For everyone wondering about the performance of the Merced, consider that they were demoing Doom. Software-rendered Quake on a P-166 looked as good as Doom ever did, so why demo Doom? Is it because not all libraries needed for Quake are available on Trillian (but they are for Doom), or is it because the Merced is just as bad as I think it is?
Diamonds support of non-MS operating systems for its video cards is much better now than it used to be. They even get special mention on the XFree86 lists.
When OS/2 was getting murdered by Win95, IBM put up a page with instructions for removing Win95 from your computer and replacing it with OS/2.
I'm not saying that Win2K is in the same position versus GNU/Linux as OS/2 was with Win95. However, the publication of these instructions make me wonder if the paranoid people inside MS feel as though Windows is in decline?
Game 'intelligence' is currently lousy, whether you're talking about chess programs, fps, or rts. By intelligence I'm talking about somthing fun for humans to play with or against. Do you see a time where 50% or more of the cpu time is spent on computer 'intelligence' instead of bookkeeping? Will there ever be a place for a AI researcher with a Ph.D. to contribute directly to video games?
Really, this is all one question about how ID achieves portability, timeliness, and profitability all at the same time.
ID has consistently brought great technology to the market well before the competition, made it available on many platforms roughly simultaneously, and even made the products fairly stable.
Consider Unreal as a foil--Unreal is slow, unstable, and only runs tolerably well on one OS with one graphics chipset (in my experience). Also, it was incredibly late, and even the bugfixes are late. This seems to be a somewhat extreme example of the norm in the games industry.
How do you explain ID's ability to accomplish all portability, timeliness, and profitability all at the same time? Does the chronic inability of other game companies to achieve any of this disgust you? How does ID make economic sense of portability, or does ID worry about economic sense?
Re:What a tangled web we weave...
on
RMS Responds
·
· Score: 1
Tom Chistiansen argues that the FSF's definition of free software is anything but free. I disagree strongly. There are limitations to what people can legally do with my free speech. For instance, there are libel laws in the United States. Also, certain forms of eavesdropping are illegal. It seems that free means many things, not all of which are compatible. Note that I'm not trying to draw a direct analogy between preventing eavesdropping or libel and the GPL. I just wish to point out that sometimes great freedoms require the sacrifice of other freedoms. The goal is to pick the freedoms worth preserving.
Having had my life improved by the FSF, but only slightly wrinkled by Richard Stallman's sermons, I feel I have come out ahead. Some notable OSS leaders seem to be detracting from this community, making grand statments about nothing that can't be overcome by a little common sense and open-mindedness.
I seem to have a far different outlook on TPM than most of those I've heard critique the film. Incidentally, my outlook also made me enjoy the film quite a bit--this at least is a nice side effect, even if I am off my rocker. I think that this is a film whose entertainment level is aimed at kids, maybe around 10 years old. However, the story, its place in the Star Wars myth, is relevant to everyone. I managed to enjoy the story immensely, and at least smile at most of the entertainment (some parts seemed lame, of course).
David Brin's article got my ire up, and I wrote the following letter to explain my arguments about why he missed the boat with TPM. I admit I pushed my slender knowledge of Joseph Cambel and George Lucas a bit with this letter, but I don't think I went too far.
Maybe this should have been submitted as an editorial, but I don't feel like I put enough time into its construction for that.
------------------------------------
Hello,
I just finished your article on what's wrong (and right) about the new Star Wars film, TPM. I'd like to say, for the record, that I have _never_ dressed up as a Star Wars character--I hope this lends to my credibility.
I was a bit distressed by your cavalier review of the film. It seems you do have some aquaintance with the works of Joseph Cambell, whom George Lucas has himself admitted had a large effect on himself and these films. However, I believe you have missed one of the most important aspects of myth: cliche is _important_ and _necessary_.
I address my differences of opinion about the cliches below. The cliches mentioned in your article that don't appear below are those with which I'm in agreement.
