and while they're at it perhaps they could clue you in that you should go outside and get the hell away from you computer!
when i first heard about LAN parties (a few years ago, while going to school at the University of Waterloo) i thought it was a joke. it boggles my mind that people actually do this, but it's downright disturbing that a company makes accessories for these "parties."
well the whole idea is that the game is about good vs evil. that's why the white box (ie, the "good" box) has money donated to charity, while the back box (ie the "evil" box) donates nothing. sure it's a gimmick, but at least it's a thoughtful gimmick:)
but really, if they wanted to do it properly both would be the same price, but the white sales would still put $5 towards a charity whereas the black ones would just be an extra $5 in their pockets:)
... but seriously, Rachel Auburn? give me a break. that new label of hers, "RA," puts out the worse circus house crap around. it's kind of cute at first, but it gets very annoying, especially if you're exposed to an entire set of that bouncy nonsense. if you want some decent UK Hard House, there are better alternatives. HardNRG.com and Energy UK. i'm not sure if you spin yourself, but those two are good places to start for the non-dj.
...of course, some people like Rachel Auburn. but there's no accounting for taste!:) at any rate, it's better than the RIAA shlop that's been removed from Napster. i'm all for it: now it's even easier to find the good stuff! a quick search brings up 97 copies of my CDs:).
Yes, as a matter of fact - my UID is greater by a factor of roughly 300. Sorry if this offends your senior status...
i'm sure this fellow was joking with that sig, but it is funny to see how much importance people put in silly little number like slashdot user numbers or karma (that is, karma after the +1 bonus).
i've been reading slashdot since very shortly after they were on slashdot.org. i was there when they implemented the user accounts, but i didn't bother getting one: there was no need when posting anonymously was always sufficient. in fact i always used to think the people who logged in were less interested in just joining the conversation and more interested in showing off and making a name for themselves. i created my user account only because most people (including moderators) were surfing at +1, and all the conversation was only had with the user account elite. the poor anonymous schmucks were almost completely igonred, regardless of the content of the message.
so at any rate, what i'm trying to say is don't trust anybody with a user number under 87585, as they're just a bunch of jackoff attention-seeking wangwarters.
you're right of course. it's only confusing when you're talking about bytes, not any other SI measurement.
a few years ago, in an effort to bring "bytes" back to the SI norm, the units kibibyte, megibyte, and gigibyte where introduced. nobody seems terribly interested in following this standard, but for what it's worth:
there used to be a site on the 'net about all this, but the only references i could find in a quick google search was this page (at the bottom) and this message.
according to their 2000 financials, they have about $1,191,000,000 in cash, but approximately $5,427,000,000 in cash and short-term investments (a few billion anyhow).
Apple didn't need Microsoft's money when they invested, the cash was to settle some lawsuits (including the GUI-ripoff bit). for what it's worth, Apple should have got considerably more than the 150 Million, but they had to cave to get a promise from Microsoft that they'd continue developing Office for the Mac. because really, if the MacOS can't open Word documents, it would never have even the marketshare it has now.
yeah, it sucks, but hey, aren't monopolies great!?!
So they are crippling OSX and breaking commonly used features?
when DVDs are playing, yes. right now if you take a screen shot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a magenta box where the DVD is playing. the OS isn't going to be "crippled" in normal use, but it is a requirement for the DVD application.
yes, it's lame, but don't blame Apple, blame the MPAA.
this is absolutely right. i'm running MacOS X build 4k73 right now and there are very few bugs i've found (and those are cosmetic things, not kernel crashes). it's true that MacOS X is being released feature incomplete, but it's certainly not buggy.
really though, OS X as it stands now is considerably (like orders of magnitude) better than a Microsoft "final" release. sure DVD playback is missing, but really, that's a separate application. while it's very nice to have Apple ship their DVD player with their OS, it's hardly a core operating system issue. i miss some of the "important" features, like pop-up-folders, but the features that are "missing" from OS X hardly amount to anything.
