On the other hand it looked like Steve Balmer was deliberately driving down the stock price. Him and his talk about, "Tech stocks are over valued including Microsofts."
There is a theory he did it to hurt start ups that rely on venture capitol more than Microsoft.
Perhaps Microsoft isn't as worried about the $60 shares as it might seem.
I'm suprised that no one has mentioned K-3d. I haven't tried it myself... But I've always been fond of screen shots and they have some cool ones. Also k3-d is gpl and runs on linux and windows.
BTW their website looks like crap. It used to look good. Brilliant even compared to how it looks now. Perhaps setting a background color would help?
Conversely it's also silly to think that people are going to get rich selly overpriced software. Who will buy another operating system when Linux works just fine and is available for free?
Just the same as car racing games, flight simulators, sport games, and combat games aren't going to go away.
I don't think most people think about cheaters when they try out a game. I never have. Good reviews make me want to try a game and if the graphics are cool.
The tricky part is creating a bot that can protect its self from other players. I have another character that has fun taking advantage of bots. With just the tiniest bit of creativity you can make the bots step into death traps. Run out of movement. Drop items. I wouldn't do this but it's fairly easy to make someone lose all their equipment if they are just in bot mode. There's all kinds of stuff you can do.
Not many people are going to write bots. If they do it doesn't hurt anyone. And if it annoys players then they can generally figure out ways to take care of the problem themselves.
Perhaps a different way to phrase the question is why is it that people didn't play massive multiplayer 3d games until fairly recently? The answer to that is obvious. People are only now getting DSL lines and decent graphics cards.
On the other hand, I don't know why you're complaining... It's not as if anyone is going to make you play it if you don't want to.
I think it's valid to question how valuable the results of this benchmark are. The byte.com server was having problems so I was not able to read the whole thing so I may have missed some stuff.
First of all it's not clear which distribution of Linux he is using.
Then it seems to me that this disk measured a lot of filesystem performance. The system was a dual boot. Which operating system was at the edge of the disk and which was toward the center of the harddrive? The operating system at the center is obviously at a disadvantage.
Little things like that are really important if you want to get accurate results.
Basically byte.com is not famous for acurate benchmarks or benchmarks of any kind. And the author doesn't claim that his test is very scientific. I'd tend to regard it as more of an opinion piece than an actual benchmark.
They claim these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
To me "information overload" and "diminished use of the brain" because computers remember stuff for you is two entirely different things.
Information overload is certainly something I experience.
I grew up in Africa and we didn't have any TV. Or phone or electricity except for two hours in the evening. If I was bored then I played soccer or went fishing etc. We had one magazine subscription to National Geographic and I read all of those articles the whole way through.
In America life there is so much stuff going on. Instead of sitting down and reading National Geographic the whole way through I surf the internet. And instead of reading everything I just skim through articles quickly. And instead of reading one page after another in a linear way I always end up having 8 netscape windows open.
Not just netscape though because I have to have good music playing in the background. And I am also supposed to be doing some programming homework so you xemacs open. And also it is important to be playing mud so I have a mud client running. And my roomates are watching TV in the other room.
So it's no wonder I start forgetting things. And I don't even have a PDA.
While it's true that parts of the OS X source code are "open" and parts are closed I fail to see why that's relevent to this discusion which does not involve code.
Another thing that is not especially clear from your references to Red Hat is how theming your window to look like OS X hurts apple financially. Care to elaborate on that?
On the other hand, these law suits do seem to involve freedom of creative expression. The way I see it the themers can not be motivated by money since they don't make any from their work. Perhaps a paralel to this in the music world is that if someone writes a song that you like then you can perform it at a party without paying any royalties to the artist. (I hope that's a legal example.:P)
Some where there is a line to be drawn on these issues. I generally tend to side more on the freedom end of things. In my opinion, as a programmer is that I should be able to write any program I want to and give it to whomever I want. Perhaps, graphics artists deserve the same right... Except if they "clone" another persons work it's as if they have the "source code" so the paralel breaks down at some point...
