ATi and anyone else that wants to make a DX compatible graphics board would be able to run the games.
The XBOX 1 uses D3D as it's 3D gaming API. It's not terribly specific to nVidia. Sure, they basically made the Xbox, but just the same it's D3D. After all, nVidia did work with Microsoft to create D3D in the first place.
It was just a possibility. If the Xbox2 uses a compatibile D3D/DX layer with Loghorn, then this is sure a possibility.
If Microsoft released an Xbox2 that could run the same games as your Loghorn Windows PC, and Vice Versa, it seems to me that game producers could see this as a way to get into two markets with one product.
It seems to me that from reading this article they may be planning on compatibility between Loghorn and Xbox2.
Standard Controller, possibility of running games from CD, centralized game management. Since the Xbox is basically a PC, and the games are basically Windows games using DirectX, this isn't a stretch of the imagination.
Buy one game, and run it on your Xbox2 or your PC. Play online with people running Xbox2's and you can use your PC, or vice versa. With a standard PC "gamepad" it would be the same type of controls.
I don't think this would be a terrible idea, but it sure would push game developers more to a "windows only" choice of platforms, which isn't really great. I'm still hoping for more games on Linux.
Itanium doesn't appear to be aimed for anything besides high end servers. I mean, the CPU's are prohibitively expensive.
It doesn't seem as though Intel was planning on going 64-bit in the Desktop/small server market anytime soon. And right now it seems as though they are going to just wait and see what happens with AMD's offerings.
As much as I have enjoyed low-cost and high-performance computers with AMD CPU's over the last few years, I don't want to see AMD gain the "intel" position over the Desktop market, either. The first thing a company does when they are in control is raise their prices.
Yea no doubt. I think x86-64 is a good idea. I mean, the x86 technology isn't the fastest, it's no the most effecient, but it works and it's market share is ridiculously large.
x86-64 ia a logical step. It allows us to be 100% compatible with the hundreds of thousands of software packages that exist today, as well as 64-bit software.
As technologies progress, and the Mhz keep on getting pumped up, the performance hit by staying compatible becomes less of an issue. Obviously the Athlon64/Opteron is not meant to replace high-end SGI type supercomputer CPU's, it's meant to provide an upgrade path for x86 to 64-bit computing.
I just hope AMD can produce enough chips, and I hope they are affordable. Since it's AMD's intention to replace all their CPU products with the new 64 bit versions, my guess is that the prices will stay competitive with the 32-bit offerings by Intel. At least in the Desktop market.
> Just draw a cross hair on your regular glasses then.
That's such a whitty comment that I can't contain myself. Give yourself a pat on the back for such a job well done.
Seriously, did you come up with that all on your own? I mean, c'mon, don't expect me to believe that you could possibly come up with something so on-topic and intellectually stimulating.
I've been waiting for something like the glasses to hit the marked for a long time. They've been showing them in commercials and stuff forever.
My only fear is that when they do eventually hit the market, they will be outragously expensive ($2,000 is my guess..)
I'd also hope that they would have some less "fashionable" models.. Those are ugly as sin. And perhaps some that aren't sunglasses at all, but simply a HUD.
When they are new, they are pretty quiet (except for the 15k drives, those seem loud any time) but the 10k drives tend to start whining a lot quicker then the slower drives.
The drive heads on a hard disk actually touch the platters with little pads. Perhaps since the drive is spinning much quicker, they wear down quicker.
However, I've had some drives that whine like hell yet keep on chugging along happily, so it doesn't necessarily mean that the drive is on the way out.
Yea, I had almost forgotten about how PCI cards are "backwards" =)
And you're right; current draw-ups show 3GIO slots paired up with old PCI slots to provide both slots in one slot.
If the technology is sound and is adopted by manufacturers quickly, we'll see 3GIO (PCI Express) cards start to replace PCI fairly quickly. Obviously it will take a looong time before we see PCI fall into the shadows like the old ISA slot.
