that introduced the $49 IDE back in 84, and have consistently turned out more standards-compliant C++ compilers than you know who. And your tastes obviously don't count for much if they lead you to that opinion about Object Pascal. It's still considered by many one of the most advanced and elegant natively compiled languages around. OTOH Forte is certainly not considered the greatest IDE by many. But then again, those are YOUR tastes.
No-one is arguing that using the mouse is ALWAYS faster, period, and let's do away with the kb. This is the Real World, and specialization is at work. For some things, some paradigms are more appropriate, for others, others (ugh). Keyboards will probably not be replaced for bulk text entry for many, many decades (regardless of what voice recognition freaks will tell you).
OTOH, control input is far less clear-cut. For example, moving files around directories will almost always be much faster using a GUI than a keyboard. Initial context setup takes some overhead (bringing up the source and destination folders), but after that, dragging files around with the mouse will beat the fastest touch typist every time, especially for longer file names.
Then again, this paradigm is poor for pattern selection. Moving random files around this way is faster, but moving all files containing the letters SSL will invariably be faster on the CLI.
The ideal is an intelligent blend of both, taking advantage of the strengths of each paradigm. People that always argue entirely in favor of one or the other in my view have a chip on the shoulder.
Incidentally, a good example of mixed paradigms are the custom input devices used in some high-end CAD shops. They include analog manipulators for adjusting on-screen objects, custom macro keys for performing frequent operations with ONE keystroke, as well as keypads and on-screen CLIs or pop-up text entry boxes for input that is most efficient using that paradigm. Sure, those workstations definitely take a while to learn, but pay back with huge gains in productivity. We are starting to see meek attempts at custom input devices with all the various Internet/Office etc keyboards around, but I'd say we haven't even reached the foot of this particular mountain.
That program was very innovative for the time. It might have looked a bit toyish and more like a game because of all the pretty graphics, but it was quite powerful, especially considering the platform.
> Well, DUHHH, HP, Ethernet is "internet connectivity" too!
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking it's not. Ethernet is LAN connectivity technology. I would guess very few people are directly connected to the internet via Ethernet. Cable modems, modems, DSL, sure, but those aren't Ethernet.
What exactly is "complete" in this case, and how would most people recognize it? Their image in my case would look considerably better if they offered me *some* data right now, than nothing for who knows how long. It's the old case of a bird in the hand being better than...
I do realize that they're not talking about charging po' folks. But they're most likely doing it in the spirit of not being the next dot-com-on-the-rocks, looking for ways to make some money. They could do much worse than setting up some "premium" services for frequent searchers and people requiring more advanced capabilities. With some money coming in, they might even be able to devote some development talent to features that couldn't otherwise be justified.
I remember that story (someone's got posted after all). But what good is it to wait a year or two until they have a "complete" archive, and only then posting it? Any old archive scrap is useful ASAP. What's the point in waiting?
Well, that's what the date range settings are for. The thing is, many topics even in computing had their heyday before 1995. Say you're interested in low-level bit twiddling on some device port under DOS. Good luck finding current threads on that. OTOH, archives before 1995 would have a good splattering of that sort of thing. Stuff like this is becoming relevant again with the growing popularity of embedded computers based on the x86 platform.
What it comes down to is this: there's no such thing as too much data.
If they beefed up Google Groups by adding archives before 1995, added a more powerful query mechanism (maybe regexp, even at the cost of reduced speed), and finally formatted the results in some more sensible fashion, I'd pay a fair bit per year for that. Given that I use deja (old habits die hard) many times every day, that would be worth even $100 a year for me.
It basically works, except for one glaring annoyance: at 1600x1200 the right quarter of the screen (starting about one inch from the top of my 19" monitor) seems to be displaying some memory locations other than the framebuffer. This area shows funky colored bars, which dance around within that area then I move windows around. The rest of the display is perfectly fine and snappy. Strange indeed.
Thanks to both of you, I'll check out the nvidia driver. I had heard of its existence, but I guess I assumed the driver that came with RH7.1, Mandrake8.1 etc was it.
While I'm not particularly a Windows whore, this statement is hard to swallow. Explain.
> but is also quite a bit heavier, and slower...that is what is using up your memory.
Memory? Who's talking about lack of memory? I've got gobs of memory. I'm talking about moving framebuffer memory around, and rendering graphics primitives. A 32-bit display takes the same time to render regardless of how much memory your app uses. I've tried those other WMs, and I'm not impressed. Sure you can get faster if you lower the resolution and color depth, but that's hardly a fair comparison.
> The implementation of X is what needs to be more hardware accelerated, perhaps
I can't say how optimized the various servers are (e.g. my TNT2), but the real culprit is not the failure of sequeezing out a couple more nanoseconds out of Bresenheim et al, but the big overhead of marshalling graphics primitives to a network protocol, or even just reducing this to shared memory operations. Add to this the many generations of code(rs) in the X code base, and I can't see how it could approach any level of efficiency.
