All the detail you need is out there on the web, but often, the detail is not what you need.. you need a broader overview, and a reasonably complete, heavily documented example so you can make your own decisions and avoid the obvious problems.
And thats exactly what 'Programming Linux Games' provides.
I recommend this book to anyone looking at doing games or multimedia programming under linux, and the chapters on sound are particularly interesting.
I have had reasonable reults running the Flash 4 Authoring environment for Win32 on Codeweavers WINE PR4.
That is, the demo version started up happily - displaying the stage, icons etc. perfectly before telling me it had timed out, which was as far as i got.
Interestingly, Photoshop 5.5 ran almost flawlessly expect the Text tool didn't work. The one flaw is unfortunately a giant, steaming hole in the functionality of the product.
I suspect Flash would work pretty well if the full version was installed.
Fonts might be an issue, abut since fonts suck so bad under Linux, youre probably better off dual-booting/VMWare/Win4Lin-ing it for this particualr type of thing.
I pay my bills by EFT-POS at a bank branch or post office.
There is no cheque-based transaction in this case, the funds are transferred electronically, after the barcode on the bill is scanned by the operator and payment accepted via my EFT-POS card.
Also, the idea that cheques are the same as cash is fallacious, a society based entirely on cheques or similar promisary notes would be exactly analogous to a 'cashless' society.
A cheque is not legal tender, and is as worthless as the paper it is written on should the person who wrote it not have the funds to clear it.
The concept of cash is firmly rooted in the idea that it is a nationally recognized representation of value, guaranteed by the government and compulsarily accepted by any commercial entity in the country.
No cash changes hands during most cheque transactions either, unless the person who banks the cheque specifically requests that. In this case, the information contained on the cheque in the mail might as well be the contents of a set of electronic packets travelling down a wire, instead of through the post written on bits of paper.
We have a high rate of adoption for EFT-POS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale), which means you can quite happily go for months without ever needing a note of any denomination.
My pay gets Direct-Credited into my bank account, and i usually carry no dollars in my wallet at all.
Parking in the city is an exception, at least where i live, since the only currency accepted is notes and coins at the boots and 'pay and display' vending machines.
Still, this is a relatively minor problem, as you can buy bus passes or a prepay parking card with EFT-POS
Practically all gas stations, supermarkets, retail shops, bars, cafes and anything else you can think of has EFT-POS available to make purchases, and it is extremely rare to find a shop you cannot use EFT-POS in, at least in the main cities.
If somebody wanted to bet me ten thousand bucks i could survive for 3 months without ever handling a note or coin, i would take that bet in a second.
You can even use EFT-POS to pay for pizza deliveries.
'We think M$ software is too expensive, but we're not prepared to bite the bullet and use an alternative or fund the devlopment of other solutions to our problem.'
With 880 million pounds - almost a billion pounds, well over a billion $US, you could easily afford to pay for a team to write an OfficeXP to Office97 file format converter, even if it meant that team of people had to spend every waking hour for a month figuring it out.
You might even have a few bucks left over, like, ohh, about 879.8 million pounds, absolute worst-case scenario.
With a few of those millions, enough people could be hired to work on OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice or the GNOME Office suite to make it, if not a total replacement, at least a workable alternative to Office XP.
This, essentially one-time, investment would save the next 4-year period's 1.2 billion pound bill, as M$ jacks the price up again, since nobody has bothered to get off their fat corporate ass and do something about it.
Its like these companies have voluntarily beached themselves like whales and are letting a giant vulture (i.e. Microsoft) slowly eat their flesh while they slowly die of suffocation in the blistering sun.
Then watch us build your 'high-speed distributed video serving network' in our spare time at no cost to you, while MS, Apple, Real and AOL fuck around for years trying to court 'industry players' and 'content copyright holders'.
If the whole 'Napster' thing proved anything it's that there are a shitload of people out there desparate for content they don't get supplied through 'mainstream media', but nobody wants to pay the same people who have been screwing them down at the record store for years.
The Linux community is crying out for decent video tools, and none of the other players except maybe Real seem particularly interested in providing them.
