I think more often than not it's the first step that's skipped. So many company do so little pre-planing. If more people took the time to analyze their problem and choose the correct arch/language there would be far fewer switches occuring. Choose the right tool for the job BEFORE you start, don't lock yourself into somehting just because it's there.
ATI Hired Precision Insight to do the drivers. This doesn't show that 3rd party drivers are better becuase PI was given all the information about the cards. ATI knew that they didn't have the Linux knowledge so the gave the job to someone who did. I think many company would be better off choosing this route.
This may be true if most designers WERE approaching software issuses with a real a plan. For the most part software is produced just to "scratch an itch". While this is a great way of getting more programs and programmers, it doesn't improve the quality of what is out there.
I don't believe that having your own linux box makes you becme a sysadmin. Perhaps a year or two ago, DEFINATELY 3 or 4 years ago, but now so many of the distributions are just stick a CD and go. I don't believe that loading Mandrake 7.2 onto your PC make you a sysadmin, or even comes close to the skill-set required for real system administration.
It's virtually impossible to do an exaustive run of a program unless it is just a straight computation. How would you "pre-run" say a Netscape browser and know all the possible buttons to be pushed? Also would you want to sit around and "pre-run" all your applications? This would take forever to start an app.
Sure some people look for clock speed over true performance, but I don't think that's the reason X86 chips have been outselling PowerPC. It has more to do with the fact that X86 chips are cheaper, more varied, and aftermarket parts are much easier to come by. Also that's where the software is.
Going there, doing that. It's called Augmented Reality, laying computer generated information/graphics over a view of the real world. These types of head mountted displays (HMD) are optical see-through displays. Eye tracking is currently impossible in a small HMDs, but it is being looked at. There are quite a few other problems such as calibrating for different focal depths, correct registration to the real world, head tracking, etc.
This is a clear case on why many of the people shouldn't be using a computer.
Exactly the opposite, this is why interfaces should be easier. Computers weren't meant to get in the way of people doing their jobs, they were meant to help people do them faster. Why shouldn't interfaces be intuitive? Shouldn't this be what we strive for?
The paypal tipping idea is working. Quite a few of the people that are doing "underground" work on the TiVos have gotten money. People are giving a few dollars here and there to show their appreciation and it shows.
Ok, first of all I own a TiVo and really like it. I'm a hardcore geek and never had problems programming my VCR. The difference between the VCR and the TiVo is that it's much easier. No tapes, single button record, pausing live tv, etc. Even my grandma could figure out how to tape with this thing.
Second, people keep saying "it's not like the comercials are gone." There are 2 parts to this.
1. The Replay and TiVo have the ability to either jump 30 sec ahead (Replay) or safely fast forward (tivo) through commercials. This is how they got the 88% statistic.
2. TiVo is also trying to make the commercials useful. To appease the advertisers (and make it interesting for users) on some broadcasts they have the ability to do single button recording when watching a commercial. Granted this only applies to commercials for specific shows _now_, but this could be expanded in later models to open a browser to the company's homepage or similiar action later on.
People also have to realize that the taping argument is the same as Tapes vs. MP3 (or wav). While I might not agree with the argument, it is a analog vs digital debate. The 2 systems currently have their own way of storing the video that noone has cracked, but that's probably only a matter of time. I'm not encouraging it, but it will happen.
I hope the article is right in that this will change television more and make it more narrow-casting.
Yes they're digital VCRs, but the Replay offers a 30 second skip ahead button and the TiVo has the ability to "safely" fast-forward through comercials (it jumps back a few seconds after you hit play).
This voxel acceleration isn't even being pushed for gaming. It's being pushed for Augmented/Virtual Reality surgery and oil drilling types of applications. Sure it'd be nice to have a voxel accelerator so when you blow some guys arm off in a game you can see chuncks fly correctly, but it's more important for other applications. I do research in AR and the fast the accelerator the better. We've already hit walls with $1400 OpenGL accelerators. Sure gaming is nice, but put on a head mounted display and try to make CG things look like they're in the real world and you'll see that acceleration has PLENTY of room to grow.
