AH HAH HAH HAH HAH HA HA HA HAH HAH HA HAH HAH HA
on
id On Linux: Bad News
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· Score: 1
That's the funniest damn thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. Wow, I bet you feel stupid now. Heh. (Hint: Lose the sig next time you post "anonymously")
Can you give me a link to wherever you discovered that Palm uses BJT's? RTL logic has been obsolete for decades. If they are really using that stuff, they ought to be taken out and shot.
Also, how do you figure that the fourth pin on a MOSFET makes any difference? In every diagram I've seen, the base pin is always connected to the source pin, if it is even drawn. Usually, and especially in digital circuits, the base pin is omitted because there isn't anything useful you can do with it...
And why are you talking about flip-flops being designed with BJT's? It's either everything in the chip is made from BJT's or everything in the chip is made from MOSFET's, or everything is made using a newer, non-obsolete method (aren't MOSFET's obsolete for digital logic as well?).
For that matter, why are you talking about flip-flops in relation to SDRAM? RAM does not use flip-flops. Only registers do, and they typically use D flip-flops, not J/K.
Your post confuses me... it almost seems as if you took a bunch of words related to electronic circuits and threw them together randomly... Do explain.
OK, I admit that I am not intimately familiar with this, but, as I understand it, MP3 compresses in blocks of one second each. This means that any voice communications done in MP3 would automatically have a latency of two seconds (round trip), which would be unacceptable. So, you'd want to use a compression format designed for real time communication. This, of course, means a trade off in bandwidth, quality, and/or required processing power. Anyway, just a small point there. (Anyone know more details?)
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Re:Still closed drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
Yeah, that does suck... NVidia wanted to release specs (they even made a good start), but NDA's prevented them from doing so.
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Re:Open source drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 1
As I understand it, they have had some problems working page flipping into the XFree86 architecture, but the next driver version is supposed to support it. I don't know about the grahpics overlay, but it sounds like the kind of thing that they'd be working on supporting soon.
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Re:So do their Windows drivers suck, too?
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 3
Even for the enormous Linux kernel module that's required to use their drivers? Really?
Yes. The only part that is Linux-dependent is the abstraction layer, for which the source code is provided. The same kernel module with a different abstraction layer is used on Windows. (If you don't believe me, head on over to that Linux dev page at nvidia -- the one with the register-level specs and such. Too bad the specs are incomplete due to NDA's...)
Does their Windows driver, after less than a week of use, bloat to consume over 200MB of virtual memory?
No one knows -- Windows itself bloats faster.:) OK, that memory leak is obviously something they are working on. It is beta software. Does it hurt so much to restart X once every few days?
they don't seem to care about keeping up with development kernels
Do you honestly expect them to?
I haven't exactly put much work into fixing the problem (but how can I, when I can't even recompile with debugging symbols?)
You have the source code for the abstraction layer in the NVidia kernel module. Any changes necessary can be made there.
Voodoo2 glide; the frame rate may not have been as fast, but the rate of driver improvment certainly was faster.
That's because NVidia's Linux driver does not require much in the way of improvements. It is pretty much complete, except for some minor bug fixes. Compare this to the Voodoo 5 driver, which was supposed to be ready a month after the release of the hardware. It is still in very poor shape (only supports one processor, no FSAA) despite having open source code.
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Re:Open source drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 5
The number of open source hackers that might fix a bug are much, much larger than the number of employees at nVivia working on drivers.
Unfortunately, you are incorrect. Compare NVidia's drivers to 3dfx's Voodoo 5 drivers. It seems as if 3dfx was simply expecting a few hundred developers to show up as soon as they made the drivers open source. As it turns out, only a couple of people outside 3dfx have made contributions, and one of them was paid to do it. It's sad, but it's true.
NVidia, on the other hand, uses the same codebase for both their Windows and Linux drivers. As a result, one could pretty much say that most of NVidia's in-house developers (over one hundred of them) are actively working on the Linux drivers. That's far more people than are working on the Linux Voodoo 5 driver, and because they are all in-house, they are much better prepared to write the drivers. After all, if one of them has a question about the hardware, they can walk down the hall and ask the lead designer.
