A) No you don't need OS source. It's nice, but BeOS drivers don't live in a communal heap of code all take from the same source tree. (I always thought of the Linux driver thing as somewhat incenstuous. Its scary that drivers are all developed together and depend on each other.)
B) You'd still need man hours to port all of the drivers. BeOS drivers are very different from Linux drivers.
C) As I recall, the XFree86 license doesn't require you to redistribute code, so its not like any vid cards will get supported that aren't already.
Wow. BeOS actually gets mentioned on/. twice in a week? Something must be up. Is Malda out of town? Just kidding;) Actually, this is a pointless subject. Linux users don't like BeOS because they feel threatened, and BeOS users don't like Linux because they envy their success. The partisans on both sides will keep spewing their rhetoric ("64bit FS, MediaOS, multi-threading, speed"/"focus shift, dead, non-OSS") and the conversation will do nothing more than to raise my blood pressure at the diehards on both sides who are unwilling to admit the faults of their OS. Without further ado, I'd like to throw my 3 cents into the ring
Advantages of BeOS over Linux:
1) It's faster. As someone who has used (and tweeked) most of the popular Linux distros, I can say that BeOS is certainly faster.
2) It has more "creature comforts." Stuff like attributes on the FS, the simple API, and obsessive attention to details like good drag and drop, good interoperabiltiy between apps, standardized interfaces, etc, really shows up in the amount of polish the OS has.
3) It scales. If you're an intermediate user, use the preferences menu for everything. With it, you can set up a telnet/NAT/ftp server with a couple of clicks. More hardcore than that? Edit the text files directly.
/etc and vi are only a terminal away.
4) It has a good app-base. A lot of the most common desktop usage apps are there, and a most of the apps are high-quality and useful. Also, almost all POSIX-text-mode apps are easily portable, so BeOS has ports of nifty stuff like compilers, language parsers, imaging libraries, and even full-blow subsystems like SANE. Plus, it has SAMBA, Apache, and dozens of other common *NIX apps. But wait, it gets better. There is an X server that is being worked on (on hiatus pending release of BONE and the new network API) and a port of Wine on the way. Lastly, BeOS currently rules the roost in terms of innovative audio apps.
5) It is easier to manage. I see/etc and I barf. Ugly as an ape's ass. Modules.conf is a travesty in this age of Plug & Play. SysV initscripts are ridiculous. (BSD all the way!;) modprobe? Why? In order to enable NAT on Linux, I have to recompile my kernel, edit modules.rc to load the ip_nat modules, and edit rc.firewall to setup the firewall rules and enable NAT. On BeOS, I copy the nat module to to net_server add-ons directory, I start up the configurator, use the defaults, and hit "Nat ON" And voila, it's on. To change my refresh rate, I go to the screen preferences and change it to a nice 85hz. In XFree86, I had to write a BeOS program that would get me the modelines and add a modline to XF86Config. Do you realize how many newbie Linux users are sitting there destroying their eyes because XFree86 doesn't think that their monitor can do 1152x864x85 (mine does that res at 90-something hz)? That's just wrong. To install ALSA, I have to edit modules.conf and give it a huge string of parameters telling it stuff that it should get from PnP anyway. In BeOS, it just loads and the only tweeking I have to do is what volume the mixer should be at. After recompiling kernel 2.4, I have to go to modules.conf and edit it to tell it that ne2k is a network driver. In BeOS, the cards are already detected and awaiting IP addresses in Network Prefrerences.
Disadvantages of BeOS vs Linux.
1) Linux will always have superior networking. BeOS just wasn't designed to put an emphasis on processes that simply move data around (TCP/IP stacks) and no matter how well designed the new network environment (BONE) is, the 3ms task slice (vs 50ms for Linux) and the pseudo/kinda/maybe realtime sheduling will work against BeOS here. But that's okay, its a client OS anyway.
2) Linux (even better, FreeBSD) has superior filesystem performance. A process that simply moves data around the filesystem will get about 20% better performance on ReiserFS than BFS. That's okay too. Unless you're a file server, you don't notice the lowered performance. Again, the OS simply wasn't designed to put a priority on just moving data around. As such, you'll see Bonnie scores 20% lower, but with half to a third of the processor usage.
