WPKG takes care of the WSUS and group policy-style updates, silently, efficiently, centrally, and works with samba! wpkg.org. We use this across multiple states in a multi-location medium sized business.
Not free, but IM+ provides gateways to all major networks, including Jabber. I have it set up to connect to my corporate server (running openfire).
Support is excellent, and it's a one-time fee of $50. I have been upgrading for 3 major versions now. They are adding features / interface improvements all the time.
O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf has been a lifesaver.
Start on one package, read up and learn about the first service, then start on the next.
A commenter further down calls them 'glorified man pages', and a man page is an excellent place to start, but O'Reilly goes far more in-depth with topics like security, concurrency, etc.
Can't recommend them enough!
Tom's Hardware did this with the first generation Athlon XPs (although they made a little aluminum foil tray to keep the egg out of the fins - yuck!
Newsflash - the heatsink is over 100 degrees Farenheit. Any modern computer heatsink is that hot as well - my CPU sits around 30 degrees Celsius - about 90 some degrees Farenheit. Not that big a deal.
Let's start with the first two sentences. "iPod isn't just popular 'cause it's cool. It's popular because it's really easy to get music onto the thing."
Well, I don't know about you, but when I want to transfer music onto a device, I generally like to transfer it from any machine. I often forget how crippled an iPod really is. When you plug it into an "unauthorized" machine and try to transfer songs to or from it, it flakes out big time. This only happened to me once (I don't own an iPod, but a friend does. Yes, they were mad.), but when all was said and done, it would not only not sync with the person's iTunes anymore, but it gave a generic "Error!" screen and told me to go to the support URL. The support URL said to pretty much reboot the thing. That didn't work. The friend ended up taking it to the Apple store, where they formatted it --- but not just a vfat format, no - that is too simple! They formatted it in HFS, then vfat. Why?!? Anyway, for storing music information in a database, that database is very prone to corruption.
So, let's look at the rest of that paragraph: "Buy it, install iTunes, plug in the iPod, and start ripping or downloading music. I just don't see Windows Media Player as competing in that space, especially not without blowing Microsoft's whole market strategy of giving users choices when it comes to Windows audio players."
Windows Media Player directly competes in that space! You can do all that stuff without having to install or download and install iTunes. It's bundled with the OS. You can rip, burn and play back music directly in WMP. And their market strategy is anything but giving the users choice. That is why they were taken to court.
Let's look at this one: "They'll get them home, try to install them, not be able to get music to upload, or the thing will crash all the time, or their PCs won't be able to see it when it's plugged in. Pack it up, take it back, and just go spend the $300 on something that actually works."
Not even out yet, and already you make it sound so much like an iPod. I'm impressed! I love a crazy-ass mass storage driver that gets corrupted almost as much as the database that holds the music. Three different people who's computers I work on have had that issue. I fail to see how that works any better. Also, I enjoy seeing an iPod error screen often. I think it is truly what they do best.
The iPod hardware is neat looking, but the setup is barely functional. And the cute little hard drives that break when you look at them wrong. Beautiful. Another friend used to work at Best Buy and told me that they had many problems with just plain busted iPod hard drives.
The service is great too. When you call you get a real person who tries to google the answer faster than you!
Anyway, sorry to flame ya. I have really had it with iPod apologists.
Installed a bluetooth KB & mouse without having to reboot(!).
Wow! What kind of wacky Operating System are you using that you would have to reboot after a Keyboard and Mouse install? I have never had an issue with getting drivers for a piece of hardware under Linux at all in almost 5 years - except for a wireless network card, and even that was point it at the windows driver and away you go. I almost never have to reboot - except on a kernel upgrade.
It is amazing to me, at work and in the world at large, that people put up with a horrible non-modular kernel like the beast that is NT
The Virtual Boy was not a half-baked idea. Gunpei Yokoi was a genius in hardware and his R&D1 group were geniuses in the software side of things (Metroid, Kid Icarus, etc.)
I would like to see someone come up with a device that tricks your eyes into believing that the image they see is three-dimensional only using mirrors and two thin strips of LEDs...
This is also the man that brought us the Game Boy, and when the Virtual Boy tanked - for a number of reasons - medical, timing on the market, cost, etc. - Yokoi left and created the WonderSwan series of handhelds.
