The graphics hardware is very powerful, but the CPU lets it down. All transformations have to be done by the CPU, which I'd rate at between a P166 and a P200. (it does have some vector floating point operations, but they don't buy you as much as you'd hope - also, it has no L2 cache.)
In practice we always found that the graphics card could easily handle all the polygons that the CPU could throw at it. However, both the games that I've worked on did involve a fair bit of physics calculations, which took away CPU bandwidth from the vertex transforms.
The best thing about the graphics card is the texture compression, which is very similar to the stuff that S3 uses. It gives you a 4:1 compression ratio, and as long as you don't use it for loading screen etc. you can't tell the difference. Overall the DC has 8Mb of texture memory, and you might lose about 3-4Mb on framebuffers and vertex list scratch space, but that leaves you the equivalent of 16-20Mb of space, which allows you very high detail textures, especially in the kind game (like Soul Calibur) where you only have one smallish scene and a couple of characters.
The graphics in PC's tend to be stunted by the fact that they have to be able to run on lower-spec systems.
The reason people don't post pro-windows posts to/. is that they tend to get rather badly flamed or told to 'get a decent operating system' in a sickeningly patronising way.
Also, many windows-related posts will get moderated down as 'Troll', even if it's a perfectly valid point or question.
/. is vastly biased to towards Linux, supportive of less popular alternative OSs, and very biased against Microsoft operating systems. Don't be suprised if windows users don't read/., as it can be a very intolerant environment. There are a vocal minority (or at least I hope it's a minority) who are very open source, but not very open minded.
"A piece of Lego" "I have a lot of Lego" "I have built a robot out of Lego"
One could argue that I'm only saying this because I'm British (Where the plural of 'A Lego brick' is always* 'Lego'), but I do actaully have some justification - from the rec.toys.lego FAQ:
While most people point out that they just say LEGOs, lunatic@netcom.com (Lunatic Johnathan Bruce E'Sex) dug out:
One catalogue, dated 1980, has the following on its back page:
Dear Parents and Children The word LEGO(R) is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you!
I see it as much like sand - you'd say:
"A grain of sand" vs "A sand" "I have a lot of sand" vs "I have a lot of sands" "I have built a castle out of sand" vs "I have built a castle out of sands"
Pedantic, I know - but it just always sounds so wrong when people refer to them as "Legos"...
What it means is that everybody is free to use decryption, but if the police wish to read one of your encrypted messages, they can get a warrant that will require you to hand over your key. Presumably non-compliance would put you in contempt of court and you might end up in jail.
However, if you're using encryption to cover up something that would get you a very long jail term anyway, you might as well just destroy your key and put up with a smaller term for contempt of court.
Personally, I would never, ever order a book from fatbrain.com or barnesandnoble.com - they use Windows servers, and I refuse to support companies that use Windows when there are alternatives. Amazon, of course, uses Digital Unix.
What a bizarre comment.
Did it ever occur to you that they use windows because it happened to be the best option for them? Even if you accept that a Unix solution would be better, there are a whole load of very good reasons why they might have NT. For instance: imagine that when they started up, they only had a few guys on board and the server guy happened to know NT best. Naturally, they would then choose NT. Now, given that it would be a pain for them to change over to a different system, why should they? especially if the systems they have at present does the job anyway.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
In general, companies don't tend to be religious about what operating system they use - they have their own best interests at heart and will do whatever they feel works best for them. It's not some weird conspiracy or anything...
Um, surely they'd just have to open up their source for the things they do to the kernel - but as an OS is much more than just a kernel, they could keep the rest proprietary.
I was under the impression that ADSL gave perforamance that was roughly in the same ballpark as cable modems - however, that's not really the most important point. Cable in this country is far less widespread than in the US, with many more people getting their extra (non-terrestrial) channels via satellite. Cable is only avaliable in some areas, mainly in the centre of large cities. However, as ADSL can operate over BT's existing network, which covers practically 100% of the population, it could make broadband access avaliable to all.
cheers,
Tim
P.S. At present ADSL is avaliable in a couple of areas as a BT trial. According to NTK, BT will be start rolling out across the country in September, and it will have a monthly cost of £30 (around $48)/month.