I think you've been watching too much CNN lately . I've noticed that the benefits of X are extolled suspiciously often within the context of servers and remote administration. May I just observe that most serious admins shun graphical tools for the command line anyway? I've seen very few admins attach their display to a remote server for anything, yet most of them live in telnet. I dare say that telnet fulfills most of the duties X is accused of for these kinds of uses. Most of the X apps that would work comfortably remotely over extended periods probably take minimal advantage of a GUI anyway and would likely work just as well in text mode.
but something needs to be done about X. I have a very mainstream video card (TNT2), and under Windows it flies for 2D work (1600x1200x32)--full window moving, resizing, scrolling etc are perceptually instantaneous. This same card under KDE 2.2.1--using what appears to be a fairly well supported XFree86 4 server, at the same resolution and color depth--feels roughly like an unaccelerated SVGA driver under Windows, maybe a bit better. Many drawing operations become visible under heavy graphic load, such as when moving windows above other busy windows that need to be redrawn. Resizing windows feels sluggish, scrolling web pages and such feels sluggish etc. We'te not talking 1990-slowness, but in a world where graphic lag of any kind is essentially a thing of the past, this is very noticeable.
Maybe it's not all due to X, who knows. But dragging around baggage beneficial to only a portion of users (that seems to be getting smaller with a growing Linux user base) almost seems unfair. If I spend most of the day in front of the framebuffer, with only occasional remoting of the display, I'd prefer to have the fastest possible performance during that majority of time, and would in exchange accept worse performance during remoting. That's essentially what happens with VNC on Windows right now. And I know we can do better than that, because Windows has notoriously few graphic hooks, and any new display system could easily improve on that without giving up performance in spades like X.
> i know tamigatchi (sp) Had a huge following among North American children
"Huge" is relative. You obviously didn't catch the magnitude of that particular craze in Japan. Compared to that the US "craze" was a mere jerk of a moribund body.
I'm not questioning the Japanse ability to create new and wonderful electronics--in fact, I very much welcome it and anticipate most new creations. But must we look for emotional fulfillment in them? The pursuit of AI is great as a means to perform useful work more efficiently and intelligently, but I certainly am not looking forward to a future where I engage emotionally with our creations (other than mere materialistic desire, that is). Then again, others are, so whatever rocks your boat.
Firmly grab stick by exposed end, pull hard, and extract. I simply asked a question, I didn't make any judgement. There is no denying the fact that all kinds of electronic gadgets and doodaahs are extremely successful in Japan, while they never succeed in any other market. The exception being the Aibo, which seems to have found willing parents in the Slashdot community.
Congratulations, you almost passed the Turing test.
The Tamagotchi, the Aibo, the new cat, and probably droves more stuff I've missed--and now the car. Are the Japanese so emotionally deficient that they need synthetic surrogates?
Bought a (not new) TiVo in spring from a seller named joscaro2. He didn't claim it was new, but said it was "as new", so it definitely was meant to be in working order. When it arrived, it didn't work. Kept freezing during setup. I called him the first time, and he claimed he never actually used it--bought it, then decided to get a Sony instead while still in the box. Yeah right. It turns out he bought it off ebay also (also used). Anyway, he wouldn't answer subsequent phone calls, despite me being curteous that first time. So I left him a message saying that I'll take up the matter with ebay and PayPal. Right away he responded to my ebay feedback saying that I left threats.
PayPal takes 30 days to follow up an incident, during which time they give the seller a chance to respond. The guy never answered their emails and calls, so they decided in my favor. Which amounted to exactly squat: they said that they can't refund the money, and that's it. Period.
Moral of the story: I won't spend any sums on ebay that I couldn't live with losing. Which basically means amounts considerably under $100, preferably around $25 or so. Any more than that, and I pretty much want to see a shirt that I could grab in anger.
PS Philips serviced my TiVo for $140, so I wasn't completely out of that money. But I ended up spending definitely more than retail.
the ability to play MPEG4, so I don't have to burn wretched VCDs anymore. Oh, and maybe a NIC so it can play movies from the network, like a PC or the TiVo. Then again, my TiVO is closer to this already. Ok, what we need is a fully integrated media device, with DVD, MP3, TiVO, etc. How does that relate to the Apex? It doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
that introduced the $49 IDE back in 84, and have consistently turned out more standards-compliant C++ compilers than you know who. And your tastes obviously don't count for much if they lead you to that opinion about Object Pascal. It's still considered by many one of the most advanced and elegant natively compiled languages around. OTOH Forte is certainly not considered the greatest IDE by many. But then again, those are YOUR tastes.