In the end I think that Apple should take it easy... Smell some roses or something. Artists goof around doing stupid stuff like this all the time... Let them have their little fun.
Thank you for pointing that out that Red Hat does not have any revenue. The Red Hat CEO keeps on saying that he's going to be profitable this year. But in light of what you have said he is obviously wrong and should give up.
Thank you for having such a great new idea about how Red Hat can not make money. They will be so grateful to you and will ask themselves why they never saw things as clearly before.
I think I've heard that SuSe is profitable. And of course we've all heard that Red Hat is planning to become profitable for the first time since their IPO later on this year.
Sure it's not Microsoft style money but they must prefer something about it to working for Microsoft I suppose. Puts food on the table I guess.
>> So we think that the business model of trying to make money on free software is doomed to fail...
My understanding is that Aplix costs $99 and is not released under the GPL. I could be wrong.
Instead of silly statements about a business model failing you would be more accurate saying something like, "It's really hard to make money off a word processor."
Microsoft seems to be the only company that can make money off office suits. And Sun has released Open Office under the GPL because they hate Microsoft and weren't making money with it anyways. This doesn't leave a much of a market for Corel and Aplix.
They had a bunch of cameras at the top of the stadium and they could switch from one camera's viewpoint to the next.
The problem was it that looking down from that angle with that sort of zoom you couldn't see very much of the field. So they'd turn the view until it was directly behind the quarter back and then they'd say, "You can tell that he doesn't have anyone open from this view." But you couldn't. You could tell that he didn't have anyone open within 3 feet but you couldn't see anything that was happenning further on down the field.
Personally, I'm of the persuasion that an entity is only Cool if it posses fundamental qualities of Coolness. Thus once a thing is determined to be in fact Cool then it shall remain Cool for all time.
I'm tempted to replace your use of the term Cool with the word Popular which denotes a more fleeting attribute dependant on the outside environment rather than on any inherent qualities.
On the other hand that doesn't make sense because that would mean that Linux was destined to be popular for only as long as it was unpopular.
In fact I think it's the smallest program possible with an ELF binary. About an eight of the size of the excecutable created if you use some kind of fancy-schamcy assembler. And a 50th the size of the same program created by gcc.
It's not just a matter of having the features, but also implementing them cleanly. I think it's pretty clear that Rusty used Darren Reed's ideas throughout. But from what I've read 2.2 kernel firewalling sounds severely damaged and needed to be scrapped.
The new implementation is not only more flexible and powerfull but much cleaner. I think before the firewall code was spread out in something like 11 different files?
I also like the new abstractions where you just break things down into simple catagories:
You can filter a packet (1)as it comes to the computer or (2)as it leaves. (3)You can filter a packet if it comes from outside and is destined to this computer. (4)You can filter a packet if it comes from outside the computer but is just passing through to another computer. (5)Or you can filter a packet if it was created on this computer.
Simple! Any packet can be fit into at least two of those five catagories.
In Linux 2.2 masquarading was a seperate hacked on peice of code. But in linux 2.4 you don't need it any more because you can just say, "If I'm masquarading a packet then it would come from outside and it would pass through my computer with out stopping so I can just filter those types of packets."
So in the end rewriting it from scratch not only adds cool features but makes it easier to write kernel code because you don't have to edit as many files and the code is cleaner. It provides a simple abstraction so life is easier for users. And kernel hackers can be lazier because because they don't need to code ip masquarading as a seperate feature. I think laziness is something we all can appreciate.
Personally I don't think that's too big of a problem. It's a question of not really being harder but just different.
I just spent this morning cursing at the windows start menu on a lab computer.
Some application put a big icon on the menu without asking me. (Installing software on those computers is frowned upon so I didn't want everyone to notice the new irc client) I wanted to get it off and so I right click on it and it gives me a menu. I look for a "remove" from menu option but I can't find it. The only thing close is a "delete" option. I didn't want to delete the program but since that was the nearest thing I selected it.