3) It still doesn't have as many GUI apps. Browsers are limited to Opera 3.6.x, Netpositive, and Opera4 (soon, maybe) Of course, there is always Mozilla, and the BeOS builds are progressing everyday. Recently, BeOS has been getting some more support in the app area, and if BeIA pans out for Be (which those anti-BeOS idiots would know, if they ever read BeNews, has been getting a LOT of industry support) then we could be seeing more desktop apps out.
4) It doesn't have as large of a developer community.
5) Be's role in all this is iffy. The focus shift hurt, but if those anti-BeOS idiots would ever read BeNews, development on BeOS is far from stopped. Right now, there are the game_audio, OpenGL, BONE, and Java2 SE ports all being worked on. I can guarentee you the slate of distros being released with Linux 2.4 will not have all these updates.
Then there are the ties. Of them, the most annoying is probably hardware support. Yes, BeOS supports less hardware than Linux. No, you can't buy any of that unsupported hardware outside a flea market. Aside from the 3D part of the NVIDIA chips present in all my computers, all of my computers have full support for BeOS. And this isn't all standard hardware either. My PIII motherboard is one of those MicroATX all-in-one jobs from a fly-by-night company. Hell, it took me half an hour just to find out who made the sucker. Yet, everything from the network chip, the sound chip, the graphics chip, they're all supported in BeOS.
Actually, I hear the best possible CDROM ripper/writer you can get is the Philips VeloCD. Its blue, it rips at 32X, and it writes at 12X (or 16X, I forget) And it actually does that in real tests!
Like Intel? (Which owns a lot of Be stock) The BeOS stock price is more a factor of lack of profile (Be who?) and the very tightly closed development system Be uses. (They don't even announce release dates. Releases just "happen")
AtheOS has great potential, but it isn't quite usable yet. For example, it still uses the BIOS for storage I/O. (Which, if I recall correctly, requirs switching to some form of real mode?) It still doesn't support acceleration of very many vid cards. It doesn't have the kick-ass media kit. It doesn't have BeOS's messaging performance, which, as I measured, exceeds 400MB/sec (PC66 SDRAM) using 10k messeges. Or, use 16-byte messeges and get an unreal 90,000 messeges per second. So far, only L4 seems to have that kind of performance. But I digress, AtheOS isn't a microkernel, so messeging speed isn't that important;) The API also leaves a little to be desired. Why copy the BeOS headers if you're going to leave out the B's (which lend consistancy and asthetic-sense to the API) and leave out some of the niftier objects. It certainly has potential though, and I wish it the best.
Most likely, BONE will approach, but not beat BSD. Two reasons
A) BSD TCP/IP is much more mature.
B) No matter how well BONE is designed (it does have some advantages such as the bone_data_t vs. mbufs issue) it is still a part of the BeOS. As such, it is expected to have an extremely fast response time, at the expense of raw throughput. For the desktop, that's great, you don't want your TCP stack using a large amount of the proc. For a server, that's less great.
Wow, 250us is a painfully high context switch time! Context switch is how fast you can switch from one process to another. On QNX RtP, that's about 4 microseconds. Both QNX and BeOS have extremely small scheduling quanta (BeOS uses 3ms, QNX 4ms, compared to Linux 2.2's 100ms and 2.4's 50ms) That increases responsiveness at the cost of throughput (which is why Linux networking will always be faster, BONE simply isn't allowed to crunch data for 100ms at a time) If the context switch took 1/4 microseconds, then about 8% of the time would be spent simply doing context switches!
NVidia IMHO makes the best current 3d hardware, but they have nothing in the business/SOHO/laptop/OEM market that I'm aware of, whereas Matrox and ATI have vast sums of revenue from those markets.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Where have you been the past 6 months. Take a look at almost every PC sold at CompUSA, go to Dell.com and look at their PCs, try Micron, Gateway, etc. They all use NVIDIA cards. There used to be a time when ATI owned this segment (RagePro) but these days, most OEM/cheap PCs come with integrated TNT2-VANTA class processors. ATI is starting to make a little bit of a comeback here since Dell recently started using the Radeon on some of its machines, but NVIDIA owns the market right now. Neomagic and ATI still rule the notebook roost, however, but there is no word on how long that will last. The reason NVIDIA is dominating is simple; their price/performance kicks ass. NVIDIA cards are cheap and fast. A Radeon DDR is usually about the same price as a GF2, but the GF2 is faster. There is only one weak segment in NVIDIA's line, that is the GeForce2 MX vs Radeon 32 SDR (or DDR for a slightly uneven match)The Radeon is only slightly more expensive, but much more powerful.