at any rate, i think the hardcore Mac users will enjoy having a stable and reasonably efficient operating system on their Mac. it had to be released sometime, and if it's anything like the recent betas, it should definitely fill that void.
oh please. it's attitudes like this that keep us locked into those rediculous bloated processors that Intel keeps spewing out.
embedded devices aren't going to run the same types of applications as your average desktop for the near future. they're designed for totally different markets. this device is not going to be a consumer-level device at first: it's going to run very customized software for customized work environments.
additionally the PIII/4 are lousy processors. yes, they'll run pretty damned quickly, but they need to be clocked to rediculous clock speeds to do so. the only reason that the Pentium series is still a leading processor is because Intel is pouring billions of dollars into its development! if they were to pour that many dollars into a well-designed RISC processor, the results would be even more impressive. there will aways be more life in the x86 family, but those improvements come with huge development costs because they're tacked onto an infrastructure that really wasn't meant to do it.
on a related note, if you put a PIII in a device like this and wore it on your belt you'd probably get third degree burns on your hips. the PIII was never meant for embedded applications. it's all about using the right tool (or chip) for the job
but anyhow, i'm ranting. but still, i don't see why x86 has to be everywhere. there are better processors for these types of environment, and hanging onto this archaic backwards compatibility is seriously hampering development. embedded devices should use embedded processors, and hey, maybe it's even a chance to help break the WinTel monopoly: Linux runs perfectly well on every embedded processor i've worked on. eventually you have to give up, and move to a new architecture that's better designed for the task at hand. embedded devices are a great place to start this change.
so do yourself a favour and start looking into the PowerPC, MIPS, SuperH and other embedded processors. the x86 is not the be-all-and-end-all of microprocessors!
What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images?
well, because only a fraction of 1% of the general surfing population surfs without images (or with text-only browsers). additionally, those that do surf without images are probably the type that don't click-through to too many advertisments anyhow. that "ALT" attribute is much better spent teaching those who use, say, IE (the majority of the surfing population), how to "follow" the advertisement (hence "Click to learn more...").
amen! the truth is, i don't completely agree with everything i wrote, but i wanted to troll and see how slashdotters would respond to these aligations. it's quite true that a significant number of people who regularly post on this site are only concerned with getting stuff for free. they don't seem to realize that a lot of the freebies we take for granted are subsidized by corporations, and eventually that gravy train is going to stop. the question is, are you willing to start paying for it?
the funny thing is, it's not like any of these advertising-sponsored freebies fill any real need: they're not food or water, or even transportation. they're little luxuries that people seem to take for granted, and don't want to give up. they "cheat the system" just because they can. most people here seem to take the stance that these sights shouldn't be advertising-sponsored, but instead of just not reading the goddamned sites they read them anyhow and say "i don't like your business model, so i'm going to try to ruin it."
is this behaviour unethical? perhaps, but that would entirely depend on your point of view. is this behaviour rediculously childish? absolutely. but then slashdot readers have never been known for their maturity (pass the Nerf gun).
incidentally, while i found the responses painfully funny, the fact that i was moderated up to 5 is disturbing; further proof that the slashdot moderation system is completely broken. but then that's why is started trolling here ages ago (that is, intelligent trolling, to provoke emotions, entice arguments and to provide an alternate point of view in discussions).
and if those ads are so bad that we block them, then they deserve to be blocked.
just because the ads don't sit right with you doesn't give you the right to read the ad-sponsored content while blocking the ads. if you have issues with the size of the advertisements, you should stop reading the content, not just blocking the ads. perhaps send a friendly note to the system administer?