The virgin mother myth has been perpetrated in many myths, not just the Christian myths. And of course this lends to the 'Choosen one', though I think this cliche could be avoided to the benefit of us regular Joes who just try to be good without the benefit of favorable prophecies. The fact that Anakin's mother is a virgin seems strange because of our culture's Christian fanaticism. It still has a place in new stories. On the other hand, I really hope Lucas doesn't go too far explaining the midichlorians or their ability to fertalize. I think we would agree that mysteries are an important parts of many myths.;-)
As far as good machines needing to be hammered on, I find this to be true in every-day life. If it works right the first time, I don't trust it. That means all it's bugs will show up at the most inconvenient time possible. This is purely a style difference between us, I think.
The fact that Obi Wan is separated from his master is very important, and hardly cliche. Here, Obi Wan is forcefully separated from his master. I think it is easy to conceive that Obi Wans victory over Darth Maul is strongly influenced by having seen Darth Maul defeat his master. And had this not happened, forcefully in this case, where would Obi Wan get the idea to _freely_ give up his life to Vader while knowing that Luke was watching? And do you recall Obi Wan's words to Vader at this point? Paraphrasing since I don't know exactly, "If you kill me now, Vader, I will become more powerful than you can imagine". I think it fits together well, and that this seen is essential. What I can never figure out is why every building in the galaxy has a nearly bottomless pit inside, with no cover on it--it lends to drama, though.
I have other disagreements with your article, those these are far less important than those above. I think all of the Star Wars films allow meaningful interpretation, sometimes deep interpretation. I am not an authority on Joseph Cambell's works or those of George Lucas. But I think that your published critique almost completely ignores the structure and purpose of myth, which seems the most appropriate catagory for the Star Wars films. For The Phantom Menace, I think many of Lucas' decisions could be attributed to making the film more appealing for children (in fact, I think he might have gone too far in a few places). This seems more reasonable when you consider the Cambell's statments about how our current lack of mythology affects the younger generations (who of course become adults in peculiarly violent and often close-minded American society). If George Lucas can get kids to start at The Phantom Menace with a keen interest, then maybe they will appreciate the entire Star Wars series as a whole when they are adults--something which would lend greatly to recognizing the social values espoused by all mythologies, including Star Wars.
We can and should typecast HPUX as the OS from the Devil. I can't begin to explain how angry I am because of the rotten, nonstandard tools and libraries on the HP workstations I have to support. HPUX is nobody's friend. Were the designers at HP arrogant? Or did they design HPUX so early that they couldn't tell how stupid their decisions were?
It is interesting that my view of a company's competitive advantage has become how well they conform to standards, not how much they stick out from the pack. The reason is that I need to get work done, and non-standard stuff wastes a lot of time. In fact, HPUX has pissed me off so much I'm even wasting time writing comments about it.
Unfortunately I don't have the specs handy anymore, nor am I going to look for them on the big Cray machines. While Cray's 800MB/sec bandwidth over their Craylink stuff is good, it's not really that fast--furthermore, it is designed for aggregate use by several processors. The SGI Origin 2000 machines use the Craylink interconnect, but the funny part is that the interconnect has more bandwidth than the pathetically slow memory on each node board. This means that no single node board (2 cpus) can saturate the interconnect (a good thing if you have a sufficiently parallelizable application, a bad thing if you don't).
On the other hand, check out some of IBM's servers, like the S70A for instance. Or, try the Compaq 264DP mobo that we're running in our lab. _Each_ Alpha 21264 has 2.6 GB/sec bandwidth to main memory. To make this much bandwidth doesn't require that the bus (or point to point connnection(s)) be operating in the GHz range, though. You have to take into account how wide the pipe is. If you pump 8 bytes per cycle for 2.6GB/sec, you can run much slower than 1GHz.
I agree that the essayist's comment about XFree86's relation to the GNU project was unfortunate, and can only hope we're all taking it the wrong way. However, several heated comments you make later in your post are completely wrong.
There is a difference between your proposed distribution and calling the system GNU/Linux, on which I don't wish to concentrate here.
