If only. I really hate PC hardware. It is hideous, I wish
I didn't have to suffer it. But here is the irony:
-Back in the 80s and early-to-mid nineties, fancy
ultra-expensive workstations pretty much wiped the
floor with PCs. But the success of the PC was linked
to the success of Microsoft and DOS (and later
Windows) which were firmly tied to the PC hardware
(OK, Win32 less so) and in leading by example,
helped to emphasize closed source software,
making people's software unportable without
the direct effort of its creators.
-Now we have Linux which is solid and pretty
damned portable (it runs on near everything
nowadays!),
and the concept of Free Software and Open-Source
is relatively common, making it far easier to get
the types of programs you want on some new
hardware... Yet now, look at the performance of
your typical PC next to most workstations. PCs
still have many of the sucky features that they
had when they came out, and workstations
generally don't, and perhaps some workstations
are more powerful than PCs in certain regards-
but nowadays, I'm just not convinced that there
is any particular performance advantage.
And when you factor in the costs...
It really becomes very difficult to justify getting
a workstation, I've certainly tried hard to
convince myself otherwise.:(
Also, about a year ago I got an old second hand
Sun Sparc-Classic for not-too-much. Mmm, nice reliable Suns. Cool.
PSU was broken when it arrived. Replacement
PSU died some time later. Ah well, maybe I was just unlucky.. But who knows how to fix a Sparcstation?
Where was I? Oh yes, well I suppose the point is, I
think the x86 platform is going to survive far far
longer, as long as MS are there to support it,
and Intel and AMD are in a position to continue
making it so cost effective to use compared to
everything else.
Well if you can see the actual code, then it helps
you learn more about the nasty proprietary file
formats and network protocols. True,
sometimes some of these are documented to some
extent- but it helps if you know how the main
product actually interprets the spec, which may
not match how it really should.
Beyond that, there are always clean room methods,
but I don't know how effective these actually
are at avoiding lawsuits and such things.
Final resolution: Judge decrees that Gates, Ballmer,
and all their lawyers drones and fanboys, are to
be fired from a big cannon into outer space, whilst
all their assets are distributed amongst the people
of the world, and their intellectual property placed
firmly into the public domain (well, some of
it would certainly be of use...).
An unproductive comment? Well, yes. But I've not
seen anyone else say it, and hell, I wanted to, and I
feel so much better for it now. Ahhhh.
Don't know much about MS's Optical Intellimouse,
but IIRC, one of the selling points was that it had
no ball, and went on nearly any surface (unless
that was a different MS mouse).
Now, whilst they may have required their own fancy
types of mouse-mat, but Sun Microsystems (and
maybe several other workstation manufacturers)
certainly had optical mice of much that style (IE-
no ball, sensors track the surface it is on) a LONG
time before MS produced their version.
Microsoft's is probably a lot better, I'd expect, being
far more recent and having advantages of selling in
bulk- but they certainly didn't make some VAST
quantum leap with a new concept, any more than
they did with DOS (bought from another company,
based on CP/M), Windows (idea copied from Apple
and PARC), Direct3D (bought from another company,
long after OpenGL had been created), Pre-emptive
multitasking (after much of the rest of the computing
world), hardware abstraction (about 25 years
after Unix), etc, etc.
Follow-up: Black book under Ghostscript
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
Well, a few hours later, I D/L'd the new ghostscript
packages (there were a fair few relevant bits) for debian,
and tried looking at the files again.
And lo! Not only much slower (unless I just hadn't
noticed how slow it was last time), but now missing
out even more areas of text!!
AARGH! Well, it was kind of too late to replace it
with the old version, so I mucked about a bit, and
found that untagging the "Antialias" option in the
"State" menu made it render everything (well,
everything I've looked at with it so far. It's 80-odd
chapters, don't forget!). Unfortunately without the
antialiasing the text looks vile.
I also noticed that it seems to be showing
the pages as different sizes... I'm not sure what is
going on there, I'm sure it didn't do that
before... Oh the wonders of software.
Re:Who is Willy Wagglestick? ...
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Two results, both from the same site. It
appears to be a nickname for Shakespeare.
