Oh yes. That's it. You do realize there is life outside of/. In the "real world" (ie. the world rarely inhabited by delusional OpenSource fundementalists) NVIDIA is regarded as a high quality company. You go buy that inferior 3DFx product for more money. That's exactly what we want to encourage. Boycott the companies that make decent products, and buy stuff from jackasses like 3DFx that still don't support modern features, and charge too much for cards that really aren't worth it. Buy cards from the same company that convinced retailers to put "Glide required" stickers on D3D and OpenGL compatible games in a last-ditch effort to save the Glide franchise. Buy products from a company that still doesn't have top quality OpenGL drivers. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sell some blood to afford this card.
www.sharkyextreme.com also has a good review on this. BTW, has anybody used the video features on this thing? In an age where 3DFx still doesn't do AGP, it's cool that NVIDIA is putting in stuff like support for HDTV.
Actually, a lot of people are willing to fork over that much. Lot's of people bought dual Voodoo2 SLI's for $600. Methinks the bulk of the price is due to the high speed RAM.
I don't know why there are so many people against NVIDIA. It seems that everytime news about NVIDIA comes out, people go out of their way to lambaste them. They release OpenGL drivers for Linux, people bitch about them not being OpenSource. It is found that they used a small amount of GPL code, people act as if they closed up the Linux kernel and released their own OS. They get some support for Microsoft, people act as if they are in a secret plot with MS to take over 3D, switch everyone to D3D, and help MS steal GPL code to boot.
Cool off. NVIDIA is a company that has a lot of class. Not only do they make quality products, but they go out of their way to make the user experience better. For example, they continually improve their drivers. Even though the current Detenator 2 drivers are already really high quality, the GeForce2 Ultra comes with the Detenator 3 drivers, which increase the speed by another 10-15% Best of all, you can use these new drivers on all cards dating back to the original TNT. Most companies don't even keep drivers for older cards on their website, much less continually improve them. The performance of the TNT must have improved 30 or 40% from the original 3.x drivers, and those weren't exactly shabby. Wheres Matrox get's major upps for doing OpenGL (badly at that) nobody ever points out that NVIDIA was a poineer in doing OpenGL on consumer cards. Back when everybody was doing "mini-GL" drivers, NVIDIA put a full OpenGL ICD in the box with the TNT. And not just any ICD either, NVIDIA's ICD has full support for everything from Quake to Softimage. Meanwhile, Matrox STILL doesn't have a full ICD. ATI's drivers are still flaky. Yet, everyone is saying "Is there an alternative to NVIDIA?" Hello, this comany releases fast prodcuts, excellent drivers with great OpenGL support, and goes out of it's way to support older users. In a market where good companies like Diamond have dissapeard, and bad companies like ATI abound, NVIDIA really does deserve some credit.
Actually, emulation probably wouldn't be possible. Most of a game machine's power is in the graphics hardware. According to your logic, it should be possible to emulate a gameboy on a TI-83 (which has the same proc clocked 50% faster) but it's not. Game machines tend to have all sorts of funky graphics procs. Programming for game machines is a throwback to the early days of the PC. You hack this, make this do something it isn't supposed to, figure out how to get the sound chip to do blits, all sorts of fun things;)
Finally, there is going to be a standard DE for Linux.
No more dealing with commercial software using Motif
instead of one of the DEs. Now what as Migual saying
about creating a standard Linux desktop environment?
I would have prefered KDE, but hey, you take what you can get, no?
A) Not chaotic in terms of spaghetti, but chaotic in terms of change. The Windows API really hasn't changed in a while. (Or are you living in the OS/2 days?) Which one is cleaner is irrelevant, I'm talking about which one is more stable.
B) Are you kidding? UNIX is only clean if you're doing console stuff. Of course, console stuff is clean on DOS too! X is hard to program, there really isn't a decent sound architecture (ALSA is still too immature) and you have to go through all sorts of hacks to do basic things like change resolution. Of course, all this is encapsulated if you use something like Qt, or GTK, but those are available on Windows too.
Linux has only happened in a small area. That is the area of servers. Linux has not yet happened in the mainstream, or (significantly) in the developer area. Your post said that people should be flocking to Linux because it is a better development environment, and that it was pointless to look at it from a user's point of view.
A) Linux is not a better development environment. NT can do everything Linux can (GCC, VI, etc) plus more (Delphi, Visual Studio, etc.)
B) User DO matter. If Linux had stayed hard to use, it would never have had the (limited) penetration it does in the business market. If it stays hard to use, it will never have a significant penetration in any market except those where UNIX was already strong.