Do you think it deleted the program or just remove the icon? Actually it didn't do either. So I select it again and this time it prints up a criptic error message.
Ah well... Perhaps if I used windows more often then I would know how to do this better... On the other hand is "intuitive" all about "no experience needed?"
I've heard of people buying Ford cars when they they got a job at Ford. It was expected of them. Of course, they kept their other car but it's considerred poor taste to drive to work in it.
It's not talking about a specific X server, it's talking about a different canvas library that uses OpenGL graphics acceleration.
>>Enlightment just has too much JUNK in it...it tries to do EVERYTHING...its a victim of rampant featuritis, or at least freeping creaturism.
I believe that the new version of enlightenment is a complete rewrite. Have you looked at the new source code?
Or on the other hand, your coment about "it tries to do EVERYTHING" may not have to do with code at all but is based on a misconception that adding features is the same thing as adding complexity to the code. This doesn't have to be true with a flexible design.
It is wrong/imposible to describe a program as "a victim of rampant featuritis" without looking at the code. Users don't look at software and say, "This software is too powerfull and flexible for me" (They may say that the interface is overwhelming or unintuitive, but that's not the same thing as featuritis).
Thus a program may indeed "do EVERYTHING" without having featuritis if the code is clean.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand it looked like Steve Balmer was deliberately driving down the stock price. Him and his talk about, "Tech stocks are over valued including Microsofts."
There is a theory he did it to hurt start ups that rely on venture capitol more than Microsoft.
Perhaps Microsoft isn't as worried about the $60 shares as it might seem.
There is something in the specifications that says you can't have a spell checker in the text area widget?
You haven't seen anything yet.
Either from Linux, computers or the internet.
The next 5 years are going to be a tremendously exciting time.
There is something wonderful about a movie that makes you piss your pants from fright.
I'm suprised that no one has mentioned K-3d. I haven't tried it myself... But I've always been fond of screen shots and they have some cool ones. Also k3-d is gpl and runs on linux and windows.
BTW their website looks like crap. It used to look good. Brilliant even compared to how it looks now. Perhaps setting a background color would help?
I don't know for sure but I think EFM will use EVAS the enlightenment canvas widget. EVAS supports anti aliasing and hardware aceleration etc.
Mozilla and, of course, gnome use gtk+ and that has to support anti-aliasing seperately.
KDE 2.1 has anti-aliased fonts I think.
Most people I talk to in "real life" still use modems.
I don't think I missed the point at all. He doesn't like unfinished games or massive online ones.
But his question was stupid because there are valid reasons why people are making more online games than before.
And his attitude was uncalled for because he doesn't have to play the game if he doesn't want to so why is he getting his panties in a knot?
Conversely it's also silly to think that people are going to get rich selly overpriced software. Who will buy another operating system when Linux works just fine and is available for free?
The online RPG isn't going to go away.
Ever.
Just the same as car racing games, flight simulators, sport games, and combat games aren't going to go away.
I don't think most people think about cheaters when they try out a game. I never have. Good reviews make me want to try a game and if the graphics are cool.
I'm writing a bot for an online game that I play.
It's not a big deal. It doesn't hurt anyone.
The tricky part is creating a bot that can protect its self from other players. I have another character that has fun taking advantage of bots. With just the tiniest bit of creativity you can make the bots step into death traps. Run out of movement. Drop items. I wouldn't do this but it's fairly easy to make someone lose all their equipment if they are just in bot mode. There's all kinds of stuff you can do.
Not many people are going to write bots. If they do it doesn't hurt anyone. And if it annoys players then they can generally figure out ways to take care of the problem themselves.
Perhaps a different way to phrase the question is why is it that people didn't play massive multiplayer 3d games until fairly recently? The answer to that is obvious. People are only now getting DSL lines and decent graphics cards.
On the other hand, I don't know why you're complaining... It's not as if anyone is going to make you play it if you don't want to.