My main point is that people _would_ care about FSF without Linux. People cared before Linux. I expect that people will care _after_ Linux (Linux Torvald's ideal world sees Linux replaced maybe 20 years from now--I'm taking this from an interview). I used GNU tools under DOS, Win95, and OS/2. GCC is an important compiler across many platforms, helping with portability and standards. GNU's impact far exceeds the Linux domain, because its fruits are more than a single kernel.
For balance, I'll mention that the Linux kernel is damn important to me and many other people. Also, it is the driving force behind the massive attention drawn away from Microsoft products lately. But Linus and others agree that popularity isn't their target, as this would in all probability detract from quality and the freedom to make choices (hopefully the right choices).
I don't actually see your comment as relevant. How does the fact that the US government committed public funds to a project which helped people, all around the world, affect the quoted statement? Remember the definition of 'free' here does not mean 'appearing out of thin air'. And anyone mad about funding the war in Vietnam would be happy, I expect, to find out some of their funds were diverted to some long-hairs at MIT.
As far as any of this goes, the US Govt's defense spending is probably the only reason the US gained an early lead in computing. And many of the early advances in computing came from sharing of information _enforced_ by the Fed Govt. Take for instance AT&Ts disclosure of transistor research, or later UNIX. Or perhaps IBM's disbundlement of its software and hardware. Government spending _often_ encourages 'free' products--i.e. products that are shared in such a way to help everyone in the US, and sometimes (with GNU, for instance) around the world.
Of course, although I'm now on your topic, I'm off the topic for this article.
GNU/Linux has a consonant following a vowell, which for me is easier to pronounce and sounds nicer than Linux/GNU. On the other hand, you could argue that the free-flowing (think beer, not speech) GNU/Linux wrongfully blurs the distinction between the underlying system software and the kernel--against the desires of the essayist.
Slashdot Mirror
For everyone wondering about the performance of the Merced, consider that they were demoing Doom. Software-rendered Quake on a P-166 looked as good as Doom ever did, so why demo Doom? Is it because not all libraries needed for Quake are available on Trillian (but they are for Doom), or is it because the Merced is just as bad as I think it is?
At about 11:12am, Feb. 03, a couple of eyeball-checks showed 12 new signatures for Starcraft per minute.
Diamonds support of non-MS operating systems for its video cards is much better now than it used to be. They even get special mention on the XFree86 lists.
-Paul Komarek
So will Nike-sponsered athletes have three (digitally-added) stripes on their shoes in the future?
When OS/2 was getting murdered by Win95, IBM put up a page with instructions for removing Win95 from your computer and replacing it with OS/2.
I'm not saying that Win2K is in the same position versus GNU/Linux as OS/2 was with Win95. However, the publication of these instructions make me wonder if the paranoid people inside MS feel as though Windows is in decline?
Game 'intelligence' is currently lousy, whether you're talking about chess programs, fps, or rts. By intelligence I'm talking about somthing fun for humans to play with or against. Do you see a time where 50% or more of the cpu time is spent on computer 'intelligence' instead of bookkeeping? Will there ever be a place for a AI researcher with a Ph.D. to contribute directly to video games?
Really, this is all one question about how ID achieves portability, timeliness, and profitability all at the same time.
ID has consistently brought great technology to the market well before the competition, made it available on many platforms roughly simultaneously, and even made the products fairly stable.
Consider Unreal as a foil--Unreal is slow, unstable, and only runs tolerably well on one OS with one graphics chipset (in my experience).
Also, it was incredibly late, and even the bugfixes are late. This seems to be a somewhat extreme example of the norm in the games industry.
How do you explain ID's ability to accomplish all portability, timeliness, and profitability all at the same time? Does the chronic inability of
other game companies to achieve any of this disgust you? How does ID make economic sense of portability, or does ID worry about economic sense?