Awww... Wish I'd spotted that one, especially
as I think I may have heard him called that before. Ah well.
Hmm. Is Anonymous another name for Noel? Oooeeeoooeeoo.
Thanks for this, I decided to read this story as it was
the first I'd actually heard of a Nixie, and I was
hoping some post somewhere would help to explain
what one actually was...
So are these Nixies still made? It sounds as though
most of the people doing stuff with them are reclaiming
old ones from scrap and things. And do they only have
ones with numbers on? I suddenly have hankering
for a Nixie terminal display!!
I especially liked the bit in the article about the bloke
who made an alarm clock with them- considering
how the tubes apparently run off ~200V, and the old
cliches about the way most people turn their alarms
off when they wake them in the morning...
I've never heard anything to confirm such a thing, so it's
probably a non-issue- but there is the Hall effect (IIRC)
that means that if you have current flowing through a
conductor, with a magnetic field at a right angle to
the direction of flow, the electrons veer over to one
side, and hence a PD builds up between opposite
sides of the conductor (at right angles to current and
field). *
Well, I have pondered over whether the Hall effect
has any meaningful effect on nerves and neurons.
Now, it may not have been due to that, but there
was something on TV where they were investigating
why people feel places are haunted. They found that
many such places had relatively high magnetic
fields, and in investigating further, they got volunteers
to sit in the laboratory and wear these helmets
with big magnets in them. No, I'm
not making this up! Anyway, the victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvolunteers reported
feeling extremely scared and sensing "evil presences"
and stuff of that nature.
It is worth remembering though, that they were
supposed to be pretty powerful magnetic fields,
and right around their heads. Also, I don't remember
whether they were supposed to be alternating
fields (but I'm fairly sure they weren't), if so then
it would have been plain old induction (but that
would presumably have fried their brains??).
*--I Am Not A Physicist either. So that definition
may well be wrong in some way. I take no responsibility for accuracy of any of this stuff whatsoever.Not none.
Re:Depends on your definition of "IT"
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, back when I was at school, when I was choosing
subjects, an "IT" option was available. Their
definition of
IT was roughly "Typing and using a spreadsheet".
Luckily I noticed that before signing up for it, and
chose something else instead.
A shameful slur against a great author
on
General IT Books?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It's like that presentation edition of
The Complete Works of Willy Wagglestick that
sits on the shelf looking splendid and making you very
proud that you own it, but never actually getting read.
I've got that, and I've read it several times over, in
particular, his most seminal work Waggling Onwards. Anyone who has a copy of this masterpiece but hasn't
taken the time to read any of it, like you clearly
haven't, should be utterly ashamed of themselves.
If anyone else isn't familiar with his works yet, I
strongly recommend they go to their local library or
bookshop and ask for a copy of the aformentioned
title, they will be glad they did.
I downloaded this at the time, took ages (and IIRC the
site had problems). Stuck all the pdf files (about 80!)
onto a MiniCD.
Then made a backup copy on another one, just in case.
Unfortunately, I noticed that much of it would cause
troubles with ghostscript. I forget the details, I think they
changed when I got a newer version.. But the newer
version still had problems, including stuff like
"unknown operator ri"
at which point the bottom (and maybe top??) of the
page would not be rendered... And on some pages
the rendering would stop, and the error window
would show a stack trace that poured past incessantly,
with the rest of the program locked up (I should point
out I was using it through "gv", not using ghostscript
directly.
Oddly enough, I decided to have another look at it
again just last night. Weird timing! As I'm in process
of upgrading my Debian box, I figure I might see if I
can update ghostscript too, never know...
As for the value of the text, well, there's a lot of it.
A fair bit (eg VGA programming) isn't really appropriate
to the most of us nowadays. Other bits (eg about
bottlenecks of an 8088...) are thoroughly out of date.
But it does seem to include a lot of points that can
be broadly applied or are still directly relevant, so I'm
certainly not throwing those CDs away.