There are plenty more out there also. VR stuff looks fine for now, but when you're trying to make CG stuff look like real world stuff and have it line up with real world objects you can use all the acceleration you can get. Untill CG looks real we're not there yet.
Well the graphics quality used to be better. We bought a O2 for $14,000 ~2 years ago. Now a GeForce2 for $300 has about 4x the OpenGL performance when running on a PC. A Elsa Gloria XXL has about 4x better than the O2 and it supports all the features (quad buffering, stereo, etc). The hardware (O2) is just getting old and the development/support for them is tapering off under IRIX. Hopefully someone will keep it going though.
Who knows, this may happen. SGI is deprecating IRIX. Support kinda shows. They're not selling much hardware either. It seems like their Cray end is the only thing that's keeping them alive (there's one more company that's happy for the ban on nuclear testing). Hopefully SGI will keep helping with porting/developing open source projects. So far it hasn't been that great. There are some definate oversights from the Gnu camp on this too. Try this: 1. Write a simple program with a int main() call that just returns 0; 2. Compile it (using g++) and link in pthreads using -lpthread and debugging info 3. run gdb on the output... 4. Marvel at how you get a Signal ? Moral of the story: sure SGI should help other people, but other people should help SGI.
I really don't agree with this. I develop on WinNT using Visual C++ for a cross-platform project on Win32, Irix 6.5, SunOS, and Linux. We don't use cross compilers, but the IDE makes it worth it. Code completion and having the MSDN library is _MUCH_ easier than sifting through man pages. The IDE gives you tools to work with, you don't have to use the code they CAN add. My code looks almost identical to stuff that's developed by hand, but it took me less time to do. I don't think I'll be able to make the switch easily to strictly linux coding till kdevelop/codecrusader/codewarrior get better.
It's actually a brilliant move for Ford. People PC/HP/UUNet is probably charging Ford roughly $20 per person per month. Then the worker pays $5 of that. So Ford is paying $15 a month. If the person that gets the PC does 2 hours of work (sending e-mails, fixing up a document, etc) a month Ford makes their money back in productivity. Sure they may say they're fostering a better understanding of technology, but they're doing it in a way that benifits them. I definately don't see anything wrong with it though. People get cheap PC's with Internet access and Ford gets more work done. This is also why they would have to use MS. Having a ramp up time for their people to learn a new OS would be wasteful. Trust me, Ford is not about to replace thier Win95/NT platform choices overnight.
You site the sound integration as how things will be in the video card category, but there are some MAJOR differences. First accelerated video in home PCs is in an infantile state when compared with human vision. While we are very preceptive to sound, we are for a great deal visual animals.
Soundcard technologies have leveled off because there is only so much quality you can represent that people can differentiate. Better speakers or headphones can only do so much. Audio comming from a computer can sound umistakeably like real world sounds.
Video on the computer is FAR from being real world. Part of this is due to the technologies used (line scanning and refresh) compared to how vision works in the real world. Video processors have to try and emulate an analog world with a digital representation. For audio there is some cutoff as to how much you can sample before there's no difference between the digital and anlog signal.
Vision doesn't have to have any such cuttoff because of how the images are interpreted. There are only a specific amount of colors we can see, but that's only one factor in graphics and video. You also have to think about motion blur and things of that nature. We barely understand how we see and interperate as humans much less being able to represent these virually.
The only thing that would make improved video processors obsolete is some other type of sensory input which exceeds it in quality. Until then we'll still want better cards.
Everybody seems to be complaining about the fact that things are slower today, but what about the fact that 40Gbps is now being rerouted through other means. That's pretty damn impressive. Sure the people who snipped the lines are idiots, but the whole net didn't come crashing down. Anyway just my $.02
Everyone complains that the e machines looked so much like the iMac.. well no one seems to complain that their sony TV looks a hell of alot like a Toshiba or anything else. Apple didn't invent colored plastic, why should they be the only ones that get to use it?
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I think more often than not it's the first step that's skipped. So many company do so little pre-planing. If more people took the time to analyze their problem and choose the correct arch/language there would be far fewer switches occuring. Choose the right tool for the job BEFORE you start, don't lock yourself into somehting just because it's there.