You really have to give a lot of credit to NVIDIA. Just two years ago, they were an obscure chip maker, and now they are the 800lb gorilla of the market. This whole 3DFx buyout is just symbolic; 3DFx was dead in the water anyway. However, it symbolizes the total defeat 3DFx has suffered at the hands of NVIDIA. I can remember when they released their original NV1 chip. It was non-standard (quads instead of triangles) was slow, and had very limited support. Then I remember the Riva128. It had pretty bad picture quality, but for several months held the speed crown. When the TNT came out, everyone pretty much knew NVIDIA would go to the top. Thankfully, they haven't lost their small-company image through all this. They still make great cards at great prices, have awesome customer support (eg. their latest drivers still upgrade even old cards like the TNT) and they are one of the few consumer vendors to get OpenGL right. If it weren't for NVIDIA, the rise of OpenGL would have been severely hindered. As I recall, they were the first major chip maker to publish a full, pro-caliber ICD. Otherwise, all those nifty OGL apps might still be useless on a market of consumer cards with "Quake drivers." All I can say is NVIDIA is 'da bomb!
PS> No, I did not get payed by NVIDIA to say this. I even have reasons to dislike NVIDIA (they won't give 3D specs to Be) However, I can see some logic in their desicion (BeOS might be a therat to the SGI-blessed Linux for 3D;) and don't hold it against them. Of course, I would not be at all dissapointed if they would suddenly change their minds, and my new NV20 would accelerate GLTeapot for me;)
Does the Linux minority have to be TOTALLY blind to reality, or can they take their collective head out of their collective ass and see what THEY need to do to overthrow MS from their position?
Most likely a driver issue. The 24 channel support is (for the present) limited to Pro-level cards that actually support that many *seperate* (not mixed) streams. Of course, the game_audio kit is being released (as in they have sample source on their website), which should allow these new "prosumer" cards to use their multi-channel capabilities. Check out game audio and 24 channel support here.
Of course, that ignores the fact that anybody is free to jump in at any time and produce a superior browser. The OSS community tried and (kinda,maybe,not really?) succeeded with Mozilla.
Umm, the "true spirit of capitalism" ain't worth squat. If we held to the "true spirit of capitalism," about half the nifty things you could do with the stock market, but aren't allowed to, would be legal. The country had a huge fall because people before the Great Depression where following the "true spirit of capitalism" and investing all of their money (borrowed or real) in businesses. The outcome of that was that we got laws to limit "the true spirit of capitalism" in order to protect the economy. Economics is not about ideologies, or and cool catchphrases such as "the true spirit of capitalism," it is about creating a finely balanced machine that can handle whatever falls within its framework. OSS software is an unexamined phenomena. It was not planned for, and it has not been studied, and thus people must use extreme caution before going idealistic and spouting of the benifits of the model. It may turn out that it works and is healthy for the economy. Then again, it could turn out to be another dot-com disaster (or worse.)
I was just talking about MP3 playback, which would be fine on any OS. I mean you can go and get a sound card with some high quality circutry (hint, Ensoniqe AudioPCI ain't it) and it would be no different from an SBLive on Linux. Second, BeOS supports up to 24 seperate audio channels, so if you ever find a card with 24 line outs...
Halflife is NOT based on Quake I. Don't even get me started on the reasons why HalfLife could not be Quake I. (Ex. No chrome mapping, limited lighting effects, less 3D accelerator integration, etc). Secondly, Quake I has already been ported. The main hangups would be that HalfLife uses a very customized version of Quake II. What in god's name ARE you talking about?
Actually, I'm underwhelmed by Win2K. It takes more memory, it runs slower, and it is less stable (for me) than NT4. NT4 only crashed on me twice, but Win2K has crashed at least a dozen times, usually running OpenGL code (RivaTNT, det3)
Oh please.
When was work started on nt5?
>>>>>
Around 1996/7. Knowing MS, NT5 and NT4 were in parallel development for the last months of NT4's release. I remember ZDNet having Beta copies around '98 or so.
It was just released early this year.
>>>>>
Believe it or not, NT5 took longer to release than kernel 2.2!
OTOH, I first started running linux in mid 1997.
>>>>>>>
So? You don't count. I'm talking about the general public. NT5 was in development LONG before MS even knew about Linux, much less considered it a threat. Hell, OS/2 was probably stronger on their radar at the time (tounge in cheek;)
I can't believe it's been over 2 years and noone's worked on a linux port of Halflife!