It doesn't fit exactly the things they were talking about
on the site, but it does kind of count as bad (or just
plain stupid) physics-
There was some film where they had built a space ship
that was powered by a singularity or summat that
allowed it to create worm-holes, in order to reach
arbitrarily distant points in space. I think the film was
Event Horizon but I'm not certain. After using it
a bit, nasty stuff started happening, and the ship became
possessed and killing the crew, or something like that.
That wasn't the bad science, we can have a bit
of suspension of disbelief, which makes it
sound mostly OK. But the selling point of the ship had
been that because it could travel between points that
were extremely far apart in next-to-no-time, that it
was travelling faster than light.
Obviously, if it's doing it by going through worm
holes, it is linking bits of space (or is it spacetime?
God, I dunno) together, and only travelling at the
speed that it goes through the worm-hole at. Whilst
they were wrong there, that's not the lame bit, which
was that the evil possessed-ship stuff all happened
because "That's what happens when you break
the laws of Physics".
Mr. Ebert confused the speed of the shadow of an object on Earth with the speed of the Earths Terminator.
SLASHDOT EXCLUSIVE: Expensive new
sequel, brought to you by a fleet of 64,000 Linux boxen!
Arnie returns yet again, now as the improved T-3000,
to go back even further in time, to destroy a bunch of large
asteroids and comets and whatnot that would eventually crash into
each other to form the Earth, because Skynet realised
it was going really badly and decided it had had
enough of it all.
And I have ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE as to what the %$#!# this is about
Er, well, if you really don't, then:
It is a 3D engine. If you do not understand this, then that is a piece of software that renders 3D scenes in games. In this case, it is a 3D engine on its own, for other people to create games (or other 3d software) with.
Is it cool? Does it suck?
I've not tried it, so I can't truly say, but from looking at
their site for a few more seconds than you claim to
have done, the screenshots certainly look very very
cool. It sounds very capable.
OTOH, it is apparently written in C++, and as
every proper Linux bod knows, C++ sucks in the
extreme, as C++ is not only slow, humungously
bloated, and not as portable as C, but it
also is not very well supported on Linux and has
a tendency to crash a fair bit. So, it's likely that
I won't be using it.
Is it going to do anything for me?
Who knows. Who cares?
Indeed.
I'm probably interested, but I don't
think a story saying click here
(etc) is
very useful
Looks to me as though it gives the relevant points,
the average/. reader would be expected to see
how it's a neat thing.
If it were plain old C, I'd be very enthusiastic
about this and would be downloading it right now,
even if I would prolly never create anything with it!
Ah well, never mind.
JC writes to OpenGL, he does not implement it, that's the job of the driver writers
Well generally, yes. Except that he helped develop the Utah-GLX Open-GL drivers for Xfree86 3.3.
Unfortunately, Utah-GLX was crappy and crashed a lot. Well, it did on my machine. I got a MGA G400 on the
strength that their HW specs had been opened and a
driver was being developed. Oh well, it's not like many
other choices are well supported on Linux today. (I'm
not too bitter now, tho, as Xfree 4's DRI version seems to work
good)
Writing an OpenGL driver, or worse,
a complete software implementation of OpenGL, is
a fucking nightmare
I'd imagine so, OpenGL is pretty big. Of course, Brian
Paul has already done the complete software
implementation with Mesa (I guess everyone knows that nowadays, right?) but I doubt that any commonly available PC graphics cards support a full OpenGL
state machine. It has too many features that are of
little interest to the average games programmer for
most companies to care that much to do it properly.
I wouldn't say that what he said implies that. He described
such commercial graphics as killing the imagination -which is true, to a certain extent. I'm currently playing
"dungeon crawl", and have been fighting a red 5 (which
happens to be an imp). I hate that 5. It keeps
healing and teleporting away from me. But I digress....
Congratulations, you just contradicted
yourself.
Doesn't look like it to me, his main point had been saying that you don't need artists to make a playable and interesting game which doesn't remotely contradict his observations regarding roguelikes.
Those who live by pedantry, die by pedantry!! Or something (Hmm, suddenly realise this will come back to haunt me:( )
I don't! Please tell, or did you make it up (as hilarious
fictional rendering algorithm?)
