Anyone else notice the blah/blah and yada/yada login/passwords don't seem to work at New York Times anymore.
Well, I created a new account to read this. Username is something like sdkfgdkfs and password is something like pwejorowebn. (email is sdkufgsdf@ksfsdf.com)
If they want another one like that added to their database every time they have a story linked to by Slashdot, they're more than welcome to it.
Reduced Visual and Audio Quality
In order to compress Dungeon Siege to a reasonable demonstration size, many textures and sounds have been heavily degraded from the retail version.
Well root my boot. I totally missed that. Yep, true enough. Since just yesterday at work we were dealing with the consequences of texture-page-thrashing due to too-large textures, I can surely see how this would improve my fps..
But heck, the demo looks fabulous even with the heavily degraded features, doesn't it.:)
Looks nice. Unfortunately, after a solid afternoon playing it, I'm pretty much bored, and don't expect to be buying the game. Far, far too repetitive for me..
Dungeon Siege, is one of the most beautiful 3D games I've ever seen, but reading on forums about it I realized that even a Geforce3 with a killer Athlon XP system would still only let the game run around 20-30 fps.
Well, I've only played the demo, but it's solid at 60fps on my Athlon XP 1600+ w/ GeForce2Ti. So unless something's horribly broken in the full version of the game, I'd call bullshit on those claims.
This is at 800x600x32bit with all the optional features (shadows etc.) turned on. It looks just fine.
The lowest end CPU you can find now-a-days is like 800Mhz, unless you go to auctions...
But when that 800MHz Duron costs $31 (www.pricewatch.com), many people might be inclined to think that perhaps you should just quit your whining and buy one, rather than scrounging through auctions to try to find a 120MHz Pentium that costs a couple of bucks less.
Mozilla is licenced under the Netscape Public Licence [mozilla.org], not the GPL.
Actually, different bits of Mozilla are licensed under a bit of a mess of different licenses. Efforts are underway to get everything unified under an NPL/GPL/LGPL "triple license", so you'll be able to use the code as long as you abide by one of those licenses. This would, of course, fall foul of Microsoft's new license.
True, it is not a good idea to allow companies to hold on to source code. At the same time, you cannot build a sound business when people are getting first impressions of your software based on it's junky alpha quality. They'll drop your software like an old habit. First impression is everything.
What the hell?? Lindows are selling this software, at $99 a shot!! If it's "junky alpha quality" and will cause people to drop them "like an old habit", it's their goddamn fault, not the GPL's!!
You'll notice that in fact the GPL inflicts no pain whatsoever on a company wishing to conduct their business the way you describe. No source code need be disclosed until the software is released. Polish it in the dark for a decade, if you like, and no zealot will be on your case. It's only when you decide that "selling software" should come before "releasing source" in the release schedule that you cop this grief.
By asking companies to release their source code early, it is asking them to compromise their software process.
"after they start selling software for $99 a copy" is not too early.
Hackers don't mind putting up with buggy half-done software, that's what they live by, they created it. But the rest of the world doesn't like terrible software quality.
If the quality of Lindows is "terrible" (and I have no idea whether it is or not), nobody is at fault except the people who decided to release it and start selling it. And why would the opinions of "the rest of the world" be influenced by the source being released alongside the binaries - nobody but a hacker is going to look at it anyway! The only thing that can make a bad impression on the general public is the actual executable software, not the source code!
I do not promote or condone what Michael Robertson has done in any way, shape or form.
Please, in that case, stop defending him in this bizarre and ill-considered way.
But it seems like the FSF is shooting themselves in the foot. The world is watching this event, and it's proving to them right now that going Open Source is a bad idea for business. If you look at some of the failures of Open Source (Eazel, Netscape) and consider what troubles Lindows has to overcome, most businesspeople have enough reason to never think again about contributing to or joining the Open Source community. This is not the public image that we need
So, what you're saying is: we shouldn't take a stand against these thieves ripping off GPLed software for their own personal profit, because if we do, we might scare off other companies who were thinking of ripping off GPLed software for their own profit? Sound thinking, dude.
