The "No Competing Browsers" I understand as well. You see, on the iPhone, the browser really isn't ordinary, but the keys to the kingdom of usability and utility. Apple wanting to protect that makes sense.
Actually, that makes no sense. If it's the most important thing to have work well, why wouldn't they welcome competition? If iPhone Firefox ended up being better than iPhone Safari, why wouldn't Apple be happy about this situation? Their customers get better utility out of the device, and Apple doesn't have to lift a finger.
What is probably the MOST annoying is "No GPLv3": Apple won't distribute GPLv3 code because it means giving aways the signing key for that app (the anti-TiVoization clause), and since all distribution is through apple, GPLv3 is out.
I guess this can be the first documented case of the GPLv3 actually working, and working well. I'm sorry, but a version of an app which you can't modify without paying $100 for a "developer key" is not free software.
However, for all the griping, this is actually an AMAZINGLY flexible and unrestricted platform, compared with say game consoles or other PDAs.
And amazingly locked down, compared with Android.
And for $100 to get a developer key (which allows you to directly run on your own devices), who cares about the distribution restrictions if you are some l33t haxor type who just HAS to run firefox on his iPhone.
In what way is this OK?
If Microsoft wanted to charge you $100 to run Firefox on Windows, you would burn them at the stake. The only thing that makes Apple different is that they aren't a monopoly... yet.
Apple is not (yet) a monopoly here, so I'm not really sure why they should be legally compelled to do this. Compare to game consoles, where the situation is exactly the same, only often worse -- I'm guessing a real console SDK (and not just some arcade or virtualized crippleware) is going to cost a bit more.
That's not to say it's alright. But it does seem like something they should be allowed to do, and something which was an obvious move, given that the thing started out locked-down. I really hope no one bought an iPhone based on the coming SDK...
look at all the games that can smoothly use DX9 and have modular support for DX10... show me a single Linux API that can work that well.
Um... POSIX?
But seriously, I think this hasn't been as much of a priority for Linux, as most apps are open source. Thus, binary compatibility doesn't matter -- you can usually recompile for the new API with minimal tweaking, so why fill up the new API with cruft?
I'm not saying that's right, just saying why it is.
The closest thing I've seen is SDL which is a shadow of DirectX, and from what I can see is basically a dead project now.
You aren't looking very closely, then. Last checkin was three days ago.
But you complain that nothing matches the "stability" of DirectX, and then you turn around and complain that SDL is a "dead project"?
No Interest in paying for software: Just read the comments on how horrifying the idea of paying for anything is on this site
Hardly worth dignifying this with a response, but I will say that most native Linux ports have given up the idea of trying to implement physical copy-protection. Burn the CD from a friend, download the files from the Internet, it doesn't care. It'll still try (somewhat) to enforce it over a network...
I'm assuming that either these companies consider Linux to be a PR stunt, or they're counting on Linux gamers to want to buy, if for no reason other than to push the statistics.
Difficulty in making multi-platform games.
Oh, bullshit. It's actually absurdly simple, unless you refuse to use SDL, say, because it's a "dead project". In fact, chances are that if it works on Linux, it'll port pretty cleanly to Windows and OS X.
Look at Introversion. Every single game I've seen them release has been on all three, and they don't exactly have money to throw away.
The real challenges are: Either you developed for one platform from the beginning, and Linux was an afterthought, or you don't want to have to deal with testing, QA, and support for such a minority OS.
WINE. Yes, people bitch and moan about it, but it works well enough for me to play Orange Box and Civilization IV on my machine without any real problems.
Once you set it up.
Consoles: If I REALLY want the popular games, I'll run out and get a Wii and not worry about all the configuration needed on a PC.
Fair enough, but for the record, it's actually possible to make a bootable game on a CD with Linux. Not as easy with Windows.
Not that it's necessarily a good idea, without some way to patch it, but it seems possible to make the PC just as easy as a console. No Wiimote, though.
Unless you are going to claim that existing games are the problem (which they are), DirectX is really only a minor problem. It isn't really the "API to beat" -- we don't have to develop some "DirectX killer." All we really need to do is educate people about what's already out there (OpenGL, SDL) and maybe create some better documentation.
Microsoft may try to go out of their way to make OpenGL irrelevant, and there may have been a time when vendors could get away with it not being a priority. And then Doom 3 came out, and suddenly everyone was scrambling to patch their OpenGL implementation to run it well, even on Windows. So it should easily be possible to develop a solid game on GL these days.