To beat M$ in this area, Sun and Philips are going to need some serious help, and the only place they're likely to find it these days is with the Open-Source/Free Software community.
We have more clout with M$ than the US Justice department does, anyway.
If we didn't perceive depth very well indeed, we wouldn't even be able to catch a ball thrown to us.
The idea that possessing another 'organ' would somehow add a new dimension to the world we sense is a little off base.
Dolphins, and bats for example, use a echo-location techniques to perceive depth, with enough accuracy to catch a fish or flying insect without any visual cues whatsoever. Our ears are just not as sensitive as theirs.
Our sense of touch is 3D in the extreme. We can feel the shape of an object, front, back and on all sides, but the nerve cells in our fingers are fundamentally no different than the nerve cells in our ear canals, its just the way we interpret the data they send, based on what we subconsciously understand about the relationship of those nerves to the rest of our world.
We don't 'know' anything at all. We only perceive what our senses tell us. You don't 'know' if something is blue or green, you can only infer it's colour from the way it looks to you.
If someone shines a red spotlight on a matte white object, and you look at it, you see a red object.
If we saw in 'True Colour' we would always know what colour an object was, even in the total absence of light. This is fallacious, of course, since the concept of colour depends totally on the existence of light.
Just as colour, the concept of 'depth' only exists because we have the means to sense it. You could surely improve or augment the way we sense depth, but would that change the way we perceive it?
This is insane. It's not like anybody with a pen and a pad of paper can't construct an 'unbreakable' encryption scheme.
This whole 'Encryption is what bought down the WTC' is just absolute bullshit.
Does nobody even think about the fact that Osama Bin Laden was on the US Governments' payroll during the 'Cold War', carrying out terrorist activities against the Russians in Afghanistan WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT AND APPROVAL OF THE US GOVERNMENT!?
If the your government is going to actually pay these guys to blow up buildings, and then pull out and leave them swinging in the wind with bloody revenge on their minds, surely encryption regulation is the least of your worries.
To Mr. Bin Laden, i doubt there is really much difference between blowing up a building in Afghanistan, and blowing one up in the US (to be fair, there is no publically available evidence that definitely points to Mr. Bin Laden as yet).
How can you consider terrorists acts planned, financed and supported by the US to be 'OK' while terrorist acts commited against the US to be 'Not OK'
The WTC bombing was a tragic and indefensible act of violent oppresion, but banning or modifying encryption software won't do a damn thing to prevent such attacks in future.
If you (the good ol' boys in the US of A) really want to prevent global terrorism, then stop financing, supporting and perpetrating it.
Call me when mozilla supports it. Even stuff like CSS is still not used pervasively for web design, and how long has it been since it reached 'W3C Official Recommendation' status?
This thing has got nothing on my cluster of 3 12MB 486DX266's hooked up with fat 10Mbps ethernet to a screaming 16MB P-75 controller running Slackware with IPVS kernel patches and giant 800MB IDE disk.
'Passport' is something anyone with a Postgres or mySQL database, Apache, OpenSSL and Perl could write the functional equivalent in a day.
Sure, it's obviously been written by a huge team of programmers, carefully screened for any possible security hole and tested on a massive scale at Microsoft's fortress in Redmond.
It's just amusing how nobody really has any confidence that the largest software company in the world can write something so basic, and get it right.
What amazes me is that the 512K 386 running Windows 3.0 machine offered a more consistent and useful UI than my P3/500 with 256MB of RAM running Mandrake 8.0
Could it be because MacOS X, as a desktop OS, is at least 5 years ahead of Linux in terms of providing casual users the software and feature support they need to do their jobs?
Personally, i use Mandrake 8.0RC1 on my iMac, since it only has 64MB of RAM and its 266MHz CPU won't drive OS X very well - however, the video acceleration in X is piss-poor, and the idea that this system would be installable (The Mandrake installer screwed up fairly badly when trying to partition my disk, and had to be repaired by using pdisk) by joe average is laughable.
The idea that Mandrake 8.0RC1 (maybe they have a new ati driver for X in 8.0 final) provides acceptable desktop performance on a Rev. A iMac is also laughable.
