware in his house for the good of the people. The Athlon is still an implementation of the x86 architecture.
The advantage of AMD is that they're providing an alternative to Intel, but the victory is slight. AMD isn't running down a new road that will give them a big advantage over Intel; both companies are pacing each other, and AMD has to keep the prices down in order to get anyone to look. Companies like Transmeta have a bigger opportunity, because they can do things that Intel simply can't do, like running at 1/25 the power consumption and 1/10 the price. Not that I'm a Transmeta fanatic, thank you, but I think they're the type of company that could have a more notable effect on the future of CPUs.
It's apparent that Nanosaur was an experiment in 3D game programming that focused on the tech, not the game (and, relevantly, the tech was mostly QuickDraw 3D based). It's very impressive that one person did this in his spare time, but it isn't something you'll want to ever spend more than an hour or two with. Remember, this game was given away free for the Macintosh, because the author knew it wasn't enough for a commercial product. A port to Linux would be an interesting comparison of the state of Linux 3D vs. Macintosh 3D.
Mical and Needle did have a hand in the Amiga, but they didn't design that system. There's gotten to be an Amiga -> Lynx -> 3DO myth behind these two fellows for some reason. They *did* design the latter two systems, but the architect of the Amiga was Jay Miner. He came up with the plan, the philosophy. He also did the video chipset design for the Atari 800, and there's definitely a philosophical connection between those two machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Could we give up on the symlinks issue please? The original Slashdot mention of that was a knee-jerk reaction. Microsoft is talking about something beyond that (i.e. automatically determining when files are copies of each other and replacing one with a link to the other; think reference counting for files).
Lots of people are saying "but a virus needs root access" and so on. In the olden days of yore, only a few sysadmins had root access. Mere users had to install software in their home directories, or they had to ask a sysadmin to put it in a global location. Things are much different now, with almost every Linux user being his or her own sysadmin. Every time someone grabs a new kernel, a new version of GNOME or KDE, a new version of gcc, a new video card driver, or just about any software, that person becomes root to do the installation. It would be relatively easy to upload a trojan horse claiming to be so-and-so and thousands of people would download it, switch to root, and run it. Then something could be installed in the .bashrc file for any user--or in the crontab--for example, and only the very hardcore are going to realize it. And that's just a simple case.
UNIX was poised to die out in the late 1980s. That OS was floundering on the professional desktop in workstations--back when that meant something other than a PC--from Sun and the now-defunct Apollo. But the general UNIXy environment and Xwindows just felt so clunky next to something lighter weight; it looked like some form of personal computer was a good alternative.
Unfortunately, as personal computers became more complex, they also became more unreliable. If Windows 3.0 crashed and you could just hit a button and be back to work in three seconds, then no one would have cared. But you had to sit through an unbearable two minute boot sequence. Networking was messy. Arcane INI files were just as bad as anything from the seventies. As reliability dropped, UNIX began looking more and more attractive. It was still butt ugly, but at least it worked.
By now, we should have something better. We've had an additional ten years to deal with the problem. We should have something very small and very stable and very easy to take care of. A computer should be able to reboot as fast as a calculator. We shouldn't have to deal with driver issues and such as much as we do. But it didn't happen. PCs got faster and more varied, but nothing improved in the reliability or simplicity department. And now, to our horror, UNIX is looking like the simpler alternative. No one would have believed it.
Bad example, I think.
No. If you want to record your own Dark Side of the Moon, then you get permission and pay royalties. The people who rip off game designs because they can't think of anything better don't want to do this. They just whine that they have the right to swipe the idea.
The first electronic book I ran across was Halcyon Days, back in 1997. It comes as a bundle of HTML files, but still gets sent out on diskette (which is cute in a retro sorta way :)
are we going to let mega-corps decide how the world is run, or are we going to do it ourselves.
This is fine. But if you're honest in your stand against "mega-corps" then you:
* Can't watch TV.
* Can't watch movies.