And even if it wasn't -- for the most part, the basic 3D stuff is the same. There are more than a few games which can use either. And there are at least a few game engines which you can buy, off the shelf, which support both, or at least OpenGL, some with Linux ports -- so you could start with a working Linux version on day 1.
Oh, and Doom3 also used DirectX on Windows, for things other than the 3D. You're probably thinking of Direct3D...
No, the biggest problem is the same as it always was. There aren't many Linux gamers, which means: Very few mainstream games on Linux, driver support is often half-assed and is driven more by workstation stuff (Quadro), and most of the Windows-only games are Direct3D only, with no effort made to make them work well under Wine (with notable exceptions, like WoW). All of which combines to make Linux a very hostile platform for gamers, which explains why there aren't many Linux gamers.
It's the same story as with every other type of app tying people to Windows. The difference is, there are at least a few areas where Linux has some powerful offerings (open or closed) which are as good as or better than the Windows competition -- I do non-.NET web development, which means it really doesn't matter much what my machine runs, and the server is probably going to run Linux. You could even make a case for things like the Gimp, OpenOffice, and GnuCash. But you can't really make the same case for games -- partly because the best we've got, really, are id games (at least on the client), and partly because each game is unique, so for the most part, gamers are going to want to play a wide variety of games (many of them new).
This means that while I can always hope, it honestly looks to me like gamers are the last people that would completely give up Windows, whether or not they toy with Linux.
I am a soft atheist (really need a better word), so I do consider most forms of religion to be silly at the least.
That said, I also find most forms of makeup to be silly -- either she's pretty enough already, or the makeup is only going to make it worse. So something being "silly" is not enough reason for me to not become involved with someone.
Now, if she was, say, a racist, that would be different, because I actually see that as wrong and hurtful. Same if she was constantly trying to convert me -- or if she insisted that our children be raised Christian, rather than at least being exposed to what their father believes.
So, about astrology: I would certainly want to talk about it, and I would find it silly, and say so. But most likely, it would be alright, if she was otherwise an intelligent and interesting person. What would not be alright is if she insisted on, say, planning weddings and vacations around astronomical things -- or if she refused to associate with a friend of mine because that friend happened to be born at the wrong time.
And I would argue that the alternative -- seeking out someone who sees the world exactly the way you do -- is going to get very boring, very fast.
Halo came somewhat close to playability, but anyone who ever seriously played the terrible PC port of one of the first two Haloes can attest that without the added challenge of dealing with a joystick input, the game is ridiculously easy, and multiplayer is a joke...
I'll take your word for that, and I do agree that the mouse is a more effective input device...
Sorry Wii, the input should be seamless and not the only thing that makes a game challenging. The mouse is obviously the easier input device for FPS, so it alone should be used.
Let me counter that with a simple ad absurdum:
An aimbotted PC is obviously the easier input device for the FPS, so it alone should be used.
Now, I don't disagree that we should have players matched up against other players with similar controls. And I do find that the mouse is a superior input device, at least for aiming, though I often wish I had a joystick rather than WASD for walking.
What I fail to see is why a controller which makes you a better player is always desirable. There are things which make a console controller a better, more seamless simulation -- I'm sorry, but it takes time to turn around, especially with that rocket launcher over your shoulder.
At what point is the controller just a crutch? (And have you been severely stomped in the console versions of Halo, maybe?)
I don't think you're a bigot. I do think you're a hypocrite.
The biggest difference I see between science and religion is that science claims no absolute knowledge. Everything is put forth as a hypothesis, and then tested and re-tested before being accepted as a theory.
Nowhere in there does it demand that you believe something, or not believe it.
You think it would be OK for your local pastor to go home and give up offerings to Zeus?
Well, my local pastor claims to believe, and teaches others to believe, in the One True God (whose name is not Zeus). You see, religion does require that you believe something, and furthermore, that you believe it without proof.
So, I certainly have less respect for scientists who choose to believe what I consider to be silly things. But that doesn't mean that they are not scientists, and frankly, there are a lot of other things they might do off-duty -- like, say, preach dogma about science on Slashdot -- which would make me think less of them as a person, but shouldn't impact their effectiveness at work, or what they discover.
I am a programmer, but that does not mean I look at every aspect of my life as a set of sequential steps organized into logical units. Where's the fun in that?
The only fucking games on communist linsux are lamr puzzles and a yahtzee clone thatcan't fucking randomize properly.
Maybe you've heard of a little game studio called Id Software? Or Epic Games? I'm not even going to mention what works on Wine.
Whie we're at it, where are the professional 3D applications?
Oh, I don't know, Maya? That's off the top of my head -- I don't do 3D professionally.