C) Your theory about my theory is off. According to your theory, developers should be flocking to Linux, and Linux should be succeding in Windows's traditional market (consumers.) They aren't. It isn't. You say that the user's point of view doesn't matter. It does. They only reason that Linux is succeeding in the server market is that it is better for the user (the admin, the management) than NT is. It isn't succeding in the consumer and business market, because for those users it ISN'T better. Smart people are working on making it better than Windows for Windows users. Other people (you) are saying that the user's perspective doesn't matter, the developer's does.
PS> You miss something quite obvious. By you logic, Linux (or BSD) would have succeeded a long time ago. The development environment was more or less the same back then. So obviously that is not the cause of Linux's success. What is the cause is vendors getting together to make the Linux user's experiance more pleasent. Not only a business user or consumer, but a sysadmin's too by making administration more central and offering technical support.
Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there. certainly, marketsize influences people downstream, but it's also true that in a high growth industry there are more buyers in the future than there are in the market at the moment, According to his logic, the PC would never have taken over from the Apple II, etc. Linux is here today, and it wasn't yesterday. That calls for explanation, not dismissal.
>>>>>>>>>>>
You miss my point. This guy said that what mattered wasn't the OS that user's wanted, but the OS the developers wanted. He said that talking about Linux from a user's perspective was thus moot. My point is that it's not. The PC would never have succeeded if it didn't offer some advantages. Windows never would have succeded if it wasn't an improvement over DOS. From a user's perspective, Linux offers no such advantages. Stability isn't so big of a concern as to offset the huge amount of software for Windows, not to metion it's ease of use. If Linux gets easy to use, and it becomes "better" for the user than Windows, sure it'll succeed. But if you ignore the user, as this guy suggests, then Linux WON'T succeed.
... so? what's your point? Hoping they remember to shut the last windows machines off?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Huh? I mean that Linux is a worse development environment for people that are used to code-generators. Believe it or not, these people make significant contributions to programming. A lot of custom software and database software is done through generation programs.
I don't have an answer to this!!! Oh wait, you answered it yourself:
>>>>>>>>>
This guy said that UNIX was a better programming environemnt. If you need to use something like Delphi, it ain't. It might one day become better for those people, but right no it's not.
They must have really good crack on his planet! due to the way Windows centralizes the installation stuff, you frequently need to reinstall the whole OS
when you screw up or install a piece of screwed up software. (Admit it: especially when you help your friends and relatives)
>>>>>>
You miss my point again. In reference to centralization, I'm talking from a developer's point of view. Whether or not it's better or worse when something goes wrong has nothing to do with it. If you develop for Linux, you have to either specify a specific distribution or set of libraries (yea right, when user's put up with that, that'll be the day), or deal with the multitude of glibcs, and X's, etc. If a customer calls up with problems, you have to ask for all this information, tell them which pieces to upgrade, spend more ink listing this on the box, etc. However, in Windows, you can simply specify (NT4 Service Pack 6a needed. Before calling tech support make sure you install this.) Or better, yet, have your installer automatically install it.
... but once it installs, don't go anywhere: you can't do unattended builds when you need to click buttons in a GUI to get the source code, build it, etc. Oh,
the perils of a CLI!
>>>>>
What crack are you on? Do you even use Visual Studio? Do you realize that it can use makefiles? I'm talking about ease of installation here. Because of the fact that hte installation instructions are so complicated, you the developer get more support calls.
But, as easy as it was to refute most of his points, or at least show the other side of the same coin, none of it's important. The most influential people
make decisions for the masses, so it does not matter what the masses expect. Look at the Computer Science labs of all of the top CS universities (MIT,
CMU, Stanford, etc.) You will see more unix and linux than Windows, and if you talk to people they can articulate 1000s of reasons why. Even if they
work on more advanced or experimental OSs or environments, chances are they do their work from Unix. They respect it. Nobody with credentials
respects Windows.
>>>>>>>>
A lot of people respect Windows. The guy who did Unreal respects DirectX (which he should.) He has credentials. I'm sure the guys at Adobe respect Mac more than UNIX. You say this as if UNIX is the end-all be-all of programmning. It isn't. Almost any tool usable in UNIX is available on NT. So from a tools point of view, they are equal. NT's API is no more difficult of convultated than X's, so that's equal. Even if you don't like it, you can use Qt, or MFC, or OWL. From a stability standpoint, NT is pretty close. For a server guy, NT doesn't stand up, but for a developer NT is mostly rock solid. IF you know what you're doing with it. My NT machine has yet to crash. I put it through hell, running Visual Studio, MAX, and an image editor at the same time, all the while listening to MP3s. So what's left. A UNIX snob's unfounded hatred of Windows.