* Can't drink any well known soft drink (Coke, Pepsi, etc).
* Can't buy most prepackaged foods.
* Can't eat at fast food chains.
* Can't buy clothes from a chain store.
* Can't buy a car.
* Can't travel by airplane.
* Can't take Tylenol.
etc.
Let's look at Hasrbro's current lawsuit, in which they're cracking down on games that they see as rip offs of games they own the rights to (old Atari titles like Asteroids and Centipede and such). Ignoring the fact that those games are twenty years old, here's the general opposition to this argument seems to go:
Hasbro lawyer: Your game is a clone of Asteroids. We own the rights to that game. Please stop producing it.
Guy who wrote an Asteroids clone: You can't copyright a game concept! I wrote this game, and it's mine.
Lawyer: It's obvious that your game is indeed Asteroids and not an original work. You could have come up with any idea in the world, yet you chose Asteroids.
Guy: It's not exactly Asteroids! Look, my asteroids are textured, and I added power-ups!
Lawyer: You have a rotating ship on the screen that shoots at rocks that break up into smaller rocks when shot. When you shoot the smallest rocks they disappear. A little enemy ship comes out every so often and shoots at you; nothing else shoots in the game except you and that ship. There's a hyperspace key. You move by pressing Thrust and then you drift around. This is your design?
Guy: Information should be free!
Lawyer: Look, if you formed a band and recorded your own version of Dark Side of the Moon, track for track, do you think that's legitimate unles you get permission?
Guy: Uh, but that's different. CDs are harder to make than games.
Lawyer: Legal issues aside, the bottom line here is that you need to think for yourself. You could write lots of games about asteroids and space ships and such without being Asteroids. There are unlimited ideas out there, why did you have to pick the one that's obviously been done by someone else? The web is full of people who think they have the right to publish their own Star Trek novelizations and create CG South Park episodes. Why? Wouldn't it just be better to do your own thing?
Guy: But I'm just a coder who doesn't have any good ideas!
Lawyer: Exactly.
Whoops, here's the correct URL: Music based on Pi"
Right here. Scroll down a bit for Pi, musical compositions based on pi (or down a little bit more for "Two Works"). No kidding. This is from an underground Seattle musician, so you'll be the only person in town with it :) I heard it a few years ago; tis good. Odd, yes, but good.
As always, the justification of "everyone should own everything" comes across mostly as "I deserve to get everything free." When someone rails against music publishers, the underlying goal is to be able to get music without having to pay $15 for a CD. When someone rails against look and feel copyrights, it's usually because he or she wants someone to be able to write a freebie clone of the same thing. When a game author decries Hasbro's recent lawsuit, it's because he or she wants to be able to write an Asteroids rip-off and be able to stake a claim as rightful author.
I agree, software patents are goofy. DIVX was dumb. DVD encryption annoying. But remember, the point of opposing such things is not to get free stuff. Yeah! Movies should be free! Comics should be free! Books should be free! These are the cries of college students without much money, not well thought out opinions. They *could* be well thought out opinions, but that's not what they come across as.
In principle you're right, but not in this case. The features of flashy video cards and CPUs are only providing a perceived benefit for a small minority (mostly hardcore game players that like to upgrade), and even in those cases the benefit may be non-existent. The Katmai instructions of the Pentium III are not doing *anything* for most PC owners except increasing the power consumption. You could replace 90% of all CPUs that are faster than 200 MHz with 200 MHz CPUs and the owners would not notice the difference. Games, high-end rendering packages, and highly intensive numerical applications (i.e. solving huge systems of equations, breaking encryption), are exceptions. So the bottom line is that we're greatly increasing power consumption for the benefit of a few. In that case, it makes sense to bend games to fit the norm, instead of taking a peculiar case and making it the norm.
There are great advantages to having a 200MHz 32-bit CPU over a 4MHz 8-bit CPU in terms of ease of development. But those same advantages are not true of going from 200MHz to 800MHz. If you're hungry, you'd rather have a good meal than a twinkie. But there's no sense in ordering three times more food than you can possibly eat. That's the point we're at with CPUs.