But anyhoo, whilst I agree that people are far more
likely to pay money for games that look good, we
are of course talking about free software developers, so
selling millions of copies is not an issue, all that
is important to most (all??) free software developers, is:
-Making something that is great
-Creating
-Demonstrating coding ability??
-Scratching an itch (as ESR would put it)
And so on.Prolly various other reasons I've not
thought of.
Of course, there do exist a good few examples of
good free games that have very strong followings,
such as Nethack, Angband, and other roguelikes (which of course have little or no graphics), XPilot, BZFlag,
and others (I'd say XKobo, but I'm not certain how
popular that is...)
So no, I don't think it's too much of an issue. OTOH, a really pretty game written specifically for
Linux could bring in a lot of people, which would be
neat... But then, if it was that good, someone would
prolly just port or clone it to windows.
Anyways... Hmm, nice to be able to post on a day I've got summat to say! My ISP seems to get blocked most of the time:P
There was a weird detective-type TV program
about 10 years or so ago, one episode, some
VR company were working on A VR system with
a display very similar to this (but without the microscopic
components).
It soon became apparent that someone in the company
had hacked up the code so that they could refocus
the lasers and burn out the brains of people using
the VR systems. Very odd program. Don't know, but
I presume that the sort of lasers they'd be likely to
use wouldn't quite have that level of power
(but I think the point was the killer also turned up the
power or summat)
(In case someone can't tell, yes it was fiction).
OT? Well, not entirely.
Not being American, I only heard of DARPA
a few years ago, learning of how they
(co-)created the ARPAnet and how that was
the beginning of the internet...
I didn't realise quite how many
other areas they'd innovated in until now
though:
This technology will replace the DARPA RMS
Just goes to show all those right-wingers who go on about him being
un-american and a hippy and stuff, eh?
According to one of my old textbooks from Uni,
there was a (not real-time) project that was meant
to translate between English and Russian, where
the difficulty with phrases and figures-of-speech
was demonstrated in a similar way:
Translating "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" to
Russian and back again produced "invisible
idiot".
Disclaimer: I claim no responsibility for any
damage caused by possible inaccuracies in this
anecdote.
Our supplement formula is
comprised of the highest quality crystalline
protein source.
Dried bull's spunk?
Seriously though, is slashdot now getting people
creating accounts just to plug products, or was
this just a coincidence (I suppose geeks get
employment from all sorts of companies)?
Slashdot Mirror
-Back in the 80s and early-to-mid nineties, fancy ultra-expensive workstations pretty much wiped the floor with PCs. But the success of the PC was linked to the success of Microsoft and DOS (and later Windows) which were firmly tied to the PC hardware (OK, Win32 less so) and in leading by example, helped to emphasize closed source software, making people's software unportable without the direct effort of its creators.
-Now we have Linux which is solid and pretty damned portable (it runs on near everything nowadays!), and the concept of Free Software and Open-Source is relatively common, making it far easier to get the types of programs you want on some new hardware... Yet now, look at the performance of your typical PC next to most workstations. PCs still have many of the sucky features that they had when they came out, and workstations generally don't, and perhaps some workstations are more powerful than PCs in certain regards- but nowadays, I'm just not convinced that there is any particular performance advantage.
And when you factor in the costs... It really becomes very difficult to justify getting a workstation, I've certainly tried hard to convince myself otherwise. :(
Also, about a year ago I got an old second hand Sun Sparc-Classic for not-too-much. Mmm, nice reliable Suns. Cool. PSU was broken when it arrived. Replacement PSU died some time later. Ah well, maybe I was just unlucky.. But who knows how to fix a Sparcstation?
Where was I? Oh yes, well I suppose the point is, I think the x86 platform is going to survive far far longer, as long as MS are there to support it, and Intel and AMD are in a position to continue making it so cost effective to use compared to everything else.
Beyond that, there are always clean room methods, but I don't know how effective these actually are at avoiding lawsuits and such things.
An unproductive comment? Well, yes. But I've not seen anyone else say it, and hell, I wanted to, and I feel so much better for it now. Ahhhh.