I'm confused. Let's see if I understand what you're saying:
ok, i posted that knowing full well i'd get responses (a troll really), but i was hoping for well-formed responses: i'm sorry, but you're just plain stupid.
no dumbass: ignoring as in not reading the fucking page, or going to the site. i "ignore" television programs by not owning a TV. but even if i meant "ignore," as in "view it anyways" it would mean "don't look at," not "never have it viewed at all."
tell me about it. it works on a more local scale too.
i work in Toronto now, and while i'd much rather work right downtown (where i live) my company's location is still an acceptable distance slightly outside of downtown. when the lease is up on this building (soon), they're going to move to buttfuck nowhere (aka Thornhill) in the suburbs. why? because it's "cheaper."
yeah, cheaper maybe, but i've already told them i'm leaving if they move out there (and i'm not the only one). how many future employees are they going to lose because they're out in the middle of nowhere? chosing a location based only on rental costs is very short-sighted.
i always wonder this. it seems that the majority of people here want everything for free. it's one thing to dislike corporate America, but most of what i see here is childish "gimmie gimmie gimmie!"
examples:
free sites put up large advertisements
great, let's block those ads! it's my God-given right to have free Internet content!
commercial software (especially MacOS X for some reason)
open source it! now now now! and not so that we can add better functionality and improve the product, but so that we can port it to Linux (ie, steal it).
secure music/content
rip it! crack it! (but only after it's in the marketplace). we have a right to free music and movies!
seriously people, this is getting disturbing. there's a difference between fighting a misuse of technology, but many people here have gone way beyond that into a "me! me! me!" attitude that make middle-age yuppies look like ghandi.
personally, i'm not keen on advertising, i despise over-consumption, and i don't own a car for purely ethical reasons. heck, i don't even own a television for christ's sake! but i still don't see what's wrong with putting some advertisements, no matter the size, on commercial-provided free content. people: advertising is not inherently evil. if you don't want to see advertising, don't read sites that have advertising: that's your choice. there's good reason to get pissed off about billboard advertising, as you can't "opt-out," but reading sites with advertising and purposefully blocking out that advertising is extremely immoral.
there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth).
The base for the product is obviously established enough to allow for a rather large penetration on servers alone (check the included server scanner in Half-Life sometime, about half the servers are running on Linux) so why not develop clients?
well, one quite obviously reason would be that the dedicated server requires considerably fewer resources. i have run Quake servers on Linux in the past, but they were all done on an old Pentium 200 at a friend's co-lo.
i have a few boxes that have the hardware (processor speed and video) necessary to run a 3D-game client, but i'm not running Linux on any of them. why? because the 3D graphics drivers on Linux are lousy, X86 is a pain and a bottleneck, and all in all the hardware is completely crippled by the sub-standard driver and API support of Linux. add this to the reasons that Carmack has given (that there's no easy way to port this stuff over to Linux) and you'll realize that it just isn't worth it!
it amazes me how many people on slashdot think that Linux' desktop marketshare is so large: it's not. the majority of Linux users i've met use Linux on their spare equipment, not on their primary desktop machine. it's just not cost-effective to write games for Linux right now. it's a sad fact, but true. sure ID is doing this, but it's really just an experiement. however i believe that the success of D3 on Linux will have a great impact on other game developers' oppions of the platform.
but despite all this, i strongly believe that most of those Half-life servers are on somebody's spare PC, and that the vast majority of those people would never use Linux as their Desktop machine.
There is a reasonable-sized market for Mac games, and apparently Linux has a bigger market share than Apple now.
for servers sure, but desktop machines? you're dreaming. Apple's marketshare cleanly dwarfs Linux on the desktop from all data i've ever seen. let's face it: Linux is not the machine of your average gamer. perhaps it should be, but it's not, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
seriously, big fat deal. i did a highschool co-op as well. i was in charge of entering names into a database, faxing, and doing tech support on Wordperfect (DOS) when people couldn't figure it out.
so it wasn't the most glamourous job, but i was just a highschool student! i put that job on my resume, and made it sound like i was integral to the team. then i got a better job through that. if you're looking for enthrauling work through your high school co-op, you're delusional and naive. go there, do the grunt work, see how things are done. the very fact that you did a highschool co-op will guarantee that you're looked at in a better light than your competition when you're going for that next job. what looks better: working the summer at McD's, or doing tech "gruntwork" at an engineering firm?
so get over it. you're in highschool for Christ's sake! i have highschool co-ops working for me now, and while i try to keep them involved and interested, at the end of the day it's one of them who's going to be doing the data entry. this is just your first step, so don't get too far ahead of yourself.
