Some games will never work on consoles without a keyboard, and I don't see a keyboard in the PS/2s future. The demographics of the two markets are very different, regardless of the technology. There have been times when consoles were significantly more powerful than PCs (when the N64 was released, full scene anti-aliasing was still a pipe dream for PC users) yet that did nothing to raise change the demographics of the situation. It will take a lot to pry the RTS/FPS/Flight Sim crowd from their PCs, and it will take a lot to get the Arcade/RPG/Puzzle gamers to give up their consoles.
As for fast OpenGL, who said anything about games? I'm talking OpenGL 3D development.
I think the guys running/. owe this guy an apology. I'm assuming that after a/. guy OKs a story, it doesn't take 3 days for that story to appear on the main page. Thus, AFS must have already been released when this story was OK'ed. Thus, the guys running Slashdot were out to lunch on this case. That caused the/. crowd to think this guy was an idiot, hence the need for an apology from the guys running/.
Slashdot crowd too status quo?
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The reaction of/.'ers to some cool (but not immediatly useful) technology is, to say the least, scary. You'd think nobody ever said,
"An x86 UNIX clone? Who needs that? What's the point if we have BSD already? And its not like x86 will ever be fast enough to run UNIX or anything! Why bother?" -Microsoft Weenie circa 1991.
Be open to new ideas or the dynamicism and vision that made computers successful will dissapear. Even if an idea isn't immediatly useful in raising your Q3 fps or running your JAVA project faster, it might still help in the future. The thinking that I've seen on Slashdot lately is probably the same thinking that led Xerox to invent a networked set of GUI computers exchanging email and not capitalize on *ANY* of it!
Obviously a non-gamer. Computer games are quite different from console games. For example, computer RPGs tend to be much more strategy oriented, but less story focused than their console counterparts. PC sports games tend to have more statistics while console sports games tend to be "lighter." PC sims can get really hardcore while console sims tend to be much more arcade-like. PC arcade games tend to generally suck while console arcade games are quite good. Its a mixture of market segment (PC gamers tend to be older and more affluent), tradition, and technology (try playing Jane's F15 without a keyboard!)
Umm, neither BeOS nor QNX are dead. And both are decidedly microkernel (in QNX even drivers run as seperate processes) and can whip Linux's (or MOSX's) ass in the speed deparment.
Not meaning to scare away a fellow BeOS user, I have to disagree. No point in providing ammunition to the BeOS-hating/. hoards.
BeOS is not and probably never will be a server OS. While BONE should kick some serious ass it will not be as good as Linux or BSD. The rest of the system just wasn't designed to pay that much attention to the network stack.
BeOS probably will never go Open Source. Certainly not as long as Be lives, and even if it dies, it will probably not. Say Be finally decides to throw in the towel. They can't OSS BeOS because of the licensed code within it, and they can't afford to strip out the licensed code because they have to close. Ideally, they would sell BeOS to SGI or something and then we'd have a REAL OS on our 3D workstations. But that's probably just idyllic fantasy. I really would like to see BeOS under some sort of Open Source. I still don't totally like the idea, and I certainly wouldn't want the dictatorship that is Linux or the anarchy of the other OSS projects (while OSS may not affect quality, it certainly does affect code-size. All the major OSS projects suffer from feature bloat because there are so many developers willing to help out) however a BeOS managed by a dedicated central group with contributions kept on a tight leash (kind of like OpenBSD except with speed and multimedia performance as the overriding goal) would probably be a good thing. While Be's coders seem to be damn good, I just don't see them having enough time to dedicate to BeOS.
Secondly, BeOS has lost two developer companies, one Wildcard design had to close it's doors because it was sued by a larger ( and as yet unkown company ) the other Thunder Munchkin Software, because the owner is a butthead.
howeverBeOS has retained the home based developer community.BeOS has gained and expanded it's user base. BeOS if it ever does fail in the market place may very well go Opensource! Be inc, current plans are to push BeIA earn revenues from that and re-channel them into BeOS. So far it seems to be working. If the Amiga can make a comeback,hell BEOS will live forever!
