Considering that barely any games run perfectly under WINE without some sort of manual tweaking, and that most games don't run acceptably well even with, is it really time to be pushing for DX10 support?
A brief overview of some of the games I'm likely to play, and their compatibility (I define "tweaking" to mean "must install Windows DLLs and/or make registry/settings changes." In other words, won't run out-of-box):
1) Warcraft III: Works playably if DirectX is disabled (force to OpenGL) but umpteen issues make it an unpleasant experience. For example, don't ALT-TAB, WINE will destroy all textuers.
2) Supreme Commander: No audio without significant tweaking. Unplayable without graphical tweaks. When you get it to run, graphical glitching, inability to select higher quality modes, almost unplayable performance.
3) Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, any other Source game: Runs unplayably slowly. A patch exists to resolve the issue at the expense of graphical glitching.
4) F.E.A.R. 2: Will not run without graphical tweaks, then it works with acceptable performance and no graphical issues. Mouse cursor may be stuck on-screen, issues with audio mixing makes voices hard to hear.
5) Natural-Selection, other Half-Life 1 (GoldSrc) games: Microphone quality issues, random crashing, host of other minor bugs, but generally works well.
6) BioShock: Frequent crashing, severe graphical issues, requires extensive tweaking to run, essentially unplayable.
So here we are, six games that cover OpenGL (Half-Life 1), DX7 (Warcraft III), DX9 (SupCom, Source games, BioShock, FEAR 2, etc.). Some like BioShock can run under DX10, but their unplayability under DX9 makes that moot.
Out of these six games that I'd like to play, only three are playable without recompiling WINE. Of those, only one (HL1-based games) work without tweaks, and it's still not perfect.
So, of my six games, none work perfectly, and only half can actually be played. And as a gamer playing a game for the first time, assuming I can even get it to work under WINE, I'll never really be sure if I'm seeing the game the way it was meant to be played, or if I'm experiencing some audio or graphical problems that I don't recognize (I wouldn't know if it wasn't supposed to be like that).
And they want to move on to DirectX 10 support? Damn it, how about you fix EXISTING APIs before moving on to new ones? Warcraft III is a DirectX 7 game, and runs so slowly by default that you have to switch it to OpenGL! If DirectX 7 still isn't working, why bother with DirectX 10?
RAID can increase throughput, but it can't reduce access latencies. Of course, if you can read two different things at the same time, that has a similar effect to halving the effective access time. But it'd take a lot of Raptors to get the effective access time down from ~7ms to ~0.1ms.
And because it's a general purpose Linux distribution powered at small low-power embedded devices, it has a practically non-existent market-share when compared to the likes of dd-wrt and Tomato. It's essentially completely unusable to anybody who doesn't know their way around a Linux box, and that rules out virtually the entire market of "people installing third-party firmware on home routers".
Then there's people like me, who DO know their way around a Linux console, but don't WANT to have to bother with the needless complexities of OpenWRT if a good UI will let me do what I want with a fraction the effort. Sure, I occasionally have to toss an IPTABLES rule into my WANUP script textbox in the UI, but for the most part, the UI does what I need.
If there were no Xbox, Halo would likely have come to its full fruition.
It ain't all peaches and cream.
It would have come to fruition as a Macintosh RTS game. Not much "fruition" going on there. Barely anybody would have played it considering that Apple's marketshare in 2001 was 2.48% and dropping (it wouldn't begin to recover until 2005). It would be a footnote, a fun modestly selling game like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Fun games that sold enough to support their producers but games that almost nobody has heard of outside the Macintosh community.
Depends on how long the recession in the US lasts. A quick check of inflation data for the US shows about 1% average for the last two months of 2008. So 3% is ahead of the game in that regard. But yes, at the very least your "investment" should be able to maintain its value.
Why would you need additional servers for expansion in a home server? We're talking about taking a very high-end rack mountable server and using it to replace what most of us are using an old Pentium 3 for.
As for spares, that doesn't make any sense. If the server is relatively new when it fails, it'll be under warranty. If it's no longer under warranty, you sold the other two servers earlier and have tons of cash from that for replacement parts.
I presume they're rack mountable. So they'd be huge. Even half-depth 1U servers are fairly large, full-depth 1U servers are enormous, and they only get bigger from there. Yes, they're very space efficient when racked, but they consume a ton of space when you've got them sitting on a table.
How do you achieve the visual effect, then? I know little of film production, but from what I understand, the basic technique is to place the squib beneath the outermost layer of cloth, and to score the cloth for easy tearing when the squib goes off.
