Most people don't think like that. They think "You have the source, you can make whatever cheats you want!" They're gamers, not coders, and most don't have a clue what they're talking about. I trust that Valve is professional enough to write tight code.
But seriously, it is a pretty serious work of fiction that the devs over at valve write tight code. Example: there's a reason that there are 3rd party scripts to auto restart the server when it crashes. We've got an HL server in the next room. 5 core dumps per day is around average. I could go on (about the client and the server), but I won't.
You can do a LOT if you have the client source. Fast paced network games (such as Half-life) have the clients handle a lot of the processing that would be done at the server if not for 1) limited computing capabilities 2) the need for the appearance of low-latency. There was a lot of whining from the Quake I & II gaming communities when the source code was released.
Trusting an untrusted host is a hard problem, one that Valve has not solved. Source code is the key to the candy store.
The camera is not very good, and is really bad in low-light situations.
You can put Linux on a picturebook, but as far as I know, noone's got the camera working under Linux with the latest 2 generations of the Picturebook. They've recently changed the hardware, and neglected to publish specifications.
If it wasn't for America you'd either be speaking Italian, German, Russian, or maybe even Turkish, take your pick. Just imagine what your life would be like if America hadn't been there to stop Mussolini and Hitler?
You make it sound like the Americans acted alone. They acted in concert with a host of other nations. The game isn't called axis & allies for nothing. The British also had something to do with Mussolini and Hitler. Americans are more responsible for nuking the hell out of millions of Japanese civilians.
Being an American means that you live here and are a contributing member of society.
[chuckle] Tell that to the INS. I am both of these things, but not an American;)
...You don't even have to be born here.
Same with most countries. But have you seen this process in action? It's non-trivial to say the least.
Saved for posterity: As for your statement that you're a non-racist, you could have fooled me....We did kill over a million NVA and VC troops (too few if you ask me)
I see....
trying to make everyone like us and feel all warm and fuzzy about the US is what led to the WTC and pentagon being bombed
That was a really tragic thing that happened that day. But do you know why Osama Bin Laden particularly despises the US? It has more to do with American interests in Saudi Arabia. (Don't get me wrong, Osama Bin Laden is responsible for some truly heinous acts)
read this book
I've never read this book, but isn't that Machiavelli's book on how to maintain your power? Rule with an iron fist, be foul while seeming fair and that whole lot? You really meant to quote this?
FYI, I am a non-american, temporarily living in the US. As such, I get to experience the American propoganda machine first-hand. You may not realize this, but american media is completely skewed towards US interests. (If you are really interested, I know of a few interesting examples of this)
Have you ever been to Manhattan? People there sometimes act like they're the center of the world. American seem to sometimes forget that the rest of the world exists too.
I read an article once, that 9-11 shocked a lot of Americans because, "they were surprised and shocked to realize that the rest of the world does not view them as they view themselves."
To fill in the blanks, it is a common perception that Americans are ignorant trigger-happy self-important bullies.
Hmmm.. Seems I've touched a nerve, judging from the number of replies to this post. Let me clarify a few points.
- I don't like spam anymore than regular old junk mail.
- I do not have an @yahoo.com email. I give yahoo money, they host a website + mailserver for me. They do not have an open relay. Standard POP before SMTP validation. People who spam the system have their access removed.
- I'm not suggesting that spam guards are not worthwhile. I just believe that they should be more configurable. eg. "If I have an email from someoneiknow@someopenrelay.com, let it through."
"I don't get that much spam. Don't spam filter for me."
What I am suggesting is that spam filtering is not a "one-size fits all" thing. I think everyone should be free to choose their own solution. I wish the people writing the spamguards would take this into account.
- I completely agree that pornographics spam should be punishable by death. Regular spam should be illegal too. I'm just saying that (at least for some of us) the solution is worse than the problem. People seem to have taken some deep offence to spam, and persue it like some sort of ruthless religious crusade.
- The reason I only get 10 or less spam mails a day, is because I don't give out my email address promiscuously. I don't post on the usenet with my real email address, and I don't reply to spam.
- You know that 97% of the fiber running the backbones (at least in North America) is unlit? Due to buffering/queuing issues, TCP queuing algorithms work best if the network is 30% saturated. But, discussion of all that is beyond the scope of this thread;)
- The UWaterloo account I mentioned was a unix account. You can put in all sorts of wonderful spam guarding software into your.forward. So you can filter it before your mail client ever sees it, or put it off for later viewing.