Isn't that what MS was saying about Linux a few years ago? If all you went by was features, then Windows2K would beat the shit out of everything else on the OS market!
Sorry to break it to you, but Be is far from dead. If you take a good look at BeBits or BeNews, you'll realize that. Sure Be is right on the edge, but the users haven't given up yet and the developers haven't given up yet. When they do, then they're toast.
PS> Methinks that a lot of the negative comments on BeUserTalk are from Slashdot trolls who got kicked out.
That't not totally true. On the BeOS at least, kernel calls are made directly, the kernel is mapped into each process's address space and the only overhead is that of the ring change (no context switch required.) Calls to various servers are usually batched. For example, the Interface Kit will collect all drawing functions you call and send them in one big batch to the app_server. The resultant overhead from sending the message is far outweighed by the actual functionality offered by that one message. QNX's Photon works much the same way. According to QNX, drawing through Photon, which uses messaging, is about as fast as making calls directly into the graphics driver. It introduces more latency, but in terms of raw throughput/cpu usage, it is about the same. When you look at the real-world performance of these two systems, you'll notice that they are faster than most UNIX's, microkernel or not.
If you count the number of hours actually spent developing HURD compared to those spent developing Linux, you'll see that HURD has had FAR less development time. Sure it started earlier, but that doesn't mean its been actively developed since the early 90's!
Stupid arguement. HURD has been more or less dormant for a long time. Even if it started in the early 90's, it certainly hasn't been developed actively for all that time. Development of the HURD only picked up steam recentely; far more recently than Linux did. So give it an equivilant number of coding hours and see what results!
Looks like the battle's already over. Anything that RDRAM gets will be because of Intel. If P4 does well, RDRAM will do well by decree. However if P4 and the Athlon are evenly matched, DDR is going to take it all the way. DDR is faster and cheaper, what more can you want?
A Voodoo1 is also limited to 640x480 resolution. However, that's considered high-res in the console world where (the TV equivalent of) 320x240 is the norm. Ever wonder why the N64 was able to put in full scene antialiasing on Voodoo1 level hardware?
It's not the DC's graphics libraries. The Dreamcast uses a version of the PowerVR Series 2 chip, which uses a tile-based renderer. Because of the way the chip is designed, it culls occulded polygons in hardware before sending them to the rasterizer. Because of this, PowerVR chips don't use a zbuffer (which was a big thing when all you had were 2MB graphics cards) and need much less memory bandwidth. In practice the scheme works really well when it is programmed correctly. However, PowerVR's chips never worked very well on PCs because the way standard APIs and games are designed don't mesh well with a tiled-based graphics chip. However, there is some evidence that the new NVIDIA and 3DFx chips may be borrowing some ideas from tile-based engines, so it is possible that they may become popular after-all.
Everything works in Windows too. It all depends on what you're using. The vast majority of people in the desktop market use office suites, file managers (the ones bundled with the DE), web browsers, and the GUI itself. In each of these every-so-imporant catagories, Linux falls flat. The two good office suites (StarOffice and WP Office 2000) pale in comparison to their Windows counterparts. StarOffice has a hideos interface that would get laughed at if it was in a professional program, and WP Office 2K is slower (and sometimes less stable) than the equivilant version on Windows. WP8 (which I think doesn't use WINE) is stable on Linux, but the interface makes one gag (motif.) The file manager in KDE2 takes forever to start up and flickers like hell after it does. The web browser situation in Linux is pretty sad. Mozilla is still unusable (bloated, slow, and buggy) Netscape 4.x is slow and ocassionally unstable, and Opera 4 is still in beta. KDE2 itself is slower than NT4's GUI or Win2K's GUI (if you turn of the alpha menus.) Not to mention the fact that games and 3D still run significantly slower on Linux than on Windows.
