Back in my day, Linux ports of various games came out, but they were a commercial disaster and the porting work stopped:-( I did manage to scrape together enough money for 6 games in total, mostly all 3D shooters including the wonderful Quake III Arena.
Quake III Arena came with a GPL'd SuSE Linux disk in the box, so you didn't even already have to have Linux installed, you could install the SuSE from CD.
It would be cool if all games were like this: native UNIX/Linux software supplied with a Free OS in the box on which to run it. It would thus be able to write the same game for x86 (32 and 64), PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, ARM, itanic etc.
However, this will never happen. In general, gamers want a slick, shrink-wrapped product with no hassle. It's for entertainment, after all, not a geek install challenge.
All the money and time has been invested in developing for Windows.
Maybe as Free Software becomes more popular, and more Mac OSX boxes get out there, it will become eceonomically feasable to develop only for UNIX using some of the modern gaming libraries to help with portability.
We'll see. Maybe I'll be able to get some new games eventually.
If anything this should give Intel an advantage because proprietary chips are more expensive or slower because they can not be produced in bulk like vainilla P4's.
intel processors are PROPRIETARY. They are not a published, open standard, like SPARC and MIPS. You can license the SPARC for $99 IIRC. You can not do this with intel. You must pay much more money to license their instruction set, under much more restrictive terms.
intel processors (x86) are COMMODITY processors. They are a "de-facto" standard, in the same way that Microsoft Windows is a de-facto standard operating system. It is in no way Open. It is proprietary.
Gcc is also most heavily optimized for the intel platform.
This bit is at least correct. That's because most people have PeeCees with intel (or compatible) processors in them, and most development, by default, has been done in this architecture. Optimisations on this architecture therefore benefit most people.
I was looking at the state of development of the FORTRAN compiler in gcc today and found this project to implement a more modern GNU FORTRAN compiler. It looks like it's a proper cross-platform complier, using gcc's back end for code generation.
I think to people in business, especially the ones running the business, e.g. a farmer, a spreadsheet is a far more useful tool than a document viewer or word processor. Connection to the Internet, on the other hand, would be highly valuable, since it is a quick, cheap, open and ubiquitous medium for communication.
Curious about the old power station - would be fun to look it up in one the "World List of Nuclear Power Plants" that showed up in Nuclear News twice a year.
Here she is. Reactor 1 is on the left, 2 on the right and the turbine hall is in the foreground. My office was in the low bit at the right hand end of the turbine hall. It's a Magnox station, which means natural uranium metal fuel in "magnox" cans, graphite moderator and carbon dioxide coolant. Thermal efficiency was about 23-25%. On a very good day, with a cold river Blackwater, no refuelling backlog and good deskdrivers it could just about manage 246MW electrical. The reactors were 480MW thermal.
First went critical in 1962, last shut down was March 2002. I left in 2000 to get a job with a future...
Economics force it to close:-( The river is too shallow to build a more powerful replacement (not enough cooling water).
Whippersnapper - probably wouldn't know what a keypunch was even if it bit him on the ass. It would be astonishing if he saw a FORTRAN coding pad.
Not quite, but at my old power station the primary reactor temperature monitoring computer was a Honeywell 316 with a teletype terminal, two green-screen displays (one for each reactor operator), a built in 160k disk and 32k-16bit words of ram. It has multitasking, and a paper tape drive for booting the operating system. There was no file system on the disk. Temperatures and flags were stored in sectors on the disk, which were loaded and modified using an octal monitor program. What fun that was. Luckily it the disk gave up in summer 2000, and couldn't be raplced, so the 2nd hand PDP-11/70s they bough 10 years previously, running RSX-11/M and some proprietary software written in CORAL-66, became front line. The power station closed in 2002. I was born in 1974. The honeywell 316 came on-line in 1972, the year my parents were married. It came with a FORTRAN-IV compiler...Yes, we had drawers full of paper tapes with the system on.
So, all those cold, dark Scottish winter afternoons spent loading hex into my ZX81 paid off when I grew up. I wonder how many kids today unedr 10 know what hexadecimal is, let alone could code a hex loader in BASIC off the top of their heads?
Really? In my day we used to have 386/33 machines with 4 10Mbit ethernet cards running Novell Netware, and several large hard disks. You're not running Windows, by any chance are you?
In Soviet Russia (Or Bushist America) our new G5 overlords welcome you! So says Natalie Portman, naked and petrified with hot grits down her pants. Troll, troll, troll your boat, gently down the stream...or something. Goodness, I must be getting old.