3) So, how much do people think that Apple paid nVidia for the whole "out on Apple first" deal?
honestly i don't think they needed to pay them much at all. think about it: NVidia's new chip will only be available in small quantities before they ramp up production anyhow. Apple is providing them a high-profile easy distribution channel for their first few lots.
from NVidia's point of view by going with this "exclusive" deal they win over the support of the Mac market, they get to announce their new chip with a big fanfare at a high-profile event at no cost to them, and they have a guaranteed sales channel for their low-volume parts. not to mention the fact that they can justify charging exorbinant ($600!) amounts of money because it's bundled with a computer that's already several thousand! sounds like a pretty good deal to me!
as far as i can see it, it's a win-win for Apple and NVidia.
FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. If it isn't reprogrammable, it isn't an FPGA. I'm sure Actel or QuickLogic would have you believe their OTP parts are "FPGAs" but I'm afraid they just aren't.
oh bah, that's such nonsense. the term "FPGA" has become a broad term to mean basically any programmable logic more complex than a CPLD. granted that while the field part of the acronym refers the ability for these parts to being programmed in the "field," the term has become generic enough that "antifuse-FPGA" is perfectly acceptable. but whatever, it's still a valid use of the term these days, and they could be used in this case. but lighten up: nobody likes a literalist;) hah.
About the speed: the parts Xilinx released a year ago run to 100MHz.
yeah, exactly: 100Mhz. big deal. i know from personal experience that Actel's SX (from around the same time period) operate at well over 300Mhz (though they only guarantee 250Mhz in a production setting, as not all designs will run that fast).
The main problem isn't the speed of the parts. It's the cost.
exactly, which is why antifuse clearly wins out here (if you're willing to put up with the fact that it's OTP). antifuse "FPGAs" are about 1/10th the cost of a comparable SRAM FPGA. plus it's easy to routinely get utilizations of over 95% with Antifuse: you'd be lucky to get 60% utilization on an SRAM FPGA. this is simply because the SRAM cells are too large to justify putting at every horizontal/vertical path junction. you can get 100% pin-locking on an antifuse FPGA even at full logic utilization! that's a considerably better value for your money.
the thing is, Antifuse FPGAs are superior to SRAM in absolutely every way (price, power consumption, performace and efficiency, plus you don't need an external EEPROM) except that they're only one-time programmable. hobbists usually like to get a handful of reprogrammables and "play around" with them, and that's fine. but if you're serious about making "open hardware" and using it in a device that you actually care about it would be worth your while to do good synthesis on the PC and then burn the antifuse FPGA for a high speed, low cost, low power decent device.
end rant. hah. that was longer than i intended it to be. can you tell that i used to work in Marketing at Actel? (and before you blow me off completely for that, i worked in Product Engineering too):) more information on Antifuse can be found here. i should know, i helped write it:).
Slashdot Mirror
and while they're at it perhaps they could clue you in that you should go outside and get the hell away from you computer!
when i first heard about LAN parties (a few years ago, while going to school at the University of Waterloo) i thought it was a joke. it boggles my mind that people actually do this, but it's downright disturbing that a company makes accessories for these "parties."
dear lord, what is the world coming to?
- j
certainly not! the best hoovers by far are those on the Roland Alpha Juno 2.