>>>>>>>>>
Strangely, QuakeII is ported, so a half-life port should be a chinch? And since it is such an easy game for today's hardware to run, Linux should have no problem with it!
Yeah, you, might have heard of nt5 before you heard of linux.. but then a friend of mine just got into computers 2 months ago, he runs winME and heard of linux only a few weeks ago.
Don't generalize for the rest of us.
>>>>>>>>>.
Stranglely, I did. But that was because I heard about NT5 when Linux still hadn't gotten halfway through 2.0.
ah, in case you haven't heard linux started in 1992, I first *heard* of linux back in '94 when I was getting a catalog selling slackware cd's. I finally got to install a copy (albeit "monkey" or "mini"-linux) in 1997
Since then I've used RH 5.0, RH 5.2, RH 6, mandrake 6, mandrake 6.2, and suse (I dunno.. 5?)
>>>>>>>>>
Slack 3.5, RH 5.0, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 Slackware 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, Suse 6.4 (for 5 minutes before I got scared off), Stampede.90-beta(still undercooked), (btw, I switched distros several times in a month when I left RedHat)
Yea, but there's no difference between using a Live! and a cheap soundcard with clean-sounding circitry. Linux doesn't use any of the acceleration features on the sound card, and for the money, there are a lot of cards that have cleaner sound, sans 3D hardware.
Good god, retch-o-licious. I think I need to hurl...
PS> This is sad that I have to include this disclaimer, but note that this is NOT an anti-OSS posting, NOT and anti-Linux posting, but a posting against people who get sentimental and blubbery over software.
Unless there is something wrong with them to begin with, they shouldn't improve your XMMS performance. Decoding an MP3 is entirely CPU, and the only thing the soundcard does is send a stream to the speakers. I don't even know what the point of running such a great soundcard under Linux is. Its not like there is any API that takes advantage of it outside Windows-land.
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A) No you don't need OS source. It's nice, but BeOS drivers don't live in a communal heap of code all take from the same source tree. (I always thought of the Linux driver thing as somewhat incenstuous. Its scary that drivers are all developed together and depend on each other.)
B) You'd still need man hours to port all of the drivers. BeOS drivers are very different from Linux drivers.
C) As I recall, the XFree86 license doesn't require you to redistribute code, so its not like any vid cards will get supported that aren't already.
Wow. BeOS actually gets mentioned on /. twice in a week? Something must be up. Is Malda out of town? Just kidding ;) Actually, this is a pointless subject. Linux users don't like BeOS because they feel threatened, and BeOS users don't like Linux because they envy their success. The partisans on both sides will keep spewing their rhetoric ("64bit FS, MediaOS, multi-threading, speed"/"focus shift, dead, non-OSS") and the conversation will do nothing more than to raise my blood pressure at the diehards on both sides who are unwilling to admit the faults of their OS. Without further ado, I'd like to throw my 3 cents into the ring
/etc and I barf. Ugly as an ape's ass. Modules.conf is a travesty in this age of Plug & Play. SysV initscripts are ridiculous. (BSD all the way! ;) modprobe? Why? In order to enable NAT on Linux, I have to recompile my kernel, edit modules.rc to load the ip_nat modules, and edit rc.firewall to setup the firewall rules and enable NAT. On BeOS, I copy the nat module to to net_server add-ons directory, I start up the configurator, use the defaults, and hit "Nat ON" And voila, it's on. To change my refresh rate, I go to the screen preferences and change it to a nice 85hz. In XFree86, I had to write a BeOS program that would get me the modelines and add a modline to XF86Config. Do you realize how many newbie Linux users are sitting there destroying their eyes because XFree86 doesn't think that their monitor can do 1152x864x85 (mine does that res at 90-something hz)? That's just wrong. To install ALSA, I have to edit modules.conf and give it a huge string of parameters telling it stuff that it should get from PnP anyway. In BeOS, it just loads and the only tweeking I have to do is what volume the mixer should be at. After recompiling kernel 2.4, I have to go to modules.conf and edit it to tell it that ne2k is a network driver. In BeOS, the cards are already detected and awaiting IP addresses in Network Prefrerences.
Advantages of BeOS over Linux:
1) It's faster. As someone who has used (and tweeked) most of the popular Linux distros, I can say that BeOS is certainly faster.