- I can understand ignorance. Pompous ignorance I cannot stand.
You know, it wasn't that long ago that someone pointed out how hard it is to be removed from spam lists.
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button. I get about 10 spam mails a day. It takes about 1/2 a second to read the subject, realize it's spam, and hit the delete button. Over the course of a year, I lose 30 minutes. That's not such a big deal to me.
What does irritate me is I'm a victim of spamguards, on both ends. My web hosting service (yahoo) for unknown reasons is listed on 1 spam list. I've tried - there seems to be no way off the list. So, occasionally, I run into an institution which has walled me off.
What makes me even more angry, is that my school where I did my undergrad, (UWaterloo) has implemented global "spam protection." And so now, I can't receive emails from some of my contacts.
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered. I'm willing to give up those 30 minutes a year in order to communicate with people. As someone pointed out, that's the beauty of the Internet. If I want spam filtering software, I'll install it myself. I don't want someone else to make that choice for me. We, as users, are losing our freedom too. I'm shocked that noone seems to notice or care.
What happens to their DNS entries when the close up shop? Loki owns a domain name, that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with their business.
I'd like to buy it. (Not lokigames.com - another more obscure one) How do I go about doing this?
Re:not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, right. All code gets peer reviewed, and it's also verified that the version that's peer reviewed is exactly what's under source control, and QA reads code? That's a fucking joke.
I used to work for Microsoft as a dev. (Visual Studio) Although coding practices vary from group to group, many (including our team) have mandatory code reviews before submitting, including ours.
Noone would personaly verify that the peer reviewed version is exactly what's under source control, but come on. Groups are tight knit. You're always going through each other's code on a daily basis. You plant a Trojan, you're going to get caught.
Let's face it. These Al Quaeda has enough problems smuggling weapons onto airplanes. Try smuggling a programmer through a Micrsoft interview process. M$ job interviews are notoriously tough. You would get more bang for the buck building a bomb and giving the federal reserve a good shaking. (No pun intended)
Y'know, when I installed W2K I thought Microsoft finally made an operating system that was "Good Enough". It was reasonably stable, and it did what I needed. Video games, development, office apps. It was as easy to use as Win95 (What the hell do you mean, "Robin Drive failed?") and as stable as NT4.
I swore I'd never upgrade Windows again. Now they have Windows XP. New technology, multi-user, blablabla. I thought nothing short of support for ext2fs would make me upgrade. I was wrong.
ONE new feature that is absolutely essential if you have an LCD screen. (ie. a laptop) Cleartype filtering. So much nicer on the eyes. Text has never looked so good.
This is the Linux email virus. It works on the honor system. Please randomly delete some files from your hard drive, and forward this email to your friends.
As nice as Quake 3 is, it still isn't truly 3D. "WTF, who the hell is this moron! Q3 is 3D!!" you're probably screaming at your monitor, and getting a glare by your family members. But, it's the truth. Its 3D on 2D. The plane of your monitor's screen is two dimensional.
According to this definition, it still could be "true 3d". Just pick up an ASUS GeForce Deluxe package. It comes with "3D Stereoscopic glasses" that makes everything appear 3D to your eyes. (It uses one of those high-speed shutters, and syncs with the monitor refresh)
This has been around for a while - I have an ASUS GeForce (original) card with this feature. Who knows how long it was available before then.
As nice as Quake 3 is, it still isn't truly 3D. "WTF, who the hell is this moron! Q3 is 3D!!" you're probably screaming at your monitor, and getting a glare by your family members. But, it's the truth. Its 3D on 2D. The plane of your monitor's screen is two dimensional.
Re:Why aren't there more demos for Linux?
on
The Assembly In Review
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It seems to me that demo crews would be more interested in writing for Linux than they are. It just seems like the two cultures would mesh well, but apparently they haven't very much.
There are a number of reasons why it's not so as convenient as you might think to program in Linux.
1) Have you ever set up OpenGL in Linux? I mean REAL hardware accelerated GL, not this mini-driver stuff? It can be a painful/impossible experience depending on your graphics card. With windows, it's just a matter of plunking down your vendor-supported video drivers.