Yea I remember the full height drives. I remember (and it wasn't that long ago) that I went to a Computer Show and they had a 1GB full-height MFM drive for UNDER $1,000!
I used to have a bunch of Seagate ST-225a's, and those were pretty loud. 5.25" half height RLL/MFM drives (20MB with RLL controller, 30MB with MFM controller.)
And actually, most servers these days also stagger the startup of hard disks; at least any Compaq server does. When you have an RSO drive shelf with 30 drives in it, it sure takes awhile to start up.
Yea, it depends. I've had some monster IDE drives that are loud or resonate some very high pitched sounds.
At my last job though, we had a data center with probably over a thousand SCSI drives of various brands and speeds (either 10k or 15k.) in compaq servers.
The 10k drives were quite loud as a general rule, and I mean the ambient sound of the motor spinning the platters. However, the 15k drives (seagate) were outragous. Not only were they loud and untouchably hot, they had this funny sound like something was rattling around in them (they all did it, so I guess it's by-design rattling..)
When using dual displays with an nVidia card, Open GL performance is very poor when running GL apps on both screens. It's less then half the performance, as to be expected.
So have fun playing UT2003 at 5FPS - but ZERO PING YAHOO!
Maybe when we see PCI express we could drop two high performance graphics cards into a machine. Until then it's kinda slow sharing a single card.
I've never had a problem with PCI. Sure, it's becoming outdated in terms of speed, but overall PCI has served the PC industry very well.
The move from ISA to PCI as the general PC slot was a very good step forward. Gone were the hair-pulling configuration issues, jumper settings, and "ISA Plug'n'Play" that sometimes worked.
The next "PCI" for the PC will most likely be something like 3GIO, which was recently renamed to "PCI Express." It's a new bus, but it's software-compatible with PCI. Since PCI Express is a new hardware interface (new slots) it's not just for compatibility; it's because PCI works and there's no reason to change what you don't need to change.
At any rate, this topic is IDE drives. 10K SCSI drives tend to be pretty loud and run quite hot. I think that the 10k IDE drives will probably imploy some sort of technologies to keep them quiet and cooler, since IDE drives generally live on the desktop.
Okay I see what you mean; one client and all that. However, to access other IM services you still need to either set up your own Jabber server or connect to a public Jabber server that supports the gateways to the other IM services.
Either way, you're simply moving the connection issues associated with using an "unnofficial" IM client from one place to another.
I think I'll stick with Trillian Pro (It Just Works) until I have some time to fool with Jabber.
However, with Trillian, you only have one client too; it connects directly to AIM, ICQ, MSN, and YahooIM. One buddy list can contain all your buddies from all the different IM services.
Thanks for the tip on "Jabber" though I'm going to check it out now.
Trillian is very good. I'm hoping for a Linux version, although it doesn't seem to be a priority for them.
It works very well, it's lightweight, I've never had it crash on me. It supports AIM/ICQ/MSN/Y!/IRC all in one buddy list.
There's also some very nice skins that make it sleek.
I'm not sure what you mean by "We need a professionally written.." Trillian isn't professionally written? What proof of that do you have? In fact, what does that mean?
I don't agree. In my opinion, the traditional UNIX type (at least in the filesystem) access control is too simple. It ends up being a lot more complex in the long run when you need another level of granularity.
ACL's are very easy to maintain and it's not the fault of the system if the users of such a system misuse it. Any system will fail if it's not properly used.
It's relative. Sure, a toaster is a toaster, but "back in the good old days" I'm sure you could get a low quality toaster too.
But as far as technology.. Things are a lot more complicated now, in that respect. A car, with all it's polution controls, has a lot more that can go wrong with it. All the gadgets that consumers demand also add tons of stuff that can go wrong.
Sure, there's times when adding that extra screw may have helped something not break, but as a whole, in today's market, making a product that's of perfect quality just costs too much with the amount of competition.