2) It has more "creature comforts." Stuff like attributes on the FS, the simple API, and obsessive attention to details like good drag and drop, good interoperabiltiy between apps, standardized interfaces, etc, really shows up in the amount of polish the OS has.
3) It scales. If you're an intermediate user, use the preferences menu for everything. With it, you can set up a telnet/NAT/ftp server with a couple of clicks. More hardcore than that? Edit the text files directly.
/etc and vi are only a terminal away.
4) It has a good app-base. A lot of the most common desktop usage apps are there, and a most of the apps are high-quality and useful. Also, almost all POSIX-text-mode apps are easily portable, so BeOS has ports of nifty stuff like compilers, language parsers, imaging libraries, and even full-blow subsystems like SANE. Plus, it has SAMBA, Apache, and dozens of other common *NIX apps. But wait, it gets better. There is an X server that is being worked on (on hiatus pending release of BONE and the new network API) and a port of Wine on the way. Lastly, BeOS currently rules the roost in terms of innovative audio apps.
5) It is easier to manage. I see
Disadvantages of BeOS vs Linux.
1) Linux will always have superior networking. BeOS just wasn't designed to put an emphasis on processes that simply move data around (TCP/IP stacks) and no matter how well designed the new network environment (BONE) is, the 3ms task slice (vs 50ms for Linux) and the pseudo/kinda/maybe realtime sheduling will work against BeOS here. But that's okay, its a client OS anyway.
2) Linux (even better, FreeBSD) has superior filesystem performance. A process that simply moves data around the filesystem will get about 20% better performance on ReiserFS than BFS. That's okay too. Unless you're a file server, you don't notice the lowered performance. Again, the OS simply wasn't designed to put a priority on just moving data around. As such, you'll see Bonnie scores 20% lower, but with half to a third of the processor usage.
3) It still doesn't have as many GUI apps. Browsers are limited to Opera 3.6.x, Netpositive, and Opera4 (soon, maybe) Of course, there is always Mozilla, and the BeOS builds are progressing everyday. Recently, BeOS has been getting some more support in the app area, and if BeIA pans out for Be (which those anti-BeOS idiots would know, if they ever read BeNews, has been getting a LOT of industry support) then we could be seeing more desktop apps out.
4) It doesn't have as large of a developer community.
5) Be's role in all this is iffy. The focus shift hurt, but if those anti-BeOS idiots would ever read BeNews, development on BeOS is far from stopped. Right now, there are the game_audio, OpenGL, BONE, and Java2 SE ports all being worked on. I can guarentee you the slate of distros being released with Linux 2.4 will not have all these updates.
Then there are the ties. Of them, the most annoying is probably hardware support. Yes, BeOS supports less hardware than Linux. No, you can't buy any of that unsupported hardware outside a flea market. Aside from the 3D part of the NVIDIA chips present in all my computers, all of my computers have full support for BeOS. And this isn't all standard hardware either. My PIII motherboard is one of those MicroATX all-in-one jobs from a fly-by-night company. Hell, it took me half an hour just to find out who made the sucker. Yet, everything from the network chip, the sound chip, the graphics chip, they're all supported in BeOS.
Actually, I hear the best possible CDROM ripper/writer you can get is the Philips VeloCD. Its blue, it rips at 32X, and it writes at 12X (or 16X, I forget) And it actually does that in real tests!
I don't know about HPFS, but NTFS is damn similar, and it does beat ext2.
That's really not that amazing. The BeOS (desktop) binaries fit into around 15MB. (Yes, including GUI, kernel, necessary drivers, and NetPositive)
It should Be. If Be has any sense, these devices will use BONE.
Like Intel? (Which owns a lot of Be stock) The BeOS stock price is more a factor of lack of profile (Be who?) and the very tightly closed development system Be uses. (They don't even announce release dates. Releases just "happen")
AtheOS has great potential, but it isn't quite usable yet. For example, it still uses the BIOS for storage I/O. (Which, if I recall correctly, requirs switching to some form of real mode?) It still doesn't support acceleration of very many vid cards. It doesn't have the kick-ass media kit. It doesn't have BeOS's messaging performance, which, as I measured, exceeds 400MB/sec (PC66 SDRAM) using 10k messeges. Or, use 16-byte messeges and get an unreal 90,000 messeges per second. So far, only L4 seems to have that kind of performance. But I digress, AtheOS isn't a microkernel, so messeging speed isn't that important ;) The API also leaves a little to be desired. Why copy the BeOS headers if you're going to leave out the B's (which lend consistancy and asthetic-sense to the API) and leave out some of the niftier objects. It certainly has potential though, and I wish it the best.