2) The simple graphics stuff can be VERY cpu intensive in X11. Blitting a bitmap to the screen requires TWO long memcpy's. X11 is horrible for this stuff. That's why Windows had fast movie players (Remember Quicktime for Win3.1?) before X - it was possible to access the hardware directly.
3) For reasons unclear to me, great assembly programmers seem affixed to DOS + derivatives. I think they all grew up in a world (OS) that allowed the assembler to have free range over the address space, able to poke and prod the hardware in ways that sane programmers such as me might consider obscene;)
4) If you want to show your stuff off, it's easier if you write for the more common (w32) platform
I think you'll find that a greater proportion of 4k demos work these days, than so-called megademos, because megademos load up huge sound and graphics systems...whereas 4ks just poke the same old addresses...
Some of us run operating systems with actual memory protection. (ie. Anything with an NT kernel)
Won't let rogue processes randomly poke around the address space anymore;)
The only win32 OS I run right now is W2k, and I couldn't get aaannny of the 4K demos to run. I got a coupla of the 64k demos to run, and all of the "megademos". (Except the ones that I couldn't extract - who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?!?)
... Okay, I give up - what does file:///c:/con/con do?
Well, I have a Compal N20U. Details about it, and how to set up Linux on it can be found here.
Big wins: Light & light (read: sexy;), dockable, Internal WinModem & Ethernet work with linux.
My primary concern was this:
I'm a student - therefore, I am poor, and will continue to do so for the foreseable future. In a few years, my laptop will be obsolete. So, it's better to have a light, obsolete laptop, than a big honking one.
I also tend to like ultrabase/mediabase/whatever you want to call it. Think IBM X-Series, or Sony Z505's. You can have your nice, thin, laptop, or you can have a big-ass laptop with all the drives.
What you say is probably true. But from the user's point of view (me) it doesn't make a difference.
Suppose Windoze/is/ wasting memory with extra Internet Explorer overhead.
The net result to the user is that I need an extra 20MB to surf with Mozilla than to surf with IE.
Assuming all things equal (IE and Zilla hog the same amount of resources) this just means that the problem is unfixable. Sucks, but might be true.
For the longest time, I couldn't stand looking at those crummy Netscape buttons. I like the themes option. Extremely customizable.(I realize this has been around for a while)
And it does seem to live up to the promise of "less crashes". (I've had it running a whole 15 minutes and it hasn't crashed yet;)
But there are drawbacks. On Win32, running Mozilla wants 33MB from my heap. That's almost 3 times what IE wants for rendering the same page:P Not sure my RAM-poor laptop can handle that.....
First of all, there are no pixel shaders in OpenGL. nVidia's extensions divide pixel shaders into Texture shaders, and Register Combiners. Which, basically mean, "Closer to the metal."
What does that mean? Well, Pixel Shader language is just a language. How the metal reacts is the same, if the semantics are the same.
However, *more importantly* ATI is going to *copy* nVidia's existing OpenGL extensions. That's the only way to compete - you must support existing features.
Don't believe me? They've already been doing this for years. Do a glGetString( GL_EXTENSIONS ); on any video card. Matrox, ATI, whatever. You're going to see a lot of NV_ (nVidia) specific extensions.
Standards are always developed later. Maybe you fail to grasp how new this technology. GeForce 3 was the first video card to support hardware vertex/pixel shaders. That was released 2 months ago.
Remember when things were "100% compatible"?... SoundBlaster compatible
Do you really remember what those days were like, when sound-cards *just* came out? You had to pick which sound card you wanted to lock your life into. Adlib? SoundBlaster? ELS? I can't hardly remember anymore.
ATI and nVidia *are* arguing about standards right now. They're working from a common frame. It's not that bad. You're just exagerating the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people don't think like that. They think "You have the source, you can make whatever cheats you want!" They're gamers, not coders, and most don't have a clue what they're talking about. I trust that Valve is professional enough to write tight code.
Sweet Clive, laugh derisively at him.
Sweet Clive: "Ahaha, ahaha, aahahaha."
But seriously, it is a pretty serious work of fiction that the devs over at valve write tight code. Example: there's a reason that there are 3rd party scripts to auto restart the server when it crashes. We've got an HL server in the next room. 5 core dumps per day is around average. I could go on (about the client and the server), but I won't.