It is always pleasing to learn about someone like Yokoi who excelled at his craft - engineering - and created things which have brought so much joy to the world while keeping in mind things like battery life, playability, and low cost.
The Virtual Boy could probably be recreated today with a moderate amount of success using tri-color OLEDs and shrinking the size of the unit to make it portable.
A significant fraction of our local theatres have equipment so lousy/dirty/scratchy/unfocused that I'm confident watching a DVD at home has better picture quality. When the HD formats take hold, there will be no contest.
Most, if not all of these problems, if you went up to the projection booth, you would find were because in major theater chains, there is no full-time projectionist. The manager runs up and starts the film for each one. They run off of huge platters and no one pays any attention to them whatever. So yes, the issue is that there is no maintenance, but there is a larger issue...
I worked for a second-run movie theater as a projectionist for several years.
The theater itself was built in 1928 and had projection equipment from the '40s. And not that Christie crap either.
Our lamphouses used a carbon arc to create light on the screen, but eventually, our distributor stopped carrying all brands but one, and finally, that company stopped making carbon rods (this was after a very steep decline in quality, which caused many complaints about the brightness, etc.)
Finally, we switched to Xenon lamphouses from the '70s. While brighter, they required more power, the bulbs are expensive and dangerous, and the machine was harder to maintain.
A digital projector was donated to us right before I left, and I thought "What's the point?" Our big draw was that we were a historic landmark, and the projection booth, while being nice and modern, encouraged projectionist laziness ("We have permission from the distributor to run the DVD, just plunk 'er in") and overall a lack of attention to the presentation, as there were not periods that you had to get out of your chair and make sure that the movie was in focus, since you were doing a changeover.
Usually, by the time we got the movies, they would have been out on DVD for several weeks, but our 1.99 price point was cheaper than the rental price of a DVD.
I know that people will just buy or rent the DVD instead of seeing the film in a theater, if DVDs are released simultaneously.
It will kill the second-run business entirely (most people will have bought the movies they are interested in already)
Realeasing them later is not an option either. When the movie leaves first-run it should be realeased on DVD. This is pretty much how it is done today. I see no reason to change one way or the other.
It is actually harmful to the theater to move either way. -Nick
Knoppmyth alternative instructions:
1) Buy a PC
2) Buy a tuner card (Hauppauge preferred)
3) Install Knoppmyth
Done!
Not only does Myth do a lot more than just PVR functionality, but Knoppmyth automatically sets everything up for you. All you have to do is point a remote at it and it works.
Try Knoppmyth - it installs and sets up all the IVTV stuff for you. You will still have to set up the ndiswrapper and ATI drivers, but since it is Debian based, I am sure it will be as easy to do as in Ubuntu. Or perhaps, try Ubuntu and install the gui for ndiswrapper - plus Ubuntu has instructions on their site that make it easy to install the proprietary ATI drivers. The only difficult thing to do is to make sure IVTV works properly, as IVTV is not in the repositories, I believe.
I have to say - Debian-style OSes have spoiled me.
I can grab and search for any type of package and install it and all dependencies automatically.
Much easier than Windows or OS X or even other Linuxes.
I use Ubuntu, and have never had to build a package from source. There are thousands of packages in the default 3 repositories, and they are searchable.
You are telling me that it is easier to go to the store, pick up a box, make sure that it works with your version of Windows, bring it home, pop it in the tray, have it installed (perhaps without the ability to remove it via the Add/Remove programs "package manager") and then roll as opposed to :
Opening syanptic, doing a search, marking for install, and clicking install - then using?
Give it a shot some time - it really is perhaps the most sane system I have ever used or seen for package additions / deletions.
apt-get all the way, baby!
If it's USB, and it's nice, you should be able to plug it in, open a terminal, type 'dmesg' and see something like "scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices usb-storage: device found at 13 SCSI device sda: blah blah-byte hdwr sectors (blah MB)"
Then all you need is a mount point (any directory) and type 'mount/dev/sda1/mountpoint'.
Hopefully it's that simple. If not, you must wait for someone to write a driver, then either compile your own kernel or wait till it gets adopted into the mainstream kernel.
Well, believe it or not, but my father works as a district manager in a large retail chain.