On my machine hardware rendered Quake 20% faster and a lot smoother (consitancy of framerate) than on Win98. On NT, my OpenGL apps (again hardware rendered) run about 15% faster. So... The truth is that in general, NT performs better for OpenGL applications. Notice I said OpenGL applications. I'm pretty sure Quake's software renderer doesn't use OpenGL. Either way, it doesn't matter what your particular machine does. In general concensus is that NT performs better for OpenGL.
It's not a feature in a "stable" kernel. That's what I mean by production quality. Sure, kernel 2.4-pre5 is very stable, but no-one in their right mind would use it on a mission critical computer. Not the same people who don't use.0 releases, and those who still don't use XFree4.
A) Texture RAM is cheap. For the last few years, graphics cards have doubled the amount of texture memory every year. Watching texture RAM is not something that people will have to do anytime soon.
B) Memory bandwidth is a much bigger problem than the amount. However, this one will soon be solved as well. The PSX2 is already using embeeded video memory, and the GCube, (with 32MB or embedded memory) is what PC graphics cards will look like in a few years. It would not be hard to imagine a card with a large bank of main memory, a large texture cache, and compression features to move compressed texture over the memory bus into the texture cache. Or, they might just use freakishly fast RAM like Hercules is doing on their cards. Or go the Matrox route and use very wide busses. There are many solutions to the problem.
I think Linus is wrong on this issue. (Yea, I'm arguing with god, shoot me.) Dependance on source compatiblitiy is a BAD thing. It leads to lack of cleary defined interfaces. It leads to non-replacibility, and all sorts of ugly things. Plus, it practice, it is not necesarily the best thing. Take a look at Windows drivers. 99% of them are closed source. Many of them are superior to their Linux counterparts. If having a stable driver API didn't work, why are Windows drivers stable? Maybe it's just me, I like COM, I like C++, so maybe I don't "get it." However, I point to BeOS as a good example of a driver API. They have dynamically loading, binary drivers. However, they maintain API versions. Thus, if an API break absolutely needs to occur, all changes can be lumped together and released as a new driver API. Now the kernel will still be able to load old drivers with a minimum of performance hit, and bloat really doesn't increase, because new driver APIs are rare. Above all, a stable driver API encourages stable code. Since the driver API is solid and non-changing, drivers can get maturity without having all types of changes. Face it, changing old source to use a new interface is an inherently dangerous process full of hacks and workarounds. Not a good idea for something as critical as a driver.
I have no clue what PGP is. And I've never heard of a way to patch DirectX 5 into NT4. The HAL won't let you do it. You can get DirectX 6 to appear as the installed version, but that's only because DirectShow or something runs up to version 6 on NT, and the DirectX control panel reports the highest component as the installed version. How exactly is this done?
A) It doesn't screw everything else. Everything else just doesn't get very many resources. And, it only happens while you're running the game. How often have you played Quake, and done something else at the same time? A lot of "hog" features are dependant on what the app asks for. If it is a simple game, that one could play in a window while doing something else, then that app can ask for a "cooperation level" that allows it to coexist peacefully with other apps. However, if it is a demanding game like Quake, DirectX allows it to use all the resources of the system. However, since 99% of the people can't play Quake and do something else at the same time, it doesn't matter. The minute you pause and switch out of Quake, then the resources go back to the applications you're using.
The whole OS doesn't run in user-mode, just services that don't need Ring0. And a lot of services don't. For example, if you're drawing a line, you don't need to go into ring 0 to do it. Or if you're asking for information about a font. Remember, Windows is essentially, Linux +X+GNOME+Mozilla. In Linux, X,GNOME and Mozilla run in user-space anyway.
Aside from the fact that that's awefully arrogant of you (programmers are secondary to users!) you're theory doesn't hold water. Two points.
A) Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there.
B) Developing for UNIX is not necessarily better.
- There are a lot of commercial developers that grew up using Microsoft code generators. Those people will be the last to switch to *NIX.
- For a lot of smaller developers (database developers, etc) the fastest way to do something is still use generation tools (like database generators, or stuff like Delphi.) Those developer's won't switch until a similar body of apps are available on Linux.
- Any tool you can use in *NIX, you can use in NT. (GCC, Emacs, etc.)