The reason I can believe that a Bill Joy scenario could occur is that the technology age has, in many ways, eradicated common sense beliefs of the past. People are making mistakes on a grand scale all the time, but it's excusable because, hey, it's technology! We need to advance at any cost!
Consider the fanaticism a huge number of people show for upcoming CPUs and video cards--e.g. Athlon, GeForce, etc. These fans don't really have a deep understanding of where the performance is coming from, or to what extent a current CPU or video card can or has been pushed. The view is "newer = better," and that's enough to fuel raging passion. This is causing people to upgrade left and right and increase the base level of machines available. Now we have 500 MHz Pentium III machines with ATI Rage 128 video cards being used for airline scheduling where a 486 would be sufficient. For absolutely no benefit, power consumption is maybe 10-50x higher than it needs to be. So even in this era of supposedly increased conservation and environmental awareness, we're just pointlessly wasting power and don't care.
That's the kind of thing that sneaks up on you without realizing it. Twenty years ago, no one would have believed such gross negligence would have been possible. The core of most "technology will doom us" arguments is that we advance without thinking. And that's exactly what we've proven ourselves to do, especially in recent years.
I understand that Scott doesn't want to talk about exact sales figures and such, but have this strong suspcion that they're very low. His avoidance of this issue only makes this more apparent. I'll say up front and repeat myself later that this isn't a bad thing, but it puts the Linux game market into a better perspective.
Most games for Windows sell a whole lot fewer copies than most people realize. Yes, Unreal and Quake 3 and Who Wants to be a Millionaire do very well, but even games that seem to be high profile--by getting endless mentions at Blue's News for example--often have numbers that may be shockingly low if you're not expecting it. Selling less than 30,000 copies of something with a lot of press isn't at all uncommon. Heck, if something sells more than 50,000 then it's doing incredibly well. So let's consider something that gets good reviews and lots of press and sells 30,000 copies. This is with ads in all the PC magazines and lots of web presence. How many copies do you think are going to be sold for Linux? Yes, there are many people using Linux, but remember that a good portion of them are either of the "software should be free" school or else they're literally in school and would rather get free stuff than pay $50 for a boxed game. Even aside, I think that if an average Loki title sells a thousand copies than that would be surprisingly good. Loki small; that will keep them in business; but the Linux game market may not bursting at the seams in the way that many people think it is.
Linux is successful because it went with the tried and true solutions rather than attempting to be innovative. If Linus had done something experimental and wacky, then he wouldn't have been able to leverage off of twenty years of UNIX tool development. Other people have written their own operating systems, or are attempting to, but in general you never hear about them because, while they may have technically succeeded, they don't have gcc and vi and emacs and Ghostscript and LaTeX and Xwindows and Mozilla and such.
Most high profile Linux-based open source projects are attempts to bring something from Windows or the Macintosh over to Linux. KDE and Gnome are heavily influenced by Windows. The Free Pascal and Lazarus projects have been attempting to clone Delphi. The Gimp is an attempt to outdo Photoshop. There are several projects trying to clone Microsoft Office. Code Crusader is cloning the CodeWarrior-style IDE. There are attempts to clone games like Civilization and old retro classics. None of this is bad! But almost never do you run across an open source developer with his own concept of what the future will be like. In some ways I find that fascinating, that the opportunities of a free operating system and open source haven't brought forth any Alan Kays or Charles Moores or Jef Raskins. I give Stallman credit for following his own vision with Emacs, but admittedly that project was started well over a decade before the Linux kernel was written.
It is also worth noting that the emotion engine contains three complete processors that can run in parallel, plus another two lesser processing units that aren't counted in this total of three. That's all on one chip. This isn't counting the graphics chip at all.
The crash of 1984 wasn't just a console crash. It brought down home computers with it and just about killed the coin-op market. The only home computer to really survive was the C64, and it was pretty wobbly for a while, but managed to come into its own a few years later.