He told me that every company (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) will get together with the retail chains several weeks before launch and divvy up the way too few consoles to create artificial demand. He said that they continue to do it well after launch, and it is not based on the number of units that they can sell. He told me that Playstations fly off of their shelves, but regardless of how much they beg and plead, they only get an allotment of 3 per store per month. He said it is the same with the 360, but worse. They are getting 3 per store, but they are not sure how many (if any) they will receive in the future.
I tend to agree that they are probably ramping the manufacturing way down (I mean, it's not like MS doesn't have enough money to move manufacturing to another plant if they were concerned about it). Don't be fooled. It is a P.R. move.
In this case, I choose not to believe the P.R. droid and listen to the guy who is right in the middle of consumers and companies. -Nick
Sure it does have to do with reality. Multi-threaded games are not really out there. Multi-threaded server processes are much more common. So, the PS3 and 360 will be great as web servers, proxy servers, etc... but as game machines, they don't really need all three - seven cores.
The statement about GL DirectX and Sony was that Nintendo's gamecube uses GL as its 3D rendering library. Xbox uses DirectX, and I *assume* PS2 uses GL.
Can't you see that they are locking developers into a single piece of hardware? There will be more trouble taken to port games without a serious speed drop between platforms.
And ASM (or Assembler - the language that is spoken directly to the hardware - very difficult, different for every platform), well, I took that back in basically the same sentence. However, different graphics APIs make it difficult. And that is only for graphics. Not even mentioning input, sound and networking.
SDL handles input and networking. GL handles graphics. OpenAL handles 3d sound.
Now, I know you were just saying that to be funny, but perhaps do a little research yourself - or perhaps, just think - before blasting me for being worried about the "next-gen" machines.
If all developers used the free libraries for graphics, sound, and input and networking then they could realize a huge profit by releasing on all consoles and all PC operating systems at once.
Do you have a problem with this or are you insane? -Nick
The very very interesting thing about the "next-gen" machines is this: They will make cross-platform releases very difficult and time consuming (in all but the Revolution's case).
The PS3 will use 7 different cores of a separate architecture to the other 2 to achieve great processing feats. Wonderful. So, on top of being nearly impossible for a developer to use, you also make it so that the code is completely useless on any other platform.
The Xbox 360 will be using 3 different POWER cores. Again, any more than 2 cores are probably going to be unused (most modern games are not multi-threaded.) So, pretty much completely worthless.
The Revolution on the other hand, has 2 POWER cores and an ATI chipset like the Xbox 360. This will make porting between the two easier, so simultaneous releases will be possible.
(Although, this is all assuming that developers program everything in ASM, I guess... C abstracts things a little bit... so I guess it is possible... *grumble grumble*)
The other way this could work is that SDL and OpenGL and OpenAL games could be the new norm, instead of GL + DirectX + whatever the hell Sony developers use.
That would be quite nice, since that would make a simultaneous release on XB, Rev, PS3 and Windows, Linux and Mac possible. But I guess developers don't want money, judging from today's games market.:-).
Sorry about that, posting at work and forgot to change the post type to Plain old text. My fault.
To continue the discussion: It must be that Microsoft is putting a lot of money into developer's hands to use their really hard-to-use tools... I have heard horror stories from my programmer friends and discussed with them how they enjoyed the switch from the unified toolset to the open alternative, and they all say they find it extremely easy to program in these free alternatives.
id software seems to be the only company that is willing to do this.
Even Bioware, who hyped up the simulataneous cross-platform release of Neverwinter Nights, ended up using SDL and openAL, but wrote the graphics engine in DirectX! So then it took them like 6 months to release a completely re-developed graphics engine for the port in OpenGL. It just seems like they could have saved a lot of time and money just going with OpenGL, but maybe they were getting a fat check from MS.
Below is my post in all it's line-breakin' glory:
The need for all the different systems is simple: Game companies are too stupid and backwards to see the need to port anything to Linux / Mac.
I am not a game developer, however, I know a couple. They say that there is absolutely no reason to write anything in DirectX at all! OpenGL for graphics (open & extensible) and SDL for things like simple input, openAL for audio (3d or non) and bam! You have a cross-platform video game.
Cedega, dxwine, wine, Crossover, all of these scratch a particular itch - running code that was designed for Windows in a Linux / UNIX environment.