But while we're at it, why did you bring up games in what is clearly an article about professional graphic design hardware? Or do you actually buy Quadro cards and wonder why your games run like shit?
I am not talkin about the gpl3 shit
Like what? Closest I can think of is blender, which is under the GPLv2. Is that what you're not talking about?
BTW, great initals, Richard stallman=RMS Titanic
Yeah, because that was totally unique to the Titanic. Except it wasn't -- it actually stands for "Royal Mail Ship".
I don't want to say "the driver is faster" because there is a lot more in the underlying OS for all three OSs.
True, but Windows makes it difficult to test "just the driver", or close to it.
That is, on Linux, I can actually go as far as custom-compiling a kernel to not include things unrelated to the game at hand -- or, at the very least, turn off services until I pretty much just have X.org and the game running. With just X and the game, I think it'd be a fair test of the kernel/driver combo.
Windows... nLite it all you want, but is it really feasible for a benchmarker to disable enough of it (including the default shell, taskbar, etc) so that you're just testing the kernel/driver?
That, and no "standard gamer" is going to go that far. Even if it turns out that it's the rest of Vista slowing it down, that's still good to know.
Ubuntu is still to niche
You've got to be kidding.
Ubuntu is pretty much the mainstream Linux OS now. It comes on Dells! I know there are other distros, but I'm still going to say that any "standard gamer" who switches is much more likely to use Ubuntu than pretty much anything else.
I don't know about you, but in a lot of places, we talk about distros without qualifying them as "Linux". That is, if you asked me what OS I was running, I would probably say "Ubuntu" or "Kubuntu". So that might be skewing the Google results a bit.
Well, for the systems actually intended to run games (that is, NOT Quadro cards), there are a few Linux ports -- I consider Id games to be "real games" -- and Wine will run quite a lot of Windows games, some of them better than on Windows.
But I don't care about "The Year of Desktop Linux" anymore. All I care about now is developing open standards. For the most part, the Web works on Linux. You may need a Firefox derivative, maybe a binary Flash plugin, but it works. And that's a start, and probably a much smarter direction to be taking things.
No dropped or mangled frames, playing at the appropriate speed, keeping up with the audio.
Video is 30 fps. No faster, no slower.
You could not be more wrong if you tried.
It depends entirely on the video source, and the framerate for that standard of video, and whether interlacing is used. Even where it's about 30 frames per second, if it's traditional video, it isn't -- it's 29 point something.
And then there are digital video sources, which can be pretty much anything, especially when the source is computer graphics.
Of course, cards of this class do not have HD encoders.
You probably mean HD decoders, which would be pretty useless until nVidia provides any kind of support for them on Linux.
The card/driver does have XV support, which means that "video overlays" and yuv conversion is handled in the card/driver (and is most likely accelerated).
That is nice. It's something I've come to expect from any machine I put Linux on. The only time I was really made aware of it was when this was not working with the binary ATI drivers -- thus, I could run the open drivers and get XV, or the closed ones and get accelerated OpenGL. It sucked.
Since then, I haven't touched an ATI machine with Linux, so it's hard for me to imagine a card without XV support.
MCxV is also supported (but I tend not to use that).
Do you mean XvMC?
Yeah, you didn't mention why you don't use that. I don't, because it tends to cause problems, especially when doing ARGB and such (Compiz) -- but also, in general, it seemed less flexible and less responsive. Plus, the computers I use nowdays can pretty much do HD video, even with the decoding in software, so hardware-accelerated mpeg2 is kind of pointless.
However, hardware-accelerated h.264 would be nice, especially at HD resolutions.
except for software that doesn't understand the concept of overscan, and wants to place things too close to the display edge.
I don't understand the concept of overscan. They are chopping off a part of your display, and you don't consider that broken?
I try to support AMD (ATI) but nVidia has had an enormous advantage in the Linux sphere for years (things tend to "just work").
Wish I could still say the same.
Lately, I haven't been able to really pin it down (though I suspect hibernate/resume), but my X will occasionally start leaking memory. It's not an X app (so xrestop says), so I'm pretty much at a loss. Inevitably, it crashes weirdly, especially on my laptop -- and until then, it just sucks down more and more RAM.
And this pretty much only happens on my nVidia machines. And it's on Kubuntu, so it's not as if it's some tweaked-out Gentoo system that is somehow My fault for picking the wrong combination of compile settings and libraries.
Now, Intel machines are rock solid, but that's to be expected -- they actually have mature open drivers. Unfortunately, nVidia has an advantage in actually being able to play most games at an acceptable framerate. This is the main reason I cheer Intel on in the debates about raytracing.
