The collected works of Frapazoid - Page 1

I have a much more serious and important question.

How come it says Team Picard but the topbanner on the site shows the retro Kirk Enterprise?

Awesomes!

I like to have a "retro" computer around. I found an old Pentium (the first one) in a pawn shop and I loaded up Windows 3.11 on it. Just like my family's first computer - a 75mhz Pentium with 8 megs of RAM. Then I loaded in all the games and my old software like Redshift and Macromedia Action 3.0 and so on.

I even got it to go online through my broadband and ran AIM and stuff on it.

Eww, we really didn't need to hear about your grandpa and his mastodons

I've got a brand new Mac Mini with an Intel GMA750, and my old GeForce2 outspecs it quite nicely

Maybe they meant "Fastest within the context of Intel's budget GPUs."

I get the same error.



It does this no matter what I do. I put in an .fgfs file with:



But it still tries to process the clouds and crashes when it does.

I know it is reading the .fgfsrc file but it does not respect all of the options.

No, definately not IRIX on x86. It's not l33t enough.

the old CEO disappointed us fans and freaks by dismissing graphics. But he did what he had to do quite well.

Yup, like throw out all the graphics technology and make products that nobody gave a rat's ass about while other companies make a fortune on graphics for consumers

It was the only way

It's not just that there'd be a lot of specific code, is that being SGI's Unix is the main point of IRIX.

You know how all that works! Companies license the Unix source code then they customize it for their platform. IRIX is a Unix like any other with your command line and Motif and all that jazz, the whole point is it's going to run on your MIPS SGI, provide awesome MIPS compilers, offer full OpenGL and support for the 8 channel sound cards and 48-bit framebuffers and fifty mega billion jillion terabytes of RAM and whatnot.

IRIX has lots and lots of neat features and big numbers but so will most proprietary platforms for very big computers.

Nah, it wouldn't have saved them.

The problem is that cheap, commodity workstations were going to kill them because consumer graphics were getting huge and taking over.

So they went for the workstation market head on specifically. That's like attacking a walled city; not recommended.

They should've went the other route and got into consumer graphics. They have done consumer graphics devices before with the N64. Not that the N64 was in any way competitive in the 90s, that's not my point, my point is they had the resources to invest in developing something new and competitive on AGP or something. It's not like they couldn't transfer their patents and know-how to another target market.

SGI had enough coolness in graphics that plenty of people would have loved to have an SGI graphics card. I would've. I was familiar with the name SGI since I was a small kid and my brother showed me an article in his EGM magazine about them. Everyone knew SGI and had a strong association, SGI with graphics.

SGI for storage servers? Whiskey tango foxtrot?

It sounds very conservative and "safe" to think they should abandon the "flashy" graphics business and focus on those workstations, but we all know how well that went in practice.

Obviously hindsight's always 20/20, but I don't think it was a bright idea at the time either. If they could invest all they did to develop IA64 systems and completely reinvent their product line to compete with something everyone knew would kill them, surely they could spend that money to get into a business that (for very related reasons!!!) everyone knew would be huge.

You can't say they didn't know NVidia and the consumer graphics companies were going to be big; that's what got the ball rolling on all this.

What makes you think that if they couldn't compete with commodity workstations they could compete with commodity graphics?

Caaause making commodity workstations they would be selling essentially the exact same thing as any of their competitors.

Consumer graphics - and I'm talking about gaming class and above - is very competitive and they could actually put their technology to use. They've made GPUs for game consoles before, that's what ATI and Nvidia are doing now in addition to gaming cards for consumers.

And cards for workstations. The proprietary workstation may have gone the way of the dinosaur but workstation class parts for PCs are still on the market from ATI, Nvidia and a few others I can't think of right now.

SGI had a lot of technology years ahead of everyone else. Technology matters there.

Low class, made for MS Word type chips from Intel and SiS aren't what I was refering to.

It's a dead horse. You could fill an Encyclopaedia Brittanica-sized bookshelf with "they should have" but ... they didn't.

I know, I just get tired of hearing it's what the had to do .

It was a completely unambitious decision made from fear. Basically "RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY! CHEAP GRAPHICS ARE BETTER THAN US!!!"

I don't respect that at all and I don't think that sort of decision should be praised. It's wasn't wise, safe, mature, smart.

Making grown men cry.

SGI had a lot of technology years ahead of everyone else.

Emphasis added for anyone who's going suggest I was implying they have anything relevant now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSKGVncs_ZQ

I don't necessarily disagree with Apple's take on Flash, but they're reminding me of Nintendo in the early 90s.

In short, Nintendo was being a huge dildo to ISVs.

But it was OK cause they were #1 and they felt they could do whatever they want.

Then when the Playstation showed up, a lot of them jumped ship.

Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII and others came out for the PSX and Nintendo was a very distant 2nd for the next ten years.

I've always wondered exactly how it was even possible for Acrobat Reader to be such a monsterously bloated program...

I dunno if it still is though, I quit using it many years ago.

It sounds like it is.

Since there's no delete button, I'll simply replace this post with something fabulous .

Yeah, I see the point... but I don't think the planet or the human kind will dissapear because operpopulation, overconsumption, overcapacity...

I think the next period is gonna be pretty rough, but honestly I see humans being around for a loooooooooong time.

My bet is on millions of years.

Other species have done it. Crocs. Crocs are my favorite beast.

Are we stupid? Of course. Can we blow our leg off? We could almost completely kill ourselves off in 2 hours with a few button pushes. Will we? Maybe! And in 50 years we won't even remember what lesson we were supposed to learn.

It just won't be the end .

It'll just really, really suck, but still.

I think people can't imagine human civilization lasting because, other than constantly fantasizing about it for the entirety of human history, our written history isn't that long so we have absolutely no mental image of what a million year old civilization would even look like.

I used a workaround.

It seems to me we're just getting started. I mean, we haven't had all this technology for but a hundred years and we're supposed to permanently destroy ourselves on it already?

I realize that we can do that now , but the way I see it, this century in front of us is the do or die moment. The ultimate test to see if Hamei is right or if we get to join the million year club.

Oil and fossil fuels are quite finite so scientist's predictions about CO2 pollution & global warming are beside the point. Even if they're wrong, we can't just stay on oil forever cause it will simply run out, and then we're boned.

We could say, as a metaphor, that God put it there to give us exactly one chance to start a civilization that can stick. Its a great big energy freebie. We can squander it, but it also gives us an opportunity to keep going. It lets you build the rockets, refine the uranium, manufacture the solar panels, pipes, power lines and hadron colliders that let you become that "tier 1" civilization. Do or die.

Just how bad CO2 is doesn't matter; there's no point in using the oil unless we're gonna use it to aggressively move off the oil to the next thing. Its not for desperately fighting over it so we can joyride til it runs out or we kill ourselves on it.

If it turns out that the scientists are wrong and we can cope with the pollution just fine, all that means is we'll last long enough for the free market to right-size us. Which will suck far, far more than certain people fantasize.

I think people who use Flash are artists who don't want to deal with the retarded mess that is using HTML & CSS for graphics design. Fighting with multiple browser's renderers...

Its a lot better now that people are abandoning support for IE6. 90% of the problem was IE6. But a lot of professionals still strongly prefer Flash.

You could just have a bunch of programmers do everything instead of artists.

That works...OK. Its very elegant in ways no real people give a rat's rear about, but it looks like this .

My head's not where it ought to be so I'm not gonna post right now. Ate something I shouldn't.