I think it's valid to question how valuable the results of this benchmark are. The byte.com server was having problems so I was not able to read the whole thing so I may have missed some stuff.
First of all it's not clear which distribution of Linux he is using.
Then it seems to me that this disk measured a lot of filesystem performance. The system was a dual boot. Which operating system was at the edge of the disk and which was toward the center of the harddrive? The operating system at the center is obviously at a disadvantage.
Little things like that are really important if you want to get accurate results.
Basically byte.com is not famous for acurate benchmarks or benchmarks of any kind. And the author doesn't claim that his test is very scientific. I'd tend to regard it as more of an opinion piece than an actual benchmark.
They claim these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and "information overload" that makes it difficult to distinguish between important and unimportant facts.
To me "information overload" and "diminished use of the brain" because computers remember stuff for you is two entirely different things.
Information overload is certainly something I experience.
I grew up in Africa and we didn't have any TV. Or phone or electricity except for two hours in the evening. If I was bored then I played soccer or went fishing etc. We had one magazine subscription to National Geographic and I read all of those articles the whole way through.
In America life there is so much stuff going on. Instead of sitting down and reading National Geographic the whole way through I surf the internet. And instead of reading everything I just skim through articles quickly. And instead of reading one page after another in a linear way I always end up having 8 netscape windows open.
Not just netscape though because I have to have good music playing in the background. And I am also supposed to be doing some programming homework so you xemacs open. And also it is important to be playing mud so I have a mud client running. And my roomates are watching TV in the other room.
So it's no wonder I start forgetting things. And I don't even have a PDA.
While it's true that parts of the OS X source code are "open" and parts are closed I fail to see why that's relevent to this discusion which does not involve code.
:P)
Another thing that is not especially clear from your references to Red Hat is how theming your window to look like OS X hurts apple financially. Care to elaborate on that?
On the other hand, these law suits do seem to involve freedom of creative expression. The way I see it the themers can not be motivated by money since they don't make any from their work. Perhaps a paralel to this in the music world is that if someone writes a song that you like then you can perform it at a party without paying any royalties to the artist. (I hope that's a legal example.
Some where there is a line to be drawn on these issues. I generally tend to side more on the freedom end of things. In my opinion, as a programmer is that I should be able to write any program I want to and give it to whomever I want. Perhaps, graphics artists deserve the same right... Except if they "clone" another persons work it's as if they have the "source code" so the paralel breaks down at some point...
In the end I think that Apple should take it easy... Smell some roses or something. Artists goof around doing stupid stuff like this all the time... Let them have their little fun.
Thank you for pointing that out that Red Hat does not have any revenue. The Red Hat CEO keeps on saying that he's going to be profitable this year. But in light of what you have said he is obviously wrong and should give up.
Thank you for having such a great new idea about how Red Hat can not make money. They will be so grateful to you and will ask themselves why they never saw things as clearly before.
I think I've heard that SuSe is profitable. And of course we've all heard that Red Hat is planning to become profitable for the first time since their IPO later on this year.
Sure it's not Microsoft style money but they must prefer something about it to working for Microsoft I suppose. Puts food on the table I guess.
>> So we think that the business model of trying to make money on free software is doomed to fail...
My understanding is that Aplix costs $99 and is not released under the GPL. I could be wrong.
Instead of silly statements about a business model failing you would be more accurate saying something like, "It's really hard to make money off a word processor."
Microsoft seems to be the only company that can make money off office suits. And Sun has released Open Office under the GPL because they hate Microsoft and weren't making money with it anyways. This doesn't leave a much of a market for Corel and Aplix.
They had a bunch of cameras at the top of the stadium and they could switch from one camera's viewpoint to the next.
The problem was it that looking down from that angle with that sort of zoom you couldn't see very much of the field. So they'd turn the view until it was directly behind the quarter back and then they'd say, "You can tell that he doesn't have anyone open from this view." But you couldn't. You could tell that he didn't have anyone open within 3 feet but you couldn't see anything that was happenning further on down the field.