Linux is great for people like me who are prepared to invest the time and effort to make it work for them, but theres no way 95% of the current Mac user base would want, need, or get excited about Linux because MacOS X is quite obviously a superior solution.
Re:KDE and Ximian Gnome Can't Get Along?
on
KDE 2.2 Released
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· Score: 2
Use Windows 2000. A few weeks back, i installed Windows 2000 and was quite impressed with Windows compared to Linux. Far nicer.
What does this have to do with 'accessing paid-for media on Linux'??
Your first point is totally redundant.
MPEG-2, CD and other consumer format playback is no problem under Linux.
In case you have been living under a rock, you CAN play encrypted DVDs under Linux, with hardware acceleration (Creative DXR3/Hollywood+) and without (Xine and others). This is a non-issue. DeCSS is out there, and it's as simple as dropping a deCSSing or CSS-bypassing plugin into your DVD player's plugin folder.
The legality of this is questionable in some countries, chiefly the U.S.A, but thats an issue for you to take up with your government, not Hollywood FX studios.
Hollywood FX studios use Linux because it's a cheap UNIX-like platform, which many people have skills with.
Until now, there hasn't been a cheap UNIX with Linux's capabilities.
Now Linux is here, it makes sense to use it because it is an excellent tool for the job these people want to perform.
This of course means they will retool those parts of their workflow that can take advantge of Linux's strengths..
How can you say this is 'BS'??
Hollywood FX studios are also completely different from the companies that actually produce, market and distribute movies, and none of the FX studios have anything to do with the decision whether or not to encrypt the final product, or which formats it will/will not be available in.
And since Windows isn't particularly popular in Hollywood digital content creation, your second point is irrelevant. Linux will not displace Windows in the corporate market because Hollywood FX studios use it.
Just look at IRIX's giant desktop market-share. It is, in many respects, a far better OS than Linux is, it is widely used by techs and in Hollywood, but nobody does their word-processing on it.
i.e. PRMan does not do ray-tracing, radiosity etc., so for those pixels that require raytracing to acheive the effect the TDs/artists intend, BMRT is used to render them.
It would indeed be wrong to think that BMRT was the primary renderer used in any major film, but it certainly may have been used in part.
BMRT is just too darn slow to be of too much use as a primary renderer, but the quality is pretty impressive.
Don't you mean that A/W have to do a good job of Maya on OS-X, or all the 3D artists that haven't already abandoned the platform in disgust will also move to x86/Windows or Linux/IRIX machines.
Its nice that Apple has decided to ship UNIX and all, but its going to be a while before the platform matures to the level MacOS 9 has, so i don't think we'll be seeing people switching platforms in droves, and least of all in the 3D arena.
After all, if you are a 3D artist working in IRIX on Maya, then switching to Maya on NT will be cheaper than switching to Maya on MacOS X - You also have the option of a real 3D accelerator (Intergraph Wildcat and others) and you get to run Maya for Linux when it is released, if you decide NT doesn't float your boat.
You also get a native Photoshop, something MacOS X sadly can't match. Even IRIX has an (old) native Photoshop.
For the 3D artist, the benefit of switching to the Mac is minimal - you get a sluggish but pretty desktop, expensive and limited hardware choices and performance which, dollar for dollar, trails the x86 architecture by a long way.
Sure, an Altivec-enhanced Photoshop gaussian blur might execute somewhat faster than an x86 chip of higher megahertz, but until we see the 866Mhz G4 actually beat a 1.4 Ghz Athlon in a Maya stress-test, the idea that everyone in the 3D world is going to drop what theyre doing and buy a Macintosh is a little bit fanciful.
It must be emabarrasing for Steve Jobs that his 'graphics workstations' aren't used at his other company - Pixar, because theyre so lame at 3D. So when Pixar universally adopts the Macintosh for it's 3D workstations, then maybe the rest of the world might take some interest.
Sure, but with a mass-produced hardware encoder you could do the same with a 100Mhz part.