Cedega's claim to fame is that it is the most compatible, and they have deals with the copy protection companies to allow for copy-protected-game x to work under Linux. That is why it is not completely free (speech or beer, probably).
dxwine is patches to the free winehq version that allow you to run DirectX applications on Linux, without any of the non-free-as-in-freedom worries.
wine is the official winehq version of wine that can run some stuff but not nearly as much as say, Cedega.
Crossover is aimed at the business set, running Quickbooks and Office through a pay-for version of winehq's set.
But to answer your main question: because it is hard to do well. Emulation alone is difficult enough - figuring out the instruction set of a processor that might not be around anymore is hard, now imagine if you had to re-implement all the crap in the Windows\System32 directory to understand where all the Linux shared libraries were and what they did. A *lot* harder. -Nick
How is Halo multi-threaded? Almost 100% of games programmed for any combination of hardware/software use one giant loop for running the game. Inside of this loop is another for physics, etc. Also inside of this loop is the game logic. The uP for the 360 is POWER, correct? POWER does not support other ISA's (like x86, in the Xbox 1). I have no idea what your statement about dual-core and emulation means... does this relate to your previous sentence? To re-iterate: 1) Emulating the x86 + nVidia platform in software (because the hardware is not inside the 360) is not going to be as fast as running on the Xbox 1, simply because the hardware is too different - POWER + ATi. 2) Games run in a single loop. If everything is running out of one main loop, there is no multi-threading. I am not a programmer by trade, but I have put my hand to making simple 2-d games, and my 3-d programmer friends tell me it is basically the same (as far as structure goes... one big loop). 3) Your second and third sentences are nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
WPKG takes care of the WSUS and group policy-style updates, silently, efficiently, centrally, and works with samba! wpkg.org. We use this across multiple states in a multi-location medium sized business.
Not free, but IM+ provides gateways to all major networks, including Jabber. I have it set up to connect to my corporate server (running openfire). Support is excellent, and it's a one-time fee of $50. I have been upgrading for 3 major versions now. They are adding features / interface improvements all the time.
O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf has been a lifesaver.
Start on one package, read up and learn about the first service, then start on the next.
A commenter further down calls them 'glorified man pages', and a man page is an excellent place to start, but O'Reilly goes far more in-depth with topics like security, concurrency, etc.
Can't recommend them enough!
The heatsink is doing its job.
Tom's Hardware did this with the first generation Athlon XPs (although they made a little aluminum foil tray to keep the egg out of the fins - yuck!
Newsflash - the heatsink is over 100 degrees Farenheit. Any modern computer heatsink is that hot as well - my CPU sits around 30 degrees Celsius - about 90 some degrees Farenheit. Not that big a deal.
Wow, that read very strangely.
Let's start with the first two sentences. "iPod isn't just popular 'cause it's cool. It's popular because it's really easy to get music onto the thing."
Well, I don't know about you, but when I want to transfer music onto a device, I generally like to transfer it from any machine. I often forget how crippled an iPod really is. When you plug it into an "unauthorized" machine and try to transfer songs to or from it, it flakes out big time. This only happened to me once (I don't own an iPod, but a friend does. Yes, they were mad.), but when all was said and done, it would not only not sync with the person's iTunes anymore, but it gave a generic "Error!" screen and told me to go to the support URL. The support URL said to pretty much reboot the thing. That didn't work. The friend ended up taking it to the Apple store, where they formatted it --- but not just a vfat format, no - that is too simple! They formatted it in HFS, then vfat. Why?!? Anyway, for storing music information in a database, that database is very prone to corruption.
So, let's look at the rest of that paragraph: "Buy it, install iTunes, plug in the iPod, and start ripping or downloading music. I just don't see Windows Media Player as competing in that space, especially not without blowing Microsoft's whole market strategy of giving users choices when it comes to Windows audio players."
Windows Media Player directly competes in that space! You can do all that stuff without having to install or download and install iTunes. It's bundled with the OS. You can rip, burn and play back music directly in WMP. And their market strategy is anything but giving the users choice. That is why they were taken to court.
Let's look at this one: "They'll get them home, try to install them, not be able to get music to upload, or the thing will crash all the time, or their PCs won't be able to see it when it's plugged in. Pack it up, take it back, and just go spend the $300 on something that actually works."