As I understand it, what Microsoft did was add an OpenGL implementation as a wrapper for DirectX. There are two things that I understand about this wrapper, though I don't really know:
First, it's overridden by any driver that chooses to implement OpenGL by itself.
And second, it's used for Aero -- the theory being that you can't have two 3D APIs controlling the hardware at once, so if you have a windowed GL app, it'll use the wrapper, whereas a fullscreen GL app will run normally. This is kind of like me running DirectX apps under Wine in a window on a Linux machine running Beryl.
Of course, I still find it obnoxious that DirectX even exists, but I don't think Microsoft were going to shoot themselves in the foot by killing all ID games, derivatives, and games which license ID engines. (If QuakeWars performance sucked on Vista, there'd be hell to pay, right?)
But I also think that all games will run faster on XP.
Disclaimer: The entire rant above is unsubstantiated. Look it up yourself.
So what you are saying is, given general-purpose CPUs with enough memory bandwidth, split out such that the heat can be distributed properly, we wouldn't need video cards?
Everything you've said is an argument against one central CPU, not for GPUs in particular. Or am I missing something?
Ah good old thin client architectures. Is that all Web 2.0 is ?
It may be a thin-client model, but the architecture is very much client-server.
A rebranding of what Citrix has been doing forever.
Except with open standards. I don't know enough about Citrix to say much else, but I very much doubt that they are open.
Of what X terminals used to be in the early 90s ?
X terminals are not at all comparable. There is client-side code running, it just happens to be machine-agnostic, and loaded/cached from the network.
Oh, and every time I've tried to do X forwarding over SSH lately, things have crashed badly when different versions of X are used. (Example: OS X client, Ubuntu server.)
To think that "This time it'll work out" is naive and ignorant of the past.
To think that this is exactly like the past is naive and ignorant of the present.
As the GP said, not all applications can be replaced by thin client solutions.
Depends how you define "thin client".
Is a diskless workstation a thin client, even if all the apps are run locally? What if it uses a hard drive as a cache? Given a big enough local cache, is there anything that you can do on a stand-alone workstation that you can't do on this one?
Given that, the only difference I see is that Web apps are currently constrained to using a browser as a runtime. Given a powerful enough "browser", I see no reason why they can't do everything a local app can do. Not that I think they should replace local apps, but it's naive to think that they can't.
I wonder, could raytracing still benefit from being done on a dedicated processor for it - i.e., a GPU?
Not an issue, really. The question is whether it can be done faster, better, or cheaper on that GPU than on a CPU.
If it's the case that there's not really an advantage to the GPU, then it makes more sense to have a really low-end GPU, reserve it maybe for some cool desktop effects, and spend the money you saved on a quad-core CPU -- or a second CPU (which might itself be quad-core, so you'd now have eight cores...)
There's two issues here - CPU vs GPU, and raytracing vs polygon rasterisation. It's not immediately clear that one should go hand in hand with the other.
They are related. It seems unlikely that you can adapt anything like a modern GPU (designed entirely for rasterisation) to do raytracing. It doesn't seem impossible that you could build a chip designed to be able to handle it, but this would still signal the end of the relevance of nVidia's expertise.
the closest you get is something like Flash or Silverlight/Moonlight, and those are basically native Apps that display their output embedded in the browser window
A browser is basically a native app that displays its output embedded in the browser window.
And Flash/Silverlight/Moonlight all provide sufficient sandboxes that web apps developed with them are technically feasible. Flash is about to get 3D support, too. I can't say I'm happy that they're closed, but it doesn't seem impossible.
Answer me this: What is the fundamental difference between a web app and a desktop app?
If you answered "One is HTML", you're a bit out of touch -- again, there's Flash, or any open Flash-killer. Even on the open standard web, there's SVG, at least.
I would answer "One is loaded over a network, primarily uses network-based systems for storage, and works with a small set of standard local applications." If that small set of standard local applications ever becomes capable of delivering web apps which can actually rival the "heavier" desktop apps, then I would say that the client OS is exactly as relevant as CPU microcode -- it's absolutely essential, it must kick ass, and it's also something the user doesn't care about.
Which just makes it easier to argue that pedantic point: You still have your distribution rights.
When you break copyright, you are ripping off a product you have no right to and that is stealing.
Circular argument. "Ripping off" means "stealing" in that context, right? So I am stealing a product, and that is stealing. Or maybe I'm not.