I'm not trolling here, I'm simply pointing out that Linux isn't as great as everybody at/. cracks it up to be. Its great for a lot of people, but for the average desktop user (which is where it is getting aimed at these days) it still has a long way to go. Criticism isn't a bad thing. Its helpful. It lets you know what you need to work on. It amazes me how blind the herd of Linux users are to the faults of their own OS. They get all riled up when Linux3D does benchmarks showing that Linux is only a little slower than Windows, but doesn't even notice when BeNews (Linux3D's BeOS equivilant) does benchmarks that show BeOS trouncing Windows significantly. That proves that Windows is not some magical fortress of fast 3D and with smart coding, an OS (even Linux!) can be faster than it! Go over to the BeNews message boards sometime. Sure it has its shares of zealots and over-optimists, but in general they seem to know that BeOS has faults. Just this morning several people pointed out the poor developer support from Be and the work it needs in the UI and App Kits.
Blind devotion to an OS doesn't get you anywhere. It ultimately serves to kill that OS because nobody has the balls to point out what sucks aobut it.
You're kidding me right? Some guy at Sun slips a comment about OSS and everybody is up in a OSS induced religious fury? Where's the hard evidence? It's not even a f*ing RUMOR! Its silly some of the stuff that makes it on Slashdot.
Then Linux users have no right to call it Windoze! The Amiga users can do it, the Amiga can whip anything for graphics speed (in terms of equivilant hardware of course.) But Win32 GDI beats X, and DirectX, D3D, and Windows NV OpenGL whips the hell out of SDL and Mesa, and Linux NV OpenGL.
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Umm, the NES has 3.5 MHz processor. You should have no problem emulating it on a PC. Hell, you'd have no problem emulating that on my TI83!
Some games will never work on consoles without a keyboard, and I don't see a keyboard in the PS/2s future. The demographics of the two markets are very different, regardless of the technology. There have been times when consoles were significantly more powerful than PCs (when the N64 was released, full scene anti-aliasing was still a pipe dream for PC users) yet that did nothing to raise change the demographics of the situation. It will take a lot to pry the RTS/FPS/Flight Sim crowd from their PCs, and it will take a lot to get the Arcade/RPG/Puzzle gamers to give up their consoles.
As for fast OpenGL, who said anything about games? I'm talking OpenGL 3D development.
I think the guys running /. owe this guy an apology. I'm assuming that after a /. guy OKs a story, it doesn't take 3 days for that story to appear on the main page. Thus, AFS must have already been released when this story was OK'ed. Thus, the guys running Slashdot were out to lunch on this case. That caused the /. crowd to think this guy was an idiot, hence the need for an apology from the guys running /.
The reaction of /.'ers to some cool (but not immediatly useful) technology is, to say the least, scary. You'd think nobody ever said,
"An x86 UNIX clone? Who needs that? What's the point if we have BSD already? And its not like x86 will ever be fast enough to run UNIX or anything! Why bother?" -Microsoft Weenie circa 1991.
Be open to new ideas or the dynamicism and vision that made computers successful will dissapear. Even if an idea isn't immediatly useful in raising your Q3 fps or running your JAVA project faster, it might still help in the future. The thinking that I've seen on Slashdot lately is probably the same thinking that led Xerox to invent a networked set of GUI computers exchanging email and not capitalize on *ANY* of it!
Obviously a non-gamer. Computer games are quite different from console games. For example, computer RPGs tend to be much more strategy oriented, but less story focused than their console counterparts. PC sports games tend to have more statistics while console sports games tend to be "lighter." PC sims can get really hardcore while console sims tend to be much more arcade-like. PC arcade games tend to generally suck while console arcade games are quite good. Its a mixture of market segment (PC gamers tend to be older and more affluent), tradition, and technology (try playing Jane's F15 without a keyboard!)