Consider how much slower a general-purpose CPU like the P3 is compared to custom hardware like the NVidia GeForce3 for doing realtime 3D. You probably would neet a 10GHz or better P3 to equal the performance of the GeForce3 at this task.
With the increasing popularity of video-processing on consumer desktops, it would be nice to see hardware manufacturers putting some hardware into their cards to support encoding functionality, as well as just augmenting software decoding.
Realtime MPEG-4 encoding is not out of the question, since realtime MPEG-2 encoding is now a consumer-level proposition - TiVO, cards from hauppage etc..
It would be interesting to see Matrox take back some market share by building a programmable video compression engine onto one of it's upcoming cards.
They have tried this with the 'Rainbow Runner' and it's ilk, but these products were never billed as a 'Complete PVR and DVD-ripping station', which i'm sure would be vastly more attractive to joe average than 'Record and edit your own home videos'
This is not to say that a 10GHz CPU would not be nifty, but rather you could get more done with a set of lower-clocked chips, each optimised for specific functions.
If your ISP is 802.11b, you should be able to use cards from any vendor to connect to their network.
I have just set up a Nokia C111 card (through a PCI-PCMCIA adapter, also supplied by Nokia) on my Linux machine.
It works great, and Nokia supplies (mixed binary/source) Linux drivers for it, which you need to compile yourself into a kernel module.
I wasn't able to get it running on one of my machines running a 2.2.14 kernel, but the other machine, with a 2.4.5 kernel worked perfectly. I am going to upgrade the 2.2.14 machine to a more modern 2.2 series kernel, so we shall see if it works then.
The card and adapter cost NZ$300 and $160 respectively - halve those to get $US.
Slashdot Mirror
And thought it was really good.
All the detail you need is out there on the web, but often, the detail is not what you need.. you need a broader overview, and a reasonably complete, heavily documented example so you can make your own decisions and avoid the obvious problems.
And thats exactly what 'Programming Linux Games' provides.
I recommend this book to anyone looking at doing games or multimedia programming under linux, and the chapters on sound are particularly interesting.
I have had reasonable reults running the Flash 4 Authoring environment for Win32 on Codeweavers WINE PR4.
That is, the demo version started up happily - displaying the stage, icons etc. perfectly before telling me it had timed out, which was as far as i got.
Interestingly, Photoshop 5.5 ran almost flawlessly expect the Text tool didn't work. The one flaw is unfortunately a giant, steaming hole in the functionality of the product.
I suspect Flash would work pretty well if the full version was installed.
Fonts might be an issue, abut since fonts suck so bad under Linux, youre probably better off dual-booting/VMWare/Win4Lin-ing it for this particualr type of thing.
is that you can't play it in bed without having the light on, making your girlfriend mad.
This hack has the potential to restore my relationship to pre-GBA goodness!
What 'online bill payments'?
I pay my bills by EFT-POS at a bank branch or post office.
There is no cheque-based transaction in this case, the funds are transferred electronically, after the barcode on the bill is scanned by the operator and payment accepted via my EFT-POS card.
Also, the idea that cheques are the same as cash is fallacious, a society based entirely on cheques or similar promisary notes would be exactly analogous to a 'cashless' society.
A cheque is not legal tender, and is as worthless as the paper it is written on should the person who wrote it not have the funds to clear it.
The concept of cash is firmly rooted in the idea that it is a nationally recognized representation of value, guaranteed by the government and compulsarily accepted by any commercial entity in the country.
No cash changes hands during most cheque transactions either, unless the person who banks the cheque specifically requests that. In this case, the information contained on the cheque in the mail might as well be the contents of a set of electronic packets travelling down a wire, instead of through the post written on bits of paper.
We have a high rate of adoption for EFT-POS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale), which means you can quite happily go for months without ever needing a note of any denomination.
My pay gets Direct-Credited into my bank account, and i usually carry no dollars in my wallet at all.
Parking in the city is an exception, at least where i live, since the only currency accepted is notes and coins at the boots and 'pay and display' vending machines.
Still, this is a relatively minor problem, as you can buy bus passes or a prepay parking card with EFT-POS
Practically all gas stations, supermarkets, retail shops, bars, cafes and anything else you can think of has EFT-POS available to make purchases, and it is extremely rare to find a shop you cannot use EFT-POS in, at least in the main cities.