I suppose you could put the squib against the outside of the costume, and then cover it with another piece of fabric on top of it to give the illusion that the cloth is being penetrated. That presupposes that washing the costumes removes the fake blood, though. On the other hand, if the cloth is black, most stains would probably be hidden after washing.
Except, then the Counter-Strike team was hired by Valve. And previously, the Team Fortress team was hired by valve. And then Day of Defeat team was hired by valve. And then the Narbacular Drop team was hired by valve.
There's a pattern here; even if Valve's executives aren't a "group of dedicated gamers", a large proportion of their best staff is. And those executives certainly have a pretty commendable attitude at running a business. They encourage community works (Black Mesa, for example, or this film project) where other large companies would squash them.
And how many other companies have a chief executive who not only encourages customers to e-mail him, but actually responds to many of them? Not enough.
I'd argue he should sell 16 and keep one for himself. While computers do rapidly depreciate in value, having a high-end server for home use can be nifty (so long as you keep it someplace where the noise won't bother you).
Not only that, but while physical hardware depreciates in value, money can appreciate in value.
Assuming values are in Canadian dollars (I know they're not, but just assume), and you stick them into a 2-year GIC (3% interest, ING Direct).
That nets you $22,544 after those two years, a $1,294 earnings. And with the current recession, that's almost certainly going to be way higher than inflation.
Drugs are not sold by hospitals. Drugs in hospitals are free. For prescriptions, people buy their drugs from a pharmacist. The province isn't the one purchasing those. Pricing has nothing to do with the province.
In fact, prices in Canada are controlled by a federal Government entity, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board:
People DO run the red lights. Because they don't slow down on yellow (yellow means green here), people don't decelerate when approaching a yellow light. So, because they don't decelerate, by the time the light turns red, it may either be too late to stop (meaning they pass the stop line 1-2 seconds after the light turns red and the "walk" signal may have appeared, or they just decide they don't feel like stopping and keep going.
You'd hardly have to run out into an intersection to get hit by a car in this scenario; you need only walk two or three feet from the sidewalk into the oncoming traffic lane. If you're on the far side of the intersection, that car may well be traveling through the intersection 3-4 seconds after the light turned red. If a pedestrian isn't paying attention to traffic and only to the walk signal, or worse, is hard of sight, this is a potentially fatal scenario. Not to mention drivers in the crossing street that wait for green and then accelerate (as they should) only to get tagged by a car entering the intersection after the light turned red...
Another pet peeve: how people seem to think it's OK to break the law and talk on cellphones. They're banned in cars without handsfree for a reason...
Sony is putting in a huge gamble here - first of all, without MS as a partner, they will need to develop their own graphics drivers or use whatever proprietary drivers Intel develops for them, which will make porting to other platforms a pain (if possible at all). MS is the only platform that has announced they are writing real time raytracing drivers (in the DX11 API due in March).
I really don't think that's relevant. Sony already uses OpenGL, but most games use middleware anyhow; the implementation specifics are of concern primarily to middleware developers (Epic, Valve, Id, CryTek, etc) rather than game developers.
Raytracing requires high memory bandwidth because it needs to be scene aware - that means Sony will likely be using the newest, most expensive memory there is (probably DDR4 or GDDR5 if Larrabee itself holds the scene). It is unlikely Larrabee can compete with dedicated rasterizers at rasterization, so raytracing is its only major plus.
They already use high-end graphics RAM in consoles, so that's not an issue. And Larrabee is designed to be a good rasterizer, not just a ray-tracer.
Developers will need to rewrite core libraries or purchase them. Want soft shadows? Buy it or re-develop in house because it isn't a default ray tracing feature and requires casting more (expensive) rays.
No change here, they already do. As I said, most game developers just license middleware. Few write their own graphics engines. Those that do expect to be able to recoup R&D costs by licensing the engine to others.
So far, Intel's demos have been at fairly low resolutions (like 512x512), and while that is theoretically scalable by processor, 1920x1080 (1080i) is nearly 8x that size.
Those demos were on general purpose processors. If Larrabee is a 32-core monster, then those 8x requirements aren't an issue.
I personally feel either Intel demonstrated something to Sony that the rest of us haven't seen or they pulled the sheet over on Sony by focusing on things ray tracing does well and avoiding things it does poorly (like showing lots of specular and avoiding diffuse lighting).
While I am interested in Larrabee, I highly doubt Sony would actually buy into it. I mean, they already dumped millions into their own similar and competing technology, Cell.
but most importantly, they don't actually do what they're supposed to do, and that is to increase road safety. psychologically, traffic cameras often turn the 3-light/red-yellow-green system into a 2-light system of just red & green. so you end up with people slamming on their brakes when the light turns yellow because they're afraid of getting a ticket. that's a lot more dangerous than lingering in the intersection when the light turns from yellow to red, which, though it might annoy you, won't actually cause any accidents (except when idiots treat intersections as drag strips).