I get this funny feeling that someone is going to say, "Well, they only have a few people working on the Linux-specific stuff." This is true, but the Linux-specific code is a very small part of the driver (less that 5%). In contrast, the far fewer 3dfx people have to implement the whole Voodoo 5 driver, including all the non-system-specific stuff, on their own. DRI helps, but it doesn't do everything.
You think your problem with the NVidia driver would be fixed if it were open source? Well, maybe, but open source really isn't the software development Utopia that you think it is. At least the NVidia driver supports all of the features of the hardware (all of them), and at (almost) full speed, as opposed to the Voodoo 5 driver which still does not support the V5's trademark parallel SLI processing or FSAA.
Disclaimer: I am by no means against open source software. Hell, I write open source software.
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Re:Still closed drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 5
Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux.
Odd... they have not crashed on me in... umm... two driver versions ago... and then the only crashes I ever had were when switching VC's. The only problem is the memory leak when OpenGL programs crash. My OpenGL programs crash alot when I'm writing them.:) But restarting X once every few days isn't much trouble.
Also when updating kernels that driver break a lot since it is binary only.
The NVidia kernel module is different from the old SBLive binary module in that the NVidia module has a source code layer between it and the kernel. To make the driver work with a new kernel version, you just have to update the source code layer, and in most cases you don't have to make any changes anyway. The binary part of the distribution is in no way dependent on your kernel version.
The SBLive was also different in that Creative didn't really give a rat's ass about the Linux support, whereas NVidia has basically made Linux an official supported platform and is keeping the Linux drivers exactly up-to-date with the Windows drivers.
So please even if you like their hardware don't support them till they open the drivers. In the long run it will help us a lot more. Teaching companies that drivers alone are not enough.
Don't forget that NVidia's OpenGL driver is the best in consumer 3D graphics. A significant portion of this driver could easily be used to enhance any other company's drivers. The software T&L engine, for example, which contains optimizations for all those instruction sets -- I'm sure 3dfx would love to get its hands on that! Graphics hardware manufacturers typically don't even support OpenGL since writing D3D drivers takes far less work, but NVidia has gone so far as to have better OpenGL support than D3D support. They would lose a significant edge if they openned their drivers.
Let's not forget why we use open source software. I don't know about you, but I use whatever software is of the highest quality. I don't care if it is open or not. In many cases, open source produces better quality software than closed source, which is why I use it. In some cases, though, closed source is better. NVidia's closed Linux drivers are far and away the highest quality 3D graphics drivers available on Linux, and the GeForce 2 has been fully supported since before the card was even announced. The open source Voodoo 5 drivers, on the other hand, are crap to this day. I'm sure you won't have much trouble finding a Linux user who will trade you a Voodoo 5 for whatever NVidia card you have, if that's really what you want.
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more speed = better quality
on
Nvidia's NV20
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· Score: 3
The increase in speed doesn't just go to framerate. Newer game engines will have their framerate locked (at a user-specified value) and will vary visual quality based on how fast the hardware is.
How can that extra speed be used? More polygons, gloss maps, dot product bump mapping, elevation maps, detail maps, better transparency/opacity, motion blur, cartoon rendering, shadow maps/volumes, dynamic lighting, environment mapping, reflections, full screen anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc. I could go on forever. All this will be in my game engine, of course.:)
As I recall... When the Voodoo 3 (and before it, the Banshee) came out, there was a question in their FAQ's about texture size. It went something like this:
Q: With all of your competitors supporting 2kx2k textures, don't you think the 256x256 limit of the [Voodoo 3 or Bashee] will cause problems?
A: Because we are the market leaders in 3D graphics hardware, game designers are designing their games to work on our hardware. That means that they will not put textures larger than 256x256 in their games because if they did then their game would not work on 3dfx cards. So, supporting larger textures is unnecessary.
That was my first clue that 3dfx was dying (I was a fan of theirs back then). Of course, they removed this question and answer from the FAQ after a short time, and you won't find any trace of it today.
Letting people defend their own IP sounds like a good idea in theory, but I wonder about how practical it would be. For example, the only way to prevent people from recording a piece of music would be to lock down the music player all the way to the speakers, which is totally unreasonable, not to mention something that Slashdotters frequently speak out against. You can bet that you would not be allowed to play that music on Linux. After all, redirecting/dev/dsp to a raw WAV file is hardly a challenge.