Most likely, BONE will approach, but not beat BSD. Two reasons
A) BSD TCP/IP is much more mature.
B) No matter how well BONE is designed (it does have some advantages such as the bone_data_t vs. mbufs issue) it is still a part of the BeOS. As such, it is expected to have an extremely fast response time, at the expense of raw throughput. For the desktop, that's great, you don't want your TCP stack using a large amount of the proc. For a server, that's less great.
Wow, 250us is a painfully high context switch time! Context switch is how fast you can switch from one process to another. On QNX RtP, that's about 4 microseconds. Both QNX and BeOS have extremely small scheduling quanta (BeOS uses 3ms, QNX 4ms, compared to Linux 2.2's 100ms and 2.4's 50ms) That increases responsiveness at the cost of throughput (which is why Linux networking will always be faster, BONE simply isn't allowed to crunch data for 100ms at a time) If the context switch took 1/4 microseconds, then about 8% of the time would be spent simply doing context switches!
NVidia IMHO makes the best current 3d hardware, but they have nothing in the business/SOHO/laptop/OEM market that I'm aware of, whereas Matrox and ATI have vast sums of revenue from those markets.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Where have you been the past 6 months. Take a look at almost every PC sold at CompUSA, go to Dell.com and look at their PCs, try Micron, Gateway, etc. They all use NVIDIA cards. There used to be a time when ATI owned this segment (RagePro) but these days, most OEM/cheap PCs come with integrated TNT2-VANTA class processors. ATI is starting to make a little bit of a comeback here since Dell recently started using the Radeon on some of its machines, but NVIDIA owns the market right now. Neomagic and ATI still rule the notebook roost, however, but there is no word on how long that will last. The reason NVIDIA is dominating is simple; their price/performance kicks ass. NVIDIA cards are cheap and fast. A Radeon DDR is usually about the same price as a GF2, but the GF2 is faster. There is only one weak segment in NVIDIA's line, that is the GeForce2 MX vs Radeon 32 SDR (or DDR for a slightly uneven match)The Radeon is only slightly more expensive, but much more powerful.
You really have to give a lot of credit to NVIDIA. Just two years ago, they were an obscure chip maker, and now they are the 800lb gorilla of the market. This whole 3DFx buyout is just symbolic; 3DFx was dead in the water anyway. However, it symbolizes the total defeat 3DFx has suffered at the hands of NVIDIA. I can remember when they released their original NV1 chip. It was non-standard (quads instead of triangles) was slow, and had very limited support. Then I remember the Riva128. It had pretty bad picture quality, but for several months held the speed crown. When the TNT came out, everyone pretty much knew NVIDIA would go to the top. Thankfully, they haven't lost their small-company image through all this. They still make great cards at great prices, have awesome customer support (eg. their latest drivers still upgrade even old cards like the TNT) and they are one of the few consumer vendors to get OpenGL right. If it weren't for NVIDIA, the rise of OpenGL would have been severely hindered. As I recall, they were the first major chip maker to publish a full, pro-caliber ICD. Otherwise, all those nifty OGL apps might still be useless on a market of consumer cards with "Quake drivers." All I can say is NVIDIA is 'da bomb!
;) and don't hold it against them. Of course, I would not be at all dissapointed if they would suddenly change their minds, and my new NV20 would accelerate GLTeapot for me ;)
PS> No, I did not get payed by NVIDIA to say this. I even have reasons to dislike NVIDIA (they won't give 3D specs to Be) However, I can see some logic in their desicion (BeOS might be a therat to the SGI-blessed Linux for 3D
Does the Linux minority have to be TOTALLY blind to reality, or can they take their collective head out of their collective ass and see what THEY need to do to overthrow MS from their position?
Most likely a driver issue. The 24 channel support is (for the present) limited to Pro-level cards that actually support that many *seperate* (not mixed) streams. Of course, the game_audio kit is being released (as in they have sample source on their website), which should allow these new "prosumer" cards to use their multi-channel capabilities. Check out game audio and 24 channel support here.
Of course, that ignores the fact that anybody is free to jump in at any time and produce a superior browser. The OSS community tried and (kinda,maybe,not really?) succeeded with Mozilla.
