Charge for tech support? How the hell is that going to work? There's already the problem of piracy, I don't hear those people complaining about lack of tech support for their "free" version of the game. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to work.
I don't think the argument of Linux users wanting everything for free holds, either. Cedega seem to be doing quite well. DooM 3 suddenly sold out on amazon.co.uk the day the Linux binary was posted on the web.
Games must be treated as entertainment, NOT software. They are far more similar to going and buying a DVD than purchasing a database app.
It says 3D support, so it must be the closed source ones. However, as others have pointed out, the nvidia modules aren't being distributed as part of the kernel, but simply taint it at runtime when they are loaded.
I haven't had a chance to look at version 8 yet, the Linux version doesn't seem to be out yet. However, I suspect the interface hasn't changed all that much. There's only so much you can add to a 100% customiseable interface. Also consider that this new version was previously given the number 7.6, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Do note that Opera 7 has been out for years. I bought it more than 2 years ago, and I think the latest version then was 7.21. And as others have said, you won't have to pay for it.
As for sticking with Opera 6 - I did that for a while, but Opera 7 has a much nicer renderer, and you can make the user interface look like Opera 6's, or better, so there's not much reason to go back.
Things will be moving away from this shortly. The XBox2 is rumoured to have more than one CPU. HyperThreading has been here for a while, dual-core chips are going to appear soon. Traditionally, the games industry has been one of the first to jump onto a performance bandwagon, and I don't anticipate a change in that. Developers will have to learn to write paralleliseable (multi-threaded) code sooner or later in order to be able to compete. Given enough time, this will be a non-issue.
If you're looking for a better IM network, why not try Jabber? There are loads of clients out there, which won't break, since the protocol is entirely open. If your client of choice doesn't support other networks, you can talk to people who aren't on jabber using server-side 'transports' to connect to other networks via Jabber itself.
I get the stuttering as well. Not the greatest system in the world here (dual AthlonMP 1800+, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, SB Live) but the CPUs are at about 50%(+/-25%) utilisation each while playing the game, and the graphics card seems to be able to handle it pretty well. Yet, I get the stuttering, but not all the time.
IE 2.0 (the pain!) shipped with WinNT 4.0, IE 1.0 might have been in the original Win95. I think Win95 OSR2 shipped with IE 3.0. 3.0 was the first IE that was usable, if I remember correctly. Nothing compared to today's browsers of course.
What I'd like to see in an onboard graphics chip is being able to use it alongside a (high-end) add-in graphics card. I realise that with AGP this wasn't possible, but with PCI-express it would be pretty cool if the on-board card got, say, 4 PCIe lanes instead of 16, when an add-in card is inserted.
I already use two monitors on my Radeon 9800, but especially as I'm running an SMP box, it would be pretty useful if a second person could be working on a separate keyboard/mouse/graphics card. I know this can be done with a PCI card (I'm working on it on my system) but all my PCI graphics cards are pretty rubbish in 3D mode.
I think you're supposed to switch from searching 'documents' to 'files and directories'. If that's accurate, I do not know - my prime exposure to Windows is in magazines.
~phil
Re:mo/photoblogging is NOT new!
on
Photoblog Revolution
·
· Score: 2, Informative
'Kamera' is the application/library that provides that functionality, which is why the protocol has the same name. But yeah, the applications must use K.:)
Sorry, I made a mental leap there without writing it out. What I meant to say was that there isn't much of an excuse of non-compliance to the treaty's regulations that apply to so-called industrial nations.
I'm well aware that the Kyoto treaty has its weaknesses, in addition to lack of enforceability.
I'm probably stating the obvious here, but for a country that big, and so strongly under the hand of the government, you'd expect better. By polluting the water, I'd expect they're mostly harming themselves (in addition to the environment) by reducing the quality of the drinking water.
Then again, with a population like that, I suppose the government doesn't really care about a few thousand poisonings, especially since they can make the media shut up about it.