- The Windows APIs are generally less chaotic. While Linux is in a constant state of flux, the Windows APIs are more stable. For example, in Linux, you have the major DE's changing heavily quite often. In Windows, the major DE APIs haven't changed all that much since Win95.
- Linux suffers from API overload. Which sound system do you program for? If you want featues and speed, you use ALSA. However, can you expect your users to have it? You could use OSS, but why not just forget it and use DirectSound? Which DE should you program for? KDE or GNOME? In the end, most commercial developers will just give up trying to choose and use Motif. And by using motif, they lose out on the cool features of KDE and GNOME. What toolkits? How can I make sure the user has the correct toolkit? What version of glibc? What version of X? You don't have these kinds of problems with Windows, mainly because MS forces people to stay on an upgrade path, and thus most users will have NT4, service pack 6a. And if they don't it's relativly easy to just include it on your CD, so you can be sure of the state of the system.
- In terms of mutlimedia, the Windows APIs are still much better.
- Developers still care about user experiance. When Sierra didn't let people choose the install directory in it's utilities, people had fits, and threatened to boycott their programs. In Linux, many programs have pages of installation instructions. Recently, I read a review of the 3 IDE's available for Linux. In the case of RedHat's GNUPro toolkit, the installation instructions consisted of half a page of CLI commands. Compare this to Visual Studio's, where you pop the CD, pick which options you want, and then go away while it installs.
Sorry, I forgot to add the addendu. Sure many of these technologies are available on Linux, but none are production quality. For example, SMP scaling isn't exactly that great even with kernel 2.4. XFree86 4.0 is still technically experimental, and the 3D framework is a lot less mature that other environments. ReiserFS and EXT3 are still experimental, as are the real-time kernel patches for Linux. Linux has display Ghostscript, but that is not a complete, fully compatible implementation, and it is rarely used in Linux programs.
A lot:
Solaris: Massive SMP scaling.
IRIX: Mature 3D framework.
IRIX: Stable journeling file system.
Solaris: Dynamic patching of most kernel code.
QNX: Real time sheduling.
Solaris, NeXT, etc. Display Postscript.
NeXT, Solaris: Flexible, ObjectiveC object model.
And of course, most commercial UNIX's offer management tools that are much more integrated and functional that Linux ones.
As far as I recall, Windows 98 has protected memory, preemptive multi-tasking, and the whole OS is basically a user-land library. (Actually, by making the OS mainly consist of a set of DLL's loaded by the application, performance is IMPROVED, since API calls don't have to do a switch into Ring0. It also means that Win98 is in a way a pseudo-exo-kernel OS.)
NT actually performs better in Quake than Win98 does.
Windows2000 solves the whole "big OS/gaming" problem quite nicely. You see, the OS needs of games are quite limited. Thus, in effect, DirectX is really as much of an OS as most games need. Since you are rarely being productive when you're gaming, some modes of DirectX allows a program to hog the system at the expense of other applications. However, since you're not using other applications while you're gaming, this isn't a problem. Quite an elegant solution really. Although, I'm against heavy OSs in general, but within the context of the problem, Win2K's solution is a pretty good one. (Though don't get me started on the code bloat. What I want is NT4 with full DirectX. Is that too much to ask?)
The NVIDIA Linux driver is faster than it looks from some of the benchmarks. The thing he mentioned, the page-flipping vs. blitting issue, seems to account for most of the performance difference between linux and Win98. I say this, because under the low-res Solar System tests, Win98 and Linux perform almost equally. Tom attributes this to CPU limitations, but the GeForce cards are geometry accelerators, so CPU limitations really shouldn't be an issue here. If the NVIDIA Linux driver really were slower, than transforms would be slower as well, and thus the Solar System score would be lower. Same thing for the low res Quake III tests.
That brings me to a question. Why doesn't the NVIDIA Linux driver implement page flipping. Page-flipping is a basic necessity (nay, a innate right!) for game developers. I seriously doubt X doesn't allow access to page flipping in full screen mode... does it? Also, I just thought of something. Does X allow access to page-flipped overlays. That might allow Quake to use page-flipping in window'ed modes. (Which would be pretty cool.)