ATI Hired Precision Insight to do the drivers. This doesn't show that 3rd party drivers are better becuase PI was given all the information about the cards. ATI knew that they didn't have the Linux knowledge so the gave the job to someone who did. I think many company would be better off choosing this route.
This may be true if most designers WERE approaching software issuses with a real a plan. For the most part software is produced just to "scratch an itch". While this is a great way of getting more programs and programmers, it doesn't improve the quality of what is out there.
I don't believe that having your own linux box makes you becme a sysadmin. Perhaps a year or two ago, DEFINATELY 3 or 4 years ago, but now so many of the distributions are just stick a CD and go. I don't believe that loading Mandrake 7.2 onto your PC make you a sysadmin, or even comes close to the skill-set required for real system administration.
It's virtually impossible to do an exaustive run of a program unless it is just a straight computation. How would you "pre-run" say a Netscape browser and know all the possible buttons to be pushed? Also would you want to sit around and "pre-run" all your applications? This would take forever to start an app.
Sure some people look for clock speed over true performance, but I don't think that's the reason X86 chips have been outselling PowerPC. It has more to do with the fact that X86 chips are cheaper, more varied, and aftermarket parts are much easier to come by. Also that's where the software is.
I'm jealous that ISAR2000(International Symposium on Augmented Reality) didn't get as much press.
Going there, doing that. It's called Augmented Reality, laying computer generated information/graphics over a view of the real world. These types of head mountted displays (HMD) are optical see-through displays. Eye tracking is currently impossible in a small HMDs, but it is being looked at. There are quite a few other problems such as calibrating for different focal depths, correct registration to the real world, head tracking, etc.
I must say that these are great....
This is a clear case on why many of the people shouldn't be using a computer.
Exactly the opposite, this is why interfaces should be easier. Computers weren't meant to get in the way of people doing their jobs, they were meant to help people do them faster. Why shouldn't interfaces be intuitive? Shouldn't this be what we strive for?
The paypal tipping idea is working. Quite a few of the people that are doing "underground" work on the TiVos have gotten money. People are giving a few dollars here and there to show their appreciation and it shows.
Believe none of what you hear and only half (or maybe less) of what you see.
That's fine, but this is _free_ and open source.
Ok, first of all I own a TiVo and really like it. I'm a hardcore geek and never had problems programming my VCR. The difference between the VCR and the TiVo is that it's much easier. No tapes, single button record, pausing live tv, etc. Even my grandma could figure out how to tape with this thing.
Second, people keep saying "it's not like the comercials are gone." There are 2 parts to this.
1. The Replay and TiVo have the ability to either jump 30 sec ahead (Replay) or safely fast forward (tivo) through commercials. This is how they got the 88% statistic.
2. TiVo is also trying to make the commercials useful. To appease the advertisers (and make it interesting for users) on some broadcasts they have the ability to do single button recording when watching a commercial. Granted this only applies to commercials for specific shows _now_, but this could be expanded in later models to open a browser to the company's homepage or similiar action later on.
People also have to realize that the taping argument is the same as Tapes vs. MP3 (or wav). While I might not agree with the argument, it is a analog vs digital debate. The 2 systems currently have their own way of storing the video that noone has cracked, but that's probably only a matter of time. I'm not encouraging it, but it will happen.
I hope the article is right in that this will change television more and make it more narrow-casting.
Yes they're digital VCRs, but the Replay offers a 30 second skip ahead button and the TiVo has the ability to "safely" fast-forward through comercials (it jumps back a few seconds after you hit play).
This voxel acceleration isn't even being pushed for gaming. It's being pushed for Augmented/Virtual Reality surgery and oil drilling types of applications. Sure it'd be nice to have a voxel accelerator so when you blow some guys arm off in a game you can see chuncks fly correctly, but it's more important for other applications. I do research in AR and the fast the accelerator the better. We've already hit walls with $1400 OpenGL accelerators. Sure gaming is nice, but put on a head mounted display and try to make CG things look like they're in the real world and you'll see that acceleration has PLENTY of room to grow.
