The alternative is VCSDRAM. Virtual Channel SDRAM has some more onboard cache and can have more than one concurrent transfer at a time (like RDRAM) plus it has a MUCH lower latency due to the SDRAM design plus the extra chache. If you think that a 50% increase in memory bandwith plus an increase in latency (RDRAM is 16 bits X 800 MHz = 1.6 GB/sec, VCSDRAM is 64 bits X 133 =1064 GB/sec) is better than a 60% (500 to 800) increase in CPU power is probably not using some very weird programs. (Or a database/file server) And Toms HW has shown that even Quake only has a memory bandwith requirement of 100MB/sec, far less than even FPM DRAM but really needs the low latency. Finally, the only reason you need the extra power is for 3D or running a server. The only case I can think of where higher memory bandwith would be better is the database/file server example. (Or serving up 1 million static web pages per second using NT:) Say if you were running a CGI server, CPU speed would be more important. Finally, MaximumPC did tests on RDRAM vs. VCSDRAM, and in real world apps (Premiere, Inspire, games, etc.) they were more or less tied. The only place RDRAM was better was synthetic benchmarks like bootmark or Winbench.
I was using Nintendo to point out that video games are a big bussiness. Of course it does not compare to Sony. Second before the whole N64 fiasco, NIN was worth about 5 billion. Although N64 did well in the US, the bulk of its market, in Japan, did not buy it. So thats probably one reason for the lowering of the cap. I also think that the $5 billion revenue, which makes sense. They make about 25$ per cartridge, but because of the expense of the cartridge, only about $4 or $5 is profit. So they have high revenue, but lower profits, and thus a lower market cap. (Another reason Sony uses CDs instead of carts.)
Yes, Sony DOES make a significant amount of money from the playstation. It gets a $7 lisence fee for each game sold, and hundreds of millions of games are sold each year. Video gaming is not something to be taken lightly, Nintendo was a 5 billion dollar company even before Pokemon. In Japan everyone has a console, and buys many games every year.
Quite a few problems. 1) Linux has never been ported to PS2, it runs a chip codesigned with Toshiba and is not MIPS compatible. (unless you want to run off the I/O proc.) You are probably thinking of the PS2 devel. stations that use Linux. 2) Linux would not mesh well with PS2. It has increadible graphics performance, but thirves on small code, direct access, and total hardware control. The PS2 OS is essentially a wrapper to the hardware, and thats what the hardware is optimized to run. It only has 32 MB of RAM, and no swap file, so X performance would suck, and in general most desktop OSes have way too many levels of abstractions (especially UNIX) for the direct to the hardware style of the PS2 to shine through. So yes, you have mad proc and graphics performance, but Linux really won't run well on it.
USB stuff isn't "odd hardware." And BeOS was never a factor here (although it DOES support every bit of USB hardware I have, a Perfection 610 scanner, a Sidewinder Precision Pro, and a pair of USB speakers), I was comparing Linux to Windows and BSD.
That's the problem. You're saying that it is possible to mix commercialism and open source. I'm saying that its not. By opening your product, you let competitors in, you lose a lot of revenue (because people like CheapBytes cut into your profits) and you lose control of your product. I think it is pretty much impossible to reconcile open source and commercialism, unless you're willing to give up major parts of one of them.
True, but it does do networking, filesystem, and a lot of the other stuff a game needs to do. If you use POSIX for this (as opposed to Win32 APIs!) then porting will be that much easier. I forgot about sound, though. Right now there isn't really a standard for good audio. Of course, you could probably just code for DirectSound, since none of the other audio systems are really as feature complete anyway. (No 3D sound, no dynamic MIDI, etc.)
How can anything be easier than clicking 'Windows Update' checking off the latest service pack, and then waiting for your computer to reboot? In general, Windows upgrades (when they worked, and to be fair, it didn't work for a lot of people) have simply consisted of downloading the relavent.exe, double clicking, and rebooting.
The whole "without deadlines" crap is bullshit. Linux has deadlines. They might not be on paper, but if Linus took 3 years to release 2.4, everyone would know that some deadline must have been busted. Linux 2.4 was supposed to come out last year. While that wasn't an official paper deadline, missing the mark by 12 months DOES count as "overdue."
Its not the language that's the problem. (BTW kernel designers tend to have fits everytime someone mentions C++ going near a kernel;) The problem is that there is no paper standard on what the module interfaces are. That's strictly a Linus design issue, not a problem with the C language.
Yea, but WinNT hasn't been claiming to be a consumer operating system (Mandrake, Redhat, ahem) And they've had AGP support for a long time. Lastly, Win95 had USB support a long time ago, and the BSDs got it a while ago as well. Linux really IS late to this game.
In any emulation layer, there is a performance hit. And if you are incurring the performance hit on higher performance hardware, then people get pissed. I mean nobody really cares if their zip drive is taking a 20% performance hit, since its slow anyway. But when their expensive 12x10x32 Plextor CD-RW drive is taking that hit, then people get mad.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is consistant with the workings of nature. What's mine is mine, and what's your's is your's. It is the natural order of things to be propriatory by default, and shared if desired. Take a look around at the rest of the planet before spouting philosophical bullshit.