This would be a troll, if this guy were lying. Unfortunately for the Linux crowd, he's right. NT4 doesn't get 30% better fps, but it is significantly faster than Win9x.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes. That's it. You do realize there is life outside of /. In the "real world" (ie. the world rarely inhabited by delusional OpenSource fundementalists) NVIDIA is regarded as a high quality company. You go buy that inferior 3DFx product for more money. That's exactly what we want to encourage. Boycott the companies that make decent products, and buy stuff from jackasses like 3DFx that still don't support modern features, and charge too much for cards that really aren't worth it. Buy cards from the same company that convinced retailers to put "Glide required" stickers on D3D and OpenGL compatible games in a last-ditch effort to save the Glide franchise. Buy products from a company that still doesn't have top quality OpenGL drivers. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sell some blood to afford this card.
www.sharkyextreme.com also has a good review on this. BTW, has anybody used the video features on this thing? In an age where 3DFx still doesn't do AGP, it's cool that NVIDIA is putting in stuff like support for HDTV.
Actually, a lot of people are willing to fork over that much. Lot's of people bought dual Voodoo2 SLI's for $600. Methinks the bulk of the price is due to the high speed RAM.
$600 for a Voodoo 5 6000? This card will perform nearly as well for much less. (The prices should go down by then.)
I don't know why there are so many people against NVIDIA. It seems that everytime news about NVIDIA comes out, people go out of their way to lambaste them. They release OpenGL drivers for Linux, people bitch about them not being OpenSource. It is found that they used a small amount of GPL code, people act as if they closed up the Linux kernel and released their own OS. They get some support for Microsoft, people act as if they are in a secret plot with MS to take over 3D, switch everyone to D3D, and help MS steal GPL code to boot.
Cool off. NVIDIA is a company that has a lot of class. Not only do they make quality products, but they go out of their way to make the user experience better. For example, they continually improve their drivers. Even though the current Detenator 2 drivers are already really high quality, the GeForce2 Ultra comes with the Detenator 3 drivers, which increase the speed by another 10-15% Best of all, you can use these new drivers on all cards dating back to the original TNT. Most companies don't even keep drivers for older cards on their website, much less continually improve them. The performance of the TNT must have improved 30 or 40% from the original 3.x drivers, and those weren't exactly shabby. Wheres Matrox get's major upps for doing OpenGL (badly at that) nobody ever points out that NVIDIA was a poineer in doing OpenGL on consumer cards. Back when everybody was doing "mini-GL" drivers, NVIDIA put a full OpenGL ICD in the box with the TNT. And not just any ICD either, NVIDIA's ICD has full support for everything from Quake to Softimage. Meanwhile, Matrox STILL doesn't have a full ICD. ATI's drivers are still flaky. Yet, everyone is saying "Is there an alternative to NVIDIA?" Hello, this comany releases fast prodcuts, excellent drivers with great OpenGL support, and goes out of it's way to support older users. In a market where good companies like Diamond have dissapeard, and bad companies like ATI abound, NVIDIA really does deserve some credit.
Or, they could do a spin off of Pocket Monsters called Pocket Hookers.
Actually, emulation probably wouldn't be possible. Most of a game machine's power is in the graphics hardware. According to your logic, it should be possible to emulate a gameboy on a TI-83 (which has the same proc clocked 50% faster) but it's not. Game machines tend to have all sorts of funky graphics procs. Programming for game machines is a throwback to the early days of the PC. You hack this, make this do something it isn't supposed to, figure out how to get the sound chip to do blits, all sorts of fun things ;)
Finally, there is going to be a standard DE for Linux.
No more dealing with commercial software using Motif
instead of one of the DEs. Now what as Migual saying
about creating a standard Linux desktop environment?
I would have prefered KDE, but hey, you take what you can get, no?
(Excuse the formatting, I'm posting from Lynx.)
It's idiots like this who give good anti-linux campaigns a bad name...
Am I joking? You decide...
A) Not chaotic in terms of spaghetti, but chaotic in terms of change. The Windows API really hasn't changed in a while. (Or are you living in the OS/2 days?) Which one is cleaner is irrelevant, I'm talking about which one is more stable.
B) Are you kidding? UNIX is only clean if you're doing console stuff. Of course, console stuff is clean on DOS too! X is hard to program, there really isn't a decent sound architecture (ALSA is still too immature) and you have to go through all sorts of hacks to do basic things like change resolution. Of course, all this is encapsulated if you use something like Qt, or GTK, but those are available on Windows too.
Linux has only happened in a small area. That is the area of servers. Linux has not yet happened in the mainstream, or (significantly) in the developer area. Your post said that people should be flocking to Linux because it is a better development environment, and that it was pointless to look at it from a user's point of view.
A) Linux is not a better development environment. NT can do everything Linux can (GCC, VI, etc) plus more (Delphi, Visual Studio, etc.)