Umm, the "true spirit of capitalism" ain't worth squat. If we held to the "true spirit of capitalism," about half the nifty things you could do with the stock market, but aren't allowed to, would be legal. The country had a huge fall because people before the Great Depression where following the "true spirit of capitalism" and investing all of their money (borrowed or real) in businesses. The outcome of that was that we got laws to limit "the true spirit of capitalism" in order to protect the economy. Economics is not about ideologies, or and cool catchphrases such as "the true spirit of capitalism," it is about creating a finely balanced machine that can handle whatever falls within its framework. OSS software is an unexamined phenomena. It was not planned for, and it has not been studied, and thus people must use extreme caution before going idealistic and spouting of the benifits of the model. It may turn out that it works and is healthy for the economy. Then again, it could turn out to be another dot-com disaster (or worse.)
I was just talking about MP3 playback, which would be fine on any OS. I mean you can go and get a sound card with some high quality circutry (hint, Ensoniqe AudioPCI ain't it) and it would be no different from an SBLive on Linux. Second, BeOS supports up to 24 seperate audio channels, so if you ever find a card with 24 line outs...
Halflife is NOT based on Quake I. Don't even get me started on the reasons why HalfLife could not be Quake I. (Ex. No chrome mapping, limited lighting effects, less 3D accelerator integration, etc). Secondly, Quake I has already been ported. The main hangups would be that HalfLife uses a very customized version of Quake II. What in god's name ARE you talking about?
Actually, I'm underwhelmed by Win2K. It takes more memory, it runs slower, and it is less stable (for me) than NT4. NT4 only crashed on me twice, but Win2K has crashed at least a dozen times, usually running OpenGL code (RivaTNT, det3)
Oh please.
;)
.90-beta(still undercooked), (btw, I switched distros several times in a month when I left RedHat)
When was work started on nt5?
>>>>>
Around 1996/7. Knowing MS, NT5 and NT4 were in parallel development for the last months of NT4's release. I remember ZDNet having Beta copies around '98 or so.
It was just released early this year.
>>>>>
Believe it or not, NT5 took longer to release than kernel 2.2!
OTOH, I first started running linux in mid 1997.
>>>>>>>
So? You don't count. I'm talking about the general public. NT5 was in development LONG before MS even knew about Linux, much less considered it a threat. Hell, OS/2 was probably stronger on their radar at the time (tounge in cheek
I can't believe it's been over 2 years and noone's worked on a linux port of Halflife!
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Strangely, QuakeII is ported, so a half-life port should be a chinch? And since it is such an easy game for today's hardware to run, Linux should have no problem with it!
Yeah, you, might have heard of nt5 before you heard of linux.. but then a friend of mine just got into computers 2 months ago, he runs winME and heard of linux only a few weeks ago.
Don't generalize for the rest of us.
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Stranglely, I did. But that was because I heard about NT5 when Linux still hadn't gotten halfway through 2.0.
ah, in case you haven't heard linux started in 1992, I first *heard* of linux back in '94 when I was getting a catalog selling slackware cd's. I finally got to install a copy (albeit "monkey" or "mini"-linux) in 1997
Since then I've used RH 5.0, RH 5.2, RH 6, mandrake 6, mandrake 6.2, and suse (I dunno.. 5?)
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Slack 3.5, RH 5.0, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 Slackware 7.0, 7.1, Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, Suse 6.4 (for 5 minutes before I got scared off), Stampede
Yea, but there's no difference between using a Live! and a cheap soundcard with clean-sounding circitry. Linux doesn't use any of the acceleration features on the sound card, and for the money, there are a lot of cards that have cleaner sound, sans 3D hardware.
Good god, retch-o-licious. I think I need to hurl...
PS> This is sad that I have to include this disclaimer, but note that this is NOT an anti-OSS posting, NOT and anti-Linux posting, but a posting against people who get sentimental and blubbery over software.
You mean 29M, don't you? The kernel hasn't been 2.9M for a LONG time.
PS> Did you know that the Mozilla source is 300MB? Sinful! Its like emacs, except with crappy fonts.
Unless there is something wrong with them to begin with, they shouldn't improve your XMMS performance. Decoding an MP3 is entirely CPU, and the only thing the soundcard does is send a stream to the speakers. I don't even know what the point of running such a great soundcard under Linux is. Its not like there is any API that takes advantage of it outside Windows-land.
Yes, I have identical systems just lying around my secret lab. I buy 'em in bulk for occasions such as these.
Get real.