- j
well the whole idea is that the game is about good vs evil. that's why the white box (ie, the "good" box) has money donated to charity, while the back box (ie the "evil" box) donates nothing. sure it's a gimmick, but at least it's a thoughtful gimmick :)
but really, if they wanted to do it properly both would be the same price, but the white sales would still put $5 towards a charity whereas the black ones would just be an extra $5 in their pockets :)
- j
... but seriously, Rachel Auburn? give me a break. that new label of hers, "RA," puts out the worse circus house crap around. it's kind of cute at first, but it gets very annoying, especially if you're exposed to an entire set of that bouncy nonsense. if you want some decent UK Hard House, there are better alternatives. HardNRG.com and Energy UK. i'm not sure if you spin yourself, but those two are good places to start for the non-dj.
...of course, some people like Rachel Auburn. but there's no accounting for taste! :) at any rate, it's better than the RIAA shlop that's been removed from Napster. i'm all for it: now it's even easier to find the good stuff! a quick search brings up 97 copies of my CDs :).
- j
yep, it's a happy little symbiotic relationship we produce: kind of like the host-parasite, but in cubicles. but hey, it's a living, right?
- j
Yes, as a matter of fact - my UID is greater by a factor of roughly 300. Sorry if this offends your senior status...
i'm sure this fellow was joking with that sig, but it is funny to see how much importance people put in silly little number like slashdot user numbers or karma (that is, karma after the +1 bonus).
i've been reading slashdot since very shortly after they were on slashdot.org. i was there when they implemented the user accounts, but i didn't bother getting one: there was no need when posting anonymously was always sufficient. in fact i always used to think the people who logged in were less interested in just joining the conversation and more interested in showing off and making a name for themselves. i created my user account only because most people (including moderators) were surfing at +1, and all the conversation was only had with the user account elite. the poor anonymous schmucks were almost completely igonred, regardless of the content of the message.
so at any rate, what i'm trying to say is don't trust anybody with a user number under 87585, as they're just a bunch of jackoff attention-seeking wangwarters.
- j
this is why i work in marketing: there's always a need for more bullshitters!
- j
yeah, this is why us marketing people don't let you engineers out of the cubicle farm.
- j
for anybody who actually cares, i just noticed that there's a related entry on everything2.com. apparently it's gibi, kibi, mebi, etc.
- j
you're right of course. it's only confusing when you're talking about bytes, not any other SI measurement.
a few years ago, in an effort to bring "bytes" back to the SI norm, the units kibibyte, megibyte, and gigibyte where introduced. nobody seems terribly interested in following this standard, but for what it's worth:
1 Kilobyte (KB) = 1000 bytes
1 Megabyte (MB) = 1000 KB
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1000 MB
1 kibibyte (KiB) = 1024 bytes
1 Megibyte (MiB) = 1024 KiB (1,048,576 bytes)
1 Gigibyte (GiB) = 1024 MiB (1,048,576 KiB)
there used to be a site on the 'net about all this, but the only references i could find in a quick google search was this page (at the bottom) and this message.
so needless to say, it's not commonly used :)
- j
How much does Apple have in cash alone?
according to their 2000 financials, they have about $1,191,000,000 in cash, but approximately $5,427,000,000 in cash and short-term investments (a few billion anyhow).
Apple didn't need Microsoft's money when they invested, the cash was to settle some lawsuits (including the GUI-ripoff bit). for what it's worth, Apple should have got considerably more than the 150 Million, but they had to cave to get a promise from Microsoft that they'd continue developing Office for the Mac. because really, if the MacOS can't open Word documents, it would never have even the marketshare it has now.
yeah, it sucks, but hey, aren't monopolies great!?!
- j
So they are crippling OSX and breaking commonly used features?
when DVDs are playing, yes. right now if you take a screen shot in OS 9 while playing a DVD you get a magenta box where the DVD is playing. the OS isn't going to be "crippled" in normal use, but it is a requirement for the DVD application.
yes, it's lame, but don't blame Apple, blame the MPAA.