B) User DO matter. If Linux had stayed hard to use, it would never have had the (limited) penetration it does in the business market. If it stays hard to use, it will never have a significant penetration in any market except those where UNIX was already strong.
C) Your theory about my theory is off. According to your theory, developers should be flocking to Linux, and Linux should be succeding in Windows's traditional market (consumers.) They aren't. It isn't. You say that the user's point of view doesn't matter. It does. They only reason that Linux is succeeding in the server market is that it is better for the user (the admin, the management) than NT is. It isn't succeding in the consumer and business market, because for those users it ISN'T better. Smart people are working on making it better than Windows for Windows users. Other people (you) are saying that the user's perspective doesn't matter, the developer's does.
PS> You miss something quite obvious. By you logic, Linux (or BSD) would have succeeded a long time ago. The development environment was more or less the same back then. So obviously that is not the cause of Linux's success. What is the cause is vendors getting together to make the Linux user's experiance more pleasent. Not only a business user or consumer, but a sysadmin's too by making administration more central and offering technical support.
Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there. certainly, marketsize influences people downstream, but it's also true that in a high growth industry there are more buyers in the future than there are in the market at the moment, According to his logic, the PC would never have taken over from the Apple II, etc. Linux is here today, and it wasn't yesterday. That calls for explanation, not dismissal.
>>>>>>>>>>>
You miss my point. This guy said that what mattered wasn't the OS that user's wanted, but the OS the developers wanted. He said that talking about Linux from a user's perspective was thus moot. My point is that it's not. The PC would never have succeeded if it didn't offer some advantages. Windows never would have succeded if it wasn't an improvement over DOS. From a user's perspective, Linux offers no such advantages. Stability isn't so big of a concern as to offset the huge amount of software for Windows, not to metion it's ease of use. If Linux gets easy to use, and it becomes "better" for the user than Windows, sure it'll succeed. But if you ignore the user, as this guy suggests, then Linux WON'T succeed.
... so? what's your point? Hoping they remember to shut the last windows machines off?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Huh? I mean that Linux is a worse development environment for people that are used to code-generators. Believe it or not, these people make significant contributions to programming. A lot of custom software and database software is done through generation programs.
I don't have an answer to this!!! Oh wait, you answered it yourself:
>>>>>>>>>
This guy said that UNIX was a better programming environemnt. If you need to use something like Delphi, it ain't. It might one day become better for those people, but right no it's not.
They must have really good crack on his planet! due to the way Windows centralizes the installation stuff, you frequently need to reinstall the whole OS
when you screw up or install a piece of screwed up software. (Admit it: especially when you help your friends and relatives)
>>>>>>
You miss my point again. In reference to centralization, I'm talking from a developer's point of view. Whether or not it's better or worse when something goes wrong has nothing to do with it. If you develop for Linux, you have to either specify a specific distribution or set of libraries (yea right, when user's put up with that, that'll be the day), or deal with the multitude of glibcs, and X's, etc. If a customer calls up with problems, you have to ask for all this information, tell them which pieces to upgrade, spend more ink listing this on the box, etc. However, in Windows, you can simply specify (NT4 Service Pack 6a needed. Before calling tech support make sure you install this.) Or better, yet, have your installer automatically install it.
... but once it installs, don't go anywhere: you can't do unattended builds when you need to click buttons in a GUI to get the source code, build it, etc. Oh,
the perils of a CLI!
>>>>>
What crack are you on? Do you even use Visual Studio? Do you realize that it can use makefiles? I'm talking about ease of installation here. Because of the fact that hte installation instructions are so complicated, you the developer get more support calls.
But, as easy as it was to refute most of his points, or at least show the other side of the same coin, none of it's important. The most influential people
make decisions for the masses, so it does not matter what the masses expect. Look at the Computer Science labs of all of the top CS universities (MIT,
CMU, Stanford, etc.) You will see more unix and linux than Windows, and if you talk to people they can articulate 1000s of reasons why. Even if they
work on more advanced or experimental OSs or environments, chances are they do their work from Unix. They respect it. Nobody with credentials
respects Windows.
>>>>>>>>
A lot of people respect Windows. The guy who did Unreal respects DirectX (which he should.) He has credentials. I'm sure the guys at Adobe respect Mac more than UNIX. You say this as if UNIX is the end-all be-all of programmning. It isn't. Almost any tool usable in UNIX is available on NT. So from a tools point of view, they are equal. NT's API is no more difficult of convultated than X's, so that's equal. Even if you don't like it, you can use Qt, or MFC, or OWL. From a stability standpoint, NT is pretty close. For a server guy, NT doesn't stand up, but for a developer NT is mostly rock solid. IF you know what you're doing with it. My NT machine has yet to crash. I put it through hell, running Visual Studio, MAX, and an image editor at the same time, all the while listening to MP3s. So what's left. A UNIX snob's unfounded hatred of Windows.
