Gaming demands high-end, near-to-the-hardware, unencumbered access. Multi-user computing demands flexibility, equitable distribution of resources, and if properly done, capability of extremely high and granular security.
Gaming does not require "near-to-the-hardware" access. Sure, people did that until the 90's and Sony did that with the Playstation but even they have backed off this somewhat by using openGL for graphics on the PS3. Modern video games are programmed in C++, using true object oriented concepts with relatively high level API's for graphics such as OpenGL or Direct X that work on a wide variety of hardware (at least on PC's) and send a few UDP packets for network play. Hardly low level. The article mentions "content delivery" problems with "limited user accounts" but this is just as much of a problem for video/audio downloads (ala iTunes) or software that patches itself (Firefox etc.).
Creative sound cards don't "just work". Their latest X-Fi cards are unsupported and will probably not have open drivers (or even closed ones) for a long while
What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux. Too bad really, because they really do make nice cards.
Actually, everything up till the radeon 9250 is very well supported with Open Source drivers even for 3D. Radeons 9500 to x850 are pretty well supported by the current developpment DRI drivers that should be stable soon (tm). Unfortunately, from the x1300 up the Open Source drivers are non existant because ATI refuses to relese information, even for a 2D driver http://airlied.livejournal.com/31180.html. For these cards you either use VESA (no acceleration) or (rather bad) proprietary drivers.
I think you mis-understand the net neutrality debate here. The laws in question would only explicitly say 'yes providers may tier the net' or 'no they may not.' It wasn't an attempt to say 'telcos MUST tier the internet.'
The telcos have been lobying against Net Neutrality and have been explicitly saying that it would be a good thing to let them tier the Internet. What could possibly make you think they won't use this power once they have gained it? This isn't reading between the lines, it their stated policy.
I would think tiered internet could happen in France just as easily, assuming there aren't laws either way (likely a good assumption). All it takes is the telecom monoplies in France to become as greedy as those here. Of course, please correct me if I'm wrong.
There are strict laws here that dictate what "France Telecom" can and can't do with it's limited monopoly. These laws have created a highly competitive market for ISP's and a lot of people are getting over 10Mbs ADSL 2+ for 25 to 30/month and also get 400+ channel TV and free phone. ISP's, such as "Free" have their own backbones and only rent the "last mile" from "France Telecom". I don't see how one ISP could now throttle some traffic and not seen it's costomers leaving in droves. That's how a competitive market should work, the US is loosing it's ranking in Internet access speed and should seriously look into the causes.
How would this affect the tiered internet propositions from the leading telecom companies?
The ICANN's role is to oversee how host names (eg. www.google.com) are mapped onto IP adresses (eg. 64.233.187.99) these IP adresses are valid globaly. The tiered internet propositions in the US (that abolish Net Neutrality int the US) will allow the US telecoms to Prioritize/Filter/Censor packets circulating on their networks. So basically, the two events have very little influence over each other. The worse ICANN can do is ban names ending in.xxx or attribute too few IP adresses to a reigion in the world, this is only mildly irritating. On the other hand the telco's intend to throtle the Internet trafic of their competitors and charge a premium for VOIP, video and other services. This would mainly suck for people inside the US and people communicating with the US. while companies such as google could setup more of thier servers outside of the US to better service other countries unaffected. In my country (France), Internet access is already so fast and partialy free from the (France Telecom) monopoly by law, so I think they would have a difficult time pushing "tiered service" here unlike other laws that cross the ocean (DMCA like laws etc.).
I think it's great when companies get hammered hard for pirating. Too many people consider all software to be free and take licencing cost out of the equation when choosing what software to use. If this type of crackdown becomes widspread, the lack of licence cost will at last give a real edge to Free Software.
Microsoft gives away lots of software, for free, there are also lots of Microsoft programming tools available for FREE... No they ain't FOSS, but they are free...
No, they don't. To run any of their "free" software you need to buy a Windows licence first. So basically you paid for it in the windows "bundle".
Unless they cough up the dough and give it to those less fortunate they aren't doing sh*t. For all the good FOSS claims to be, its pretty shallow when you compare it against the actual good that the Gates Foundation does.
give a man some fish and he can eat today, teach a man how to fish and he can feed himsef all his life. The Free Software world dosen't hand out a fixed amount of free licences of Windows it contibutes software, with it's code, for (F)free with an unlimited amount of licences. As for giving away billions, RMS does not have billions to give away in the first place.