I admit I find it difficult to understand how this guy can be in the same industry as me - perhaps they work differently at Probe?
Games are much, much more that just a 'graphics engine' with a some art tacked on, otherwise you've got little more than a VRML 1.0 viewer.
Sure, it's not that difficult to get a simple graphics engine up and running that will get some 3d objects on the screen, however you need much more than that for a modern game. You need to have an engine that is flexible and easy to use - it's important that all the coders working on the game don't have to waste any time bending over backwards to get something to work. It's not easy to make an engine flexible and easy to use - there are a lot of comprimises that you have to make, and considerable design effort goes into it.
Also, getting 3d graphics to go fast *isn't* something that anybody can easily do now - the difference between a naive and a streamlined graphics pipeline can be very big - you could easily see in the order of a 200% performance increase. That makes the difference between 'playable' and 'unplayable' on lower-end machines.
Other than that, there's all the game code itself - AI, menu code - game logic, simulation, effects etc... The code to handle the game itself will normally be considerably larger than the code to handle the graphics.
Also, another point about game art. It tends to take a lot longer to produce the original art and maps for a game than it does to produce add-on or replacement art later, simply because it was having to be developed at the same time as the game. Once the code is done, the process is much more streamlined, because everything needed to do it is in place.
believe it has become a trend for commercial software developers to only release their products for MS Windows simply because that's what Windows stands for -- monetary gain.
Well of course - games companies are out to make money, and the choice of platform is dictated by the amount of money that can be made from releasing games on that platform.
to port video games from other operating systems to Linux... should rest on the developer's shoulders.
Again, only if they can recoup the development costs in doing that. Otherwise they are simply being rather generous in letting someone else access the source code.
The main problem with releasing games for multiple operating systems is the support. That's why you'll notice that many of the Linux ports are being released without any support - it's just too expensive.
I respect your opinion if you want to think that Be is the greatest ever, but please, don't attack free software just because you don't understand it and you're not a developer.
Actually, the reason I love BeOS is because it's so much fun to develop for. I find it much nicer than both UNIX and Windows to program for.
BeOS users just tend to be of the opinion that 'not all software has to be open source', rather than 'open source sucks', but they do get an awful lot of shit from the Linux & Open Source crowds about how crap BeOS is because it's not open source, and how they ought to use a 'real' operating system like Linux, and how Open Source projects shouldn't be ported to it because the OS is proprietary. Often it seems like Open Source software should be 'free' but only to run on Linux...
Dude, haven't you ever looked at the responese you get around here to anything which isn't Linux or Open Source? Anybody who chooses not to use Linux gets derided as somehow incapable, stupid, or both. The worst Be advocates seem to do in general is to just always keep going on about it with a somewhat incessant cheery enthusiasm, but in general they don't slur the users of other Operating Systems. I see stuff that's not far off the emails posted up on the Mindcraft site on slashdot every day. It's depressing.
It sounds to me like they might be running BeOS with a few utilities ported ever from Linux - BeOS boots up *very* quickly - it takes longer for my computer to go through the pre-boot stuff (graphcis card init, SCSI startup, memory check etc...) that it does to go from there to the desktop. Apparently version 4.5 is even quicker - I imagine Be could quite easily make a version that took a few shortcuts, as they know the exact specs of the system to speed it up some more, resulting in a bootup which is only a few seconds long.
However, there's not an awful lot I can do about it - Linux is just often not an option. I *have* to work on Windows. I did try putting Linux on my computer at home, but I just didn't really like it - getting it to work just seemed to involve far too much work. - I'd hardly describe myself as 'feeble' - I'd just rather get on with using an OS rather than spending ages getting it configured so that I can use it...