Umm, neither BeOS nor QNX are dead. And both are decidedly microkernel (in QNX even drivers run as seperate processes) and can whip Linux's (or MOSX's) ass in the speed deparment.
So, by your logic, OpenBSD gets a lot less coding time and thus must have unrealistic political bullshit wrapped up in the technical design?
Not meaning to scare away a fellow BeOS user, I have to disagree. No point in providing ammunition to the BeOS-hating /. hoards.
BeOS is not and probably never will be a server OS. While BONE should kick some serious ass it will not be as good as Linux or BSD. The rest of the system just wasn't designed to pay that much attention to the network stack.
BeOS probably will never go Open Source. Certainly not as long as Be lives, and even if it dies, it will probably not. Say Be finally decides to throw in the towel. They can't OSS BeOS because of the licensed code within it, and they can't afford to strip out the licensed code because they have to close. Ideally, they would sell BeOS to SGI or something and then we'd have a REAL OS on our 3D workstations. But that's probably just idyllic fantasy. I really would like to see BeOS under some sort of Open Source. I still don't totally like the idea, and I certainly wouldn't want the dictatorship that is Linux or the anarchy of the other OSS projects (while OSS may not affect quality, it certainly does affect code-size. All the major OSS projects suffer from feature bloat because there are so many developers willing to help out) however a BeOS managed by a dedicated central group with contributions kept on a tight leash (kind of like OpenBSD except with speed and multimedia performance as the overriding goal) would probably be a good thing. While Be's coders seem to be damn good, I just don't see them having enough time to dedicate to BeOS.
Secondly, BeOS has lost two developer companies, one Wildcard design had to close it's doors because it was sued by a larger ( and as yet unkown company ) the other Thunder Munchkin Software, because the owner is a butthead.
howeverBeOS has retained the home based developer community.BeOS has gained and expanded it's user base. BeOS if it ever does fail in the market place may very well go Opensource! Be inc, current plans are to push BeIA earn revenues from that and re-channel them into BeOS. So far it seems to be working. If the Amiga can make a comeback,hell BEOS will live forever!
Isn't that what MS was saying about Linux a few years ago? If all you went by was features, then Windows2K would beat the shit out of everything else on the OS market!
Sorry to break it to you, but Be is far from dead. If you take a good look at BeBits or BeNews, you'll realize that. Sure Be is right on the edge, but the users haven't given up yet and the developers haven't given up yet. When they do, then they're toast. PS> Methinks that a lot of the negative comments on BeUserTalk are from Slashdot trolls who got kicked out.
If 50% of the code in your HelloWorld program is from Microsoft, then damn yes you should call it Micrsoft/HelloWorld!
That't not totally true. On the BeOS at least, kernel calls are made directly, the kernel is mapped into each process's address space and the only overhead is that of the ring change (no context switch required.) Calls to various servers are usually batched. For example, the Interface Kit will collect all drawing functions you call and send them in one big batch to the app_server. The resultant overhead from sending the message is far outweighed by the actual functionality offered by that one message. QNX's Photon works much the same way. According to QNX, drawing through Photon, which uses messaging, is about as fast as making calls directly into the graphics driver. It introduces more latency, but in terms of raw throughput/cpu usage, it is about the same. When you look at the real-world performance of these two systems, you'll notice that they are faster than most UNIX's, microkernel or not.
If you count the number of hours actually spent developing HURD compared to those spent developing Linux, you'll see that HURD has had FAR less development time. Sure it started earlier, but that doesn't mean its been actively developed since the early 90's!
Stupid arguement. HURD has been more or less dormant for a long time. Even if it started in the early 90's, it certainly hasn't been developed actively for all that time. Development of the HURD only picked up steam recentely; far more recently than Linux did. So give it an equivilant number of coding hours and see what results!
Looks like the battle's already over. Anything that RDRAM gets will be because of Intel. If P4 does well, RDRAM will do well by decree. However if P4 and the Athlon are evenly matched, DDR is going to take it all the way. DDR is faster and cheaper, what more can you want?