An excellent, excellent piece. This is one of those articles that cuts through the all the rah-rah nonsense and puts forth a truthful view of Linux and the community surrounding it. I've never understood why anything less than "We're the best! Bill Gates is gonna go down!" isn't tolerated, but it certainly should be.
Perhaps his best point is why it's important for Linux advocates to learn their history. The peculiar dichotomy is that Linux is viewed as the up and coming technology for the techno-savy generation, but in actuality:
1. Linux is really just a whole lot like UNIX, which people in their fifties were programming 20+ years ago.
2. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the entire UNIX bulkiness and clunkiness were on their way out. UNIX was on all the "What's out for the nineties" lists. And there was a reason for that: hacks like Xwindows and csh just felt so backward at the time, especially next to an Amiga or Macintosh.
I'm not anti-Linux. I run RedHat 5.2 at home, and I read Slashdot daily. But I'm honest about Linux, and I also use Windows (and a Mac). Getting sucked into the "Linux will rock your world!" mentality is a bad thing. Linux is better than some things, worse than others. You have to be truthful about that or you'll turn into a raving loon.
Many posters are making a fundamental mistake in thinking that ease of use is something that's needed for "average folks" (i.e. grandma and grandpa). Thing is, tech-heads want ease of use too. Maybe 3r33t MP3 collektorz think that arcane is better, but most intelligent computer users and coders would rather have something that's easier to use as well. We can only fool ourselves for so long into thinking that 1970s sysadmin tech is where it's at.
Speaking as a game programmer, these advances are coming so fast that there's no time to concentrate on (1) pushing the limits of what a current generation of cards can do, and (2) dealing with card-specific features.
On the first point, there's not enough time to sit down and focus on where all the rendering time is going in a complex game. Well, more like there are so many card and driver combos out there that the best we can do is try to write generic code and have it work across the board. If we could focus on one card, say a Voodoo 2, then we could push the limits of that chipset out beyond what people only expect from a GeForce. But there's no time for that, so we plow ahead using about 50% of each card's capabilities for the three month window until the next card comes along.
On the second point, 3dfx, Nvidia, Matrox and ATI (and S3, and...) are all branching out into odd and card specific feature sets. 3dfx has their T-buffer. Nvidia has "8 lights per triangle hardware lighting." Matrox has a certain kind of hardware bump-mapping. ATI has all sorts of wacky stuff. The bottom line becomes "Do we want to just focus on writing a great game, or do we want to spend an extra six months of development so we can support special features of all these cards that were considered hot eight months ago when we were still pre-beta?" And tacking in special Matrox-only support, for example, is hell on QA. It makes a lot of sense to ignore such features, unless we're getting a bundle from the card company to cover us for the trouble.
Any game that uses OpenGL for more than a rasterization-only API automatically uses geometry acceleration on cards/drivers that support it.
Realistically, the boost is less than you may think. An average game doesn't spend more than 15% of a frame doing transformation. So the Ultra-Fast-Geometry-Accelerator-of-the-Future is going to buy you a 15% speedup in that case. The other issue is that geometry acceleration is only useful when you pump the data straight to the card and don't want or need intermediate results. For example, you'll have to transform points (one way or another) to do collision detection against instanced objects. But you can't use the geometry acceleration in that case, because the CPU needs the results.
Geometry acceleration is good, but it's not the panacea that many people are expecting it to be.
The issue as I see it is not hardware support and what not but the user. Not everyone should own a computer. It's that simple. Some people can't drive. I don't want these people using a computer. Give them a limited function internet appliance and let them be on their way. In those cases, the hardware is tuned to work explicitly before it goes out the door of the factory. I think it's wonderful that computers have been pushed into the mainstream and that people WANT to use them but as much as apple or microsoft or even the eazel people would have you believe, a better interface isn't the answer. The desktop interface paradigm may change and SHOULD change but we need better educated users.