I wonder how that one will pan out then. Not much we can do but hope for the best right now I guess.:(
The point is that stuff such as file handling should be unified within the game, but everyone will have their own system. We use PhysFS to abstract everything within one big file tree. If you use PhysFS, you have to change, or, if you want to be able to upgrade to a higher version later without any trouble later, rewrite all the Irrlicht code that uses files, rather than writing some kind of plugin/implementing a generic interface.
XML parsing was possibly a bad example, but we've basically got two XML parsers compiled into the game right now. Irrlicht's XML parser would be a pain to get running with PhysFS, and it only works once the graphics engine is set up, at which point we'll actually have done a considerable amount of XML file loading already.
The problem with all this added functionality is that it's fairly laborious to work around if you don't want it, and it's quite likely that that is the case, because the way it's integrated into the engine isn't especially flexible.
Input handling is another one of these problems. We support keyboard and joystick input in our game. Because keyboard input is heavily tied in with the windowing abstraction, and thus the graphics engine, it seems sensible to put it into the graphics engine. It isn't that clever though, because you'd now have two seperate systems doing almost the same thing - the graphics engine doing keyboard input, and the input system doing joystick input. It's barmy!
I also shy away from anything but graphics being dependent on the graphics engine. If there was an Irrlicht file handling module, an Irrlicht Input module, and an Irrlicht graphics module, that would be great. If I decided to drop Irrlicht graphics I could still use Irrlicht file handling without having this behemoth sleeping in my source tree. As it is, I wouldn't even want to rely on loading sound files with the Irrlicht file system, because sound and graphics are, and should be separate.
It can certainly be worked around, it would just be a lot friendlier to make it inherently more extensible, for example by creating a very simple file handling interface, providing a standard implementation that uses fstream objects or whatever, but leaving you the ability to create another implementation to that interface which happens to use your file handling system of choice. Lots of C-based libraries use callbacks for this kind of stuff, and in C++, with polymorphism in the language, it should be even cleaner!
That's somewhat true. I've selected Irrlicht for graphics in our project, and although it's better than most other engines out there, it's still a pain to integrate into a game and still make it be replacable.
The problem with all game-oriented graphics engines I've seen is that they do more than it says on the box. They handle input, XML parsing, file handling, etc. and you end up re-implementing a lot of stuff to tie it in with your code unless you let yourself depend completely on the engine in question.
One possibility is to put the hard drive in another computer, install the OS, and switch it back. Most Linux distros will do this happily.
Windows NT based OSes are actually installed by copying a bootable installer to the hard disk (the non-graphical part of WinNT, 2k and XP setup) so if you move the hard disk back to the original machine at that point, you won't have any driver issues, because there haven't been any installed yet.
Don't know about Win9x though, those OSes are so obsolete I can't even remember them.
Windows does have font sets for screens with different pixel sizes, the problem are the applications that become illegible or otherwise unusable because of widgets overlapping each other or being too small. Yep folks, that's what happens when you define absolute (pixel) widget dimensions. This applies to the vast majority of applications, from what I remember from my Windows days.
Interesting, I hadn't come across BeFS before. (other than that humble configuration option in the kernel) How does it compare to Reiser4, which is supposed to be all the rage nowadays?
Now, I've always been interested in file system development, but I'm afraid I don't have enough time to dedicate to such a project right now; I probably also don't know enough about the topic to be of any use.
I didn't interpret it as an ad, either. I'm bemused by the whole Longhorn issue and will keep on converting people to Linux. I was just saying that it wouldn't necessarily be pointless to advertise here. MS actually did run actual ads on slashdot a while back.
Slashdot Mirror
Charge for tech support? How the hell is that going to work? There's already the problem of piracy, I don't hear those people complaining about lack of tech support for their "free" version of the game. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to work.
I don't think the argument of Linux users wanting everything for free holds, either. Cedega seem to be doing quite well. DooM 3 suddenly sold out on amazon.co.uk the day the Linux binary was posted on the web.
Games must be treated as entertainment, NOT software. They are far more similar to going and buying a DVD than purchasing a database app.