Not even out yet, and already you make it sound so much like an iPod. I'm impressed! I love a crazy-ass mass storage driver that gets corrupted almost as much as the database that holds the music. Three different people who's computers I work on have had that issue. I fail to see how that works any better. Also, I enjoy seeing an iPod error screen often. I think it is truly what they do best.
The iPod hardware is neat looking, but the setup is barely functional. And the cute little hard drives that break when you look at them wrong. Beautiful. Another friend used to work at Best Buy and told me that they had many problems with just plain busted iPod hard drives.
The service is great too. When you call you get a real person who tries to google the answer faster than you!
Anyway, sorry to flame ya. I have really had it with iPod apologists.
-Nick
Wow! What kind of wacky Operating System are you using that you would have to reboot after a Keyboard and Mouse install? I have never had an issue with getting drivers for a piece of hardware under Linux at all in almost 5 years - except for a wireless network card, and even that was point it at the windows driver and away you go. I almost never have to reboot - except on a kernel upgrade.
It is amazing to me, at work and in the world at large, that people put up with a horrible non-modular kernel like the beast that is NT
The Virtual Boy was not a half-baked idea. Gunpei Yokoi was a genius in hardware and his R&D1 group were geniuses in the software side of things (Metroid, Kid Icarus, etc.)
l =url2html-2421http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_ Yokoi />
I would like to see someone come up with a device that tricks your eyes into believing that the image they see is three-dimensional only using mirrors and two thin strips of LEDs...
This is also the man that brought us the Game Boy, and when the Virtual Boy tanked - for a number of reasons - medical, timing on the market, cost, etc. - Yokoi left and created the WonderSwan series of handhelds.
It is always pleasing to learn about someone like Yokoi who excelled at his craft - engineering - and created things which have brought so much joy to the world while keeping in mind things like battery life, playability, and low cost.
The Virtual Boy could probably be recreated today with a moderate amount of success using tri-color OLEDs and shrinking the size of the unit to make it portable.
Wiki has the answers... ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoire
It is more difficult to rotate that bulb with the face shield then to pull out a carbon with tongs once a night.
Thus, more difficult to maintain.
There is more wait-time between maintenance, but the maintenance you do is more difficult, what with the bulb waiting to explode in your hands!
I love the advantages of Xenon, don't get me wrong, I just think carbons were easier.
-Nick
Most, if not all of these problems, if you went up to the projection booth, you would find were because in major theater chains, there is no full-time projectionist. The manager runs up and starts the film for each one. They run off of huge platters and no one pays any attention to them whatever. So yes, the issue is that there is no maintenance, but there is a larger issue...
Tell me about it...
I worked for a second-run movie theater as a projectionist for several years.
The theater itself was built in 1928 and had projection equipment from the '40s. And not that Christie crap either.
Our lamphouses used a carbon arc to create light on the screen, but eventually, our distributor stopped carrying all brands but one, and finally, that company stopped making carbon rods (this was after a very steep decline in quality, which caused many complaints about the brightness, etc.)
Finally, we switched to Xenon lamphouses from the '70s. While brighter, they required more power, the bulbs are expensive and dangerous, and the machine was harder to maintain.
A digital projector was donated to us right before I left, and I thought "What's the point?" Our big draw was that we were a historic landmark, and the projection booth, while being nice and modern, encouraged projectionist laziness ("We have permission from the distributor to run the DVD, just plunk 'er in") and overall a lack of attention to the presentation, as there were not periods that you had to get out of your chair and make sure that the movie was in focus, since you were doing a changeover.
Usually, by the time we got the movies, they would have been out on DVD for several weeks, but our 1.99 price point was cheaper than the rental price of a DVD.
I know that people will just buy or rent the DVD instead of seeing the film in a theater, if DVDs are released simultaneously.
It will kill the second-run business entirely (most people will have bought the movies they are interested in already)
Realeasing them later is not an option either. When the movie leaves first-run it should be realeased on DVD. This is pretty much how it is done today. I see no reason to change one way or the other.
It is actually harmful to the theater to move either way.
-Nick
Using a Debian-derivitive, Linux kernel 2.6 OS, I haven't had to worry much about hardware at all.
Especially not a sound card.
Are you running 2.2 or something? What kind of soundcard?