Except that you DON'T use C++ to program to the PS2's hardware. The Vector Unit's use macro (VU0) or micro assembly instructions that are preloaded into their instruction memory before running. Similarly, programming the DMAC controller relies upon building a DMA chain structure in memory and then triggering an upload.
Dude, I know, I program PS2's for a living. That was my part of my point - Java is a replacement for "C++ code used to called gfx library functions", not a replacement for what you need on a console (on a PS2 anyway).
What should happen is that the graphics library exposes a clean interface to the programmer, either C, C++ or Java and NOT assembly or hardware related.
Well, yes, if you value programmer ease over maximum performance. This generation of console wars will probably decide which way the console makers go in the future.
And to take your example of the Bezier subdivision used by SSX, well that game has been successfully ported to both the X-Box and the Gamecube with added graphical effects.
Oh, of course, I wasn't suggesting that what you could do with the VU1 code you couldn't do any other way. Just that you couldn't get PS2 _and_ Gamecube _and_ Xbox _and_ PC all running nicely with one codebase, whatever the talking heads at Sun might think..
I thought the same thing until I went to JavaOne last year. There were 2 guys, that worked for some game company, on the pavillion floor that inplemented a pretty cool FPS using the Java 3D APIs (These APIs use OpenGL for hardware accelerated rendering).
Oh yeah, all very well if you're talking PCs. I'll wager that most 3D PC games could be written in Java and, although they'd suffer a bit of a hit in speed and memory requirements, at least the rendering would run fast, and they'd still be playable.
But this idiot is shooting his mouth off about consoles. Let me tell you, it's one thing to have a layer like OpenGL when all the video cards it needs to handle are basically the same. GeForce, Radeon, whatever, there's some differences when you look at the very newest features (e.g. pixel shaders) but for 99% of their functionality, it's the same.
Now compare this to the PS2, where instead of having some crappy "vertex shader" to do transformation & lighting, you effectively have a full featured CPU. How wasted is this going to be when your Java gaming platform can't ever call upon it to do more than the basic stuff supported by PC cards? It won't be rendering too many bézier patches with dynamic level of detail with this Java platform, will it? Now take into account what whilst all the PC cards are competing over who can have the most texture stages handled in hardware, the PS2 resolutely sticks to one, and if you want more, you do multiple passes. Thus totally changing the approach you need for texture tricks like lightmaps, reflections, shadows, etc.
Nope, if you want a replacement for C++ as your language to call OpenGL or DirectX with, Java could fit the bill, but if you want to program a PS2 - forget it.
That explains the record profits made by the game industry last year.
Most game projects don't make money. The ones that do, make so much more money than the other ones lose, that the industry as a whole makes great profits.
In another part they blast AICN for using psuedonyms like Moriarty and Elektra, saying that "they might be studio hacks," but then a few paragraphs later go on to identify Moriarty as Drew McWeeny, an AICN staffer.
..and let's face it, if your name was "McWeeny", you'd use a pseudonym too!
But what about parents who do a good job? Parents who read Dr. Spock, have family dinners, spend a night a week with no TV but playing games and talking to their children..
A night a week with no TV? Surely that would be considered child abuse in America today?
The article wasn't referring to worldwide gross, but to the gross in Japan.
If you want a bit more trivia, it seems that Sen to Chihiro has the highest worldwide gross of any film that has not been released in the USA (I found it here, it's at #162)
While you got a funny moderation, actually it's the truth...Ask your parents or even your grandparents what music they like or was their favorite when they were your age. Then do a search on your favorite filesharing program. Keep it to one of the simple to operate clients such as Morpheus. You will find the music they told you about.
Truly. Last Christmas, my wife went looking for christmas music via Limewire (we'd just moved house and our Christmas CDs were in storage). It took no time at all to find Bing Crosby singing about a million carols..
it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in.