You can get the high quality stuff. It will just cost you a good deal more money.
If a company puts out low quality crap, is the consumer going to purchase something else from them? With so much competition out there for most electronics, it doesn't really make much sense.
As for a product made only by one manufacturer, perhaps this could be true.. I just don't think this is the driving force behind flimsy products.
Seems that to me the reason we see low quality stuff is because it generally means they can make it for a lot less money and sell it for a lot less money. People like to buy things that are inexpensive, even if they know it's not top-grade stuff./shrug
A media player and a Web Browser are kinda, like, different. Creating a media player today is a hell of a lot more complicated then creating a web browser in 1991.
Not to say that I love all the skinning and user interfaces on these things, but they are still pretty new and I'm sure they will improve. xine looks pretty darned good these days, and eventually the functionaliy will improve as well./shrug
Can't expect miracles overnight. So, this guy should keep on using O2 or whatever, and see how many avi/DivX/mpeg2 movies he can play without using one of these media players.
I use unfinished software becuase I want the functionality now. So, I deal with the dumb problems and I'm happy to be able to use it at all.
Well actually... you could theoretically have a distribution of software or an archive on a DVD.
We don't see too much software distributed on DVD's YET, but once DVD players in the PC are as common as CD-ROM drives, we'll see them.
For now, we can play movies on the PC. And when your favorite software is distributed on DVD, you'll be glad that you already have a DVD-ROM drive in your machine. In a few years, we may even be able to install RedHat from two DVD's instead of 15 CD's.
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It's not about nVidia at all. It's about DirectX.
ATi and anyone else that wants to make a DX compatible graphics board would be able to run the games.
The XBOX 1 uses D3D as it's 3D gaming API. It's not terribly specific to nVidia. Sure, they basically made the Xbox, but just the same it's D3D. After all, nVidia did work with Microsoft to create D3D in the first place.
It was just a possibility. If the Xbox2 uses a compatibile D3D/DX layer with Loghorn, then this is sure a possibility.
If Microsoft released an Xbox2 that could run the same games as your Loghorn Windows PC, and Vice Versa, it seems to me that game producers could see this as a way to get into two markets with one product.
It seems to me that from reading this article they may be planning on compatibility between Loghorn and Xbox2.
Standard Controller, possibility of running games from CD, centralized game management. Since the Xbox is basically a PC, and the games are basically Windows games using DirectX, this isn't a stretch of the imagination.
Buy one game, and run it on your Xbox2 or your PC. Play online with people running Xbox2's and you can use your PC, or vice versa. With a standard PC "gamepad" it would be the same type of controls.
I don't think this would be a terrible idea, but it sure would push game developers more to a "windows only" choice of platforms, which isn't really great. I'm still hoping for more games on Linux.
Itanium doesn't appear to be aimed for anything besides high end servers. I mean, the CPU's are prohibitively expensive.
It doesn't seem as though Intel was planning on going 64-bit in the Desktop/small server market anytime soon. And right now it seems as though they are going to just wait and see what happens with AMD's offerings.
As much as I have enjoyed low-cost and high-performance computers with AMD CPU's over the last few years, I don't want to see AMD gain the "intel" position over the Desktop market, either. The first thing a company does when they are in control is raise their prices.
Yea no doubt. I think x86-64 is a good idea. I mean, the x86 technology isn't the fastest, it's no the most effecient, but it works and it's market share is ridiculously large.
x86-64 ia a logical step. It allows us to be 100% compatible with the hundreds of thousands of software packages that exist today, as well as 64-bit software.
As technologies progress, and the Mhz keep on getting pumped up, the performance hit by staying compatible becomes less of an issue. Obviously the Athlon64/Opteron is not meant to replace high-end SGI type supercomputer CPU's, it's meant to provide an upgrade path for x86 to 64-bit computing.
I just hope AMD can produce enough chips, and I hope they are affordable. Since it's AMD's intention to replace all their CPU products with the new 64 bit versions, my guess is that the prices will stay competitive with the 32-bit offerings by Intel. At least in the Desktop market.
