🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8csmmq$uie$1@slb1.atl.mindspring.net>,
Mark S. Bilk <msb@netcom.com> wrote:

>Other than his figures on Linux usage and its growth (which
>he has explained are estimates, and discussed their basis),
>and occasional misremembering of exactly who did a particular
>thing (which, in any case, was done) would you please give 
>some examples of major, important assertions by Ballard which 
>you have shown to be false?

	There are some things that he isn't very familiar with and is out
of his element in discussing, such as the Macintosh platform and real-time
3D games. 

	The latter he's mixed up with VRML, which was a big hype a few
years ago, but which never took off very fast. I think that 3D cards had
not been good enough in those days to get generalized-model rendering with
reasonable speed and screen resolution. 

	However, 3D games use a variety of hacks and shortcuts to speed up
rendering, and their world geometries are usually designed so as to
provide an abundance of visibility hints, so as to avoid rendering 
anything that can be shown to be hidden. And although the more recent 3D 
games include an abundance of 3D-model inhabitants, these have tended to 
have only a few hundred polygons of flat surface.

	And even here, there is evidence of Microsoft villainy, such as
Microsoft promoting the 3D-rendering API Direct3D for game duty instead of
OpenGL. And here again, M$ shows a remarkable lack of innovativeness; 
Direct3D's earlier designs had been awkward and difficult to work with, 
but the more recent versions seem like some sort of OpenGL clone.


--
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.petrich.com/home.html