You can do a LOT if you have the client source. Fast paced network games (such as Half-life) have the clients handle a lot of the processing that would be done at the server if not for 1) limited computing capabilities 2) the need for the appearance of low-latency. There was a lot of whining from the Quake I & II gaming communities when the source code was released.
Trusting an untrusted host is a hard problem, one that Valve has not solved. Source code is the key to the candy store.
Then how come the most popular games in the world are "The Sims" and "Myst"?
*cough* *cough* counter-strike *cough* *cough*
I assume money is some sort of property. Regular ol' "stuff" kind of property. Like my computer or my car, or even this chair I'm sitting on.
But last time I checked, about 98% of money exists only as bits in a computer somewhere. Not paper currency or anything, just bits.
Which is basically what domain names are. Bits in a computer. So it seems to stand to reason that domain names are regular ol' property.
I have one of these notebooks. If you want to see some sample pictures, I put up a slideshow at a little get-together a little while back.
http://www.francischang.com/slides/8-2-02/
The camera is not very good, and is really bad in low-light situations.
You can put Linux on a picturebook, but as far as I know, noone's got the camera working under Linux with the latest 2 generations of the Picturebook. They've recently changed the hardware, and neglected to publish specifications.
Hell, I can already do that.
int factorLargePrime( int largePrime ) {
return largePrime;
}
You make it sound like the Americans acted alone. They acted in concert with a host of other nations. The game isn't called axis & allies for nothing. The British also had something to do with Mussolini and Hitler. Americans are more responsible for nuking the hell out of millions of Japanese civilians.
Being an American means that you live here and are a contributing member of society.[chuckle] Tell that to the INS. I am both of these things, but not an American ;)
Same with most countries. But have you seen this process in action? It's non-trivial to say the least.
Saved for posterity:As for your statement that you're a non-racist, you could have fooled me.
I see....
trying to make everyone like us and feel all warm and fuzzy about the US is what led to the WTC and pentagon being bombedThat was a really tragic thing that happened that day. But do you know why Osama Bin Laden particularly despises the US? It has more to do with American interests in Saudi Arabia. (Don't get me wrong, Osama Bin Laden is responsible for some truly heinous acts)
read this bookI've never read this book, but isn't that Machiavelli's book on how to maintain your power? Rule with an iron fist, be foul while seeming fair and that whole lot? You really meant to quote this?
FYI, I am a non-american, temporarily living in the US. As such, I get to experience the American propoganda machine first-hand. You may not realize this, but american media is completely skewed towards US interests. (If you are really interested, I know of a few interesting examples of this)
Have you ever been to Manhattan? People there sometimes act like they're the center of the world. American seem to sometimes forget that the rest of the world exists too.
I read an article once, that 9-11 shocked a lot of Americans because, "they were surprised and shocked to realize that the rest of the world does not view them as they view themselves."
To fill in the blanks, it is a common perception that Americans are ignorant trigger-happy self-important bullies.
Once upon a time, I turned to my friend and said, "When in God's name did graphics cards become more expensive than your CPU?"
Without missing a beat he replies, ".. Well, it's got more transistors..."
Hmmm.. Seems I've touched a nerve, judging from the number of replies to this post. Let me clarify a few points.
;) .forward. So you can filter it before your mail client ever sees it, or put it off for later viewing.
- I don't like spam anymore than regular old junk mail.
- I do not have an @yahoo.com email. I give yahoo money, they host a website + mailserver for me. They do not have an open relay. Standard POP before SMTP validation. People who spam the system have their access removed.
- I'm not suggesting that spam guards are not worthwhile. I just believe that they should be more configurable.
eg. "If I have an email from someoneiknow@someopenrelay.com, let it through."
"I don't get that much spam. Don't spam filter for me."
What I am suggesting is that spam filtering is not a "one-size fits all" thing. I think everyone should be free to choose their own solution. I wish the people writing the spamguards would take this into account.
- I completely agree that pornographics spam should be punishable by death. Regular spam should be illegal too. I'm just saying that (at least for some of us) the solution is worse than the problem. People seem to have taken some deep offence to spam, and persue it like some sort of ruthless religious crusade.
- The reason I only get 10 or less spam mails a day, is because I don't give out my email address promiscuously. I don't post on the usenet with my real email address, and I don't reply to spam.