Now, whilst they may have required their own fancy types of mouse-mat, but Sun Microsystems (and maybe several other workstation manufacturers) certainly had optical mice of much that style (IE- no ball, sensors track the surface it is on) a LONG time before MS produced their version.
Microsoft's is probably a lot better, I'd expect, being far more recent and having advantages of selling in bulk- but they certainly didn't make some VAST quantum leap with a new concept, any more than they did with DOS (bought from another company, based on CP/M), Windows (idea copied from Apple and PARC), Direct3D (bought from another company, long after OpenGL had been created), Pre-emptive multitasking (after much of the rest of the computing world), hardware abstraction (about 25 years after Unix), etc, etc.
And lo! Not only much slower (unless I just hadn't noticed how slow it was last time), but now missing out even more areas of text!!
AARGH! Well, it was kind of too late to replace it with the old version, so I mucked about a bit, and found that untagging the "Antialias" option in the "State" menu made it render everything (well, everything I've looked at with it so far. It's 80-odd chapters, don't forget!). Unfortunately without the antialiasing the text looks vile.
I also noticed that it seems to be showing the pages as different sizes... I'm not sure what is going on there, I'm sure it didn't do that before... Oh the wonders of software.
Hmm. Is Anonymous another name for Noel? Oooeeeoooeeoo.
So are these Nixies still made? It sounds as though most of the people doing stuff with them are reclaiming old ones from scrap and things. And do they only have ones with numbers on? I suddenly have hankering for a Nixie terminal display!!
I especially liked the bit in the article about the bloke who made an alarm clock with them- considering how the tubes apparently run off ~200V, and the old cliches about the way most people turn their alarms off when they wake them in the morning...
Well, I have pondered over whether the Hall effect has any meaningful effect on nerves and neurons.
Now, it may not have been due to that, but there was something on TV where they were investigating why people feel places are haunted. They found that many such places had relatively high magnetic fields, and in investigating further, they got volunteers to sit in the laboratory and wear these helmets with big magnets in them. No, I'm not making this up! Anyway, the victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hvolunteers reported feeling extremely scared and sensing "evil presences" and stuff of that nature.
It is worth remembering though, that they were supposed to be pretty powerful magnetic fields, and right around their heads. Also, I don't remember whether they were supposed to be alternating fields (but I'm fairly sure they weren't), if so then it would have been plain old induction (but that would presumably have fried their brains??).
*--I Am Not A Physicist either. So that definition may well be wrong in some way. I take no responsibility for accuracy of any of this stuff whatsoever.Not none.
Luckily I noticed that before signing up for it, and chose something else instead.
If anyone else isn't familiar with his works yet, I strongly recommend they go to their local library or bookshop and ask for a copy of the aformentioned title, they will be glad they did.
Then made a backup copy on another one, just in case.
Unfortunately, I noticed that much of it would cause troubles with ghostscript. I forget the details, I think they changed when I got a newer version.. But the newer version still had problems, including stuff like
"unknown operator ri"
at which point the bottom (and maybe top??) of the page would not be rendered... And on some pages the rendering would stop, and the error window would show a stack trace that poured past incessantly, with the rest of the program locked up (I should point out I was using it through "gv", not using ghostscript directly.
Oddly enough, I decided to have another look at it again just last night. Weird timing! As I'm in process of upgrading my Debian box, I figure I might see if I can update ghostscript too, never know...
As for the value of the text, well, there's a lot of it. A fair bit (eg VGA programming) isn't really appropriate to the most of us nowadays. Other bits (eg about bottlenecks of an 8088...) are thoroughly out of date. But it does seem to include a lot of points that can be broadly applied or are still directly relevant, so I'm certainly not throwing those CDs away.
There was some film where they had built a space ship that was powered by a singularity or summat that allowed it to create worm-holes, in order to reach arbitrarily distant points in space. I think the film was Event Horizon but I'm not certain. After using it a bit, nasty stuff started happening, and the ship became possessed and killing the crew, or something like that.
That wasn't the bad science, we can have a bit of suspension of disbelief, which makes it sound mostly OK. But the selling point of the ship had been that because it could travel between points that were extremely far apart in next-to-no-time, that it was travelling faster than light.