If somebody wanted to bet me ten thousand bucks i could survive for 3 months without ever handling a note or coin, i would take that bet in a second.
You can even use EFT-POS to pay for pizza deliveries.
'We think M$ software is too expensive, but we're not prepared to bite the bullet and use an alternative or fund the devlopment of other solutions to our problem.'
With 880 million pounds - almost a billion pounds, well over a billion $US, you could easily afford to pay for a team to write an OfficeXP to Office97 file format converter, even if it meant that team of people had to spend every waking hour for a month figuring it out.
You might even have a few bucks left over, like, ohh, about 879.8 million pounds, absolute worst-case scenario.
With a few of those millions, enough people could be hired to work on OpenOffice, StarOffice, KOffice or the GNOME Office suite to make it, if not a total replacement, at least a workable alternative to Office XP.
This, essentially one-time, investment would save the next 4-year period's 1.2 billion pound bill, as M$ jacks the price up again, since nobody has bothered to get off their fat corporate ass and do something about it.
Its like these companies have voluntarily beached themselves like whales and are letting a giant vulture (i.e. Microsoft) slowly eat their flesh while they slowly die of suffocation in the blistering sun.
And see how many horsepower you can get out of that humble lawnmower engine.
Experiment with alternative fuels and see if you can run your lawnmower engine off the methane produced from your housegold garbage or something.
Then watch us build your 'high-speed distributed video serving network' in our spare time at no cost to you, while MS, Apple, Real and AOL fuck around for years trying to court 'industry players' and 'content copyright holders'.
If the whole 'Napster' thing proved anything it's that there are a shitload of people out there desparate for content they don't get supplied through 'mainstream media', but nobody wants to pay the same people who have been screwing them down at the record store for years.
The Linux community is crying out for decent video tools, and none of the other players except maybe Real seem particularly interested in providing them.
To beat M$ in this area, Sun and Philips are going to need some serious help, and the only place they're likely to find it these days is with the Open-Source/Free Software community.
We have more clout with M$ than the US Justice department does, anyway.
Wildly inaccurate?
If we didn't perceive depth very well indeed, we wouldn't even be able to catch a ball thrown to us.
The idea that possessing another 'organ' would somehow add a new dimension to the world we sense is a little off base.
Dolphins, and bats for example, use a echo-location techniques to perceive depth, with enough accuracy to catch a fish or flying insect without any visual cues whatsoever. Our ears are just not as sensitive as theirs.
Our sense of touch is 3D in the extreme. We can feel the shape of an object, front, back and on all sides, but the nerve cells in our fingers are fundamentally no different than the nerve cells in our ear canals, its just the way we interpret the data they send, based on what we subconsciously understand about the relationship of those nerves to the rest of our world.
We don't 'know' anything at all. We only perceive what our senses tell us. You don't 'know' if something is blue or green, you can only infer it's colour from the way it looks to you.
If someone shines a red spotlight on a matte white object, and you look at it, you see a red object.
If we saw in 'True Colour' we would always know what colour an object was, even in the total absence of light. This is fallacious, of course, since the concept of colour depends totally on the existence of light.
Just as colour, the concept of 'depth' only exists because we have the means to sense it. You could surely improve or augment the way we sense depth, but would that change the way we perceive it?
This is insane. It's not like anybody with a pen and a pad of paper can't construct an 'unbreakable' encryption scheme.
This whole 'Encryption is what bought down the WTC' is just absolute bullshit.
Does nobody even think about the fact that Osama Bin Laden was on the US Governments' payroll during the 'Cold War', carrying out terrorist activities against the Russians in Afghanistan WITH THE FINANCIAL SUPPORT AND APPROVAL OF THE US GOVERNMENT!?
If the your government is going to actually pay these guys to blow up buildings, and then pull out and leave them swinging in the wind with bloody revenge on their minds, surely encryption regulation is the least of your worries.