- j
this is absolutely right. i'm running MacOS X build 4k73 right now and there are very few bugs i've found (and those are cosmetic things, not kernel crashes). it's true that MacOS X is being released feature incomplete, but it's certainly not buggy.
really though, OS X as it stands now is considerably (like orders of magnitude) better than a Microsoft "final" release. sure DVD playback is missing, but really, that's a separate application. while it's very nice to have Apple ship their DVD player with their OS, it's hardly a core operating system issue. i miss some of the "important" features, like pop-up-folders, but the features that are "missing" from OS X hardly amount to anything.
at any rate, i think the hardcore Mac users will enjoy having a stable and reasonably efficient operating system on their Mac. it had to be released sometime, and if it's anything like the recent betas, it should definitely fill that void.
- j
oh please. it's attitudes like this that keep us locked into those rediculous bloated processors that Intel keeps spewing out.
embedded devices aren't going to run the same types of applications as your average desktop for the near future. they're designed for totally different markets. this device is not going to be a consumer-level device at first: it's going to run very customized software for customized work environments.
additionally the PIII/4 are lousy processors. yes, they'll run pretty damned quickly, but they need to be clocked to rediculous clock speeds to do so. the only reason that the Pentium series is still a leading processor is because Intel is pouring billions of dollars into its development! if they were to pour that many dollars into a well-designed RISC processor, the results would be even more impressive. there will aways be more life in the x86 family, but those improvements come with huge development costs because they're tacked onto an infrastructure that really wasn't meant to do it.
on a related note, if you put a PIII in a device like this and wore it on your belt you'd probably get third degree burns on your hips. the PIII was never meant for embedded applications. it's all about using the right tool (or chip) for the job
but anyhow, i'm ranting. but still, i don't see why x86 has to be everywhere. there are better processors for these types of environment, and hanging onto this archaic backwards compatibility is seriously hampering development. embedded devices should use embedded processors, and hey, maybe it's even a chance to help break the WinTel monopoly: Linux runs perfectly well on every embedded processor i've worked on. eventually you have to give up, and move to a new architecture that's better designed for the task at hand. embedded devices are a great place to start this change.
so do yourself a favour and start looking into the PowerPC, MIPS, SuperH and other embedded processors. the x86 is not the be-all-and-end-all of microprocessors!
- j
What's the point of putting alt text if it's meaningless to people who don't use images?
well, because only a fraction of 1% of the general surfing population surfs without images (or with text-only browsers). additionally, those that do surf without images are probably the type that don't click-through to too many advertisments anyhow. that "ALT" attribute is much better spent teaching those who use, say, IE (the majority of the surfing population), how to "follow" the advertisement (hence "Click to learn more...").
makes sense to me!
- j
amen! the truth is, i don't completely agree with everything i wrote, but i wanted to troll and see how slashdotters would respond to these aligations. it's quite true that a significant number of people who regularly post on this site are only concerned with getting stuff for free. they don't seem to realize that a lot of the freebies we take for granted are subsidized by corporations, and eventually that gravy train is going to stop. the question is, are you willing to start paying for it?
the funny thing is, it's not like any of these advertising-sponsored freebies fill any real need: they're not food or water, or even transportation. they're little luxuries that people seem to take for granted, and don't want to give up. they "cheat the system" just because they can. most people here seem to take the stance that these sights shouldn't be advertising-sponsored, but instead of just not reading the goddamned sites they read them anyhow and say "i don't like your business model, so i'm going to try to ruin it."
is this behaviour unethical? perhaps, but that would entirely depend on your point of view. is this behaviour rediculously childish? absolutely. but then slashdot readers have never been known for their maturity (pass the Nerf gun).
incidentally, while i found the responses painfully funny, the fact that i was moderated up to 5 is disturbing; further proof that the slashdot moderation system is completely broken. but then that's why is started trolling here ages ago (that is, intelligent trolling, to provoke emotions, entice arguments and to provide an alternate point of view in discussions).
- j
and if those ads are so bad that we block them, then they deserve to be blocked.
just because the ads don't sit right with you doesn't give you the right to read the ad-sponsored content while blocking the ads. if you have issues with the size of the advertisements, you should stop reading the content, not just blocking the ads. perhaps send a friendly note to the system administer?