Microsoft software I use on my computer lets me use MY computer as I see fit as well.
Really? what about "Windows Genuine Advantage", do you really want it to phone home all the time, what about DRM, are you happy that to play HD content on your next PC you will have to shell out for an HDCP monitor+graphics card even though your current setup is powerful enough? You can do with your computer as Microsoft sees fit. Kiss your ball and chain and give them billions. Every time someone licences 5000 lines of code under the GPL they are giving away 1 year of work, every time someone downloads GNU/Linux and installs it without fee, the "Free Software" world is giving them 100$.
There are currently 14 Radeon 9250 based cards on newegg. As for rt2x00 wifi cars look on the FSF web page for a massive list of them.
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards .html some by "obscure" manifacturers such as D-Link.
I currently use a Radeon 9250 on my second computer with open source drivers (including hardware accelerated OpenGL). It works great out of the box (on Debian testing) without fiddling and can run Quake3, America's Army and all of the OpenGL screen savers with good performance. Its the most powerful graphics card out there with *open source* drivers.
I belive that it is in the interest of the Free software comunity to use the best possible hardware *with open drivers*. When you get such a card let the manifacturer know that you are willing to get a higher end, more expensive card when it will have *open source* drivers. I hope the X800 's (open source) DRI drivers get there fast because it's next on my list!
Also, slightly off topic, before you buy that Linux unsuported Wifi card, get an rt2x00 based Wifi card it's the only set of 812.11g Wifi cards that have _full_ GPL drivers!
I would like the religious right to accept the possibility that, instead of some omnicient being intelligently constructing the universe, it might have been a giant 3 headed alien working on his or her 3rd grade science project.
The only thing that interests me is if native OpenGL will be supported in composite (eyecandy) mode instead of through a wrapper (see opengl.org for details about this). If not it will be a serious blow to portable applications that use 3D acceleration.
Sony will support Blue Ray by shipping it with their PS3. Meanwhile, Microsoft is supporting HD DVD by _not_ including it in their XBox 360. Hmmm... I wonder what kind of support Intel is going to offer for HD DVD...
Pentium 5: now with HD DVD support!
Nevermind, I still put my money on Blue Ray.
Better yet, why don't more developers program for OpenGL? Granted, DirectX 9 has a lot of good support for pixel shaders and stuff, but OpenGL 2 can do that too.
I have read this type of notion before. Microsoft pulled a nice PR stunt by convincing, even some "tech heads" that that DX is more advanced than OpenGL. OpenGL does not need some future version to come out to offer all the functionnality of Direct X 9. OpenGL does that already, most notably, pixel and vertex shaders in a C like language using the "GL_ARB_fragment_shader" extension and the "GL_ARB_vertex_shader" extension. Proof of this is that games that supposably showcase advanced DirectX functionnality, like Far Cry, often have a more or less hiden "OpenGL" rendering mode that implements all the eye candy effects.
Direct 3D could dissapear TOMMORROW and the realtime 3D graphics community would lose NOTHING. I defy anyone to give me an example, some sample code, an effect in a game, anything that can be done with Direct 3D and not OpenGL ANYTHING!
The most annoying part of your code is not that it enables clippy (although...) but it uses a negative expression (disabled) for the name of a Boolean. Very annoying.
X3D is the successor to VRML, it is mostly the same but in a XML type format. You can check it out at web3d.org . A lot of software packages can import/export it but the flurry of VRML browsers declined when VRML content creation didn't reach the expected levels.
Also, if i am not mistaken, a lot of material data frequently used by 3D artists (multi texturing, bump maps not to mention pixel shaders etc.) are not supported by the format. Which makes it crap as an interchange format.
On the upside: it is now incorporated as part of the mpeg4 standard...
my only question is how will they allow Linux users to flash their firmware when the manufacturers don't provide floppy drives on most of the Centrino lines.
the article mentions Firmware but i suspect it is similar to some USB ADSL modems: the firmware is routinely uploaded by the driver during init. I doubt this means the firmware needs to be updated to *support* Linux (do you remember ever flashing any hardware's BIOS to run Linx?), the Windows driver probably does the same thing.
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He also mentionned how great the (current as of 2007) Citroen Saxo is.
Gaming does not require "near-to-the-hardware" access.