Knoppmyth alternative instructions: 1) Buy a PC 2) Buy a tuner card (Hauppauge preferred) 3) Install Knoppmyth Done! Not only does Myth do a lot more than just PVR functionality, but Knoppmyth automatically sets everything up for you. All you have to do is point a remote at it and it works.
Try Knoppmyth - it installs and sets up all the IVTV stuff for you.
You will still have to set up the ndiswrapper and ATI drivers, but since it is Debian based, I am sure it will be as easy to do as in Ubuntu.
Or perhaps, try Ubuntu and install the gui for ndiswrapper - plus Ubuntu has instructions on their site that make it easy to install the proprietary ATI drivers. The only difficult thing to do is to make sure IVTV works properly, as IVTV is not in the repositories, I believe.
P.S. ATI is horrible at writing drivers
I have to say - Debian-style OSes have spoiled me. I can grab and search for any type of package and install it and all dependencies automatically. Much easier than Windows or OS X or even other Linuxes. I use Ubuntu, and have never had to build a package from source. There are thousands of packages in the default 3 repositories, and they are searchable. You are telling me that it is easier to go to the store, pick up a box, make sure that it works with your version of Windows, bring it home, pop it in the tray, have it installed (perhaps without the ability to remove it via the Add/Remove programs "package manager") and then roll as opposed to : Opening syanptic, doing a search, marking for install, and clicking install - then using? Give it a shot some time - it really is perhaps the most sane system I have ever used or seen for package additions / deletions. apt-get all the way, baby!
Jeff K is that you?
Who doesn't?!?
-Nick
Talking about Linux, of course ;)
Yarrgh! What IS that mess? It looks like the stats of the hub, not the device plugged in, at least to my non-appled eyes.
-Nick
If it's USB, and it's nice, you should be able to plug it in, open a terminal, type 'dmesg' and see something like "scsi5 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
/dev/sda1 /mountpoint'.
usb-storage: device found at 13
SCSI device sda: blah blah-byte hdwr sectors (blah MB)"
Then all you need is a mount point (any directory) and type 'mount
Hopefully it's that simple. If not, you must wait for someone to write a driver, then either compile your own kernel or wait till it gets adopted into the mainstream kernel.
Good luck!
-Nick
Who else read that line "As a flower or hammer to the face!"
Smaaaaaaaash!
-Nick
Well, believe it or not, but my father works as a district manager in a large retail chain.
He told me that every company (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) will get together with the retail chains several weeks before launch and divvy up the way too few consoles to create artificial demand. He said that they continue to do it well after launch, and it is not based on the number of units that they can sell. He told me that Playstations fly off of their shelves, but regardless of how much they beg and plead, they only get an allotment of 3 per store per month. He said it is the same with the 360, but worse. They are getting 3 per store, but they are not sure how many (if any) they will receive in the future.
I tend to agree that they are probably ramping the manufacturing way down (I mean, it's not like MS doesn't have enough money to move manufacturing to another plant if they were concerned about it). Don't be fooled. It is a P.R. move.
In this case, I choose not to believe the P.R. droid and listen to the guy who is right in the middle of consumers and companies.
-Nick
OK, you are correct. I don't program games, so I did some research, and you were correct. My bad.
The example that was given to me was "Have you ever played a game and had the game lock up but the music keeps playing?"
To which I responded, "Yes. Ohhhhhhh. Right."
So thanks for the education!
-Nick
Sure it does have to do with reality. Multi-threaded games are not really out there. Multi-threaded server processes are much more common. So, the PS3 and 360 will be great as web servers, proxy servers, etc... but as game machines, they don't really need all three - seven cores.
The statement about GL DirectX and Sony was that Nintendo's gamecube uses GL as its 3D rendering library. Xbox uses DirectX, and I *assume* PS2 uses GL.
Can't you see that they are locking developers into a single piece of hardware? There will be more trouble taken to port games without a serious speed drop between platforms.
And ASM (or Assembler - the language that is spoken directly to the hardware - very difficult, different for every platform), well, I took that back in basically the same sentence. However, different graphics APIs make it difficult. And that is only for graphics. Not even mentioning input, sound and networking.
SDL handles input and networking. GL handles graphics. OpenAL handles 3d sound.
Now, I know you were just saying that to be funny, but perhaps do a little research yourself - or perhaps, just think - before blasting me for being worried about the "next-gen" machines.