According to the benchmarks on Anandtech, next to none.
Umm, according to Intel's road map we'll have 2 GHz before the end of the year.
They can't because the video memory is embedded into the graphics synthesizer chip.
A Voodoo1 is also limited to 640x480 resolution. However, that's considered high-res in the console world where (the TV equivalent of) 320x240 is the norm. Ever wonder why the N64 was able to put in full scene antialiasing on Voodoo1 level hardware?
Stolen analogy for analogy from the article that was posted on Slashdot a while ago ;)
It's not the DC's graphics libraries. The Dreamcast uses a version of the PowerVR Series 2 chip, which uses a tile-based renderer. Because of the way the chip is designed, it culls occulded polygons in hardware before sending them to the rasterizer. Because of this, PowerVR chips don't use a zbuffer (which was a big thing when all you had were 2MB graphics cards) and need much less memory bandwidth. In practice the scheme works really well when it is programmed correctly. However, PowerVR's chips never worked very well on PCs because the way standard APIs and games are designed don't mesh well with a tiled-based graphics chip. However, there is some evidence that the new NVIDIA and 3DFx chips may be borrowing some ideas from tile-based engines, so it is possible that they may become popular after-all.
Everything works in Windows too. It all depends on what you're using. The vast majority of people in the desktop market use office suites, file managers (the ones bundled with the DE), web browsers, and the GUI itself. In each of these every-so-imporant catagories, Linux falls flat. The two good office suites (StarOffice and WP Office 2000) pale in comparison to their Windows counterparts. StarOffice has a hideos interface that would get laughed at if it was in a professional program, and WP Office 2K is slower (and sometimes less stable) than the equivilant version on Windows. WP8 (which I think doesn't use WINE) is stable on Linux, but the interface makes one gag (motif.) The file manager in KDE2 takes forever to start up and flickers like hell after it does. The web browser situation in Linux is pretty sad. Mozilla is still unusable (bloated, slow, and buggy) Netscape 4.x is slow and ocassionally unstable, and Opera 4 is still in beta. KDE2 itself is slower than NT4's GUI or Win2K's GUI (if you turn of the alpha menus.) Not to mention the fact that games and 3D still run significantly slower on Linux than on Windows.
/. cracks it up to be. Its great for a lot of people, but for the average desktop user (which is where it is getting aimed at these days) it still has a long way to go. Criticism isn't a bad thing. Its helpful. It lets you know what you need to work on. It amazes me how blind the herd of Linux users are to the faults of their own OS. They get all riled up when Linux3D does benchmarks showing that Linux is only a little slower than Windows, but doesn't even notice when BeNews (Linux3D's BeOS equivilant) does benchmarks that show BeOS trouncing Windows significantly. That proves that Windows is not some magical fortress of fast 3D and with smart coding, an OS (even Linux!) can be faster than it! Go over to the BeNews message boards sometime. Sure it has its shares of zealots and over-optimists, but in general they seem to know that BeOS has faults. Just this morning several people pointed out the poor developer support from Be and the work it needs in the UI and App Kits.
I'm not trolling here, I'm simply pointing out that Linux isn't as great as everybody at
Blind devotion to an OS doesn't get you anywhere. It ultimately serves to kill that OS because nobody has the balls to point out what sucks aobut it.
You're kidding me right? Some guy at Sun slips a comment about OSS and everybody is up in a OSS induced religious fury? Where's the hard evidence? It's not even a f*ing RUMOR! Its silly some of the stuff that makes it on Slashdot.
Then Linux users have no right to call it Windoze! The Amiga users can do it, the Amiga can whip anything for graphics speed (in terms of equivilant hardware of course.) But Win32 GDI beats X, and DirectX, D3D, and Windows NV OpenGL whips the hell out of SDL and Mesa, and Linux NV OpenGL.
What's the point of switching from Windows to Linux if Linux runs SLOWER?