Obviously, if it's doing it by going through worm holes, it is linking bits of space (or is it spacetime? God, I dunno) together, and only travelling at the speed that it goes through the worm-hole at. Whilst they were wrong there, that's not the lame bit, which was that the evil possessed-ship stuff all happened because "That's what happens when you break the laws of Physics".
I could have screamed when I heard that one.
Arnie returns yet again, now as the improved T-3000, to go back even further in time, to destroy a bunch of large asteroids and comets and whatnot that would eventually crash into each other to form the Earth, because Skynet realised it was going really badly and decided it had had enough of it all.
Read More...
(or something like that)
It is a 3D engine. If you do not understand this, then that is a piece of software that renders 3D scenes in games. In this case, it is a 3D engine on its own, for other people to create games (or other 3d software) with.
I've not tried it, so I can't truly say, but from looking at their site for a few more seconds than you claim to have done, the screenshots certainly look very very cool. It sounds very capable.OTOH, it is apparently written in C++, and as every proper Linux bod knows, C++ sucks in the extreme, as C++ is not only slow, humungously bloated, and not as portable as C, but it also is not very well supported on Linux and has a tendency to crash a fair bit. So, it's likely that I won't be using it.
Indeed.Looks to me as though it gives the relevant points, the average
If it were plain old C, I'd be very enthusiastic about this and would be downloading it right now, even if I would prolly never create anything with it! Ah well, never mind.
Unfortunately, Utah-GLX was crappy and crashed a lot. Well, it did on my machine. I got a MGA G400 on the strength that their HW specs had been opened and a driver was being developed. Oh well, it's not like many other choices are well supported on Linux today. (I'm not too bitter now, tho, as Xfree 4's DRI version seems to work good)
I'd imagine so, OpenGL is pretty big. Of course, Brian Paul has already done the complete software implementation with Mesa (I guess everyone knows that nowadays, right?) but I doubt that any commonly available PC graphics cards support a full OpenGL state machine. It has too many features that are of little interest to the average games programmer for most companies to care that much to do it properly.Well, IMHO, y'know.
Those who live by pedantry, die by pedantry!! Or something (Hmm, suddenly realise this will come back to haunt me :( )
But anyhoo, whilst I agree that people are far more likely to pay money for games that look good, we are of course talking about free software developers, so selling millions of copies is not an issue, all that is important to most (all??) free software developers, is:
-Making something that is great
-Creating
-Demonstrating coding ability??
-Scratching an itch (as ESR would put it)
And so on.Prolly various other reasons I've not thought of.
Of course, there do exist a good few examples of good free games that have very strong followings, such as Nethack, Angband, and other roguelikes (which of course have little or no graphics), XPilot, BZFlag, and others (I'd say XKobo, but I'm not certain how popular that is...)
So no, I don't think it's too much of an issue. OTOH, a really pretty game written specifically for Linux could bring in a lot of people, which would be neat... But then, if it was that good, someone would prolly just port or clone it to windows.
Anyways... Hmm, nice to be able to post on a day I've got summat to say! My ISP seems to get blocked most of the time :P
It soon became apparent that someone in the company had hacked up the code so that they could refocus the lasers and burn out the brains of people using the VR systems. Very odd program. Don't know, but I presume that the sort of lasers they'd be likely to use wouldn't quite have that level of power (but I think the point was the killer also turned up the power or summat)
(In case someone can't tell, yes it was fiction).
OT? Well, not entirely.
I think my favourite of the images shown was this one.
Not got a NeXT machine meself, but that did make me wish I had...
I didn't realise quite how many other areas they'd innovated in until now though:
Just goes to show all those right-wingers who go on about him being un-american and a hippy and stuff, eh?
Translating "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" to Russian and back again produced "invisible idiot".
Disclaimer: I claim no responsibility for any damage caused by possible inaccuracies in this anecdote.
[snip] Dried bull's spunk?
Seriously though, is slashdot now getting people creating accounts just to plug products, or was this just a coincidence (I suppose geeks get employment from all sorts of companies)?