It's sort of like Libertarianism. I like the idea, but there's no way in hell that it will work in practice. (see this comment for my take on that.)
..but being against pubic government protection...
I certainly don't want the goverment to have anything to do with my pubic area, either.:)
I honestly cannot understand how anyone could be so selfish as to say that it is not one's right to decide for themselves how the information they create is to be used.
If any one of you anti-copyright people has not spent at least several months of your free time working on something which you are giving away for free, then you have NO RIGHT to even argue about this. I expect anyone who responds to this post to start out by saying what it is that they have created.
Me? I've spent over a year working on a 3D game engine which is licensed under the LGPL.
All I can say is, if you don't like the way someone has licensed something, then just don't use their product. It just isn't right to say "I should be able to do whatever I want with this thing on which this person has spend months working." If it were not for them, the thing would not exist, and you certainly would not have it. So, if you want whatever it is that they have created, then give them your respect, damnit.
All the votes in Florida were in long before anyone knew that the counts were close there. They never project a winner in a state before the polls close.
Bush was declared the winner a while ago, but further Florida counts have shown Bush beating Gore by only 1310 votes. 13-hundred-and-fucking-ten. More votes than that are not yet counted. Furthermore, such a small margin will certainly warrent a recount.
Bush will probably win, but it is still possible for Gore to pull through. Amazing. Simply amazing.
Ever take statistics? If you count the votes for a completely random subset of the population, even if the subset is a very small subset, you can still be 99% certain that the winner in that subset will win the election. That's how they calculate these things. The only reason why the had to take back Florida is because the first few votes that they counted didn't represent a completely random subset of the Florida population.
I'm all for third parties, but here's the problem: Look at any of the undecided states. Look at the vote counts. Most Nader voters would prefer Gore over Bush. If you add Nader's votes to Gore in these states, Gore wins. This is true even in some of the states that have been declared Bush states. In other words, if everyone were forced to vote either Bush or Gore, Gore would win. As it is, either Bush or Gore is clearly going to win, but if Bush wins, it may not be what the people really wanted.
I'm all for third parties, but we need a new voting system where people can vote for Nader without effectively voting for Bush. Perhaps a system similar to Kuro5hin's comment moderation system?
It looks like whoever wins Florida will take the election. Watch that page very closely. Right now, Bush is ahead, but Gore is gaining on him at about the right rate to make it a tie.
Did you make sure to remove all signs of Mesa from/usr/lib,/usr/X11R6/lib,/usr/X11R6/lib/modules, etc.? That's what usually causes trouble with the drivers. This is Mesa's/XFree's fault, not NVidia's.
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit. I'm sorry if so. :(
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That's the funniest damn thing I've seen on Slashdot in a long time. Wow, I bet you feel stupid now. Heh. (Hint: Lose the sig next time you post "anonymously")
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modprobe emu10k1
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::wonders how he's been listening to music on his Debian box with the SBLive! for the last year::
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Can you give me a link to wherever you discovered that Palm uses BJT's? RTL logic has been obsolete for decades. If they are really using that stuff, they ought to be taken out and shot.
Also, how do you figure that the fourth pin on a MOSFET makes any difference? In every diagram I've seen, the base pin is always connected to the source pin, if it is even drawn. Usually, and especially in digital circuits, the base pin is omitted because there isn't anything useful you can do with it...
And why are you talking about flip-flops being designed with BJT's? It's either everything in the chip is made from BJT's or everything in the chip is made from MOSFET's, or everything is made using a newer, non-obsolete method (aren't MOSFET's obsolete for digital logic as well?).
For that matter, why are you talking about flip-flops in relation to SDRAM? RAM does not use flip-flops. Only registers do, and they typically use D flip-flops, not J/K.
Your post confuses me... it almost seems as if you took a bunch of words related to electronic circuits and threw them together randomly... Do explain.