In Montreal, we already have a two-light system. Virtually all motorists treat yellow lights as green, which means that people frequently run red lights because they didn't slow down even through the light was yellow long before they reached the intersection.
Because of this, it's not safe for pedestrians to enter the intersection as soon as the "walk" sign appears, because there's likely to still be cars who ignored the yellow light.
Combined with the fact that jaywalking is the norm in Montreal (and is expected), I'd rather have people slam on the breaks on a yellow light instead of completely ignoring them. Running red lights is such an incredibly common occurrence that it'd be a big improvement.
And I always wondered at the people who complain about red-light cameras. Because to me, that probably means that they regularly run red lights. A pet peeve of mine; I *wish* we had red-light cameras in Montreal.
Do they have some magically awesome chipset that has never graced the consumer market?
Yes, Larrabee. It's a massively-multicored x86 processor designed to act as a GPU (it has some fixed-function GPU stuff tacked on).
In effect, Intel intends to build a GPU powerful enough to get software rendering (and all the flexibility and power that brings) up to the same speed as hardware-accelerated rendering. Intel is also going to be providing OpenGL/Direct3D abstraction layers so that existing games can work.
Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.
I agree that it needs a lot of work, but it's also improving at a pretty decent clip. I tried it when I ran Ubuntu 8.04, and had a nightmare with the networking. By Ubuntu 8.10, the included version made networking a snap, making it easy to use host networking to simulate a device on my network.
Another roadblock that was fixed in those 6-months; the older version couldn't boot Ubuntu Server (I believe it was a matter of VirtualBox not supporting PXE), while the newer version can.
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Considering that barely any games run perfectly under WINE without some sort of manual tweaking, and that most games don't run acceptably well even with, is it really time to be pushing for DX10 support?
A brief overview of some of the games I'm likely to play, and their compatibility (I define "tweaking" to mean "must install Windows DLLs and/or make registry/settings changes." In other words, won't run out-of-box):
1) Warcraft III: Works playably if DirectX is disabled (force to OpenGL) but umpteen issues make it an unpleasant experience. For example, don't ALT-TAB, WINE will destroy all textuers.
2) Supreme Commander: No audio without significant tweaking. Unplayable without graphical tweaks. When you get it to run, graphical glitching, inability to select higher quality modes, almost unplayable performance.
3) Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, any other Source game: Runs unplayably slowly. A patch exists to resolve the issue at the expense of graphical glitching.
4) F.E.A.R. 2: Will not run without graphical tweaks, then it works with acceptable performance and no graphical issues. Mouse cursor may be stuck on-screen, issues with audio mixing makes voices hard to hear.
5) Natural-Selection, other Half-Life 1 (GoldSrc) games: Microphone quality issues, random crashing, host of other minor bugs, but generally works well.
6) BioShock: Frequent crashing, severe graphical issues, requires extensive tweaking to run, essentially unplayable.
So here we are, six games that cover OpenGL (Half-Life 1), DX7 (Warcraft III), DX9 (SupCom, Source games, BioShock, FEAR 2, etc.). Some like BioShock can run under DX10, but their unplayability under DX9 makes that moot.
Out of these six games that I'd like to play, only three are playable without recompiling WINE. Of those, only one (HL1-based games) work without tweaks, and it's still not perfect.
So, of my six games, none work perfectly, and only half can actually be played. And as a gamer playing a game for the first time, assuming I can even get it to work under WINE, I'll never really be sure if I'm seeing the game the way it was meant to be played, or if I'm experiencing some audio or graphical problems that I don't recognize (I wouldn't know if it wasn't supposed to be like that).
And they want to move on to DirectX 10 support? Damn it, how about you fix EXISTING APIs before moving on to new ones? Warcraft III is a DirectX 7 game, and runs so slowly by default that you have to switch it to OpenGL! If DirectX 7 still isn't working, why bother with DirectX 10?
RAID can increase throughput, but it can't reduce access latencies. Of course, if you can read two different things at the same time, that has a similar effect to halving the effective access time. But it'd take a lot of Raptors to get the effective access time down from ~7ms to ~0.1ms.
Then isn't a better question, "Did it work with mplayer"?
I believe the answer is no, but that's not obvious when talking about Silverlight/Moonlight.
WMP isn't written in Silverlight, so why would you expect WMP to run under Moonlight? Your question makes no sense.