Did you read the article or just skip to the conclusion? I quote from the middle of page 4:
To keep things fair, we tested with the memory timings set as aggressively as possible on each motherboard, so long as the system was stable. Because we were using very high quality memory, using aggressive memory timings generally wasn't a problem. The one exception was the SiS 745, which simply refused to POST if we set the CAS latency to 2, regardless of whether the memory was running at 266MHz or 333MHz. We tried it with several different DDR333 DIMMs, and the ECS 745 board wouldn't POST at CAS 2 with any of them, even with the memory clock set to DDR266. So in the case of the 745 chipset, we had to test at CAS 2.5.
Perhaps they should be reviewing the total stability of any given solution.
Well, they commented on instability where they encountered it. One of the tested motherboards they had to reduce the memory timings to make it stable. The others were stable throughout their benchmarking.
I for one know that I used to have an Iwill board based on the ALi MaGIK chipset, and it was a hell of a lot more stable than my current KT266A.
There's more to a motherboard than just the chipset. I have an Epox 8KHA+, which has a KT266A, and it's the first PC I've ever owned that doesn't suffer from random lockups when hammering the AGP bus. So I infer that your problem was, in fact, caused by something other than the KT266A chipset.
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
I wrote a review of a Linux distribution which was published by an English computer mag which we shall not name. I did this as a favour for someone who worked at the same company (although not for the same magazine). None of that magazine's staff had the knowledge to install Linux and properly review it, so if I hadn't stepped in, they were going to chase up a few reviews off the net, and cobble together something based on the points these reviews made.
Needless to say, I did it properly. Paid quite well, too - 150ukp for an evening's work, and I got to keep the distro (SuSE 7.2 professional, would have cost about 50ukp I think to buy).
This POS Moulin Rouge is nominated but not Amélie? What a joke!
Amélie got nominated for cinematography, art direction, sound, original screenplay and best foreign film. Damn well better win a few of those, it was a fantastic film. It's competing against LotR for the first three though..
For awhile the same title was "stuck" in my rent queue. Every time I sent it back, they would send it out again. Annoying, and it went on for a couple months despite mails to customer service.
..and..
Here's my main beef: Netflix dropped it's "Mature" title section... I emailed customer service about the matter several times. No response.
Y'know, we're all geeks together and all, but there are times when it's really better to pick up the phone and chew someone's ass than to send repeated emails to customer "service"..
..and in Australia, you can try www.dvdbuzz.com.au. I just signed up, currently waiting to get my cc verified then the movies will be on their way! Costs $A39 a month, so pretty much the same as Netflix.
Ah. That's surprising, though, because GCC was one of the first compilers to do 64-bit integer operations in the x86 FPU, which has good 64-bit integer capability. Why didn't that get used for Java?
You've lost me here. I'm no x86 guru (only assembly coding I've done recently is for the PS2) but I thought the only 64-bit integer instructions were added in SSE and SSE2? (and the benchmarking on the IBM article was done on a Pentium II so wouldn't have had either of those available). Are there tricks you can do just with the FPU for 64-bit integer maths??
for (long test=2; test < i; test++)
{ if (i%test == 0) { return false; }
}
If the compiler generates slow code for that, something is very wrong in the compiler.
According to this message to the GCJ mailing list, it's because GCJ doesn't produce particularly good 64-bit integer math code..
The graph here shows the dual GHz G4 with GeForce4 MX scoring 115fps at 1024x768 on Quake 3. How on earth did they get such dreadful performance?? The first benchmark I turned up on AnandTech has a 1.2GHz Athlon (way, way behind current top of the line) with a GeForce3 (not even a GeForce3 Ti) pulling 168fps. Could this be related to djohnsto's comment about the parlous state of Apple's OpenGL implementation?
1. You can mix integer, floating-point, and Altivec code on the G4. On the P3 you can't mix them without a costly context switch.
That is incorrect.
The original MMX SIMD instructions had problems like that. The integer vector instructions and the fp instructions used the same register set, so they couldn't be freely mixed. However, that is not the case with SSE/SSE2. The vector registers used for these ops are not shared with anything. No context switches required.
However I do believe Altivec is better than SSE. Much more useful instruction set. Can't compare it to SSE2 though, since that does double-precision fp vector ops, Altivec (like SSE) only does single-precision.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else notice the blah/blah and yada/yada login/passwords don't seem to work at New York Times anymore.