- j
I'm confused. Let's see if I understand what you're saying:
ok, i posted that knowing full well i'd get responses (a troll really), but i was hoping for well-formed responses: i'm sorry, but you're just plain stupid.
no dumbass: ignoring as in not reading the fucking page, or going to the site. i "ignore" television programs by not owning a TV. but even if i meant "ignore," as in "view it anyways" it would mean "don't look at," not "never have it viewed at all."
i encourage responses, but you're a dipshit.
- j
tell me about it. it works on a more local scale too.
i work in Toronto now, and while i'd much rather work right downtown (where i live) my company's location is still an acceptable distance slightly outside of downtown. when the lease is up on this building (soon), they're going to move to buttfuck nowhere (aka Thornhill) in the suburbs. why? because it's "cheaper."
yeah, cheaper maybe, but i've already told them i'm leaving if they move out there (and i'm not the only one). how many future employees are they going to lose because they're out in the middle of nowhere? chosing a location based only on rental costs is very short-sighted.
- j
why are most slashdot users so cheap?
i always wonder this. it seems that the majority of people here want everything for free. it's one thing to dislike corporate America, but most of what i see here is childish "gimmie gimmie gimmie!"
examples:
great, let's block those ads! it's my God-given right to have free Internet content!
open source it! now now now! and not so that we can add better functionality and improve the product, but so that we can port it to Linux (ie, steal it).
rip it! crack it! (but only after it's in the marketplace). we have a right to free music and movies!
seriously people, this is getting disturbing. there's a difference between fighting a misuse of technology, but many people here have gone way beyond that into a "me! me! me!" attitude that make middle-age yuppies look like ghandi.
personally, i'm not keen on advertising, i despise over-consumption, and i don't own a car for purely ethical reasons. heck, i don't even own a television for christ's sake! but i still don't see what's wrong with putting some advertisements, no matter the size, on commercial-provided free content. people: advertising is not inherently evil. if you don't want to see advertising, don't read sites that have advertising: that's your choice. there's good reason to get pissed off about billboard advertising, as you can't "opt-out," but reading sites with advertising and purposefully blocking out that advertising is extremely immoral.
there are ways to properly fight the misuse of advertising, including ignoring advertising-sponsored content. but blocking that advertising is nothing but stealing. (and yes, it is stealing despite the fact that it's "digital." it's stealing bandwidth).
seriously, grow up.
- j
The base for the product is obviously established enough to allow for a rather large penetration on servers alone (check the included server scanner in Half-Life sometime, about half the servers are running on Linux) so why not develop clients?
well, one quite obviously reason would be that the dedicated server requires considerably fewer resources. i have run Quake servers on Linux in the past, but they were all done on an old Pentium 200 at a friend's co-lo.
i have a few boxes that have the hardware (processor speed and video) necessary to run a 3D-game client, but i'm not running Linux on any of them. why? because the 3D graphics drivers on Linux are lousy, X86 is a pain and a bottleneck, and all in all the hardware is completely crippled by the sub-standard driver and API support of Linux. add this to the reasons that Carmack has given (that there's no easy way to port this stuff over to Linux) and you'll realize that it just isn't worth it!
it amazes me how many people on slashdot think that Linux' desktop marketshare is so large: it's not. the majority of Linux users i've met use Linux on their spare equipment, not on their primary desktop machine. it's just not cost-effective to write games for Linux right now. it's a sad fact, but true. sure ID is doing this, but it's really just an experiement. however i believe that the success of D3 on Linux will have a great impact on other game developers' oppions of the platform.
but despite all this, i strongly believe that most of those Half-life servers are on somebody's spare PC, and that the vast majority of those people would never use Linux as their Desktop machine.