And because it's a general purpose Linux distribution powered at small low-power embedded devices, it has a practically non-existent market-share when compared to the likes of dd-wrt and Tomato. It's essentially completely unusable to anybody who doesn't know their way around a Linux box, and that rules out virtually the entire market of "people installing third-party firmware on home routers".
Then there's people like me, who DO know their way around a Linux console, but don't WANT to have to bother with the needless complexities of OpenWRT if a good UI will let me do what I want with a fraction the effort. Sure, I occasionally have to toss an IPTABLES rule into my WANUP script textbox in the UI, but for the most part, the UI does what I need.
If there were no Xbox, Halo would likely have come to its full fruition.
It ain't all peaches and cream.
It would have come to fruition as a Macintosh RTS game. Not much "fruition" going on there. Barely anybody would have played it considering that Apple's marketshare in 2001 was 2.48% and dropping (it wouldn't begin to recover until 2005). It would be a footnote, a fun modestly selling game like Marathon or Escape Velocity. Fun games that sold enough to support their producers but games that almost nobody has heard of outside the Macintosh community.
BSD isn't dead, BSD is dying. There's a difference.
Depends on how long the recession in the US lasts. A quick check of inflation data for the US shows about 1% average for the last two months of 2008. So 3% is ahead of the game in that regard. But yes, at the very least your "investment" should be able to maintain its value.
Why would you need additional servers for expansion in a home server? We're talking about taking a very high-end rack mountable server and using it to replace what most of us are using an old Pentium 3 for.
As for spares, that doesn't make any sense. If the server is relatively new when it fails, it'll be under warranty. If it's no longer under warranty, you sold the other two servers earlier and have tons of cash from that for replacement parts.
I presume they're rack mountable. So they'd be huge. Even half-depth 1U servers are fairly large, full-depth 1U servers are enormous, and they only get bigger from there. Yes, they're very space efficient when racked, but they consume a ton of space when you've got them sitting on a table.
How do you achieve the visual effect, then? I know little of film production, but from what I understand, the basic technique is to place the squib beneath the outermost layer of cloth, and to score the cloth for easy tearing when the squib goes off.
I suppose you could put the squib against the outside of the costume, and then cover it with another piece of fabric on top of it to give the illusion that the cloth is being penetrated. That presupposes that washing the costumes removes the fake blood, though. On the other hand, if the cloth is black, most stains would probably be hidden after washing.
Squibs might come cheap, but the destruction of the costumes worn while using them doesn't (be it in time or money).
Except, then the Counter-Strike team was hired by Valve. And previously, the Team Fortress team was hired by valve. And then Day of Defeat team was hired by valve. And then the Narbacular Drop team was hired by valve.
There's a pattern here; even if Valve's executives aren't a "group of dedicated gamers", a large proportion of their best staff is. And those executives certainly have a pretty commendable attitude at running a business. They encourage community works (Black Mesa, for example, or this film project) where other large companies would squash them.
And how many other companies have a chief executive who not only encourages customers to e-mail him, but actually responds to many of them? Not enough.
Would the tax writeoff really be more than simply selling the hardware outright?
I'd argue he should sell 16 and keep one for himself. While computers do rapidly depreciate in value, having a high-end server for home use can be nifty (so long as you keep it someplace where the noise won't bother you).
Not only that, but while physical hardware depreciates in value, money can appreciate in value.
Assuming values are in Canadian dollars (I know they're not, but just assume), and you stick them into a 2-year GIC (3% interest, ING Direct).
That nets you $22,544 after those two years, a $1,294 earnings. And with the current recession, that's almost certainly going to be way higher than inflation.
Drugs are not sold by hospitals. Drugs in hospitals are free. For prescriptions, people buy their drugs from a pharmacist. The province isn't the one purchasing those. Pricing has nothing to do with the province.
In fact, prices in Canada are controlled by a federal Government entity, the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board:
http://www.pmprb-cepmb.gc.ca/
They set pricing limits. This has nothing to do with "huge bulk orders".
Aren't drugs already like 50% in Canada? So wouldn't a more meaningful gesture be to sell drugs for 25% of the price in Canada?
Three-quarters-off a $200 prescription is still $50. Not something that people living on a dollar or two a day can afford.
People DO run the red lights. Because they don't slow down on yellow (yellow means green here), people don't decelerate when approaching a yellow light. So, because they don't decelerate, by the time the light turns red, it may either be too late to stop (meaning they pass the stop line 1-2 seconds after the light turns red and the "walk" signal may have appeared, or they just decide they don't feel like stopping and keep going.