Now I use BeOS as my alternative OS - it's cute and fun to program to.
I get the impression from the website that the upgrade is an upgrade from version 3 to version 4.5, and replaces the upgrade that used to be avaliable of 3 to 4.
Although Windows 9x leaves a lot to be desired on the stability front, it is a mistake to assume that all code that comes out of Microsoft will be bad. There are a lot of very talented, dedicated people working at Microsoft, and although they produce their fair share of crap, there are a lot of good products that they produce. DirectX is a good example - the first couple of incarnations were shit, but now they've got a pretty neat multimedia API. Sure, it's got some problems *cough*DirectSound*cough*, but the quality is improving all the time.
I've met some of their engineers, and I can assure you that the ones I met were earnest, dedicated and professional, and committed to producing something cool and neat. Now, I agree that they've got some pretty sick bastards higher up the scale in management, but don't let that fool you. The engineers are still human.
In what is Opera not helping Linux? Opera software is producing another alternative browser for the system. The only reason we view browsers as 'basic applications' is that we've become accustomed to them being given away for free due to the MS/Netscape war. Browsers are fairly complex programs, which take a lot of time to develop - Netscape and IE were (and are) developed off the back of other, non-free software.
I just don't see how increased choice can be bad for Linux users.
I really don't see what's wrong with charging for a web browser. It's just another piece of sofware, after all. Opera's success will hinge on whether it offers sufficient advantages over it's free competitors for people to pay for it. If you don't think it's worth it, fine; use one of the other browsers. At least this way you get a choice - if Opera was free we wouldn't *have* Opera. The programmers working on it would we working on something else to support themselves instead.
Slashdot Mirror
The graphics hardware is very powerful, but the CPU lets it down. All transformations have to be done by the CPU, which I'd rate at between a P166 and a P200. (it does have some vector floating point operations, but they don't buy you as much as you'd hope - also, it has no L2 cache.)
In practice we always found that the graphics card could easily handle all the polygons that the CPU could throw at it. However, both the games that I've worked on did involve a fair bit of physics calculations, which took away CPU bandwidth from the vertex transforms.
The best thing about the graphics card is the texture compression, which is very similar to the stuff that S3 uses. It gives you a 4:1 compression ratio, and as long as you don't use it for loading screen etc. you can't tell the difference. Overall the DC has 8Mb of texture memory, and you might lose about 3-4Mb on framebuffers and vertex list scratch space, but that leaves you the equivalent of 16-20Mb of space, which allows you very high detail textures, especially in the kind game (like Soul Calibur) where you only have one smallish scene and a couple of characters.
The graphics in PC's tend to be stunted by the fact that they have to be able to run on lower-spec systems.
cheers,
Tim
The reason people don't post pro-windows posts to /. is that they tend to get rather badly flamed or told to 'get a decent operating system' in a sickeningly patronising way.
/., as it can be a very intolerant environment. There are a vocal minority (or at least I hope it's a minority) who are very open source, but not very open minded.
Also, many windows-related posts will get moderated down as 'Troll', even if it's a perfectly valid point or question.
/. is vastly biased to towards Linux, supportive of less popular alternative OSs, and very biased against Microsoft operating systems. Don't be suprised if windows users don't read
Hmmm - doesn't that put
Linux = software crop von the....
Er... let's not go there...
"A piece of Lego"
"I have a lot of Lego"
"I have built a robot out of Lego"
One could argue that I'm only saying this because I'm British (Where the plural of 'A Lego brick' is always* 'Lego'), but I do actaully have some justification - from the rec.toys.lego FAQ:
I see it as much like sand - you'd say
"A grain of sand" vs "A sand"
"I have a lot of sand" vs "I have a lot of sands"
"I have built a castle out of sand" vs "I have built a castle out of sands"
Pedantic, I know - but it just always sounds so wrong when people refer to them as "Legos"...
cheers,
Tim
Can't believe you turned down the opportunity to work out how much mp3 playlength you could fit on one, Rob...