Well, there's no doubt which camp you're in then.
>> That program was very innovative for the time.
> Was? AudioMulch [audiomulch.com] has yet to reach version 1.0
I was talking about "Bars and Pipes" on the Amiga.
No-one is arguing that using the mouse is ALWAYS faster, period, and let's do away with the kb. This is the Real World, and specialization is at work. For some things, some paradigms are more appropriate, for others, others (ugh). Keyboards will probably not be replaced for bulk text entry for many, many decades (regardless of what voice recognition freaks will tell you).
OTOH, control input is far less clear-cut. For example, moving files around directories will almost always be much faster using a GUI than a keyboard. Initial context setup takes some overhead (bringing up the source and destination folders), but after that, dragging files around with the mouse will beat the fastest touch typist every time, especially for longer file names.
Then again, this paradigm is poor for pattern selection. Moving random files around this way is faster, but moving all files containing the letters SSL will invariably be faster on the CLI.
The ideal is an intelligent blend of both, taking advantage of the strengths of each paradigm. People that always argue entirely in favor of one or the other in my view have a chip on the shoulder.
Incidentally, a good example of mixed paradigms are the custom input devices used in some high-end CAD shops. They include analog manipulators for adjusting on-screen objects, custom macro keys for performing frequent operations with ONE keystroke, as well as keypads and on-screen CLIs or pop-up text entry boxes for input that is most efficient using that paradigm. Sure, those workstations definitely take a while to learn, but pay back with huge gains in productivity. We are starting to see meek attempts at custom input devices with all the various Internet/Office etc keyboards around, but I'd say we haven't even reached the foot of this particular mountain.
That program was very innovative for the time. It might have looked a bit toyish and more like a game because of all the pretty graphics, but it was quite powerful, especially considering the platform.
> Well, DUHHH, HP, Ethernet is "internet connectivity" too!
I know what you mean, but strictly speaking it's not. Ethernet is LAN connectivity technology. I would guess very few people are directly connected to the internet via Ethernet. Cable modems, modems, DSL, sure, but those aren't Ethernet.
The "10/100 baseT card" is mentioned right there under "what's in the box", BEFORE the modem. The solution to your problem is *reading*.
What exactly is "complete" in this case, and how would most people recognize it? Their image in my case would look considerably better if they offered me *some* data right now, than nothing for who knows how long. It's the old case of a bird in the hand being better than...
I do realize that they're not talking about charging po' folks. But they're most likely doing it in the spirit of not being the next dot-com-on-the-rocks, looking for ways to make some money. They could do much worse than setting up some "premium" services for frequent searchers and people requiring more advanced capabilities. With some money coming in, they might even be able to devote some development talent to features that couldn't otherwise be justified.
I remember that story (someone's got posted after all). But what good is it to wait a year or two until they have a "complete" archive, and only then posting it? Any old archive scrap is useful ASAP. What's the point in waiting?
Well, that's what the date range settings are for. The thing is, many topics even in computing had their heyday before 1995. Say you're interested in low-level bit twiddling on some device port under DOS. Good luck finding current threads on that. OTOH, archives before 1995 would have a good splattering of that sort of thing. Stuff like this is becoming relevant again with the growing popularity of embedded computers based on the x86 platform.
What it comes down to is this: there's no such thing as too much data.
If they beefed up Google Groups by adding archives before 1995, added a more powerful query mechanism (maybe regexp, even at the cost of reduced speed), and finally formatted the results in some more sensible fashion, I'd pay a fair bit per year for that. Given that I use deja (old habits die hard) many times every day, that would be worth even $100 a year for me.
It basically works, except for one glaring annoyance: at 1600x1200 the right quarter of the screen (starting about one inch from the top of my 19" monitor) seems to be displaying some memory locations other than the framebuffer. This area shows funky colored bars, which dance around within that area then I move windows around. The rest of the display is perfectly fine and snappy. Strange indeed.
every electronic device known to man on their body deserve to have every cavity examined.
Thanks to both of you, I'll check out the nvidia driver. I had heard of its existence, but I guess I assumed the driver that came with RH7.1, Mandrake8.1 etc was it.
> KDS can do a lot more than windows,
While I'm not particularly a Windows whore, this statement is hard to swallow. Explain.
> but is also quite a bit heavier, and slower...that is what is using up your memory.
Memory? Who's talking about lack of memory? I've got gobs of memory. I'm talking about moving framebuffer memory around, and rendering graphics primitives. A 32-bit display takes the same time to render regardless of how much memory your app uses. I've tried those other WMs, and I'm not impressed. Sure you can get faster if you lower the resolution and color depth, but that's hardly a fair comparison.