Personally, I can't wait for a 64-bit desktop!
My guess is that the LCD screen is built into the glass of the glasses, not projected onto it.
Well, not really. x86-64 code won't run on an x86-32 machine. But, x86-32 code will run on the new x86-64 athlons/opterons at full-speed.
It's like the transition from the 286 to the 386. Backward compatible, not forward compatible.
> Just draw a cross hair on your regular glasses then.
That's such a whitty comment that I can't contain myself. Give yourself a pat on the back for such a job well done.
Seriously, did you come up with that all on your own? I mean, c'mon, don't expect me to believe that you could possibly come up with something so on-topic and intellectually stimulating.
Yea I suppose so, that would be extremely disturbing.
I'm generally not the paranoid type though.
I've been waiting for something like the glasses to hit the marked for a long time. They've been showing them in commercials and stuff forever.
My only fear is that when they do eventually hit the market, they will be outragously expensive ($2,000 is my guess..)
I'd also hope that they would have some less "fashionable" models.. Those are ugly as sin. And perhaps some that aren't sunglasses at all, but simply a HUD.
Yea I noticed that too =)
The color display in the picture looks much cooler.
When they are new, they are pretty quiet (except for the 15k drives, those seem loud any time) but the 10k drives tend to start whining a lot quicker then the slower drives.
The drive heads on a hard disk actually touch the platters with little pads. Perhaps since the drive is spinning much quicker, they wear down quicker.
However, I've had some drives that whine like hell yet keep on chugging along happily, so it doesn't necessarily mean that the drive is on the way out.
Yea, I had almost forgotten about how PCI cards are "backwards" =)
And you're right; current draw-ups show 3GIO slots paired up with old PCI slots to provide both slots in one slot.
If the technology is sound and is adopted by manufacturers quickly, we'll see 3GIO (PCI Express) cards start to replace PCI fairly quickly. Obviously it will take a looong time before we see PCI fall into the shadows like the old ISA slot.
Yea I remember the full height drives. I remember (and it wasn't that long ago) that I went to a Computer Show and they had a 1GB full-height MFM drive for UNDER $1,000!
I used to have a bunch of Seagate ST-225a's, and those were pretty loud. 5.25" half height RLL/MFM drives (20MB with RLL controller, 30MB with MFM controller.)
And actually, most servers these days also stagger the startup of hard disks; at least any Compaq server does. When you have an RSO drive shelf with 30 drives in it, it sure takes awhile to start up.
Yea, it depends. I've had some monster IDE drives that are loud or resonate some very high pitched sounds.
At my last job though, we had a data center with probably over a thousand SCSI drives of various brands and speeds (either 10k or 15k.) in compaq servers.
The 10k drives were quite loud as a general rule, and I mean the ambient sound of the motor spinning the platters. However, the 15k drives (seagate) were outragous. Not only were they loud and untouchably hot, they had this funny sound like something was rattling around in them (they all did it, so I guess it's by-design rattling..)
When using dual displays with an nVidia card, Open GL performance is very poor when running GL apps on both screens. It's less then half the performance, as to be expected.
So have fun playing UT2003 at 5FPS - but ZERO PING YAHOO!
Maybe when we see PCI express we could drop two high performance graphics cards into a machine. Until then it's kinda slow sharing a single card.
I've never had a problem with PCI. Sure, it's becoming outdated in terms of speed, but overall PCI has served the PC industry very well.
The move from ISA to PCI as the general PC slot was a very good step forward. Gone were the hair-pulling configuration issues, jumper settings, and "ISA Plug'n'Play" that sometimes worked.
The next "PCI" for the PC will most likely be something like 3GIO, which was recently renamed to "PCI Express." It's a new bus, but it's software-compatible with PCI. Since PCI Express is a new hardware interface (new slots) it's not just for compatibility; it's because PCI works and there's no reason to change what you don't need to change.