On my machine hardware rendered Quake 20% faster and a lot smoother (consitancy of framerate) than on Win98. On NT, my OpenGL apps (again hardware rendered) run about 15% faster. So... The truth is that in general, NT performs better for OpenGL applications. Notice I said OpenGL applications. I'm pretty sure Quake's software renderer doesn't use OpenGL. Either way, it doesn't matter what your particular machine does. In general concensus is that NT performs better for OpenGL.
It's not a feature in a "stable" kernel. That's what I mean by production quality. Sure, kernel 2.4-pre5 is very stable, but no-one in their right mind would use it on a mission critical computer. Not the same people who don't use .0 releases, and those who still don't use XFree4.
A) Texture RAM is cheap. For the last few years, graphics cards have doubled the amount of texture memory every year. Watching texture RAM is not something that people will have to do anytime soon.
B) Memory bandwidth is a much bigger problem than the amount. However, this one will soon be solved as well. The PSX2 is already using embeeded video memory, and the GCube, (with 32MB or embedded memory) is what PC graphics cards will look like in a few years. It would not be hard to imagine a card with a large bank of main memory, a large texture cache, and compression features to move compressed texture over the memory bus into the texture cache. Or, they might just use freakishly fast RAM like Hercules is doing on their cards. Or go the Matrox route and use very wide busses. There are many solutions to the problem.
I think Linus is wrong on this issue. (Yea, I'm arguing with god, shoot me.) Dependance on source compatiblitiy is a BAD thing. It leads to lack of cleary defined interfaces. It leads to non-replacibility, and all sorts of ugly things. Plus, it practice, it is not necesarily the best thing. Take a look at Windows drivers. 99% of them are closed source. Many of them are superior to their Linux counterparts. If having a stable driver API didn't work, why are Windows drivers stable? Maybe it's just me, I like COM, I like C++, so maybe I don't "get it." However, I point to BeOS as a good example of a driver API. They have dynamically loading, binary drivers. However, they maintain API versions. Thus, if an API break absolutely needs to occur, all changes can be lumped together and released as a new driver API. Now the kernel will still be able to load old drivers with a minimum of performance hit, and bloat really doesn't increase, because new driver APIs are rare. Above all, a stable driver API encourages stable code. Since the driver API is solid and non-changing, drivers can get maturity without having all types of changes. Face it, changing old source to use a new interface is an inherently dangerous process full of hacks and workarounds. Not a good idea for something as critical as a driver.
I have no clue what PGP is. And I've never heard of a way to patch DirectX 5 into NT4. The HAL won't let you do it. You can get DirectX 6 to appear as the installed version, but that's only because DirectShow or something runs up to version 6 on NT, and the DirectX control panel reports the highest component as the installed version. How exactly is this done?
A) It doesn't screw everything else. Everything else just doesn't get very many resources. And, it only happens while you're running the game. How often have you played Quake, and done something else at the same time? A lot of "hog" features are dependant on what the app asks for. If it is a simple game, that one could play in a window while doing something else, then that app can ask for a "cooperation level" that allows it to coexist peacefully with other apps. However, if it is a demanding game like Quake, DirectX allows it to use all the resources of the system. However, since 99% of the people can't play Quake and do something else at the same time, it doesn't matter. The minute you pause and switch out of Quake, then the resources go back to the applications you're using.
The whole OS doesn't run in user-mode, just services that don't need Ring0. And a lot of services don't. For example, if you're drawing a line, you don't need to go into ring 0 to do it. Or if you're asking for information about a font. Remember, Windows is essentially, Linux +X+GNOME+Mozilla. In Linux, X,GNOME and Mozilla run in user-space anyway.
Aside from the fact that that's awefully arrogant of you (programmers are secondary to users!) you're theory doesn't hold water. Two points.
A) Userbase is king. Windows has the userbase. If Linux doesn't get a big userbase, then people won't develop there.
B) Developing for UNIX is not necessarily better.
- There are a lot of commercial developers that grew up using Microsoft code generators. Those people will be the last to switch to *NIX.
- For a lot of smaller developers (database developers, etc) the fastest way to do something is still use generation tools (like database generators, or stuff like Delphi.) Those developer's won't switch until a similar body of apps are available on Linux.