>> Linux is cool because no one uses it.
Personally, I'm of the persuasion that an entity is only Cool if it posses fundamental qualities of Coolness. Thus once a thing is determined to be in fact Cool then it shall remain Cool for all time.
I'm tempted to replace your use of the term Cool with the word Popular which denotes a more fleeting attribute dependant on the outside environment rather than on any inherent qualities.
On the other hand that doesn't make sense because that would mean that Linux was destined to be popular for only as long as it was unpopular.
My brain is going to implode.
heh heh..
that's a good one.
can be found right here.
It's cool because it's really small.
In fact I think it's the smallest program possible with an ELF binary. About an eight of the size of the excecutable created if you use some kind of fancy-schamcy assembler. And a 50th the size of the same program created by gcc.
darn cool if you ask me.
It's not just a matter of having the features, but also implementing them cleanly. I think it's pretty clear that Rusty used Darren Reed's ideas throughout. But from what I've read 2.2 kernel firewalling sounds severely damaged and needed to be scrapped.
The new implementation is not only more flexible and powerfull but much cleaner. I think before the firewall code was spread out in something like 11 different files?
I also like the new abstractions where you just break things down into simple catagories:
You can filter a packet (1)as it comes to the computer or (2)as it leaves. (3)You can filter a packet if it comes from outside and is destined to this computer. (4)You can filter a packet if it comes from outside the computer but is just passing through to another computer. (5)Or you can filter a packet if it was created on this computer.
Simple! Any packet can be fit into at least two of those five catagories.
In Linux 2.2 masquarading was a seperate hacked on peice of code. But in linux 2.4 you don't need it any more because you can just say, "If I'm masquarading a packet then it would come from outside and it would pass through my computer with out stopping so I can just filter those types of packets."
So in the end rewriting it from scratch not only adds cool features but makes it easier to write kernel code because you don't have to edit as many files and the code is cleaner. It provides a simple abstraction so life is easier for users. And kernel hackers can be lazier because because they don't need to code ip masquarading as a seperate feature. I think laziness is something we all can appreciate.
Personally I don't think that's too big of a problem. It's a question of not really being harder but just different.
I just spent this morning cursing at the windows start menu on a lab computer.
Some application put a big icon on the menu without asking me. (Installing software on those computers is frowned upon so I didn't want everyone to notice the new irc client) I wanted to get it off and so I right click on it and it gives me a menu. I look for a "remove" from menu option but I can't find it. The only thing close is a "delete" option. I didn't want to delete the program but since that was the nearest thing I selected it.
Do you think it deleted the program or just remove the icon? Actually it didn't do either. So I select it again and this time it prints up a criptic error message.
Ah well... Perhaps if I used windows more often then I would know how to do this better... On the other hand is "intuitive" all about "no experience needed?"
offtopic:
I've heard of people buying Ford cars when they they got a job at Ford. It was expected of them. Of course, they kept their other car but it's considerred poor taste to drive to work in it.
You must have misread the article.
It's not talking about a specific X server, it's talking about a different canvas library that uses OpenGL graphics acceleration.
>>Enlightment just has too much JUNK in it...it tries to do EVERYTHING...its a victim of rampant featuritis, or at least freeping creaturism.
I believe that the new version of enlightenment is a complete rewrite. Have you looked at the new source code?
Or on the other hand, your coment about "it tries to do EVERYTHING" may not have to do with code at all but is based on a misconception that adding features is the same thing as adding complexity to the code. This doesn't have to be true with a flexible design.
It is wrong/imposible to describe a program as "a victim of rampant featuritis" without looking at the code. Users don't look at software and say, "This software is too powerfull and flexible for me" (They may say that the interface is overwhelming or unintuitive, but that's not the same thing as featuritis).
Thus a program may indeed "do EVERYTHING" without having featuritis if the code is clean.