Do you not realize at ALL that Linux is a fragmented (in a good way;) project, and what the kernel developers do is simply develop the kernel. They don't do it instead of doing other stuff for Linux, they do it because that's their niche. If they release a new kernel, it has nothing to do with other people not releasing better development tools!
WITFM (Where is the fucking manual) You can always tell a newbie to read the manual IF there was a manual. Often, however, there is just a bunch of individual, non related pages for different packages. This is where Linux suffers from fragmentation. Everybody does his thing his way. The reason nobody ever has to do this in windows is becuase A. There is a huge helpfile, B. All config. stuff is in one place and is more or less self explanitory. The problem is documentation only talks about a very specific thing while it does not talk about things in terms of the system as a whole. (Edit your config file for package XXX) Which would be WHERE? exactly?
Actually, the POWER architechture is at the heart of those machines. PowerPC is a significantly lower performance proc. As I remember it an article posted on Slashdot about the HP PA-RISC stated that PowerPC was more or less unworthy of RISC status in that its FP performance is little better than x86. Even theoretically an 800MHz PIII is only slightly (20%) slower than a 500MHz G4 and in reality its probably much less with the PIII pulling far ahead. This comes from the fact that AltiVec is 128 bit and the G4 as two fp pipes. So you have 4floats X two pipes X 500MHz=4 gigaflops. Intel is 64 bit so 2 floats X two pipes X 800 MHz =3.2 gigaflops.
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack. (Although I hate the concept of porting an OS from 32 to 64 bit be considered a "simple hack" under any circumstances. Doing stuff like that gets you stuff like X.)
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack. (Although I hate the concept of porting an OS from 32 to 64 bit be considered a "simple hack" under any circumstances. Doing stuff like that gets you stuff like X.
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack.
Its true. Patents and propriatory stuff is not a Bad Thing. Thats what keeps people going and developing new stuff. Its prevalent in everything from fast food (does McDonalds release the recipie for its fries?) to Physics (do scientists give out research before they have had a change to publish a paper on it?) I have no problem with Open stuff, as long as OpenStuff people don't complain about other people keeping their stuff closed. Its their technology they can do with it whatever they damn well please.
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The alternative is VCSDRAM. Virtual Channel SDRAM has some more onboard cache and can have more than one concurrent transfer at a time (like RDRAM) plus it has a MUCH lower latency due to the SDRAM design plus the extra chache. If you think that a 50% increase in memory bandwith plus an increase in latency (RDRAM is 16 bits X 800 MHz = 1.6 GB/sec, VCSDRAM is 64 bits X 133 =1064 GB/sec) is better than a 60% (500 to 800) increase in CPU power is probably not using some very weird programs. (Or a database/file server) And Toms HW has shown that even Quake only has a memory bandwith requirement of 100MB/sec, far less than even FPM DRAM but really needs the low latency. Finally, the only reason you need the extra power is for 3D or running a server. The only case I can think of where higher memory bandwith would be better is the database/file server example. (Or serving up 1 million static web pages per second using NT:) Say if you were running a CGI server, CPU speed would be more important. Finally, MaximumPC did tests on RDRAM vs. VCSDRAM, and in real world apps (Premiere, Inspire, games, etc.) they were more or less tied. The only place RDRAM was better was synthetic benchmarks like bootmark or Winbench.
I was using Nintendo to point out that video games are a big bussiness. Of course it does not compare to Sony. Second before the whole N64 fiasco, NIN was worth about 5 billion. Although N64 did well in the US, the bulk of its market, in Japan, did not buy it. So thats probably one reason for the lowering of the cap. I also think that the $5 billion revenue, which makes sense. They make about 25$ per cartridge, but because of the expense of the cartridge, only about $4 or $5 is profit. So they have high revenue, but lower profits, and thus a lower market cap. (Another reason Sony uses CDs instead of carts.)
Yes, Sony DOES make a significant amount of money from the playstation. It gets a $7 lisence fee for each game sold, and hundreds of millions of games are sold each year. Video gaming is not something to be taken lightly, Nintendo was a 5 billion dollar company even before Pokemon. In Japan everyone has a console, and buys many games every year.
Quite a few problems.
1) Linux has never been ported to PS2, it runs a chip codesigned with Toshiba and is not MIPS compatible. (unless you want to run off the I/O proc.) You are probably thinking of the PS2 devel. stations that use Linux.
2) Linux would not mesh well with PS2. It has increadible graphics performance, but thirves on small code, direct access, and total hardware control. The PS2 OS is essentially a wrapper to the hardware, and thats what the hardware is optimized to run. It only has 32 MB of RAM, and no swap file, so X performance would suck, and in general most desktop OSes have way too many levels of abstractions (especially UNIX) for the direct to the hardware style of the PS2 to shine through.
So yes, you have mad proc and graphics performance, but Linux really won't run well on it.
Total releases of 2.4 promised in the last year: one.
Total delivered: zero
Total releases of BeOS promised in the last year: one
Total delivered: one
USB stuff isn't "odd hardware." And BeOS was never a factor here (although it DOES support every bit of USB hardware I have, a Perfection 610 scanner, a Sidewinder Precision Pro, and a pair of USB speakers), I was comparing Linux to Windows and BSD.