At any rate, this topic is IDE drives. 10K SCSI drives tend to be pretty loud and run quite hot. I think that the 10k IDE drives will probably imploy some sort of technologies to keep them quiet and cooler, since IDE drives generally live on the desktop.
Okay I see what you mean; one client and all that. However, to access other IM services you still need to either set up your own Jabber server or connect to a public Jabber server that supports the gateways to the other IM services.
Either way, you're simply moving the connection issues associated with using an "unnofficial" IM client from one place to another.
I think I'll stick with Trillian Pro (It Just Works) until I have some time to fool with Jabber.
I'll definately check it out, it sounds cool.
However, with Trillian, you only have one client too; it connects directly to AIM, ICQ, MSN, and YahooIM. One buddy list can contain all your buddies from all the different IM services.
Thanks for the tip on "Jabber" though I'm going to check it out now.
Trillian is very good. I'm hoping for a Linux version, although it doesn't seem to be a priority for them.
It works very well, it's lightweight, I've never had it crash on me. It supports AIM/ICQ/MSN/Y!/IRC all in one buddy list.
There's also some very nice skins that make it sleek.
I'm not sure what you mean by "We need a professionally written.." Trillian isn't professionally written? What proof of that do you have? In fact, what does that mean?
I don't agree. In my opinion, the traditional UNIX type (at least in the filesystem) access control is too simple. It ends up being a lot more complex in the long run when you need another level of granularity.
ACL's are very easy to maintain and it's not the fault of the system if the users of such a system misuse it. Any system will fail if it's not properly used.
It's relative. Sure, a toaster is a toaster, but "back in the good old days" I'm sure you could get a low quality toaster too.
But as far as technology.. Things are a lot more complicated now, in that respect. A car, with all it's polution controls, has a lot more that can go wrong with it. All the gadgets that consumers demand also add tons of stuff that can go wrong.
Sure, there's times when adding that extra screw may have helped something not break, but as a whole, in today's market, making a product that's of perfect quality just costs too much with the amount of competition.
You can get the high quality stuff. It will just cost you a good deal more money.
I don't necessarily agree.
/shrug
If a company puts out low quality crap, is the consumer going to purchase something else from them? With so much competition out there for most electronics, it doesn't really make much sense.
As for a product made only by one manufacturer, perhaps this could be true.. I just don't think this is the driving force behind flimsy products.
Seems that to me the reason we see low quality stuff is because it generally means they can make it for a lot less money and sell it for a lot less money. People like to buy things that are inexpensive, even if they know it's not top-grade stuff.
And my TV is better then your Stove!
/shrug
That's the kind of comparison you're making here.
A media player and a Web Browser are kinda, like, different. Creating a media player today is a hell of a lot more complicated then creating a web browser in 1991.
Not to say that I love all the skinning and user interfaces on these things, but they are still pretty new and I'm sure they will improve. xine looks pretty darned good these days, and eventually the functionaliy will improve as well.
Can't expect miracles overnight. So, this guy should keep on using O2 or whatever, and see how many avi/DivX/mpeg2 movies he can play without using one of these media players.
I use unfinished software becuase I want the functionality now. So, I deal with the dumb problems and I'm happy to be able to use it at all.
Perhaps at first. When the technologies are new they are more difficult to produce.
When they are manufactured for awhile, the techniques are refined and trivialized and the yealds go way up.
By your resoning, by 2050 we'll be making one computer chip from 3 tons of materials. Obviously this is not going to happen.
Well actually... you could theoretically have a distribution of software or an archive on a DVD.
We don't see too much software distributed on DVD's YET, but once DVD players in the PC are as common as CD-ROM drives, we'll see them.
For now, we can play movies on the PC. And when your favorite software is distributed on DVD, you'll be glad that you already have a DVD-ROM drive in your machine. In a few years, we may even be able to install RedHat from two DVD's instead of 15 CD's.