What it means is that everybody is free to use decryption, but if the police wish to read one of your encrypted messages, they can get a warrant that will require you to hand over your key. Presumably non-compliance would put you in contempt of court and you might end up in jail.
However, if you're using encryption to cover up something that would get you a very long jail term anyway, you might as well just destroy your key and put up with a smaller term for contempt of court.
Personally, I would never, ever order a book from fatbrain.com or barnesandnoble.com - they use Windows servers, and I refuse to support companies that use Windows when there are alternatives. Amazon, of course, uses Digital Unix.
What a bizarre comment.
Did it ever occur to you that they use windows because it happened to be the best option for them? Even if you accept that a Unix solution would be better, there are a whole load of very good reasons why they might have NT. For instance: imagine that when they started up, they only had a few guys on board and the server guy happened to know NT best. Naturally, they would then choose NT. Now, given that it would be a pain for them to change over to a different system, why should they? especially if the systems they have at present does the job anyway.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
In general, companies don't tend to be religious about what operating system they use - they have their own best interests at heart and will do whatever they feel works best for them. It's not some weird conspiracy or anything...
Um, surely they'd just have to open up their source for the things they do to the kernel - but as an OS is much more than just a kernel, they could keep the rest proprietary.
cheers,
Tim
P.S. At present ADSL is avaliable in a couple of areas as a BT trial. According to NTK, BT will be start rolling out across the country in September, and it will have a monthly cost of £30 (around $48)/month.
Huh?
I admit I find it difficult to understand how this guy can be in the same industry as me - perhaps they work differently at Probe?
Games are much, much more that just a 'graphics engine' with a some art tacked on, otherwise you've got little more than a VRML 1.0 viewer.
Sure, it's not that difficult to get a simple graphics engine up and running that will get some 3d objects on the screen, however you need much more than that for a modern game. You need to have an engine that is flexible and easy to use - it's important that all the coders working on the game don't have to waste any time bending over backwards to get something to work. It's not easy to make an engine flexible and easy to use - there are a lot of comprimises that you have to make, and considerable design effort goes into it.
Also, getting 3d graphics to go fast *isn't* something that anybody can easily do now - the difference between a naive and a streamlined graphics pipeline can be very big - you could easily see in the order of a 200% performance increase. That makes the difference between 'playable' and 'unplayable' on lower-end machines.
Other than that, there's all the game code itself - AI, menu code - game logic, simulation, effects etc... The code to handle the game itself will normally be considerably larger than the code to handle the graphics.
Also, another point about game art. It tends to take a lot longer to produce the original art and maps for a game than it does to produce add-on or replacement art later, simply because it was having to be developed at the same time as the game. Once the code is done, the process is much more streamlined, because everything needed to do it is in place.
cheers,
Tim
Well of course - games companies are out to make money, and the choice of platform is dictated by the amount of money that can be made from releasing games on that platform.
to port video games from other operating systems to Linux ... should rest on the developer's shoulders.
Again, only if they can recoup the development costs in doing that. Otherwise they are simply being rather generous in letting someone else access the source code.
The main problem with releasing games for multiple operating systems is the support. That's why you'll notice that many of the Linux ports are being released without any support - it's just too expensive.
I thought he was very good in:
What's eating Gilbert grape
Total Eclipse
Romeo & Juliet
Although he's been in his fair share of duff films as well
I think he would be an interesting (if not neccesarily the best) actor for the role.
"Microworkz does not run a BeOS/Linux hybrid, but an OS based on the ideas found therein."
Huh?
a) What does 'based on the ideas found therein' actually mean?
b) Where does this 'Clarification' come from? I've not seen any other articles which have any new definite information in them about the OS...
Perhaps this will teach daveo to make use of the 'preview' button next time...