What I am doing is making a copy of a product, when I do not have the right to make such a copy. Thus, it is copyright infringement, not theft. That doesn't make it right, but it is certainly a different issue.
To argue otherwise... well, that's exactly what the "You wouldn't steal a car" ads do. Is that what you want to say -- that stealing a movie is morally equivalent to stealing a car?
inconsistent support across browsers and platforms.
And you're not helping.
a limited-slow-solution
Give me a faster, open one, and I'm all for it.
Flash Player is not all about vector BTW.
No, it's also about replacing open, working, fast movie and audio plugins with one gigantic, closed plugin-to-end-them-all, which is also far slower at playing video than any of the alternatives.
Oh, and there's a script engine. ActionScript any good? Because JavaScript is good enough for me, and the Flash script runtime has been donated to Firefox, I think.
are against Adobe, one of the primary supporters/developers of SVG early on.
Oh, I'm all for open Adobe things -- like PDF. Because PDF is open, I now have several kick-ass PDF readers to choose from, aside from Adobe's bloated one. But I can't even get a 64-bit Flash player.
The notion of a common runtime that supports different languages is bogus.
What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?
The difference is, things like Silverlight are designed to be more portable. Or at least, are designed with technologies which should make them more portable -- I'm not at all sure Microsoft intends to do that.
Another approach is to implement a language on top of.Net, like IronPython, but that's not the same thing.
Erm, WTF?
By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of.Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a.Net language.
Or would you care to tell me in what way it is "not the same thing"?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that makes no sense. If it's the most important thing to have work well, why wouldn't they welcome competition? If iPhone Firefox ended up being better than iPhone Safari, why wouldn't Apple be happy about this situation? Their customers get better utility out of the device, and Apple doesn't have to lift a finger.
I guess this can be the first documented case of the GPLv3 actually working, and working well. I'm sorry, but a version of an app which you can't modify without paying $100 for a "developer key" is not free software.
And amazingly locked down, compared with Android.
In what way is this OK?
If Microsoft wanted to charge you $100 to run Firefox on Windows, you would burn them at the stake. The only thing that makes Apple different is that they aren't a monopoly... yet.
Firefox is getting better, and I think they were working on a mobile version...
Anyway, shouldn't it be my choice?
Agreed, but where can I get one with a nice, big touchscreen, which recognizes gestures well enough that I don't need another input device?
Apple is not (yet) a monopoly here, so I'm not really sure why they should be legally compelled to do this. Compare to game consoles, where the situation is exactly the same, only often worse -- I'm guessing a real console SDK (and not just some arcade or virtualized crippleware) is going to cost a bit more.
That's not to say it's alright. But it does seem like something they should be allowed to do, and something which was an obvious move, given that the thing started out locked-down. I really hope no one bought an iPhone based on the coming SDK...
Given a properly-developed game, it should take less than 1% of your time to work on portability.
Um... POSIX?
But seriously, I think this hasn't been as much of a priority for Linux, as most apps are open source. Thus, binary compatibility doesn't matter -- you can usually recompile for the new API with minimal tweaking, so why fill up the new API with cruft?
I'm not saying that's right, just saying why it is.
You aren't looking very closely, then. Last checkin was three days ago.
But you complain that nothing matches the "stability" of DirectX, and then you turn around and complain that SDL is a "dead project"?
Hardly worth dignifying this with a response, but I will say that most native Linux ports have given up the idea of trying to implement physical copy-protection. Burn the CD from a friend, download the files from the Internet, it doesn't care. It'll still try (somewhat) to enforce it over a network...
I'm assuming that either these companies consider Linux to be a PR stunt, or they're counting on Linux gamers to want to buy, if for no reason other than to push the statistics.
Oh, bullshit. It's actually absurdly simple, unless you refuse to use SDL, say, because it's a "dead project". In fact, chances are that if it works on Linux, it'll port pretty cleanly to Windows and OS X.
Look at Introversion. Every single game I've seen them release has been on all three, and they don't exactly have money to throw away.
The real challenges are: Either you developed for one platform from the beginning, and Linux was an afterthought, or you don't want to have to deal with testing, QA, and support for such a minority OS.
Once you set it up.
Fair enough, but for the record, it's actually possible to make a bootable game on a CD with Linux. Not as easy with Windows.
Not that it's necessarily a good idea, without some way to patch it, but it seems possible to make the PC just as easy as a console. No Wiimote, though.
Unless you are going to claim that existing games are the problem (which they are), DirectX is really only a minor problem. It isn't really the "API to beat" -- we don't have to develop some "DirectX killer." All we really need to do is educate people about what's already out there (OpenGL, SDL) and maybe create some better documentation.