~phil
Maybe it's there for pre-GeForce cards or so, but nothing beyond that. My GeForce4 Go certainly only runs in 2D mode on the nv drivers.
It's a bit different for the radeon driver, which has limited 3D support for up to Radeon 9200.
~phil
It says 3D support, so it must be the closed source ones. However, as others have pointed out, the nvidia modules aren't being distributed as part of the kernel, but simply taint it at runtime when they are loaded.
~phil
I haven't had a chance to look at version 8 yet, the Linux version doesn't seem to be out yet. However, I suspect the interface hasn't changed all that much. There's only so much you can add to a 100% customiseable interface. Also consider that this new version was previously given the number 7.6, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
~phil
Do note that Opera 7 has been out for years. I bought it more than 2 years ago, and I think the latest version then was 7.21. And as others have said, you won't have to pay for it.
As for sticking with Opera 6 - I did that for a while, but Opera 7 has a much nicer renderer, and you can make the user interface look like Opera 6's, or better, so there's not much reason to go back.
~phil
Things will be moving away from this shortly. The XBox2 is rumoured to have more than one CPU. HyperThreading has been here for a while, dual-core chips are going to appear soon. Traditionally, the games industry has been one of the first to jump onto a performance bandwagon, and I don't anticipate a change in that. Developers will have to learn to write paralleliseable (multi-threaded) code sooner or later in order to be able to compete. Given enough time, this will be a non-issue.
~phil
This is very true, but only after grammar school, high school, or equivalent. Everyone knows that during school, logic is in fact inverted.
~phil
I doubt he'll be able to move everyone on his contact list away from MSN, though. The transports are a good compromise.
~phil
If you're looking for a better IM network, why not try Jabber? There are loads of clients out there, which won't break, since the protocol is entirely open. If your client of choice doesn't support other networks, you can talk to people who aren't on jabber using server-side 'transports' to connect to other networks via Jabber itself.
~phil
I get the stuttering as well. Not the greatest system in the world here (dual AthlonMP 1800+, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9800XT, SB Live) but the CPUs are at about 50%(+/-25%) utilisation each while playing the game, and the graphics card seems to be able to handle it pretty well. Yet, I get the stuttering, but not all the time.
~phil
IE 2.0 (the pain!) shipped with WinNT 4.0, IE 1.0 might have been in the original Win95. I think Win95 OSR2 shipped with IE 3.0. 3.0 was the first IE that was usable, if I remember correctly. Nothing compared to today's browsers of course.
~phil
Wow, I wasn't aware this existed. Do you by any chance know how (fast) it interfaces with the northbridge? Surely it doesn't have 2 AGP channels?
~phil
What I'd like to see in an onboard graphics chip is being able to use it alongside a (high-end) add-in graphics card. I realise that with AGP this wasn't possible, but with PCI-express it would be pretty cool if the on-board card got, say, 4 PCIe lanes instead of 16, when an add-in card is inserted.
I already use two monitors on my Radeon 9800, but especially as I'm running an SMP box, it would be pretty useful if a second person could be working on a separate keyboard/mouse/graphics card. I know this can be done with a PCI card (I'm working on it on my system) but all my PCI graphics cards are pretty rubbish in 3D mode.
~phil
I think you're supposed to switch from searching 'documents' to 'files and directories'. If that's accurate, I do not know - my prime exposure to Windows is in magazines.
~phil
You must be talking about this device.
~phil
'Kamera' is the application/library that provides that functionality, which is why the protocol has the same name. But yeah, the applications must use K. :)
~phil
Sorry, I made a mental leap there without writing it out. What I meant to say was that there isn't much of an excuse of non-compliance to the treaty's regulations that apply to so-called industrial nations.
I'm well aware that the Kyoto treaty has its weaknesses, in addition to lack of enforceability.
~phil
I'm probably stating the obvious here, but for a country that big, and so strongly under the hand of the government, you'd expect better. By polluting the water, I'd expect they're mostly harming themselves (in addition to the environment) by reducing the quality of the drinking water.