- You know that 97% of the fiber running the backbones (at least in North America) is unlit? Due to buffering/queuing issues, TCP queuing algorithms work best if the network is 30% saturated. But, discussion of all that is beyond the scope of this thread
- The UWaterloo account I mentioned was a unix account. You can put in all sorts of wonderful spam guarding software into your
- I can understand ignorance. Pompous ignorance I cannot stand.
You know, it wasn't that long ago that someone pointed out how hard it is to be removed from spam lists.
That aside, I've always wondered why people get so upset over spam. It's not that hard to hit the delete button. I get about 10 spam mails a day. It takes about 1/2 a second to read the subject, realize it's spam, and hit the delete button. Over the course of a year, I lose 30 minutes. That's not such a big deal to me.
What does irritate me is I'm a victim of spamguards, on both ends. My web hosting service (yahoo) for unknown reasons is listed on 1 spam list. I've tried - there seems to be no way off the list. So, occasionally, I run into an institution which has walled me off.
What makes me even more angry, is that my school where I did my undergrad, (UWaterloo) has implemented global "spam protection." And so now, I can't receive emails from some of my contacts.
It's about the right to choose. I want to be able to control IF my email gets spam filtered. I'm willing to give up those 30 minutes a year in order to communicate with people. As someone pointed out, that's the beauty of the Internet. If I want spam filtering software, I'll install it myself. I don't want someone else to make that choice for me. We, as users, are losing our freedom too. I'm shocked that noone seems to notice or care.
What happens to their DNS entries when the close up shop? Loki owns a domain name, that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with their business.
I'd like to buy it. (Not lokigames.com - another more obscure one) How do I go about doing this?
Yeah, right. All code gets peer reviewed, and it's also verified that the version that's peer reviewed is exactly what's under source control, and QA reads code? That's a fucking joke.
I used to work for Microsoft as a dev. (Visual Studio) Although coding practices vary from group to group, many (including our team) have mandatory code reviews before submitting, including ours.
Noone would personaly verify that the peer reviewed version is exactly what's under source control, but come on. Groups are tight knit. You're always going through each other's code on a daily basis. You plant a Trojan, you're going to get caught.
Let's face it. These Al Quaeda has enough problems smuggling weapons onto airplanes. Try smuggling a programmer through a Micrsoft interview process. M$ job interviews are notoriously tough. You would get more bang for the buck building a bomb and giving the federal reserve a good shaking. (No pun intended)
I have enough trouble with finding my remote.
Now I can lose my keyboard, mouse, monitor and CPU. This is definately progress.
Y'know, when I installed W2K I thought Microsoft finally made an operating system that was "Good Enough". It was reasonably stable, and it did what I needed. Video games, development, office apps. It was as easy to use as Win95 (What the hell do you mean, "Robin Drive failed?") and as stable as NT4.
And I could make it as pretty as I wanted, with Windowblinds without giving up a nice bash prompt and emacs.
I swore I'd never upgrade Windows again. Now they have Windows XP. New technology, multi-user, blablabla. I thought nothing short of support for ext2fs would make me upgrade. I was wrong.
ONE new feature that is absolutely essential if you have an LCD screen. (ie. a laptop) Cleartype filtering. So much nicer on the eyes. Text has never looked so good.
Overview of Cleartype & Links
Some samples
As nice as Quake 3 is, it still isn't truly 3D. "WTF, who the hell is this moron! Q3 is 3D!!" you're probably screaming at your monitor, and getting a glare by your family members. But, it's the truth. Its 3D on 2D. The plane of your monitor's screen is two dimensional.
According to this definition, it still could be "true 3d". Just pick up an ASUS GeForce Deluxe package. It comes with "3D Stereoscopic glasses" that makes everything appear 3D to your eyes. (It uses one of those high-speed shutters, and syncs with the monitor refresh)
This has been around for a while - I have an ASUS GeForce (original) card with this feature. Who knows how long it was available before then.
As nice as Quake 3 is, it still isn't truly 3D. "WTF, who the hell is this moron! Q3 is 3D!!" you're probably screaming at your monitor, and getting a glare by your family members. But, it's the truth. Its 3D on 2D. The plane of your monitor's screen is two dimensional.Now that we have the specs, how long before we can expect implementations that actually take advantage of them?
;)
They already do.
There are quite a few - lnxscene.org
There are a number of reasons why it's not so as convenient as you might think to program in Linux.