Microsoft may try to go out of their way to make OpenGL irrelevant, and there may have been a time when vendors could get away with it not being a priority. And then Doom 3 came out, and suddenly everyone was scrambling to patch their OpenGL implementation to run it well, even on Windows. So it should easily be possible to develop a solid game on GL these days.
And even if it wasn't -- for the most part, the basic 3D stuff is the same. There are more than a few games which can use either. And there are at least a few game engines which you can buy, off the shelf, which support both, or at least OpenGL, some with Linux ports -- so you could start with a working Linux version on day 1.
Oh, and Doom3 also used DirectX on Windows, for things other than the 3D. You're probably thinking of Direct3D...
No, the biggest problem is the same as it always was. There aren't many Linux gamers, which means: Very few mainstream games on Linux, driver support is often half-assed and is driven more by workstation stuff (Quadro), and most of the Windows-only games are Direct3D only, with no effort made to make them work well under Wine (with notable exceptions, like WoW). All of which combines to make Linux a very hostile platform for gamers, which explains why there aren't many Linux gamers.
It's the same story as with every other type of app tying people to Windows. The difference is, there are at least a few areas where Linux has some powerful offerings (open or closed) which are as good as or better than the Windows competition -- I do non-.NET web development, which means it really doesn't matter much what my machine runs, and the server is probably going to run Linux. You could even make a case for things like the Gimp, OpenOffice, and GnuCash. But you can't really make the same case for games -- partly because the best we've got, really, are id games (at least on the client), and partly because each game is unique, so for the most part, gamers are going to want to play a wide variety of games (many of them new).
This means that while I can always hope, it honestly looks to me like gamers are the last people that would completely give up Windows, whether or not they toy with Linux.
I am a soft atheist (really need a better word), so I do consider most forms of religion to be silly at the least.
That said, I also find most forms of makeup to be silly -- either she's pretty enough already, or the makeup is only going to make it worse. So something being "silly" is not enough reason for me to not become involved with someone.
Now, if she was, say, a racist, that would be different, because I actually see that as wrong and hurtful. Same if she was constantly trying to convert me -- or if she insisted that our children be raised Christian, rather than at least being exposed to what their father believes.
So, about astrology: I would certainly want to talk about it, and I would find it silly, and say so. But most likely, it would be alright, if she was otherwise an intelligent and interesting person. What would not be alright is if she insisted on, say, planning weddings and vacations around astronomical things -- or if she refused to associate with a friend of mine because that friend happened to be born at the wrong time.
And I would argue that the alternative -- seeking out someone who sees the world exactly the way you do -- is going to get very boring, very fast.
I'll take your word for that, and I do agree that the mouse is a more effective input device...
Let me counter that with a simple ad absurdum:
An aimbotted PC is obviously the easier input device for the FPS, so it alone should be used.
Now, I don't disagree that we should have players matched up against other players with similar controls. And I do find that the mouse is a superior input device, at least for aiming, though I often wish I had a joystick rather than WASD for walking.
What I fail to see is why a controller which makes you a better player is always desirable. There are things which make a console controller a better, more seamless simulation -- I'm sorry, but it takes time to turn around, especially with that rocket launcher over your shoulder.
At what point is the controller just a crutch? (And have you been severely stomped in the console versions of Halo, maybe?)
I don't think you're a bigot. I do think you're a hypocrite.
The biggest difference I see between science and religion is that science claims no absolute knowledge. Everything is put forth as a hypothesis, and then tested and re-tested before being accepted as a theory.
Nowhere in there does it demand that you believe something, or not believe it.
Well, my local pastor claims to believe, and teaches others to believe, in the One True God (whose name is not Zeus). You see, religion does require that you believe something, and furthermore, that you believe it without proof.
So, I certainly have less respect for scientists who choose to believe what I consider to be silly things. But that doesn't mean that they are not scientists, and frankly, there are a lot of other things they might do off-duty -- like, say, preach dogma about science on Slashdot -- which would make me think less of them as a person, but shouldn't impact their effectiveness at work, or what they discover.
I am a programmer, but that does not mean I look at every aspect of my life as a set of sequential steps organized into logical units. Where's the fun in that?
Maybe you've heard of a little game studio called Id Software? Or Epic Games? I'm not even going to mention what works on Wine.
Oh, I don't know, Maya? That's off the top of my head -- I don't do 3D professionally.
But while we're at it, why did you bring up games in what is clearly an article about professional graphic design hardware? Or do you actually buy Quadro cards and wonder why your games run like shit?