Actually, the reason I love BeOS is because it's so much fun to develop for. I find it much nicer than both UNIX and Windows to program for.
BeOS users just tend to be of the opinion that 'not all software has to be open source', rather than 'open source sucks', but they do get an awful lot of shit from the Linux & Open Source crowds about how crap BeOS is because it's not open source, and how they ought to use a 'real' operating system like Linux, and how Open Source projects shouldn't be ported to it because the OS is proprietary. Often it seems like Open Source software should be 'free' but only to run on Linux...
Dude, haven't you ever looked at the responese you get around here to anything which isn't Linux or Open Source? Anybody who chooses not to use Linux gets derided as somehow incapable, stupid, or both. The worst Be advocates seem to do in general is to just always keep going on about it with a somewhat incessant cheery enthusiasm, but in general they don't slur the users of other Operating Systems. I see stuff that's not far off the emails posted up on the Mindcraft site on slashdot every day. It's depressing.
It sounds to me like they might be running BeOS with a few utilities ported ever from Linux - BeOS boots up *very* quickly - it takes longer for my computer to go through the pre-boot stuff (graphcis card init, SCSI startup, memory check etc...) that it does to go from there to the desktop. Apparently version 4.5 is even quicker - I imagine Be could quite easily make a version that took a few shortcuts, as they know the exact specs of the system to speed it up some more, resulting in a bootup which is only a few seconds long.
I often complain about flaws I find in Windows.
However, there's not an awful lot I can do about it - Linux is just often not an option. I *have* to work on Windows. I did try putting Linux on my computer at home, but I just didn't really like it - getting it to work just seemed to involve far too much work. - I'd hardly describe myself as 'feeble' - I'd just rather get on with using an OS rather than spending ages getting it configured so that I can use it...
Now I use BeOS as my alternative OS - it's cute and fun to program to.
I'm suprised you're not breaking an NDA there, Bob!
I get the impression from the website that the upgrade is an upgrade from version 3 to version 4.5, and replaces the upgrade that used to be avaliable of 3 to 4.
If you've got a 100 user system, it's likely that the price of installing the OS isn't going to be that big an issue, considering the cost of
a) Hardware
b) Software applications
c) Maintainance & support
You'd go with the OS that supported the software that you wanted with the minimum of fuss, and had the support options you wanted.
Although I don't know this for sure - most old English country mansions like Bletchley were named after the family who first built them.
:(
You can search the UK phone directory for 'bletchley' here, but you'll need to do it region by region.
Although Windows 9x leaves a lot to be desired on the stability front, it is a mistake to assume that all code that comes out of Microsoft will be bad. There are a lot of very talented, dedicated people working at Microsoft, and although they produce their fair share of crap, there are a lot of good products that they produce. DirectX is a good example - the first couple of incarnations were shit, but now they've got a pretty neat multimedia API. Sure, it's got some problems *cough*DirectSound*cough*, but the quality is improving all the time.
I've met some of their engineers, and I can assure you that the ones I met were earnest, dedicated and professional, and committed to producing something cool and neat. Now, I agree that they've got some pretty sick bastards higher up the scale in management, but don't let that fool you. The engineers are still human.
In what is Opera not helping Linux? Opera software is producing another alternative browser for the system. The only reason we view browsers as 'basic applications' is that we've become accustomed to them being given away for free due to the MS/Netscape war. Browsers are fairly complex programs, which take a lot of time to develop - Netscape and IE were (and are) developed off the back of other, non-free software.
I just don't see how increased choice can be bad for Linux users.
I really don't see what's wrong with charging for a web browser. It's just another piece of sofware, after all. Opera's success will hinge on whether it offers sufficient advantages over it's free competitors for people to pay for it. If you don't think it's worth it, fine; use one of the other browsers. At least this way you get a choice - if Opera was free we wouldn't *have* Opera. The programmers working on it would we working on something else to support themselves instead.