What do you mean? Win98 supports USB just fine? As for Win95, my USB speakers aren't complaining about it.
That's the problem. You're saying that it is possible to mix commercialism and open source. I'm saying that its not. By opening your product, you let competitors in, you lose a lot of revenue (because people like CheapBytes cut into your profits) and you lose control of your product. I think it is pretty much impossible to reconcile open source and commercialism, unless you're willing to give up major parts of one of them.
True, but it does do networking, filesystem, and a lot of the other stuff a game needs to do. If you use POSIX for this (as opposed to Win32 APIs!) then porting will be that much easier. I forgot about sound, though. Right now there isn't really a standard for good audio. Of course, you could probably just code for DirectSound, since none of the other audio systems are really as feature complete anyway. (No 3D sound, no dynamic MIDI, etc.)
Or remove RedHat 7 and intstall Slack. That should increase performance as well.
How can anything be easier than clicking 'Windows Update' checking off the latest service pack, and then waiting for your computer to reboot? In general, Windows upgrades (when they worked, and to be fair, it didn't work for a lot of people) have simply consisted of downloading the relavent .exe, double clicking, and rebooting.
The whole "without deadlines" crap is bullshit. Linux has deadlines. They might not be on paper, but if Linus took 3 years to release 2.4, everyone would know that some deadline must have been busted. Linux 2.4 was supposed to come out last year. While that wasn't an official paper deadline, missing the mark by 12 months DOES count as "overdue."
Its not the language that's the problem. (BTW kernel designers tend to have fits everytime someone mentions C++ going near a kernel;) The problem is that there is no paper standard on what the module interfaces are. That's strictly a Linus design issue, not a problem with the C language.
Or something only a gnu would choose? Hmmm.
Yea, but WinNT hasn't been claiming to be a consumer operating system (Mandrake, Redhat, ahem) And they've had AGP support for a long time. Lastly, Win95 had USB support a long time ago, and the BSDs got it a while ago as well. Linux really IS late to this game.
In any emulation layer, there is a performance hit. And if you are incurring the performance hit on higher performance hardware, then people get pissed. I mean nobody really cares if their zip drive is taking a 20% performance hit, since its slow anyway. But when their expensive 12x10x32 Plextor CD-RW drive is taking that hit, then people get mad.
The whole concept of "intellectual property" is consistant with the workings of nature. What's mine is mine, and what's your's is your's. It is the natural order of things to be propriatory by default, and shared if desired. Take a look around at the rest of the planet before spouting philosophical bullshit.
Do you not realize at ALL that Linux is a fragmented (in a good way ;) project, and what the kernel developers do is simply develop the kernel. They don't do it instead of doing other stuff for Linux, they do it because that's their niche. If they release a new kernel, it has nothing to do with other people not releasing better development tools!
WITFM (Where is the fucking manual) You can always tell a newbie to read the manual IF there was a manual. Often, however, there is just a bunch of individual, non related pages for different packages. This is where Linux suffers from fragmentation. Everybody does his thing his way. The reason nobody ever has to do this in windows is becuase A. There is a huge helpfile, B. All config. stuff is in one place and is more or less self explanitory. The problem is documentation only talks about a very specific thing while it does not talk about things in terms of the system as a whole. (Edit your config file for package XXX) Which would be WHERE? exactly?
Actually, the POWER architechture is at the heart of those machines. PowerPC is a significantly lower performance proc. As I remember it an article posted on Slashdot about the HP PA-RISC stated that PowerPC was more or less unworthy of RISC status in that its FP performance is little better than x86. Even theoretically an 800MHz PIII is only slightly (20%) slower than a 500MHz G4 and in reality its probably much less with the PIII pulling far ahead. This comes from the fact that AltiVec is 128 bit and the G4 as two fp pipes. So you have 4floats X two pipes X 500MHz=4 gigaflops. Intel is 64 bit so 2 floats X two pipes X 800 MHz =3.2 gigaflops.
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack. (Although I hate the concept of porting an OS from 32 to 64 bit be considered a "simple hack" under any circumstances. Doing stuff like that gets you stuff like X.)
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack. (Although I hate the concept of porting an OS from 32 to 64 bit be considered a "simple hack" under any circumstances. Doing stuff like that gets you stuff like X.
Some people get the idea that he is referring to the Itanium as a 64 bit x86 chip. However, he is probably referring to the AMD K8, a 64 bit x86 chip, as I doubt getting Linux to run on Itanium was a simple hack.
Its true. Patents and propriatory stuff is not a Bad Thing. Thats what keeps people going and developing new stuff. Its prevalent in everything from fast food (does McDonalds release the recipie for its fries?) to Physics (do scientists give out research before they have had a change to publish a paper on it?) I have no problem with Open stuff, as long as OpenStuff people don't complain about other people keeping their stuff closed. Its their technology they can do with it whatever they damn well please.
Well XiG does both. As of now they are higher quality than XFree, and XFree does not yet have a finished 3D implementation.