Tom Chistiansen argues that the FSF's definition of free software is anything but free. I disagree strongly. There are limitations to what people can legally do with my free speech. For instance, there are libel laws in the United States. Also, certain forms of eavesdropping are illegal. It seems that free means many things, not all of which are compatible. Note that I'm not trying to draw a direct analogy between preventing eavesdropping or libel and the GPL. I just wish to point out that sometimes great freedoms require the sacrifice of other freedoms. The goal is to pick the freedoms worth preserving.
Having had my life improved by the FSF, but only slightly wrinkled by Richard Stallman's sermons, I feel I have come out ahead. Some notable OSS leaders seem to be detracting from this community, making grand statments about nothing that can't be overcome by a little common sense and open-mindedness.
-Paul Komarek
I seem to have a far different outlook on TPM than most of those I've heard critique the film. Incidentally, my outlook also made me enjoy the film quite a bit--this at least is a nice side effect, even if I am off my rocker. I think that this is a film whose entertainment level is aimed at kids, maybe around 10 years old. However, the story, its place in the Star Wars myth, is relevant to everyone. I managed to enjoy the story immensely, and at least smile at most of the entertainment (some parts seemed lame, of course).
;-)
David Brin's article got my ire up, and I wrote the following letter to explain my arguments about why he missed the boat with TPM. I admit I pushed my slender knowledge of Joseph Cambel and George Lucas a bit with this letter, but I don't think I went too far.
Maybe this should have been submitted as an editorial, but I don't feel like I put enough time into its construction for that.
------------------------------------
Hello,
I just finished your article on what's wrong (and right) about the new Star Wars film, TPM. I'd like to say, for the record, that I have _never_ dressed up as a Star Wars character--I hope this lends to my credibility.
I was a bit distressed by your cavalier review of the film. It seems you do have some aquaintance with the works of Joseph Cambell, whom George Lucas has himself admitted had a large effect on himself and these films. However, I believe you have missed one of the most important aspects of myth: cliche is _important_ and _necessary_.
I address my differences of opinion about the cliches below. The cliches mentioned in your article that don't appear below are those with which I'm in agreement.
The virgin mother myth has been perpetrated in many myths, not just the Christian myths. And of course this lends to the 'Choosen one', though I think this cliche could be avoided to the benefit of us regular Joes who just try to be good without the benefit of favorable prophecies. The fact that Anakin's mother is a virgin seems strange because of our culture's Christian fanaticism. It still has a place in new stories. On the other hand, I really hope Lucas doesn't go too far explaining the midichlorians or their ability to fertalize. I think we would agree that mysteries are an important parts of many myths.
As far as good machines needing to be hammered on, I find this to be true in every-day life. If it works right the first time, I don't trust it. That means all it's bugs will show up at the most inconvenient time possible. This is purely a style difference between us, I think.
The fact that Obi Wan is separated from his master is very important, and hardly cliche. Here, Obi Wan is forcefully separated from his master. I think it is easy to conceive that Obi Wans victory over Darth Maul is strongly influenced by having seen Darth Maul defeat his master. And had this not happened, forcefully in this case, where would Obi Wan get the idea to _freely_ give up his life to Vader while knowing that Luke was watching? And do you recall Obi Wan's words to Vader at this point? Paraphrasing since I don't know exactly, "If you kill me now, Vader, I will become more powerful than you can imagine". I think it fits together well, and that this seen is essential. What I can never figure out is why every building in the galaxy has a nearly bottomless pit inside, with no cover on it--it lends to drama, though.
I have other disagreements with your article, those these are far less important than those above. I think all of the Star Wars films allow meaningful interpretation, sometimes deep interpretation. I am not an authority on Joseph Cambell's works or those of George Lucas. But I think that your published critique almost completely ignores the structure and purpose of myth, which seems the most appropriate catagory for the Star Wars films. For The Phantom Menace, I think many of Lucas' decisions could be attributed to making the film more appealing for children (in fact, I think he might have gone too far in a few places). This seems more reasonable when you consider the Cambell's statments about how our current lack of mythology affects the younger generations (who of course become adults in peculiarly violent and often close-minded American society). If George Lucas can get kids to start at The Phantom Menace with a keen interest, then maybe they will appreciate the entire Star Wars series as a whole when they are adults--something which would lend greatly to recognizing the social values espoused by all mythologies, including Star Wars.