A good example of this is to compare the memory bandwidth of the USIII and the P4. The USIII uses a 256-bit bus to memory, while the P4 uses only a 64-bit wide data bus (shared for memory and I/O). However, the USIII's bus runs at only 75MT/s (75MHz SDR). The P4's bus runs at 800MT/s (200MHz QDR). End result is that even though the P4's data bus is only 64-bits wide to the chipset, it offers considerably more bandwidth than the UltraSparc bus.
What about latency? This is important in multitasking and multithreading, so I've heard.
That action is ultimately futile since the gestation may not have time to go to term, and the offspring, if born, would not grow to reproduction age...
You have my condolences, living in Aberdeen and working in Dundee!! What a terribly boring drive, down that A90, and with all those dangerous juctions. I used to work in Aberdeen a few years ago. The traffic is appaling, especially at rush-hour.
I stand by what I said about FORTRAN-77 being worse than the interpreted BASICs that came with 8-bit home micros in the early eighties. Going from C back to brain-damaged BASIC-like FORTRAN was hell on a stick.
he time with Fortran that it takes to get proficient enough with it to appreciate its elegance, power and simplicity.
FORTRAN-77 in its pure form is very simple, nay simplistic. The syntax is ad-hoc. There is no WHILE, or REPEAT UNITL. The I/O is primitive to the point of barbarism. Good grief, FORTH was more advanced.
Anyway, thank you for taking part in an entertaining religious flamewar. LOL
Sure there will be bad traffic once in a while, but not often enough for the 3 time rule to kick in.
Ah, you have not experienced traffic is southeast England then. The M25 and its tributaries are frequently closed for hours at a time.
If you have to be in on time, you should learn what traffic is like, and plan to be early enough everyday that normal traffic variences can be covered.
I find teleworking a much more satisfactory solution.
I was merely making the point that having authoritarian working rules just for the sake of it are pointless, often counterproductive and archaic. These days work has to be done at all sorts of times of day. Heck, I used to work putting out potatoes in a supermarket. There was no long hair (had to be shaved), you could wear any colour of socks as long as they were black (also trousers and shoes) and if you dared not smile at a customer when they were threatening to castrate you you were sacked.
No it is not. Not everyone sleeps like a log, regular as clockwork. Not everyone has reliable transport. What happens if there's a serious accident and they close the motorway for 3 hours? Why is 1 minute so important? There are 450 minuts in a 7.5 hour working day. 1 minute is less than three tenths of one percent of that.
Why do some employers treat their workers with contempt, condescention, and suspicion? Why are they so irrational? Whay purpose do such arbitrary rules serve? If timing has to be so precise, surely a machine should be doing it.
It's just yet another IBM PR fluff piece. There seems to be one or so a week here. Funny how it's always IBM, when there's so much other, often more important, interesting and novel stuff going on out there. IBM is doing a very good job of publicising itself these days.
99% of the problem is the programmer not the language.
I'd still use C because I've never used Fortran
FORTRAN, especially in its older incarnations e.g. FORTRAN-77, reall is that bad. Having learned C as a teenager (K&R then ANSI) and then being forced to write some F-77, I can assure you it was no picnic. If you remember the BASIC interpreters that used to come on 8-bit micros in the early 80s, without the user-friendly error messages, with fixed-format 80-column source geared towards old punch cards, cryptic run-time errors, if any... You get the idea.
C is old too, but it's a heck of a lot easier to learn, easier to understand, more consistent etc. than old FORTRAN. FORTRAN's systax is largely ad-hoc. Remember, it was one of the first two compiled "high-level" languages. COBOL was the other. It shows.
FORTRAN 90 and then 95 came along. A few years ago we had a work experience student who was learning a language called F, basically modern fortran with all the old rubbish removed.
Anyway, old FORTRAN (77 and before and without many of the vendor-only extensions) is sheer purgatory for the modern programmer.
There was a better competitor called ALGOL once upon a time, but as with VHS video and MS Windows, the "worst" one prevailed.
When I was doing Physics at Uni they forced me to use FORTRAN 77 for "portability" despite the fact that I already knew C.
However, 10 years ago, FORTRAN compilers were very much more advanced in terms of optimisation for numerical work than C (e.g. the Cray compiler could do automatic vectorisation.)
I would have thought that if you had a big, expensive supercomputer, you can afford the compiler. Not buying the compiler is silly, because you'll probably end up with an order of magnitude less performance out of it with a compiler whose primary goal is portability and has been designed to work well on totally different hardware architectures.
Having said that, though, if you've got a low end box, you probably want a cheap or free compiler. Why spend $1000+ on a compiler when the box probably cost less? The low end box can probably sustain 100+MFLOPS (easily) and peak well into the GFLOPS. That's a cheap Athlon we're talking about. So you probably don't want to buy a fancy FORTRAN compiler. Why not just stick to C or even C++ nowadays? Legacy code:-(
So you have a problem. The big supercomputer you bough 5 years ago probably has a "slow" C/C++ compiler. The nice cheap box you have on your desk has arubbishy FORTRAN compiler and a reasonable C/C++ compiler.