Links for those interested in AR:
rit.edu
Media Lab
The Navy
There are plenty more out there also. VR stuff looks fine for now, but when you're trying to make CG stuff look like real world stuff and have it line up with real world objects you can use all the acceleration you can get. Untill CG looks real we're not there yet.
Well the graphics quality used to be better. We bought a O2 for $14,000 ~2 years ago. Now a GeForce2 for $300 has about 4x the OpenGL performance when running on a PC. A Elsa Gloria XXL has about 4x better than the O2 and it supports all the features (quad buffering, stereo, etc). The hardware (O2) is just getting old and the development/support for them is tapering off under IRIX. Hopefully someone will keep it going though.
Who knows, this may happen. SGI is deprecating IRIX. Support kinda shows. They're not selling much hardware either. It seems like their Cray end is the only thing that's keeping them alive (there's one more company that's happy for the ban on nuclear testing). Hopefully SGI will keep helping with porting/developing open source projects. So far it hasn't been that great. There are some definate oversights from the Gnu camp on this too. Try this: 1. Write a simple program with a int main() call that just returns 0; 2. Compile it (using g++) and link in pthreads using -lpthread and debugging info 3. run gdb on the output... 4. Marvel at how you get a Signal ? Moral of the story: sure SGI should help other people, but other people should help SGI.
I really don't agree with this. I develop on WinNT using Visual C++ for a cross-platform project on Win32, Irix 6.5, SunOS, and Linux. We don't use cross compilers, but the IDE makes it worth it. Code completion and having the MSDN library is _MUCH_ easier than sifting through man pages. The IDE gives you tools to work with, you don't have to use the code they CAN add. My code looks almost identical to stuff that's developed by hand, but it took me less time to do. I don't think I'll be able to make the switch easily to strictly linux coding till kdevelop/codecrusader/codewarrior get better.
It's actually a brilliant move for Ford. People PC/HP/UUNet is probably charging Ford roughly $20 per person per month. Then the worker pays $5 of that. So Ford is paying $15 a month. If the person that gets the PC does 2 hours of work (sending e-mails, fixing up a document, etc) a month Ford makes their money back in productivity. Sure they may say they're fostering a better understanding of technology, but they're doing it in a way that benifits them. I definately don't see anything wrong with it though. People get cheap PC's with Internet access and Ford gets more work done. This is also why they would have to use MS. Having a ramp up time for their people to learn a new OS would be wasteful. Trust me, Ford is not about to replace thier Win95/NT platform choices overnight.
You site the sound integration as how things will be in the video card category, but there are some MAJOR differences. First accelerated video in home PCs is in an infantile state when compared with human vision. While we are very preceptive to sound, we are for a great deal visual animals.
Soundcard technologies have leveled off because there is only so much quality you can represent that people can differentiate. Better speakers or headphones can only do so much. Audio comming from a computer can sound umistakeably like real world sounds.
Video on the computer is FAR from being real world. Part of this is due to the technologies used (line scanning and refresh) compared to how vision works in the real world. Video processors have to try and emulate an analog world with a digital representation. For audio there is some cutoff as to how much you can sample before there's no difference between the digital and anlog signal.
Vision doesn't have to have any such cuttoff because of how the images are interpreted. There are only a specific amount of colors we can see, but that's only one factor in graphics and video. You also have to think about motion blur and things of that nature. We barely understand how we see and interperate as humans much less being able to represent these virually.
The only thing that would make improved video processors obsolete is some other type of sensory input which exceeds it in quality. Until then we'll still want better cards.
Everybody seems to be complaining about the fact that things are slower today, but what about the fact that 40Gbps is now being rerouted through other means. That's pretty damn impressive. Sure the people who snipped the lines are idiots, but the whole net didn't come crashing down.
Anyway just my $.02
Everyone complains that the e machines looked so much like the iMac.. well no one seems to complain that their sony TV looks a hell of alot like a Toshiba or anything else. Apple didn't invent colored plastic, why should they be the only ones that get to use it?
Yeah they were still being uploaded at the time.. you could see them grow if you refreshed...