Like what? Closest I can think of is blender, which is under the GPLv2. Is that what you're not talking about?
Yeah, because that was totally unique to the Titanic. Except it wasn't -- it actually stands for "Royal Mail Ship".
I'm doing nicely, thank you.
Never suspected it was the Windows fanbois living in their mother's basements all along, though. Thanks for that, you just made my day.
True, but Windows makes it difficult to test "just the driver", or close to it.
That is, on Linux, I can actually go as far as custom-compiling a kernel to not include things unrelated to the game at hand -- or, at the very least, turn off services until I pretty much just have X.org and the game running. With just X and the game, I think it'd be a fair test of the kernel/driver combo.
Windows... nLite it all you want, but is it really feasible for a benchmarker to disable enough of it (including the default shell, taskbar, etc) so that you're just testing the kernel/driver?
That, and no "standard gamer" is going to go that far. Even if it turns out that it's the rest of Vista slowing it down, that's still good to know.
You've got to be kidding.
Ubuntu is pretty much the mainstream Linux OS now. It comes on Dells! I know there are other distros, but I'm still going to say that any "standard gamer" who switches is much more likely to use Ubuntu than pretty much anything else.
I don't know about you, but in a lot of places, we talk about distros without qualifying them as "Linux". That is, if you asked me what OS I was running, I would probably say "Ubuntu" or "Kubuntu". So that might be skewing the Google results a bit.
Well, for the systems actually intended to run games (that is, NOT Quadro cards), there are a few Linux ports -- I consider Id games to be "real games" -- and Wine will run quite a lot of Windows games, some of them better than on Windows.
But I don't care about "The Year of Desktop Linux" anymore. All I care about now is developing open standards. For the most part, the Web works on Linux. You may need a Firefox derivative, maybe a binary Flash plugin, but it works. And that's a start, and probably a much smarter direction to be taking things.
No dropped or mangled frames, playing at the appropriate speed, keeping up with the audio.
You could not be more wrong if you tried.
It depends entirely on the video source, and the framerate for that standard of video, and whether interlacing is used. Even where it's about 30 frames per second, if it's traditional video, it isn't -- it's 29 point something.
And then there are digital video sources, which can be pretty much anything, especially when the source is computer graphics.
You probably mean HD decoders, which would be pretty useless until nVidia provides any kind of support for them on Linux.
That is nice. It's something I've come to expect from any machine I put Linux on. The only time I was really made aware of it was when this was not working with the binary ATI drivers -- thus, I could run the open drivers and get XV, or the closed ones and get accelerated OpenGL. It sucked.
Since then, I haven't touched an ATI machine with Linux, so it's hard for me to imagine a card without XV support.
Do you mean XvMC?
Yeah, you didn't mention why you don't use that. I don't, because it tends to cause problems, especially when doing ARGB and such (Compiz) -- but also, in general, it seemed less flexible and less responsive. Plus, the computers I use nowdays can pretty much do HD video, even with the decoding in software, so hardware-accelerated mpeg2 is kind of pointless.
However, hardware-accelerated h.264 would be nice, especially at HD resolutions.
I don't understand the concept of overscan. They are chopping off a part of your display, and you don't consider that broken?
Wish I could still say the same.
Lately, I haven't been able to really pin it down (though I suspect hibernate/resume), but my X will occasionally start leaking memory. It's not an X app (so xrestop says), so I'm pretty much at a loss. Inevitably, it crashes weirdly, especially on my laptop -- and until then, it just sucks down more and more RAM.
And this pretty much only happens on my nVidia machines. And it's on Kubuntu, so it's not as if it's some tweaked-out Gentoo system that is somehow My fault for picking the wrong combination of compile settings and libraries.
Now, Intel machines are rock solid, but that's to be expected -- they actually have mature open drivers. Unfortunately, nVidia has an advantage in actually being able to play most games at an acceptable framerate. This is the main reason I cheer Intel on in the debates about raytracing.
As I understand it, what Microsoft did was add an OpenGL implementation as a wrapper for DirectX. There are two things that I understand about this wrapper, though I don't really know:
First, it's overridden by any driver that chooses to implement OpenGL by itself.
And second, it's used for Aero -- the theory being that you can't have two 3D APIs controlling the hardware at once, so if you have a windowed GL app, it'll use the wrapper, whereas a fullscreen GL app will run normally. This is kind of like me running DirectX apps under Wine in a window on a Linux machine running Beryl.