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If you want mp3's of a CD you own, then download LAME and GRIP and make them yourself! It ain't hard. :)
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OK, I admit that I am not intimately familiar with this, but, as I understand it, MP3 compresses in blocks of one second each. This means that any voice communications done in MP3 would automatically have a latency of two seconds (round trip), which would be unacceptable. So, you'd want to use a compression format designed for real time communication. This, of course, means a trade off in bandwidth, quality, and/or required processing power. Anyway, just a small point there. (Anyone know more details?)
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Yeah, that does suck... NVidia wanted to release specs (they even made a good start), but NDA's prevented them from doing so.
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As I understand it, they have had some problems working page flipping into the XFree86 architecture, but the next driver version is supposed to support it. I don't know about the grahpics overlay, but it sounds like the kind of thing that they'd be working on supporting soon.
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Yes. The only part that is Linux-dependent is the abstraction layer, for which the source code is provided. The same kernel module with a different abstraction layer is used on Windows. (If you don't believe me, head on over to that Linux dev page at nvidia -- the one with the register-level specs and such. Too bad the specs are incomplete due to NDA's...)
No one knows -- Windows itself bloats faster. :) OK, that memory leak is obviously something they are working on. It is beta software. Does it hurt so much to restart X once every few days?
Do you honestly expect them to?
You have the source code for the abstraction layer in the NVidia kernel module. Any changes necessary can be made there.
That's because NVidia's Linux driver does not require much in the way of improvements. It is pretty much complete, except for some minor bug fixes. Compare this to the Voodoo 5 driver, which was supposed to be ready a month after the release of the hardware. It is still in very poor shape (only supports one processor, no FSAA) despite having open source code.
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Unfortunately, you are incorrect. Compare NVidia's drivers to 3dfx's Voodoo 5 drivers. It seems as if 3dfx was simply expecting a few hundred developers to show up as soon as they made the drivers open source. As it turns out, only a couple of people outside 3dfx have made contributions, and one of them was paid to do it. It's sad, but it's true.
NVidia, on the other hand, uses the same codebase for both their Windows and Linux drivers. As a result, one could pretty much say that most of NVidia's in-house developers (over one hundred of them) are actively working on the Linux drivers. That's far more people than are working on the Linux Voodoo 5 driver, and because they are all in-house, they are much better prepared to write the drivers. After all, if one of them has a question about the hardware, they can walk down the hall and ask the lead designer.
I get this funny feeling that someone is going to say, "Well, they only have a few people working on the Linux-specific stuff." This is true, but the Linux-specific code is a very small part of the driver (less that 5%). In contrast, the far fewer 3dfx people have to implement the whole Voodoo 5 driver, including all the non-system-specific stuff, on their own. DRI helps, but it doesn't do everything.
You think your problem with the NVidia driver would be fixed if it were open source? Well, maybe, but open source really isn't the software development Utopia that you think it is. At least the NVidia driver supports all of the features of the hardware (all of them), and at (almost) full speed, as opposed to the Voodoo 5 driver which still does not support the V5's trademark parallel SLI processing or FSAA.
Disclaimer: I am by no means against open source software. Hell, I write open source software.
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Odd... they have not crashed on me in... umm... two driver versions ago... and then the only crashes I ever had were when switching VC's. The only problem is the memory leak when OpenGL programs crash. My OpenGL programs crash alot when I'm writing them. :) But restarting X once every few days isn't much trouble.
The NVidia kernel module is different from the old SBLive binary module in that the NVidia module has a source code layer between it and the kernel. To make the driver work with a new kernel version, you just have to update the source code layer, and in most cases you don't have to make any changes anyway. The binary part of the distribution is in no way dependent on your kernel version.
The SBLive was also different in that Creative didn't really give a rat's ass about the Linux support, whereas NVidia has basically made Linux an official supported platform and is keeping the Linux drivers exactly up-to-date with the Windows drivers.
Don't forget that NVidia's OpenGL driver is the best in consumer 3D graphics. A significant portion of this driver could easily be used to enhance any other company's drivers. The software T&L engine, for example, which contains optimizations for all those instruction sets -- I'm sure 3dfx would love to get its hands on that! Graphics hardware manufacturers typically don't even support OpenGL since writing D3D drivers takes far less work, but NVidia has gone so far as to have better OpenGL support than D3D support. They would lose a significant edge if they openned their drivers.