- Any tool you can use in *NIX, you can use in NT. (GCC, Emacs, etc.)
- The Windows APIs are generally less chaotic. While Linux is in a constant state of flux, the Windows APIs are more stable. For example, in Linux, you have the major DE's changing heavily quite often. In Windows, the major DE APIs haven't changed all that much since Win95.
- Linux suffers from API overload. Which sound system do you program for? If you want featues and speed, you use ALSA. However, can you expect your users to have it? You could use OSS, but why not just forget it and use DirectSound? Which DE should you program for? KDE or GNOME? In the end, most commercial developers will just give up trying to choose and use Motif. And by using motif, they lose out on the cool features of KDE and GNOME. What toolkits? How can I make sure the user has the correct toolkit? What version of glibc? What version of X? You don't have these kinds of problems with Windows, mainly because MS forces people to stay on an upgrade path, and thus most users will have NT4, service pack 6a. And if they don't it's relativly easy to just include it on your CD, so you can be sure of the state of the system.
- In terms of mutlimedia, the Windows APIs are still much better.
- Developers still care about user experiance. When Sierra didn't let people choose the install directory in it's utilities, people had fits, and threatened to boycott their programs. In Linux, many programs have pages of installation instructions. Recently, I read a review of the 3 IDE's available for Linux. In the case of RedHat's GNUPro toolkit, the installation instructions consisted of half a page of CLI commands. Compare this to Visual Studio's, where you pop the CD, pick which options you want, and then go away while it installs.
Sorry, I forgot to add the addendu. Sure many of these technologies are available on Linux, but none are production quality. For example, SMP scaling isn't exactly that great even with kernel 2.4. XFree86 4.0 is still technically experimental, and the 3D framework is a lot less mature that other environments. ReiserFS and EXT3 are still experimental, as are the real-time kernel patches for Linux. Linux has display Ghostscript, but that is not a complete, fully compatible implementation, and it is rarely used in Linux programs.
A lot:
Solaris: Massive SMP scaling.
IRIX: Mature 3D framework.
IRIX: Stable journeling file system.
Solaris: Dynamic patching of most kernel code.
QNX: Real time sheduling.
Solaris, NeXT, etc. Display Postscript.
NeXT, Solaris: Flexible, ObjectiveC object model.
And of course, most commercial UNIX's offer management tools that are much more integrated and functional that Linux ones.
Huh? Could you please elaborate?
As far as I recall, Windows 98 has protected memory, preemptive multi-tasking, and the whole OS is basically a user-land library. (Actually, by making the OS mainly consist of a set of DLL's loaded by the application, performance is IMPROVED, since API calls don't have to do a switch into Ring0. It also means that Win98 is in a way a pseudo-exo-kernel OS.)
NT actually performs better in Quake than Win98 does.
Windows2000 solves the whole "big OS/gaming" problem quite nicely. You see, the OS needs of games are quite limited. Thus, in effect, DirectX is really as much of an OS as most games need. Since you are rarely being productive when you're gaming, some modes of DirectX allows a program to hog the system at the expense of other applications. However, since you're not using other applications while you're gaming, this isn't a problem. Quite an elegant solution really. Although, I'm against heavy OSs in general, but within the context of the problem, Win2K's solution is a pretty good one. (Though don't get me started on the code bloat. What I want is NT4 with full DirectX. Is that too much to ask?)
The NVIDIA Linux driver is faster than it looks from some of the benchmarks. The thing he mentioned, the page-flipping vs. blitting issue, seems to account for most of the performance difference between linux and Win98. I say this, because under the low-res Solar System tests, Win98 and Linux perform almost equally. Tom attributes this to CPU limitations, but the GeForce cards are geometry accelerators, so CPU limitations really shouldn't be an issue here. If the NVIDIA Linux driver really were slower, than transforms would be slower as well, and thus the Solar System score would be lower. Same thing for the low res Quake III tests.
That brings me to a question. Why doesn't the NVIDIA Linux driver implement page flipping. Page-flipping is a basic necessity (nay, a innate right!) for game developers. I seriously doubt X doesn't allow access to page flipping in full screen mode... does it? Also, I just thought of something. Does X allow access to page-flipped overlays. That might allow Quake to use page-flipping in window'ed modes. (Which would be pretty cool.)
This would be a troll, if this guy were lying. Unfortunately for the Linux crowd, he's right. NT4 doesn't get 30% better fps, but it is significantly faster than Win9x.