1) Have you ever set up OpenGL in Linux? I mean REAL hardware accelerated GL, not this mini-driver stuff? It can be a painful/impossible experience depending on your graphics card. With windows, it's just a matter of plunking down your vendor-supported video drivers.
2) The simple graphics stuff can be VERY cpu intensive in X11. Blitting a bitmap to the screen requires TWO long memcpy's. X11 is horrible for this stuff. That's why Windows had fast movie players (Remember Quicktime for Win3.1?) before X - it was possible to access the hardware directly.
3) For reasons unclear to me, great assembly programmers seem affixed to DOS + derivatives. I think they all grew up in a world (OS) that allowed the assembler to have free range over the address space, able to poke and prod the hardware in ways that sane programmers such as me might consider obscene ;)
4) If you want to show your stuff off, it's easier if you write for the more common (w32) platform
I think you'll find that a greater proportion of 4k demos work these days, than so-called megademos, because megademos load up huge sound and graphics systems...whereas 4ks just poke the same old addresses ...
Some of us run operating systems with actual memory protection. (ie. Anything with an NT kernel)
Won't let rogue processes randomly poke around the address space anymore ;)
The only win32 OS I run right now is W2k, and I couldn't get aaannny of the 4K demos to run. I got a coupla of the 64k demos to run, and all of the "megademos". (Except the ones that I couldn't extract - who the @#%$@#% uses LHA these days?!?)
... Okay, I give up - what does file:///c:/con/con do?
I would like to introduce to you, Dr. Gravity
Well, I have a Compal N20U. Details about it, and how to set up Linux on it can be found here.
Big wins: Light & light (read: sexy ;), dockable, Internal WinModem & Ethernet work with linux.
My primary concern was this:
I'm a student - therefore, I am poor, and will continue to do so for the foreseable future. In a few years, my laptop will be obsolete. So, it's better to have a light, obsolete laptop, than a big honking one.
I also tend to like ultrabase/mediabase/whatever you want to call it. Think IBM X-Series, or Sony Z505's. You can have your nice, thin, laptop, or you can have a big-ass laptop with all the drives.
Girlfriend + Purse ;)
...
Solutions for your:
- phone
- pda
- multi-tool
- laptop
- cigarettes & lighter
- wallet (coins only)
- movie tickets
-
What you say is probably true. But from the user's point of view (me) it doesn't make a difference.
/is/ wasting memory with extra Internet Explorer overhead.
Suppose Windoze
The net result to the user is that I need an extra 20MB to surf with Mozilla than to surf with IE.
Assuming all things equal (IE and Zilla hog the same amount of resources) this just means that the problem is unfixable. Sucks, but might be true.
For the longest time, I couldn't stand looking at those crummy Netscape buttons. I like the themes option. Extremely customizable.(I realize this has been around for a while)
;)
:P Not sure my RAM-poor laptop can handle that.....
And it does seem to live up to the promise of "less crashes". (I've had it running a whole 15 minutes and it hasn't crashed yet
But there are drawbacks. On Win32, running Mozilla wants 33MB from my heap. That's almost 3 times what IE wants for rendering the same page
A nice surprise: Mozilla properly handles true alpha-masked PNGs.
But hey, kudos to the mozilla folk for making a stable build!
Hehehe, don't be silly.
First of all, there are no pixel shaders in OpenGL. nVidia's extensions divide pixel shaders into Texture shaders, and Register Combiners. Which, basically mean, "Closer to the metal."
What does that mean? Well, Pixel Shader language is just a language. How the metal reacts is the same, if the semantics are the same.
However, *more importantly* ATI is going to *copy* nVidia's existing OpenGL extensions. That's the only way to compete - you must support existing features.
Don't believe me? They've already been doing this for years. Do a glGetString( GL_EXTENSIONS ); on any video card. Matrox, ATI, whatever. You're going to see a lot of NV_ (nVidia) specific extensions.
Standards are always developed later. Maybe you fail to grasp how new this technology. GeForce 3 was the first video card to support hardware vertex/pixel shaders. That was released 2 months ago.
Remember when things were "100% compatible"? ... SoundBlaster compatible
Do you really remember what those days were like, when sound-cards *just* came out? You had to pick which sound card you wanted to lock your life into. Adlib? SoundBlaster? ELS? I can't hardly remember anymore.
ATI and nVidia *are* arguing about standards right now. They're working from a common frame. It's not that bad. You're just exagerating the problem.