Well, I created a new account to read this. Username is something like sdkfgdkfs and password is something like pwejorowebn. (email is sdkufgsdf@ksfsdf.com)
If they want another one like that added to their database every time they have a story linked to by Slashdot, they're more than welcome to it.
From the readme doc accompanying the demo:
Reduced Visual and Audio Quality In order to compress Dungeon Siege to a reasonable demonstration size, many textures and sounds have been heavily degraded from the retail version.
Well root my boot. I totally missed that. Yep, true enough. Since just yesterday at work we were dealing with the consequences of texture-page-thrashing due to too-large textures, I can surely see how this would improve my fps..
But heck, the demo looks fabulous even with the heavily degraded features, doesn't it. :)
Looks nice. Unfortunately, after a solid afternoon playing it, I'm pretty much bored, and don't expect to be buying the game. Far, far too repetitive for me..
Dungeon Siege, is one of the most beautiful 3D games I've ever seen, but reading on forums about it I realized that even a Geforce3 with a killer Athlon XP system would still only let the game run around 20-30 fps.
Well, I've only played the demo, but it's solid at 60fps on my Athlon XP 1600+ w/ GeForce2Ti. So unless something's horribly broken in the full version of the game, I'd call bullshit on those claims.
This is at 800x600x32bit with all the optional features (shadows etc.) turned on. It looks just fine.
The lowest end CPU you can find now-a-days is like 800Mhz, unless you go to auctions...
But when that 800MHz Duron costs $31 (www.pricewatch.com), many people might be inclined to think that perhaps you should just quit your whining and buy one, rather than scrounging through auctions to try to find a 120MHz Pentium that costs a couple of bucks less.
Mozilla is licenced under the Netscape Public Licence [mozilla.org], not the GPL.
Actually, different bits of Mozilla are licensed under a bit of a mess of different licenses. Efforts are underway to get everything unified under an NPL/GPL/LGPL "triple license", so you'll be able to use the code as long as you abide by one of those licenses. This would, of course, fall foul of Microsoft's new license.
True, it is not a good idea to allow companies to hold on to source code. At the same time, you cannot build a sound business when people are getting first impressions of your software based on it's junky alpha quality. They'll drop your software like an old habit. First impression is everything.
What the hell?? Lindows are selling this software, at $99 a shot!! If it's "junky alpha quality" and will cause people to drop them "like an old habit", it's their goddamn fault, not the GPL's!!
You'll notice that in fact the GPL inflicts no pain whatsoever on a company wishing to conduct their business the way you describe. No source code need be disclosed until the software is released. Polish it in the dark for a decade, if you like, and no zealot will be on your case. It's only when you decide that "selling software" should come before "releasing source" in the release schedule that you cop this grief.
By asking companies to release their source code early, it is asking them to compromise their software process.
"after they start selling software for $99 a copy" is not too early.
Hackers don't mind putting up with buggy half-done software, that's what they live by, they created it. But the rest of the world doesn't like terrible software quality.
If the quality of Lindows is "terrible" (and I have no idea whether it is or not), nobody is at fault except the people who decided to release it and start selling it. And why would the opinions of "the rest of the world" be influenced by the source being released alongside the binaries - nobody but a hacker is going to look at it anyway! The only thing that can make a bad impression on the general public is the actual executable software, not the source code!
I do not promote or condone what Michael Robertson has done in any way, shape or form.
Please, in that case, stop defending him in this bizarre and ill-considered way.
But it seems like the FSF is shooting themselves in the foot. The world is watching this event, and it's proving to them right now that going Open Source is a bad idea for business. If you look at some of the failures of Open Source (Eazel, Netscape) and consider what troubles Lindows has to overcome, most businesspeople have enough reason to never think again about contributing to or joining the Open Source community. This is not the public image that we need
So, what you're saying is: we shouldn't take a stand against these thieves ripping off GPLed software for their own personal profit, because if we do, we might scare off other companies who were thinking of ripping off GPLed software for their own profit? Sound thinking, dude.