-Paul Komarek
We can and should typecast HPUX as the OS from the Devil. I can't begin to explain how angry I am because of the rotten, nonstandard tools and libraries on the HP workstations I have to support. HPUX is nobody's friend. Were the designers at HP arrogant? Or did they design HPUX so early that they couldn't tell how stupid their decisions were?
It is interesting that my view of a company's competitive advantage has become how well they conform to standards, not how much they stick out from the pack. The reason is that I need to get work done, and non-standard stuff wastes a lot of time. In fact, HPUX has pissed me off so much I'm even wasting time writing comments about it.
Unfortunately I don't have the specs handy anymore, nor am I going to look for them on the big Cray machines. While Cray's 800MB/sec bandwidth over their Craylink stuff is good, it's not really that fast--furthermore, it is designed for aggregate use by several processors. The SGI Origin 2000 machines use the Craylink interconnect, but the funny part is that the interconnect has more bandwidth than the pathetically slow memory on each node board. This means that no single node board (2 cpus) can saturate the interconnect (a good thing if you have a sufficiently parallelizable application, a bad thing if you don't).
On the other hand, check out some of IBM's servers, like the S70A for instance. Or, try the Compaq 264DP mobo that we're running in our lab. _Each_ Alpha 21264 has 2.6 GB/sec bandwidth to main memory. To make this much bandwidth doesn't require that the bus (or point to point connnection(s)) be operating in the GHz range, though. You have to take into account how wide the pipe is. If you pump 8 bytes per cycle for 2.6GB/sec, you can run much slower than 1GHz.
-Paul Komarek
I agree that the essayist's comment about XFree86's relation to the GNU project was unfortunate, and can only hope we're all taking it the wrong way. However, several heated comments you make later in your post are completely wrong.
There is a difference between your proposed distribution and calling the system GNU/Linux, on which I don't wish to concentrate here.
My main point is that people _would_ care about FSF without Linux. People cared before Linux. I expect that people will care _after_ Linux (Linux Torvald's ideal world sees Linux replaced maybe 20 years from now--I'm taking this from an interview). I used GNU tools under DOS, Win95, and OS/2. GCC is an important compiler across many platforms, helping with portability and standards. GNU's impact far exceeds the Linux domain, because its fruits are more than a single kernel.
For balance, I'll mention that the Linux kernel is damn important to me and many other people. Also, it is the driving force behind the massive attention drawn away from Microsoft products lately. But Linus and others agree that popularity isn't their target, as this would in all probability detract from quality and the freedom to make choices (hopefully the right choices).
I don't actually see your comment as relevant. How does the fact that the US government committed public funds to a project which helped people, all around the world, affect the quoted statement? Remember the definition of 'free' here does not mean 'appearing out of thin air'. And anyone mad about funding the war in Vietnam would be happy, I expect, to find out some of their funds were diverted to some long-hairs at MIT.
As far as any of this goes, the US Govt's defense spending is probably the only reason the US gained an early lead in computing. And many of the early advances in computing came from sharing of information _enforced_ by the Fed Govt. Take for instance AT&Ts disclosure of transistor research, or later UNIX. Or perhaps IBM's disbundlement of its software and hardware. Government spending _often_ encourages 'free' products--i.e. products that are shared in such a way to help everyone in the US, and sometimes (with GNU, for instance) around the world.
Of course, although I'm now on your topic, I'm off the topic for this article.
GNU/Linux has a consonant following a vowell, which for me is easier to pronounce and sounds nicer than Linux/GNU. On the other hand, you could argue that the free-flowing (think beer, not speech) GNU/Linux wrongfully blurs the distinction between the underlying system software and the kernel--against the desires of the essayist.