[MUD-Dev] 3D graphics (Was: The impact of the web on muds)

[Chris Gray]

[Chris L:]

[me:]
:>Re: the earlier comment about us all running 1GHz Alphas in 1999: I've
:>been having a hard time settling on what my next computer (when $ allows)
:>should be - a Pentium running Linux or an Alpha running Linux. I'd like
:>to chose the one with the best performance, but also with a decent
:>expected lifetime.
:
:What sort of lifetime?

A half dozen years maybe. It's the time investment that is the big thing.
I'll likely end up doing debugging with disassemblies, so getting to know
the tools and the machine well, along with the linkage conventions. If
that familiarity can survive for a while, I'll waste less time. I switch
back and forth so much at work, that I like my hobby computing to be a
bit more stable.

[Off topic: our Windows NT boxes arrived at work last week (humongous big
servers that are nearly empty), so I'll soon be diving into that foreign
(to me) universe. It'll be interesting to do a complete recreation of our
software on them (a straight port is pretty much impossible), but I'm
steeling myself for a long sequence of frustrations with an environment
I'm not familiar with, and where simple things like 'rlogin' just aren't
done. My mind is almost used to switching around among our nasty
implementation differences for SunOS, Solaris, AIX and HP-UX, but now its
going to be wrenched wildly into a different universe. This is because
our code involves very low level work, and presses the limits of what some
system calls can do. So, its *really* nice if my home software world is
friendly, consistent, and stable.]

:Samsung appears to be following up on this with early models of their MB's
:and the like being leaked.

It's gonna be fun to watch, if nothing else. I wish them luck, though.

:>What endian does Linux run Alphas in? 
:
:Big.

OK, thanks. If they ran in little-endian, that would be one more reason
not to get one (I'm *very* used to big-endian).

--
Chris Gray   cg at ami-cg.GraySage.Edmonton.AB.CA