Except that you DON'T use C++ to program to the PS2's hardware. The Vector Unit's use macro (VU0) or micro assembly instructions that are preloaded into their instruction memory before running. Similarly, programming the DMAC controller relies upon building a DMA chain structure in memory and then triggering an upload.
Dude, I know, I program PS2's for a living. That was my part of my point - Java is a replacement for "C++ code used to called gfx library functions", not a replacement for what you need on a console (on a PS2 anyway).
What should happen is that the graphics library exposes a clean interface to the programmer, either C, C++ or Java and NOT assembly or hardware related.
Well, yes, if you value programmer ease over maximum performance. This generation of console wars will probably decide which way the console makers go in the future.
And to take your example of the Bezier subdivision used by SSX, well that game has been successfully ported to both the X-Box and the Gamecube with added graphical effects.
Oh, of course, I wasn't suggesting that what you could do with the VU1 code you couldn't do any other way. Just that you couldn't get PS2 _and_ Gamecube _and_ Xbox _and_ PC all running nicely with one codebase, whatever the talking heads at Sun might think..
I thought the same thing until I went to JavaOne last year. There were 2 guys, that worked for some game company, on the pavillion floor that inplemented a pretty cool FPS using the Java 3D APIs (These APIs use OpenGL for hardware accelerated rendering).
Oh yeah, all very well if you're talking PCs. I'll wager that most 3D PC games could be written in Java and, although they'd suffer a bit of a hit in speed and memory requirements, at least the rendering would run fast, and they'd still be playable.
But this idiot is shooting his mouth off about consoles. Let me tell you, it's one thing to have a layer like OpenGL when all the video cards it needs to handle are basically the same. GeForce, Radeon, whatever, there's some differences when you look at the very newest features (e.g. pixel shaders) but for 99% of their functionality, it's the same.
Now compare this to the PS2, where instead of having some crappy "vertex shader" to do transformation & lighting, you effectively have a full featured CPU. How wasted is this going to be when your Java gaming platform can't ever call upon it to do more than the basic stuff supported by PC cards? It won't be rendering too many bézier patches with dynamic level of detail with this Java platform, will it? Now take into account what whilst all the PC cards are competing over who can have the most texture stages handled in hardware, the PS2 resolutely sticks to one, and if you want more, you do multiple passes. Thus totally changing the approach you need for texture tricks like lightmaps, reflections, shadows, etc.
Nope, if you want a replacement for C++ as your language to call OpenGL or DirectX with, Java could fit the bill, but if you want to program a PS2 - forget it.
That explains the record profits made by the game industry last year.
Most game projects don't make money. The ones that do, make so much more money than the other ones lose, that the industry as a whole makes great profits.
In another part they blast AICN for using psuedonyms like Moriarty and Elektra, saying that "they might be studio hacks," but then a few paragraphs later go on to identify Moriarty as Drew McWeeny, an AICN staffer.
..and let's face it, if your name was "McWeeny", you'd use a pseudonym too!
But what about parents who do a good job? Parents who read Dr. Spock, have family dinners, spend a night a week with no TV but playing games and talking to their children..
A night a week with no TV? Surely that would be considered child abuse in America today?
The article wasn't referring to worldwide gross, but to the gross in Japan.
If you want a bit more trivia, it seems that Sen to Chihiro has the highest worldwide gross of any film that has not been released in the USA (I found it here, it's at #162)
While you got a funny moderation, actually it's the truth...Ask your parents or even your grandparents what music they like or was their favorite when they were your age. Then do a search on your favorite filesharing program. Keep it to one of the simple to operate clients such as Morpheus. You will find the music they told you about.
Truly. Last Christmas, my wife went looking for christmas music via Limewire (we'd just moved house and our Christmas CDs were in storage). It took no time at all to find Bing Crosby singing about a million carols..
It's not all teenagers sharing Metallica MP3s..
I always wondered why the other machines of the Amiga's heyday don't have the same bull-terrier style fan base.
Why am I not hearing rumor after rumor, year after year, about the return of the Atari ST, for example?
