The reason is that (most) local calls are free. Some people cannot make calls other than local - fixed price per month. Faced with that, the telcos chose to make the cell user pay.
Yet again, more crap about the TCP/IP stack in Windows.
The Windows NT TCP/IP STREAM code was written by Spider Software in Edinburgh, Scotland. MS bought it and spent a lot of time making it thread and SMP safe. The stream code itself was a clean room implementation of the AT&T system V code - AFAIK BSD has never had streams and never will have. At the time the NT was being written the BSD code was unclean and fraught with legal problems.
I've seen the code, and I also personally know the original developer of the Spider code.
Well said - driving a display like this is not easy.
For example, it has 4X the number of pixels of a normal monitor. That means a bandwidth increase of 4X, or around 400MHz. Current cards not only cannot handle this, but the video cable technology can't handle it either. I seem to remember that at least one other display like this uses 2 simultaneous digital connections to get round this.
With MS pushing for greater than 32 bits per pixel (3 X 10bit seems popular) for Longhorn (next XP), the memory requirements will be staggering. Add to that the requirement in games that you have more than one display buffer (drawing in one while displaying the other). That latest nVidia or ATI card you bought can't handle this at all - it will require a new generation to do so. I pushed for more research on this topic at my last company - unfortunately, the focus is so much on 3D performance that this sort of thing is left to one side.
2D will be a problem soon, as well. The push is for 2D operations to be done by the 3D engine (i.e. get rid of the 2D side). Scrolling a 4 million pixel window using a 3D texture operation will be interesting to watch.
In several ways...
There have been many rumors about how MS was going to develope it's own chip for 'Xbox 2' - almost certainly to pin their suppliers to reduced prices.
Rumors about Apple having an x86 port of OSX are just the same old story - putting pressure on their suppliers to reduce prices etc.
Personally, I don't believe that Apple would EVER try to take on MS - they would be crushed, and they know it. Swatting annoying flies is easy for MS - they have a good track record at doing it.
Frankly, I'm a little suprised that the readers of slashdot don't find it difficult that someone like Apple is prepared to make significant sums of money from open source code - if MS did the same, the screams would be audible in Redmond. OpenBSD for $120 has to be fair, doesn't it?
Perhaps, we would all like to pay over the odds for our machines - maybe we're just tired of $35 DVD drives etc., and would much prefer to pay someone (e.g. Apple) for higher priced drives. That is exactly what we would have if Apple was in control. Apple's pursuit of dealers offering cheaper DVD drives shows how far they will go in this respect. Let's all pay Apple prices - anything cheaper must be bad, after all.
Sam and Max has to be one of my all time favorite games - to hell with advanced 3D pixel shaders and realistic worlds. Wak a Rat was one of the best interactive game experiences ever.
Help - need reality fix.
Many video cards hold frame buffer/textures in a private format optimized for the video processor. This means that if you want to read them, there may be an uncompress or untiling operation being done without your knowledge. This is expecially true for textures. These operations may be computationally intense - and any memory that can be written in AGP space is un cached, and so slow to access by the proceesor.
In general, cards are optimized for drawing and display, not for read back of the buffers.
Another problem is that access to the host memory for writing (via the AGP bus) is not immediate. The card is competing with the processor.
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The reason is that (most) local calls are free. Some people cannot make calls other than local - fixed price per month. Faced with that, the telcos chose to make the cell user pay.
Yet again, more crap about the TCP/IP stack in Windows.
The Windows NT TCP/IP STREAM code was written by Spider Software in Edinburgh, Scotland. MS bought it and spent a lot of time making it thread and SMP safe. The stream code itself was a clean room implementation of the AT&T system V code - AFAIK BSD has never had streams and never will have. At the time the NT was being written the BSD code was unclean and fraught with legal problems.
I've seen the code, and I also personally know the original developer of the Spider code.
Well said - driving a display like this is not easy.
For example, it has 4X the number of pixels of a normal monitor. That means a bandwidth increase of 4X, or around 400MHz. Current cards not only cannot handle this, but the video cable technology can't handle it either. I seem to remember that at least one other display like this uses 2 simultaneous digital connections to get round this.
With MS pushing for greater than 32 bits per pixel (3 X 10bit seems popular) for Longhorn (next XP), the memory requirements will be staggering. Add to that the requirement in games that you have more than one display buffer (drawing in one while displaying the other). That latest nVidia or ATI card you bought can't handle this at all - it will require a new generation to do so.
I pushed for more research on this topic at my last company - unfortunately, the focus is so much on 3D performance that this sort of thing is left to one side.
2D will be a problem soon, as well. The push is for 2D operations to be done by the 3D engine (i.e. get rid of the 2D side). Scrolling a 4 million pixel window using a 3D texture operation will be interesting to watch.
In several ways... There have been many rumors about how MS was going to develope it's own chip for 'Xbox 2' - almost certainly to pin their suppliers to reduced prices. Rumors about Apple having an x86 port of OSX are just the same old story - putting pressure on their suppliers to reduce prices etc. Personally, I don't believe that Apple would EVER try to take on MS - they would be crushed, and they know it. Swatting annoying flies is easy for MS - they have a good track record at doing it. Frankly, I'm a little suprised that the readers of slashdot don't find it difficult that someone like Apple is prepared to make significant sums of money from open source code - if MS did the same, the screams would be audible in Redmond. OpenBSD for $120 has to be fair, doesn't it? Perhaps, we would all like to pay over the odds for our machines - maybe we're just tired of $35 DVD drives etc., and would much prefer to pay someone (e.g. Apple) for higher priced drives. That is exactly what we would have if Apple was in control. Apple's pursuit of dealers offering cheaper DVD drives shows how far they will go in this respect. Let's all pay Apple prices - anything cheaper must be bad, after all.
Sam and Max has to be one of my all time favorite games - to hell with advanced 3D pixel shaders and realistic worlds. Wak a Rat was one of the best interactive game experiences ever. Help - need reality fix.
Many video cards hold frame buffer/textures in a private format optimized for the video processor. This means that if you want to read them, there may be an uncompress or untiling operation being done without your knowledge. This is expecially true for textures. These operations may be computationally intense - and any memory that can be written in AGP space is un cached, and so slow to access by the proceesor. In general, cards are optimized for drawing and display, not for read back of the buffers. Another problem is that access to the host memory for writing (via the AGP bus) is not immediate. The card is competing with the processor.