So, you can convert all your legacy code to C and C++, you can buy a commercial FORTRAN compiler or why don't you universities cough up some time and money to give to the GNU FORTRAN people to help them improve their compiler? Or is that too radical and lefty?
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Quake III Arena came with a GPL'd SuSE Linux disk in the box, so you didn't even already have to have Linux installed, you could install the SuSE from CD.
It would be cool if all games were like this: native UNIX/Linux software supplied with a Free OS in the box on which to run it. It would thus be able to write the same game for x86 (32 and 64), PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC, ARM, itanic etc.
However, this will never happen. In general, gamers want a slick, shrink-wrapped product with no hassle. It's for entertainment, after all, not a geek install challenge.
All the money and time has been invested in developing for Windows.
Maybe as Free Software becomes more popular, and more Mac OSX boxes get out there, it will become eceonomically feasable to develop only for UNIX using some of the modern gaming libraries to help with portability.
We'll see. Maybe I'll be able to get some new games eventually.
intel processors are PROPRIETARY. They are not a published, open standard, like SPARC and MIPS. You can license the SPARC for $99 IIRC. You can not do this with intel. You must pay much more money to license their instruction set, under much more restrictive terms.
intel processors (x86) are COMMODITY processors. They are a "de-facto" standard, in the same way that Microsoft Windows is a de-facto standard operating system. It is in no way Open. It is proprietary.
Gcc is also most heavily optimized for the intel platform.
This bit is at least correct. That's because most people have PeeCees with intel (or compatible) processors in them, and most development, by default, has been done in this architecture. Optimisations on this architecture therefore benefit most people.
Evil, wicked, twisted porn link in the above! And a vaguely amusing picture of the back of a bare-naked lady including her bare bottom!
No! You have it all wrong!
C# is the Reliant Robbin of programming languages.
I was looking at the state of development of the FORTRAN compiler in gcc today and found this project to implement a more modern GNU FORTRAN compiler. It looks like it's a proper cross-platform complier, using gcc's back end for code generation.
I think to people in business, especially the ones running the business, e.g. a farmer, a spreadsheet is a far more useful tool than a document viewer or word processor. Connection to the Internet, on the other hand, would be highly valuable, since it is a quick, cheap, open and ubiquitous medium for communication.
Here she is. Reactor 1 is on the left, 2 on the right and the turbine hall is in the foreground. My office was in the low bit at the right hand end of the turbine hall. It's a Magnox station, which means natural uranium metal fuel in "magnox" cans, graphite moderator and carbon dioxide coolant. Thermal efficiency was about 23-25%. On a very good day, with a cold river Blackwater, no refuelling backlog and good deskdrivers it could just about manage 246MW electrical. The reactors were 480MW thermal.
First went critical in 1962, last shut down was March 2002. I left in 2000 to get a job with a future...
Economics force it to close :-( The river is too shallow to build a more powerful replacement (not enough cooling water).
Not quite, but at my old power station the primary reactor temperature monitoring computer was a Honeywell 316 with a teletype terminal, two green-screen displays (one for each reactor operator), a built in 160k disk and 32k-16bit words of ram. It has multitasking, and a paper tape drive for booting the operating system. There was no file system on the disk. Temperatures and flags were stored in sectors on the disk, which were loaded and modified using an octal monitor program. What fun that was. Luckily it the disk gave up in summer 2000, and couldn't be raplced, so the 2nd hand PDP-11/70s they bough 10 years previously, running RSX-11/M and some proprietary software written in CORAL-66, became front line. The power station closed in 2002. I was born in 1974. The honeywell 316 came on-line in 1972, the year my parents were married. It came with a FORTRAN-IV compiler...Yes, we had drawers full of paper tapes with the system on.
So, all those cold, dark Scottish winter afternoons spent loading hex into my ZX81 paid off when I grew up. I wonder how many kids today unedr 10 know what hexadecimal is, let alone could code a hex loader in BASIC off the top of their heads?
Kids today!
Really? In my day we used to have 386/33 machines with 4 10Mbit ethernet cards running Novell Netware, and several large hard disks. You're not running Windows, by any chance are you?
In Soviet Russia (Or Bushist America) our new G5 overlords welcome you! So says Natalie Portman, naked and petrified with hot grits down her pants. Troll, troll, troll your boat, gently down the stream...or something. Goodness, I must be getting old.
Let's have one with a Wankel engine! :-)
What about latency? This is important in multitasking and multithreading, so I've heard.