Of course, I still find it obnoxious that DirectX even exists, but I don't think Microsoft were going to shoot themselves in the foot by killing all ID games, derivatives, and games which license ID engines. (If QuakeWars performance sucked on Vista, there'd be hell to pay, right?)
But I also think that all games will run faster on XP.
Disclaimer: The entire rant above is unsubstantiated. Look it up yourself.
So what you are saying is, given general-purpose CPUs with enough memory bandwidth, split out such that the heat can be distributed properly, we wouldn't need video cards?
Everything you've said is an argument against one central CPU, not for GPUs in particular. Or am I missing something?
It may be a thin-client model, but the architecture is very much client-server.
Except with open standards. I don't know enough about Citrix to say much else, but I very much doubt that they are open.
X terminals are not at all comparable. There is client-side code running, it just happens to be machine-agnostic, and loaded/cached from the network.
Oh, and every time I've tried to do X forwarding over SSH lately, things have crashed badly when different versions of X are used. (Example: OS X client, Ubuntu server.)
To think that this is exactly like the past is naive and ignorant of the present.
Depends how you define "thin client".
Is a diskless workstation a thin client, even if all the apps are run locally? What if it uses a hard drive as a cache? Given a big enough local cache, is there anything that you can do on a stand-alone workstation that you can't do on this one?
Given that, the only difference I see is that Web apps are currently constrained to using a browser as a runtime. Given a powerful enough "browser", I see no reason why they can't do everything a local app can do. Not that I think they should replace local apps, but it's naive to think that they can't.
Oh, it works. You just have to do it in base 13.
Oh, you can say whatever you want. It just can't be a contract.
I don't see how those are contradictory.
Not an issue, really. The question is whether it can be done faster, better, or cheaper on that GPU than on a CPU.
If it's the case that there's not really an advantage to the GPU, then it makes more sense to have a really low-end GPU, reserve it maybe for some cool desktop effects, and spend the money you saved on a quad-core CPU -- or a second CPU (which might itself be quad-core, so you'd now have eight cores...)
They are related. It seems unlikely that you can adapt anything like a modern GPU (designed entirely for rasterisation) to do raytracing. It doesn't seem impossible that you could build a chip designed to be able to handle it, but this would still signal the end of the relevance of nVidia's expertise.
A browser is basically a native app that displays its output embedded in the browser window.
And Flash/Silverlight/Moonlight all provide sufficient sandboxes that web apps developed with them are technically feasible. Flash is about to get 3D support, too. I can't say I'm happy that they're closed, but it doesn't seem impossible.
Answer me this: What is the fundamental difference between a web app and a desktop app?
If you answered "One is HTML", you're a bit out of touch -- again, there's Flash, or any open Flash-killer. Even on the open standard web, there's SVG, at least.
I would answer "One is loaded over a network, primarily uses network-based systems for storage, and works with a small set of standard local applications." If that small set of standard local applications ever becomes capable of delivering web apps which can actually rival the "heavier" desktop apps, then I would say that the client OS is exactly as relevant as CPU microcode -- it's absolutely essential, it must kick ass, and it's also something the user doesn't care about.
Which just makes it easier to argue that pedantic point: You still have your distribution rights.
Circular argument. "Ripping off" means "stealing" in that context, right? So I am stealing a product, and that is stealing. Or maybe I'm not.
What I am doing is making a copy of a product, when I do not have the right to make such a copy. Thus, it is copyright infringement, not theft. That doesn't make it right, but it is certainly a different issue.
To argue otherwise... well, that's exactly what the "You wouldn't steal a car" ads do. Is that what you want to say -- that stealing a movie is morally equivalent to stealing a car?
Because it is not stealing, it is copyright infringement.
And they are not synonymous, they are analogous.
And you're not helping.
Give me a faster, open one, and I'm all for it.
No, it's also about replacing open, working, fast movie and audio plugins with one gigantic, closed plugin-to-end-them-all, which is also far slower at playing video than any of the alternatives.
Oh, and there's a script engine. ActionScript any good? Because JavaScript is good enough for me, and the Flash script runtime has been donated to Firefox, I think.
Oh, I'm all for open Adobe things -- like PDF. Because PDF is open, I now have several kick-ass PDF readers to choose from, aside from Adobe's bloated one. But I can't even get a 64-bit Flash player.
What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?
The difference is, things like Silverlight are designed to be more portable. Or at least, are designed with technologies which should make them more portable -- I'm not at all sure Microsoft intends to do that.
IronPython, IronRuby, Windows PowerShell, JScript...
Erm, WTF?
By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of .Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a .Net language.
Or would you care to tell me in what way it is "not the same thing"?