Sure, people did that until the 90's and Sony did that with the Playstation but even they have backed off this somewhat by using openGL for graphics on the PS3. Modern video games are programmed in C++, using true object oriented concepts with relatively high level API's for graphics such as OpenGL or Direct X that work on a wide variety of hardware (at least on PC's) and send a few UDP packets for network play. Hardly low level.
The article mentions "content delivery" problems with "limited user accounts" but this is just as much of a problem for video/audio downloads (ala iTunes) or software that patches itself (Firefox etc.).
Creative sound cards don't "just work". Their latest X-Fi cards are unsupported and will probably not have open drivers (or even closed ones) for a long while
There are strict laws here that dictate what "France Telecom" can and can't do with it's limited monopoly. These laws have created a highly competitive market for ISP's and a lot of people are getting over 10Mbs ADSL 2+ for 25 to 30/month and also get 400+ channel TV and free phone. ISP's, such as "Free" have their own backbones and only rent the "last mile" from "France Telecom". I don't see how one ISP could now throttle some traffic and not seen it's costomers leaving in droves. That's how a competitive market should work, the US is loosing it's ranking in Internet access speed and should seriously look into the causes.
So basically, the two events have very little influence over each other. The worse ICANN can do is ban names ending in
On the other hand the telco's intend to throtle the Internet trafic of their competitors and charge a premium for VOIP, video and other services. This would mainly suck for people inside the US and people communicating with the US. while companies such as google could setup more of thier servers outside of the US to better service other countries unaffected. In my country (France), Internet access is already so fast and partialy free from the (France Telecom) monopoly by law, so I think they would have a difficult time pushing "tiered service" here unlike other laws that cross the ocean (DMCA like laws etc.).
I think it's great when companies get hammered hard for pirating. Too many people consider all software to be free and take licencing cost out of the equation when choosing what software to use. If this type of crackdown becomes widspread, the lack of licence cost will at last give a real edge to Free Software.
There are currently 14 Radeon 9250 based cards on newegg. As for rt2x00 wifi cars look on the FSF web page for a massive list of them. http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards .html some by "obscure" manifacturers such as D-Link.
I currently use a Radeon 9250 on my second computer with open source drivers (including hardware accelerated OpenGL). It works great out of the box (on Debian testing) without fiddling and can run Quake3, America's Army and all of the OpenGL screen savers with good performance. Its the most powerful graphics card out there with *open source* drivers.
I belive that it is in the interest of the Free software comunity to use the best possible hardware *with open drivers*. When you get such a card let the manifacturer know that you are willing to get a higher end, more expensive card when it will have *open source* drivers. I hope the X800 's (open source) DRI drivers get there fast because it's next on my list!
Also, slightly off topic, before you buy that Linux unsuported Wifi card, get an rt2x00 based Wifi card it's the only set of 812.11g Wifi cards that have _full_ GPL drivers!
That's been done, remember the DVD port of "Dragon's Lair". It is a game playable on a run of the mill DVD player!
The only thing that interests me is if native OpenGL will be supported in composite (eyecandy) mode instead of through a wrapper (see opengl.org for details about this). If not it will be a serious blow to portable applications that use 3D acceleration.
Sony will support Blue Ray by shipping it with their PS3. Meanwhile, Microsoft is supporting HD DVD by _not_ including it in their XBox 360. Hmmm... I wonder what kind of support Intel is going to offer for HD DVD... Pentium 5: now with HD DVD support! Nevermind, I still put my money on Blue Ray.
Where as the US version is a lot more fun. Apparently there is a new "capture the oil field" mode.
Well, that figures... But if you really want to laugh try searching for "xfree86" and then "xfree85"
X3D is the successor to VRML, it is mostly the same but in a XML type format. You can check it out at web3d.org . A lot of software packages can import/export it but the flurry of VRML browsers declined when VRML content creation didn't reach the expected levels. Also, if i am not mistaken, a lot of material data frequently used by 3D artists (multi texturing, bump maps not to mention pixel shaders etc.) are not supported by the format. Which makes it crap as an interchange format. On the upside: it is now incorporated as part of the mpeg4 standard...
the article mentions Firmware but i suspect it is similar to some USB ADSL modems: the firmware is routinely uploaded by the driver during init. I doubt this means the firmware needs to be updated to *support* Linux (do you remember ever flashing any hardware's BIOS to run Linx?), the Windows driver probably does the same thing.
Well technically no, it's not. An autopsy requires the subject to be deceased *before* the procedure.