To Mr. Bin Laden, i doubt there is really much difference between blowing up a building in Afghanistan, and blowing one up in the US (to be fair, there is no publically available evidence that definitely points to Mr. Bin Laden as yet).
How can you consider terrorists acts planned, financed and supported by the US to be 'OK' while terrorist acts commited against the US to be 'Not OK'
The WTC bombing was a tragic and indefensible act of violent oppresion, but banning or modifying encryption software won't do a damn thing to prevent such attacks in future.
If you (the good ol' boys in the US of A) really want to prevent global terrorism, then stop financing, supporting and perpetrating it.
Yeah yeah, SVG now an official recommendation.
Call me when mozilla supports it. Even stuff like CSS is still not used pervasively for web design, and how long has it been since it reached 'W3C Official Recommendation' status?
These are radio controlled cars.
If the machines had to be totally autonomous, now that would be interesting.
This thing has got nothing on my cluster of 3 12MB 486DX266's hooked up with fat 10Mbps ethernet to a screaming 16MB P-75 controller running Slackware with IPVS kernel patches and giant 800MB IDE disk.
'Passport' is something anyone with a Postgres or mySQL database, Apache, OpenSSL and Perl could write the functional equivalent in a day.
Sure, it's obviously been written by a huge team of programmers, carefully screened for any possible security hole and tested on a massive scale at Microsoft's fortress in Redmond.
It's just amusing how nobody really has any confidence that the largest software company in the world can write something so basic, and get it right.
What amazes me is that the 512K 386 running Windows 3.0 machine offered a more consistent and useful UI than my P3/500 with 256MB of RAM running Mandrake 8.0
CmdrTaco joins JonKatz on my Slashdot filter list
Could it be because MacOS X, as a desktop OS, is at least 5 years ahead of Linux in terms of providing casual users the software and feature support they need to do their jobs?
Personally, i use Mandrake 8.0RC1 on my iMac, since it only has 64MB of RAM and its 266MHz CPU won't drive OS X very well - however, the video acceleration in X is piss-poor, and the idea that this system would be installable (The Mandrake installer screwed up fairly badly when trying to partition my disk, and had to be repaired by using pdisk) by joe average is laughable.
The idea that Mandrake 8.0RC1 (maybe they have a new ati driver for X in 8.0 final) provides acceptable desktop performance on a Rev. A iMac is also laughable.
Linux is great for people like me who are prepared to invest the time and effort to make it work for them, but theres no way 95% of the current Mac user base would want, need, or get excited about Linux because MacOS X is quite obviously a superior solution.
Use Windows 2000. A few weeks back, i installed Windows 2000 and was quite impressed with Windows compared to Linux. Far nicer.
What does this have to do with 'accessing paid-for media on Linux'??
Your first point is totally redundant.
MPEG-2, CD and other consumer format playback is no problem under Linux.
In case you have been living under a rock, you CAN play encrypted DVDs under Linux, with hardware acceleration (Creative DXR3/Hollywood+) and without (Xine and others). This is a non-issue. DeCSS is out there, and it's as simple as dropping a deCSSing or CSS-bypassing plugin into your DVD player's plugin folder.
The legality of this is questionable in some countries, chiefly the U.S.A, but thats an issue for you to take up with your government, not Hollywood FX studios.
Hollywood FX studios use Linux because it's a cheap UNIX-like platform, which many people have skills with.
Until now, there hasn't been a cheap UNIX with Linux's capabilities.
Now Linux is here, it makes sense to use it because it is an excellent tool for the job these people want to perform.
This of course means they will retool those parts of their workflow that can take advantge of Linux's strengths..
How can you say this is 'BS'??
Hollywood FX studios are also completely different from the companies that actually produce, market and distribute movies, and none of the FX studios have anything to do with the decision whether or not to encrypt the final product, or which formats it will/will not be available in.
And since Windows isn't particularly popular in Hollywood digital content creation, your second point is irrelevant. Linux will not displace Windows in the corporate market because Hollywood FX studios use it.
Just look at IRIX's giant desktop market-share. It is, in many respects, a far better OS than Linux is, it is widely used by techs and in Hollywood, but nobody does their word-processing on it.