Well, that would be because Amigas rule and all the other machines suck! Duh!
it doesnt look like they paid much attention to bios settings, they said that they were stuck running the sis745 chipset at 2.5 cas latency. The sis chipsets come set at 2.5 default.. but you can change the setting in the bios depending on what kind of ram you put in.
Did you read the article or just skip to the conclusion? I quote from the middle of page 4:
Perhaps they should be reviewing the total stability of any given solution.
Well, they commented on instability where they encountered it. One of the tested motherboards they had to reduce the memory timings to make it stable. The others were stable throughout their benchmarking.
I for one know that I used to have an Iwill board based on the ALi MaGIK chipset, and it was a hell of a lot more stable than my current KT266A.
There's more to a motherboard than just the chipset. I have an Epox 8KHA+, which has a KT266A, and it's the first PC I've ever owned that doesn't suffer from random lockups when hammering the AGP bus. So I infer that your problem was, in fact, caused by something other than the KT266A chipset.
Its not just games that get reviewed incorrectly, its software too.
I wrote a review of a Linux distribution which was published by an English computer mag which we shall not name. I did this as a favour for someone who worked at the same company (although not for the same magazine). None of that magazine's staff had the knowledge to install Linux and properly review it, so if I hadn't stepped in, they were going to chase up a few reviews off the net, and cobble together something based on the points these reviews made.
Needless to say, I did it properly. Paid quite well, too - 150ukp for an evening's work, and I got to keep the distro (SuSE 7.2 professional, would have cost about 50ukp I think to buy).
This POS Moulin Rouge is nominated but not Amélie? What a joke!
Amélie got nominated for cinematography, art direction, sound, original screenplay and best foreign film. Damn well better win a few of those, it was a fantastic film. It's competing against LotR for the first three though..
For awhile the same title was "stuck" in my rent queue. Every time I sent it back, they would send it out again. Annoying, and it went on for a couple months despite mails to customer service.
..and..
Here's my main beef: Netflix dropped it's "Mature" title section. .. I emailed customer service about the matter several times. No response.
Y'know, we're all geeks together and all, but there are times when it's really better to pick up the phone and chew someone's ass than to send repeated emails to customer "service"..
..and in Australia, you can try www.dvdbuzz.com.au. I just signed up, currently waiting to get my cc verified then the movies will be on their way! Costs $A39 a month, so pretty much the same as Netflix.
Ah. That's surprising, though, because GCC was one of the first compilers to do 64-bit integer operations in the x86 FPU, which has good 64-bit integer capability. Why didn't that get used for Java?
You've lost me here. I'm no x86 guru (only assembly coding I've done recently is for the PS2) but I thought the only 64-bit integer instructions were added in SSE and SSE2? (and the benchmarking on the IBM article was done on a Pentium II so wouldn't have had either of those available). Are there tricks you can do just with the FPU for 64-bit integer maths??
for (long test=2; test < i; test++)
{ if (i%test == 0) { return false; }
}
If the compiler generates slow code for that, something is very wrong in the compiler.
According to this message to the GCJ mailing list, it's because GCJ doesn't produce particularly good 64-bit integer math code..
The graph here shows the dual GHz G4 with GeForce4 MX scoring 115fps at 1024x768 on Quake 3. How on earth did they get such dreadful performance?? The first benchmark I turned up on AnandTech has a 1.2GHz Athlon (way, way behind current top of the line) with a GeForce3 (not even a GeForce3 Ti) pulling 168fps. Could this be related to djohnsto's comment about the parlous state of Apple's OpenGL implementation?
1. You can mix integer, floating-point, and Altivec code on the G4. On the P3 you can't mix them without a costly context switch.
That is incorrect.
The original MMX SIMD instructions had problems like that. The integer vector instructions and the fp instructions used the same register set, so they couldn't be freely mixed. However, that is not the case with SSE/SSE2. The vector registers used for these ops are not shared with anything. No context switches required.
However I do believe Altivec is better than SSE. Much more useful instruction set. Can't compare it to SSE2 though, since that does double-precision fp vector ops, Altivec (like SSE) only does single-precision.