- j
There is a reasonable-sized market for Mac games, and apparently Linux has a bigger market share than Apple now.
for servers sure, but desktop machines? you're dreaming. Apple's marketshare cleanly dwarfs Linux on the desktop from all data i've ever seen. let's face it: Linux is not the machine of your average gamer. perhaps it should be, but it's not, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
- j
seriously, big fat deal. i did a highschool co-op as well. i was in charge of entering names into a database, faxing, and doing tech support on Wordperfect (DOS) when people couldn't figure it out.
so it wasn't the most glamourous job, but i was just a highschool student! i put that job on my resume, and made it sound like i was integral to the team. then i got a better job through that. if you're looking for enthrauling work through your high school co-op, you're delusional and naive. go there, do the grunt work, see how things are done. the very fact that you did a highschool co-op will guarantee that you're looked at in a better light than your competition when you're going for that next job. what looks better: working the summer at McD's, or doing tech "gruntwork" at an engineering firm?
so get over it. you're in highschool for Christ's sake! i have highschool co-ops working for me now, and while i try to keep them involved and interested, at the end of the day it's one of them who's going to be doing the data entry. this is just your first step, so don't get too far ahead of yourself.
- j
3) So, how much do people think that Apple paid nVidia for the whole "out on Apple first" deal?
honestly i don't think they needed to pay them much at all. think about it: NVidia's new chip will only be available in small quantities before they ramp up production anyhow. Apple is providing them a high-profile easy distribution channel for their first few lots.
from NVidia's point of view by going with this "exclusive" deal they win over the support of the Mac market, they get to announce their new chip with a big fanfare at a high-profile event at no cost to them, and they have a guaranteed sales channel for their low-volume parts. not to mention the fact that they can justify charging exorbinant ($600!) amounts of money because it's bundled with a computer that's already several thousand! sounds like a pretty good deal to me!
as far as i can see it, it's a win-win for Apple and NVidia.
- j
FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. If it isn't reprogrammable, it isn't an FPGA. I'm sure Actel or QuickLogic would have you believe their OTP parts are "FPGAs" but I'm afraid they just aren't.
oh bah, that's such nonsense. the term "FPGA" has become a broad term to mean basically any programmable logic more complex than a CPLD. granted that while the field part of the acronym refers the ability for these parts to being programmed in the "field," the term has become generic enough that "antifuse-FPGA" is perfectly acceptable. but whatever, it's still a valid use of the term these days, and they could be used in this case. but lighten up: nobody likes a literalist ;) hah.
About the speed: the parts Xilinx released a year ago run to 100MHz.
yeah, exactly: 100Mhz. big deal. i know from personal experience that Actel's SX (from around the same time period) operate at well over 300Mhz (though they only guarantee 250Mhz in a production setting, as not all designs will run that fast).
The main problem isn't the speed of the parts. It's the cost.
exactly, which is why antifuse clearly wins out here (if you're willing to put up with the fact that it's OTP). antifuse "FPGAs" are about 1/10th the cost of a comparable SRAM FPGA. plus it's easy to routinely get utilizations of over 95% with Antifuse: you'd be lucky to get 60% utilization on an SRAM FPGA. this is simply because the SRAM cells are too large to justify putting at every horizontal/vertical path junction. you can get 100% pin-locking on an antifuse FPGA even at full logic utilization! that's a considerably better value for your money.
the thing is, Antifuse FPGAs are superior to SRAM in absolutely every way (price, power consumption, performace and efficiency, plus you don't need an external EEPROM) except that they're only one-time programmable. hobbists usually like to get a handful of reprogrammables and "play around" with them, and that's fine. but if you're serious about making "open hardware" and using it in a device that you actually care about it would be worth your while to do good synthesis on the PC and then burn the antifuse FPGA for a high speed, low cost, low power decent device.
end rant. hah. that was longer than i intended it to be. can you tell that i used to work in Marketing at Actel? (and before you blow me off completely for that, i worked in Product Engineering too) :) more information on Antifuse can be found here. i should know, i helped write it :).
- j