> The implementation of X is what needs to be more hardware accelerated, perhaps
I can't say how optimized the various servers are (e.g. my TNT2), but the real culprit is not the failure of sequeezing out a couple more nanoseconds out of Bresenheim et al, but the big overhead of marshalling graphics primitives to a network protocol, or even just reducing this to shared memory operations. Add to this the many generations of code(rs) in the X code base, and I can't see how it could approach any level of efficiency.
I think you've been watching too much CNN lately . I've noticed that the benefits of X are extolled suspiciously often within the context of servers and remote administration. May I just observe that most serious admins shun graphical tools for the command line anyway? I've seen very few admins attach their display to a remote server for anything, yet most of them live in telnet. I dare say that telnet fulfills most of the duties X is accused of for these kinds of uses. Most of the X apps that would work comfortably remotely over extended periods probably take minimal advantage of a GUI anyway and would likely work just as well in text mode.
but something needs to be done about X. I have a very mainstream video card (TNT2), and under Windows it flies for 2D work (1600x1200x32)--full window moving, resizing, scrolling etc are perceptually instantaneous. This same card under KDE 2.2.1--using what appears to be a fairly well supported XFree86 4 server, at the same resolution and color depth--feels roughly like an unaccelerated SVGA driver under Windows, maybe a bit better. Many drawing operations become visible under heavy graphic load, such as when moving windows above other busy windows that need to be redrawn. Resizing windows feels sluggish, scrolling web pages and such feels sluggish etc. We'te not talking 1990-slowness, but in a world where graphic lag of any kind is essentially a thing of the past, this is very noticeable.
Maybe it's not all due to X, who knows. But dragging around baggage beneficial to only a portion of users (that seems to be getting smaller with a growing Linux user base) almost seems unfair. If I spend most of the day in front of the framebuffer, with only occasional remoting of the display, I'd prefer to have the fastest possible performance during that majority of time, and would in exchange accept worse performance during remoting. That's essentially what happens with VNC on Windows right now. And I know we can do better than that, because Windows has notoriously few graphic hooks, and any new display system could easily improve on that without giving up performance in spades like X.
> i know tamigatchi (sp) Had a huge following among North American children
"Huge" is relative. You obviously didn't catch the magnitude of that particular craze in Japan. Compared to that the US "craze" was a mere jerk of a moribund body.
I'm not questioning the Japanse ability to create new and wonderful electronics--in fact, I very much welcome it and anticipate most new creations. But must we look for emotional fulfillment in them? The pursuit of AI is great as a means to perform useful work more efficiently and intelligently, but I certainly am not looking forward to a future where I engage emotionally with our creations (other than mere materialistic desire, that is). Then again, others are, so whatever rocks your boat.
Firmly grab stick by exposed end, pull hard, and extract. I simply asked a question, I didn't make any judgement. There is no denying the fact that all kinds of electronic gadgets and doodaahs are extremely successful in Japan, while they never succeed in any other market. The exception being the Aibo, which seems to have found willing parents in the Slashdot community.
Congratulations, you almost passed the Turing test.
The Tamagotchi, the Aibo, the new cat, and probably droves more stuff I've missed--and now the car. Are the Japanese so emotionally deficient that they need synthetic surrogates?
Bought a (not new) TiVo in spring from a seller named joscaro2. He didn't claim it was new, but said it was "as new", so it definitely was meant to be in working order. When it arrived, it didn't work. Kept freezing during setup. I called him the first time, and he claimed he never actually used it--bought it, then decided to get a Sony instead while still in the box. Yeah right. It turns out he bought it off ebay also (also used). Anyway, he wouldn't answer subsequent phone calls, despite me being curteous that first time. So I left him a message saying that I'll take up the matter with ebay and PayPal. Right away he responded to my ebay feedback saying that I left threats.
PayPal takes 30 days to follow up an incident, during which time they give the seller a chance to respond. The guy never answered their emails and calls, so they decided in my favor. Which amounted to exactly squat: they said that they can't refund the money, and that's it. Period.
Moral of the story: I won't spend any sums on ebay that I couldn't live with losing. Which basically means amounts considerably under $100, preferably around $25 or so. Any more than that, and I pretty much want to see a shirt that I could grab in anger.
PS Philips serviced my TiVo for $140, so I wasn't completely out of that money. But I ended up spending definitely more than retail.
> I must add a single bit of noise to one of 40 bites of data
How many bytes are there in one of your bites though?
a piece of software to automate the insertion and removal of CDs. Wait, or is that hardware?
the ability to play MPEG4, so I don't have to burn wretched VCDs anymore. Oh, and maybe a NIC so it can play movies from the network, like a PC or the TiVo. Then again, my TiVO is closer to this already. Ok, what we need is a fully integrated media device, with DVD, MP3, TiVO, etc. How does that relate to the Apex? It doesn't.