Let's not forget why we use open source software. I don't know about you, but I use whatever software is of the highest quality. I don't care if it is open or not. In many cases, open source produces better quality software than closed source, which is why I use it. In some cases, though, closed source is better. NVidia's closed Linux drivers are far and away the highest quality 3D graphics drivers available on Linux, and the GeForce 2 has been fully supported since before the card was even announced. The open source Voodoo 5 drivers, on the other hand, are crap to this day. I'm sure you won't have much trouble finding a Linux user who will trade you a Voodoo 5 for whatever NVidia card you have, if that's really what you want.
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The increase in speed doesn't just go to framerate. Newer game engines will have their framerate locked (at a user-specified value) and will vary visual quality based on how fast the hardware is.
How can that extra speed be used? More polygons, gloss maps, dot product bump mapping, elevation maps, detail maps, better transparency/opacity, motion blur, cartoon rendering, shadow maps/volumes, dynamic lighting, environment mapping, reflections, full screen anti-aliasing, motion blur, etc. I could go on forever. All this will be in my game engine, of course. :)
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As I recall... When the Voodoo 3 (and before it, the Banshee) came out, there was a question in their FAQ's about texture size. It went something like this:
That was my first clue that 3dfx was dying (I was a fan of theirs back then). Of course, they removed this question and answer from the FAQ after a short time, and you won't find any trace of it today.
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I didn't say anything about modding me down. I said "Don't kill me". I was appologizing for making a breach of etiquette.
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And that's how it should be. :)
Letting people defend their own IP sounds like a good idea in theory, but I wonder about how practical it would be. For example, the only way to prevent people from recording a piece of music would be to lock down the music player all the way to the speakers, which is totally unreasonable, not to mention something that Slashdotters frequently speak out against. You can bet that you would not be allowed to play that music on Linux. After all, redirecting /dev/dsp to a raw WAV file is hardly a challenge.
It's sort of like Libertarianism. I like the idea, but there's no way in hell that it will work in practice. (see this comment for my take on that.)
I certainly don't want the goverment to have anything to do with my pubic area, either. :)
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3 in 10 quadrillion chance. Statistics don't lie. You can't argue this one.
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I honestly cannot understand how anyone could be so selfish as to say that it is not one's right to decide for themselves how the information they create is to be used.
If any one of you anti-copyright people has not spent at least several months of your free time working on something which you are giving away for free, then you have NO RIGHT to even argue about this. I expect anyone who responds to this post to start out by saying what it is that they have created.
Me? I've spent over a year working on a 3D game engine which is licensed under the LGPL.
All I can say is, if you don't like the way someone has licensed something, then just don't use their product. It just isn't right to say "I should be able to do whatever I want with this thing on which this person has spend months working." If it were not for them, the thing would not exist, and you certainly would not have it. So, if you want whatever it is that they have created, then give them your respect, damnit.
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All the votes in Florida were in long before anyone knew that the counts were close there. They never project a winner in a state before the polls close.
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Bush was declared the winner a while ago, but further Florida counts have shown Bush beating Gore by only 1310 votes. 13-hundred-and-fucking-ten. More votes than that are not yet counted. Furthermore, such a small margin will certainly warrent a recount.
Bush will probably win, but it is still possible for Gore to pull through. Amazing. Simply amazing.
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Ever take statistics? If you count the votes for a completely random subset of the population, even if the subset is a very small subset, you can still be 99% certain that the winner in that subset will win the election. That's how they calculate these things. The only reason why the had to take back Florida is because the first few votes that they counted didn't represent a completely random subset of the Florida population.
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I'm all for third parties, but we need a new voting system where people can vote for Nader without effectively voting for Bush. Perhaps a system similar to Kuro5hin's comment moderation system?
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It looks like whoever wins Florida will take the election. Watch that page very closely. Right now, Bush is ahead, but Gore is gaining on him at about the right rate to make it a tie.
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How, exactly, does one get a balloon to float outside of the Earth's atmosphere?
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Did you make sure to remove all signs of Mesa from /usr/lib, /usr/X11R6/lib, /usr/X11R6/lib/modules, etc.? That's what usually causes trouble with the drivers. This is Mesa's/XFree's fault, not NVidia's.
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