This is completely off base. On a superficial level, your analogy is wrong. Most anyone can drive, but it isn't necessary to know how to replace a fuel injector or a muffler in order to do so. Some people can, but does that mean that other people are stupid and shouldn't drive?
More fundamentally, you're dividing the world into techies and grandmas and are focused on the different ways each of those groups uses computers. That's not the issue. The point is that Linux is still too much hassle for the techies who don't want to waste their time in that way. Car enthusiasts may like to fiddle, but that doesn't mean they want to own cars that are more difficult to maintain than everyone else, just to show how cool they are. And yet that's the Linux philosophy.
Look, there's a *reason* that in any group of knowledgable tech-heads that most of them would rather just work with Windows--and this is even though they don't like Windows. It's because all the sysadmin headaches of Linux, all the do-it-yourself issues, all the compatibility problems, they just don't seem worth it for a lot of people. These people are not stupid; they're quite often brilliant. It Linux *were* clearly superior to Windows then the techies would be switching over just for the sheer joy of it, and you'd never find a hardcore programming shop using anything but Linux. But this isn't the case. Linux is only worth it if you want to make a hobby of twiddling and downloading and configuring instead of writing code. That's something that you can do if you're a student, or if you just like the twiddling, but it's a deterrent otherwise. Let me clarify that this isn't the "keep away the computer newbies" barrier everyone seems so fond of, but something that's keeping away great technical minds. That's the hurdle Linux can't get over; that's why it isn't taking over the desktop. It's a weird philisophical issue that's at fault, not the underlying technology.
While a port of Office would be fine, there's much work to be done before the typical Linux environment is as comfortable as Windows. I have to admit that while I love the stability of Linux, it still makes me feel like I'm living in the 1970s. That's how I felt almost ten years ago when I used UNIX workstations during the day, and the general consensus was "UNIX is a dying dinosaur."
I'm still unable to get sound working on my Dell machine running RedHat 5.2. I still get "pixel trash" using the latest Bashee driver for X that I can find. And I've started tiring of having to spend hours grabbing constanst updates for this part of the system and that. I would much prefer using Linux all the time, but it isn't there yet. I'd run a web site on a Linux server in a minute, but I sheepishly have to admit that it's still a clunker as an alternative to Windows for most everyday tasks.
Yes, Intel is a Big Bad Multi-Billion Dollar Corporation. And the x86 archietecture has had a deservedly bad reputation since before most Slashdotters were born. What's humorous to me is that the teeming geek masses have gotten behind the AMD like it's a real alternative to the situation. AMD is not exactly some guy hacking hardware in his house for the good of the people. The Athlon is still an implementation of the x86 architecture.
The advantage of AMD is that they're providing an alternative to Intel, but the victory is slight. AMD isn't running down a new road that will give them a big advantage over Intel; both companies are pacing each other, and AMD has to keep the prices down in order to get anyone to look. Companies like Transmeta have a bigger opportunity, because they can do things that Intel simply can't do, like running at 1/25 the power consumption and 1/10 the price. Not that I'm a Transmeta fanatic, thank you, but I think they're the type of company that could have a more notable effect on the future of CPUs.
It's apparent that Nanosaur was an experiment in 3D game programming that focused on the tech, not the game (and, relevantly, the tech was mostly QuickDraw 3D based). It's very impressive that one person did this in his spare time, but it isn't something you'll want to ever spend more than an hour or two with. Remember, this game was given away free for the Macintosh, because the author knew it wasn't enough for a commercial product. A port to Linux would be an interesting comparison of the state of Linux 3D vs. Macintosh 3D.
Mical and Needle did have a hand in the Amiga, but they didn't design that system. There's gotten to be an Amiga -> Lynx -> 3DO myth behind these two fellows for some reason. They *did* design the latter two systems, but the architect of the Amiga was Jay Miner. He came up with the plan, the philosophy. He also did the video chipset design for the Atari 800, and there's definitely a philosophical connection between those two machines.