If all developers used the free libraries for graphics, sound, and input and networking then they could realize a huge profit by releasing on all consoles and all PC operating systems at once.
Do you have a problem with this or are you insane?
-Nick
The very very interesting thing about the "next-gen" machines is this:
:-).
They will make cross-platform releases very difficult and time consuming (in all but the Revolution's case).
The PS3 will use 7 different cores of a separate architecture to the other 2 to achieve great processing feats. Wonderful. So, on top of being nearly impossible for a developer to use, you also make it so that the code is completely useless on any other platform.
The Xbox 360 will be using 3 different POWER cores. Again, any more than 2 cores are probably going to be unused (most modern games are not multi-threaded.) So, pretty much completely worthless.
The Revolution on the other hand, has 2 POWER cores and an ATI chipset like the Xbox 360. This will make porting between the two easier, so simultaneous releases will be possible.
(Although, this is all assuming that developers program everything in ASM, I guess... C abstracts things a little bit... so I guess it is possible... *grumble grumble*)
The other way this could work is that SDL and OpenGL and OpenAL games could be the new norm, instead of GL + DirectX + whatever the hell Sony developers use.
That would be quite nice, since that would make a simultaneous release on XB, Rev, PS3 and Windows, Linux and Mac possible. But I guess developers don't want money, judging from today's games market.
-Nick
Sorry about that, posting at work and forgot to change the post type to Plain old text. My fault.
To continue the discussion: It must be that Microsoft is putting a lot of money into developer's hands to use their really hard-to-use tools... I have heard horror stories from my programmer friends and discussed with them how they enjoyed the switch from the unified toolset to the open alternative, and they all say they find it extremely easy to program in these free alternatives.
id software seems to be the only company that is willing to do this.
Even Bioware, who hyped up the simulataneous cross-platform release of Neverwinter Nights, ended up using SDL and openAL, but wrote the graphics engine in DirectX! So then it took them like 6 months to release a completely re-developed graphics engine for the port in OpenGL. It just seems like they could have saved a lot of time and money just going with OpenGL, but maybe they were getting a fat check from MS.
Below is my post in all it's line-breakin' glory:
The need for all the different systems is simple: Game companies are too stupid and backwards to see the need to port anything to Linux / Mac.
I am not a game developer, however, I know a couple. They say that there is absolutely no reason to write anything in DirectX at all! OpenGL for graphics (open & extensible) and SDL for things like simple input, openAL for audio (3d or non) and bam! You have a cross-platform video game.
Cedega, dxwine, wine, Crossover, all of these scratch a particular itch - running code that was designed for Windows in a Linux / UNIX environment.
Cedega's claim to fame is that it is the most compatible, and they have deals with the copy protection companies to allow for copy-protected-game x to work under Linux. That is why it is not completely free (speech or beer, probably).
dxwine is patches to the free winehq version that allow you to run DirectX applications on Linux, without any of the non-free-as-in-freedom worries.
wine is the official winehq version of wine that can run some stuff but not nearly as much as say, Cedega.
Crossover is aimed at the business set, running Quickbooks and Office through a pay-for version of winehq's set.
But to answer your main question: because it is hard to do well. Emulation alone is difficult enough - figuring out the instruction set of a processor that might not be around anymore is hard, now imagine if you had to re-implement all the crap in the Windows\System32 directory to understand where all the Linux shared libraries were and what they did. A *lot* harder.
-Nick
How is Halo multi-threaded? Almost 100% of games programmed for any combination of hardware/software use one giant loop for running the game. Inside of this loop is another for physics, etc. Also inside of this loop is the game logic.
The uP for the 360 is POWER, correct? POWER does not support other ISA's (like x86, in the Xbox 1). I have no idea what your statement about dual-core and emulation means... does this relate to your previous sentence?
To re-iterate:
1) Emulating the x86 + nVidia platform in software (because the hardware is not inside the 360) is not going to be as fast as running on the Xbox 1, simply because the hardware is too different - POWER + ATi.
2) Games run in a single loop. If everything is running out of one main loop, there is no multi-threading. I am not a programmer by trade, but I have put my hand to making simple 2-d games, and my 3-d programmer friends tell me it is basically the same (as far as structure goes... one big loop).
3) Your second and third sentences are nonsense.
-Nick