That action is ultimately futile since the gestation may not have time to go to term, and the offspring, if born, would not grow to reproduction age...
Well are they? I need to know.
...and the Injuns (sic) were there first.
Couldn't you just telework, and only drive down for meetings? Or is that too radical for your employers?
You have my condolences, living in Aberdeen and working in Dundee!! What a terribly boring drive, down that A90, and with all those dangerous juctions. I used to work in Aberdeen a few years ago. The traffic is appaling, especially at rush-hour.
he time with Fortran that it takes to get proficient enough with it to appreciate its elegance, power and simplicity.
FORTRAN-77 in its pure form is very simple, nay simplistic. The syntax is ad-hoc. There is no WHILE, or REPEAT UNITL. The I/O is primitive to the point of barbarism. Good grief, FORTH was more advanced.
Anyway, thank you for taking part in an entertaining religious flamewar. LOL
Ah, you have not experienced traffic is southeast England then. The M25 and its tributaries are frequently closed for hours at a time.
If you have to be in on time, you should learn what traffic is like, and plan to be early enough everyday that normal traffic variences can be covered.
I find teleworking a much more satisfactory solution.
I was merely making the point that having authoritarian working rules just for the sake of it are pointless, often counterproductive and archaic. These days work has to be done at all sorts of times of day. Heck, I used to work putting out potatoes in a supermarket. There was no long hair (had to be shaved), you could wear any colour of socks as long as they were black (also trousers and shoes) and if you dared not smile at a customer when they were threatening to castrate you you were sacked.
No, sorry, it's been many years since I did any scientific programming. I know Sun has some math libraries that may be available freely.
No it is not. Not everyone sleeps like a log, regular as clockwork. Not everyone has reliable transport. What happens if there's a serious accident and they close the motorway for 3 hours? Why is 1 minute so important? There are 450 minuts in a 7.5 hour working day. 1 minute is less than three tenths of one percent of that.
Why do some employers treat their workers with contempt, condescention, and suspicion? Why are they so irrational? Whay purpose do such arbitrary rules serve? If timing has to be so precise, surely a machine should be doing it.
It's just yet another IBM PR fluff piece. There seems to be one or so a week here. Funny how it's always IBM, when there's so much other, often more important, interesting and novel stuff going on out there. IBM is doing a very good job of publicising itself these days.
Not C++ but C: f2c
I'd still use C because I've never used Fortran
FORTRAN, especially in its older incarnations e.g. FORTRAN-77, reall is that bad. Having learned C as a teenager (K&R then ANSI) and then being forced to write some F-77, I can assure you it was no picnic. If you remember the BASIC interpreters that used to come on 8-bit micros in the early 80s, without the user-friendly error messages, with fixed-format 80-column source geared towards old punch cards, cryptic run-time errors, if any... You get the idea.
C is old too, but it's a heck of a lot easier to learn, easier to understand, more consistent etc. than old FORTRAN. FORTRAN's systax is largely ad-hoc. Remember, it was one of the first two compiled "high-level" languages. COBOL was the other. It shows.
FORTRAN 90 and then 95 came along. A few years ago we had a work experience student who was learning a language called F, basically modern fortran with all the old rubbish removed.
Anyway, old FORTRAN (77 and before and without many of the vendor-only extensions) is sheer purgatory for the modern programmer.
There was a better competitor called ALGOL once upon a time, but as with VHS video and MS Windows, the "worst" one prevailed.
God, I'm getting old...
However, 10 years ago, FORTRAN compilers were very much more advanced in terms of optimisation for numerical work than C (e.g. the Cray compiler could do automatic vectorisation.)
I would have thought that if you had a big, expensive supercomputer, you can afford the compiler. Not buying the compiler is silly, because you'll probably end up with an order of magnitude less performance out of it with a compiler whose primary goal is portability and has been designed to work well on totally different hardware architectures.
Having said that, though, if you've got a low end box, you probably want a cheap or free compiler. Why spend $1000+ on a compiler when the box probably cost less? The low end box can probably sustain 100+MFLOPS (easily) and peak well into the GFLOPS. That's a cheap Athlon we're talking about. So you probably don't want to buy a fancy FORTRAN compiler. Why not just stick to C or even C++ nowadays? Legacy code :-(
So you have a problem. The big supercomputer you bough 5 years ago probably has a "slow" C/C++ compiler. The nice cheap box you have on your desk has arubbishy FORTRAN compiler and a reasonable C/C++ compiler.
So, you can convert all your legacy code to C and C++, you can buy a commercial FORTRAN compiler or why don't you universities cough up some time and money to give to the GNU FORTRAN people to help them improve their compiler? Or is that too radical and lefty?