BMRT is often used as a ray-server by PRMan.
i.e. PRMan does not do ray-tracing, radiosity etc., so for those pixels that require raytracing to acheive the effect the TDs/artists intend, BMRT is used to render them.
It would indeed be wrong to think that BMRT was the primary renderer used in any major film, but it certainly may have been used in part.
BMRT is just too darn slow to be of too much use as a primary renderer, but the quality is pretty impressive.
Isn't this JXTA thing just a rip-off of the Jabber project, with no actual implementation, and no actual apps?
Thats what it looks like to me, anyway.
Don't you mean that A/W have to do a good job of Maya on OS-X, or all the 3D artists that haven't already abandoned the platform in disgust will also move to x86/Windows or Linux/IRIX machines.
Its nice that Apple has decided to ship UNIX and all, but its going to be a while before the platform matures to the level MacOS 9 has, so i don't think we'll be seeing people switching platforms in droves, and least of all in the 3D arena.
After all, if you are a 3D artist working in IRIX on Maya, then switching to Maya on NT will be cheaper than switching to Maya on MacOS X - You also have the option of a real 3D accelerator (Intergraph Wildcat and others) and you get to run Maya for Linux when it is released, if you decide NT doesn't float your boat.
You also get a native Photoshop, something MacOS X sadly can't match. Even IRIX has an (old) native Photoshop.
For the 3D artist, the benefit of switching to the Mac is minimal - you get a sluggish but pretty desktop, expensive and limited hardware choices and performance which, dollar for dollar, trails the x86 architecture by a long way.
Sure, an Altivec-enhanced Photoshop gaussian blur might execute somewhat faster than an x86 chip of higher megahertz, but until we see the 866Mhz G4 actually beat a 1.4 Ghz Athlon in a Maya stress-test, the idea that everyone in the 3D world is going to drop what theyre doing and buy a Macintosh is a little bit fanciful.
It must be emabarrasing for Steve Jobs that his 'graphics workstations' aren't used at his other company - Pixar, because theyre so lame at 3D. So when Pixar universally adopts the Macintosh for it's 3D workstations, then maybe the rest of the world might take some interest.
Sure, but with a mass-produced hardware encoder you could do the same with a 100Mhz part.
Consider how much slower a general-purpose CPU like the P3 is compared to custom hardware like the NVidia GeForce3 for doing realtime 3D. You probably would neet a 10GHz or better P3 to equal the performance of the GeForce3 at this task.
With the increasing popularity of video-processing on consumer desktops, it would be nice to see hardware manufacturers putting some hardware into their cards to support encoding functionality, as well as just augmenting software decoding.
Realtime MPEG-4 encoding is not out of the question, since realtime MPEG-2 encoding is now a consumer-level proposition - TiVO, cards from hauppage etc..
It would be interesting to see Matrox take back some market share by building a programmable video compression engine onto one of it's upcoming cards.
They have tried this with the 'Rainbow Runner' and it's ilk, but these products were never billed as a 'Complete PVR and DVD-ripping station', which i'm sure would be vastly more attractive to joe average than 'Record and edit your own home videos'
This is not to say that a 10GHz CPU would not be nifty, but rather you could get more done with a set of lower-clocked chips, each optimised for specific functions.
The bacteria see how effective this weapon is and start to incorporate it to better infect our cells.
When this happens, the current antibiotic-resistant 'superbugs' are going to look pretty tame in comparison.
If your ISP is 802.11b, you should be able to use cards from any vendor to connect to their network.
I have just set up a Nokia C111 card (through a PCI-PCMCIA adapter, also supplied by Nokia) on my Linux machine.
It works great, and Nokia supplies (mixed binary/source) Linux drivers for it, which you need to compile yourself into a kernel module.
I wasn't able to get it running on one of my machines running a 2.2.14 kernel, but the other machine, with a 2.4.5 kernel worked perfectly. I am going to upgrade the 2.2.14 machine to a more modern 2.2 series kernel, so we shall see if it works then.
The card and adapter cost NZ$300 and $160 respectively - halve those to get $US.