:(
Then again, with a population like that, I suppose the government doesn't really care about a few thousand poisonings, especially since they can make the media shut up about it.
I wonder how that one will pan out then. Not much we can do but hope for the best right now I guess.
~phil
I don't know if the China is the worst polluter, a while back it certainly wasn't. It's definitely not the worst polluter per inhabitant.
Not that there's any excuse for being exempt from the Kyoto agreement.
~phil
The point is that stuff such as file handling should be unified within the game, but everyone will have their own system. We use PhysFS to abstract everything within one big file tree. If you use PhysFS, you have to change, or, if you want to be able to upgrade to a higher version later without any trouble later, rewrite all the Irrlicht code that uses files, rather than writing some kind of plugin/implementing a generic interface.
XML parsing was possibly a bad example, but we've basically got two XML parsers compiled into the game right now. Irrlicht's XML parser would be a pain to get running with PhysFS, and it only works once the graphics engine is set up, at which point we'll actually have done a considerable amount of XML file loading already.
The problem with all this added functionality is that it's fairly laborious to work around if you don't want it, and it's quite likely that that is the case, because the way it's integrated into the engine isn't especially flexible.
Input handling is another one of these problems. We support keyboard and joystick input in our game. Because keyboard input is heavily tied in with the windowing abstraction, and thus the graphics engine, it seems sensible to put it into the graphics engine. It isn't that clever though, because you'd now have two seperate systems doing almost the same thing - the graphics engine doing keyboard input, and the input system doing joystick input. It's barmy!
I also shy away from anything but graphics being dependent on the graphics engine. If there was an Irrlicht file handling module, an Irrlicht Input module, and an Irrlicht graphics module, that would be great. If I decided to drop Irrlicht graphics I could still use Irrlicht file handling without having this behemoth sleeping in my source tree. As it is, I wouldn't even want to rely on loading sound files with the Irrlicht file system, because sound and graphics are, and should be separate.
It can certainly be worked around, it would just be a lot friendlier to make it inherently more extensible, for example by creating a very simple file handling interface, providing a standard implementation that uses fstream objects or whatever, but leaving you the ability to create another implementation to that interface which happens to use your file handling system of choice. Lots of C-based libraries use callbacks for this kind of stuff, and in C++, with polymorphism in the language, it should be even cleaner!
~phil
That's somewhat true. I've selected Irrlicht for graphics in our project, and although it's better than most other engines out there, it's still a pain to integrate into a game and still make it be replacable.
The problem with all game-oriented graphics engines I've seen is that they do more than it says on the box. They handle input, XML parsing, file handling, etc. and you end up re-implementing a lot of stuff to tie it in with your code unless you let yourself depend completely on the engine in question.
~phil
One possibility is to put the hard drive in another computer, install the OS, and switch it back. Most Linux distros will do this happily.
Windows NT based OSes are actually installed by copying a bootable installer to the hard disk (the non-graphical part of WinNT, 2k and XP setup) so if you move the hard disk back to the original machine at that point, you won't have any driver issues, because there haven't been any installed yet.
Don't know about Win9x though, those OSes are so obsolete I can't even remember them.
~phil
Windows does have font sets for screens with different pixel sizes, the problem are the applications that become illegible or otherwise unusable because of widgets overlapping each other or being too small. Yep folks, that's what happens when you define absolute (pixel) widget dimensions. This applies to the vast majority of applications, from what I remember from my Windows days.
~phil
Interesting, I hadn't come across BeFS before. (other than that humble configuration option in the kernel) How does it compare to Reiser4, which is supposed to be all the rage nowadays?
Now, I've always been interested in file system development, but I'm afraid I don't have enough time to dedicate to such a project right now; I probably also don't know enough about the topic to be of any use.
~phil
I didn't interpret it as an ad, either. I'm bemused by the whole Longhorn issue and will keep on converting people to Linux. I was just saying that it wouldn't necessarily be pointless to advertise here. MS actually did run actual ads on slashdot a while back.
~phil