You'd hardly have to run out into an intersection to get hit by a car in this scenario; you need only walk two or three feet from the sidewalk into the oncoming traffic lane. If you're on the far side of the intersection, that car may well be traveling through the intersection 3-4 seconds after the light turned red. If a pedestrian isn't paying attention to traffic and only to the walk signal, or worse, is hard of sight, this is a potentially fatal scenario. Not to mention drivers in the crossing street that wait for green and then accelerate (as they should) only to get tagged by a car entering the intersection after the light turned red...
Another pet peeve: how people seem to think it's OK to break the law and talk on cellphones. They're banned in cars without handsfree for a reason...
Sony is putting in a huge gamble here - first of all, without MS as a partner, they will need to develop their own graphics drivers or use whatever proprietary drivers Intel develops for them, which will make porting to other platforms a pain (if possible at all). MS is the only platform that has announced they are writing real time raytracing drivers (in the DX11 API due in March).
I really don't think that's relevant. Sony already uses OpenGL, but most games use middleware anyhow; the implementation specifics are of concern primarily to middleware developers (Epic, Valve, Id, CryTek, etc) rather than game developers.
Raytracing requires high memory bandwidth because it needs to be scene aware - that means Sony will likely be using the newest, most expensive memory there is (probably DDR4 or GDDR5 if Larrabee itself holds the scene). It is unlikely Larrabee can compete with dedicated rasterizers at rasterization, so raytracing is its only major plus.
They already use high-end graphics RAM in consoles, so that's not an issue. And Larrabee is designed to be a good rasterizer, not just a ray-tracer.
Developers will need to rewrite core libraries or purchase them. Want soft shadows? Buy it or re-develop in house because it isn't a default ray tracing feature and requires casting more (expensive) rays.
No change here, they already do. As I said, most game developers just license middleware. Few write their own graphics engines. Those that do expect to be able to recoup R&D costs by licensing the engine to others.
So far, Intel's demos have been at fairly low resolutions (like 512x512), and while that is theoretically scalable by processor, 1920x1080 (1080i) is nearly 8x that size.
Those demos were on general purpose processors. If Larrabee is a 32-core monster, then those 8x requirements aren't an issue.
I personally feel either Intel demonstrated something to Sony that the rest of us haven't seen or they pulled the sheet over on Sony by focusing on things ray tracing does well and avoiding things it does poorly (like showing lots of specular and avoiding diffuse lighting).
While I am interested in Larrabee, I highly doubt Sony would actually buy into it. I mean, they already dumped millions into their own similar and competing technology, Cell.
but most importantly, they don't actually do what they're supposed to do, and that is to increase road safety. psychologically, traffic cameras often turn the 3-light/red-yellow-green system into a 2-light system of just red & green. so you end up with people slamming on their brakes when the light turns yellow because they're afraid of getting a ticket. that's a lot more dangerous than lingering in the intersection when the light turns from yellow to red, which, though it might annoy you, won't actually cause any accidents (except when idiots treat intersections as drag strips).
In Montreal, we already have a two-light system. Virtually all motorists treat yellow lights as green, which means that people frequently run red lights because they didn't slow down even through the light was yellow long before they reached the intersection.
Because of this, it's not safe for pedestrians to enter the intersection as soon as the "walk" sign appears, because there's likely to still be cars who ignored the yellow light.
Combined with the fact that jaywalking is the norm in Montreal (and is expected), I'd rather have people slam on the breaks on a yellow light instead of completely ignoring them. Running red lights is such an incredibly common occurrence that it'd be a big improvement.
And I always wondered at the people who complain about red-light cameras. Because to me, that probably means that they regularly run red lights. A pet peeve of mine; I *wish* we had red-light cameras in Montreal.
Do they have some magically awesome chipset that has never graced the consumer market?
Yes, Larrabee. It's a massively-multicored x86 processor designed to act as a GPU (it has some fixed-function GPU stuff tacked on).
In effect, Intel intends to build a GPU powerful enough to get software rendering (and all the flexibility and power that brings) up to the same speed as hardware-accelerated rendering. Intel is also going to be providing OpenGL/Direct3D abstraction layers so that existing games can work.
Larrabee is expected to at least be competitive with nVidia/AMD's stuff, although it might not be until the second generation product before they're on equal footing.
Huh? I never said anything about Xen, I was discussing the progress of VirtualBox under Ubuntu...
I agree that it needs a lot of work, but it's also improving at a pretty decent clip. I tried it when I ran Ubuntu 8.04, and had a nightmare with the networking. By Ubuntu 8.10, the included version made networking a snap, making it easy to use host networking to simulate a device on my network.
Another roadblock that was fixed in those 6-months; the older version couldn't boot Ubuntu Server (I believe it was a matter of VirtualBox not supporting PXE), while the newer version can.