How is this at all like the way the human eye sees?
This foveon system is like the human eye inasmuchas the light photons penetrate multiple layers and register at more than one levels in the same spot. For example, take a look at this cross section of the human retina.
Current CCDs only collect one waveband of light at one area. To simulate colour, they collect three different wavebands in adjacent areas on the surface of the CCD. Hence the funky moire patterns you that you see in tightly patterned cloth on the sample piccies on the site.
I hate pixel noise in my digital pictures. I have heard that since red color has to be detected at the deepest part of the silicon there is an abudance of noise in the reds.
If the upper layers are completely transparent in the red, then your concerns don't apply. As long as the actual transparency of the upper layers is reasonable, then there is little cause to worry - traditionally CCDs are far more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum than the blue so even modest photon loss at the red end is unlikely to seriously degrade the pictures.
The other nice thing about this technology is that the spatial size of the light bins is approximately three times larger than that for the equivalent physical sized CCD - that means better signal-to-noise ratios for this new technology.
Anyway, the presentations look compelling. I await cameras with reasonable numbers of megapixels (say 4Mpixels +) and reviews...
Nice figures but you missed another leech on the side of the finances - Taxes. Consumer pays approximately 15% tax on the new product. There are probably other taxes being worked out from the base cost as well going down the chain to Remedy, so that's going to bite even harder.
Short of John Carmack actually revealing how much money id software makes for each copy of Quake 3 sold, you probably can't get hard figures. But I think your estimate of around $3 profit per game is about right, especially once you factor in material costs, packaging and transport costs.
Most people don't use Ogg Vorbis for the quality. They use it for the license.
Speak for yourself - I use it for the quality, especially now that the audio artefacts that were so obvious in early development releases are fixed.
In high bitrate modes, there is little difference between properly encoded MP3s and OGG files. And high bitrate is what really matters, unless you are streaming over a low bandwidth connection (in which OGG is the clear winner due to size).
Personal blind testing between Ogg VBR 160kbit and MP3 192kbit was pretty even - very few people could tell the difference and where there were impressions of 'better' it fell on the Ogg side. Given that Ogg VBR 160kbit is about 25% smaller than the MP3 at 192kbit, that's pretty useful.
Yes, sure they can "give out" GCC, bash, EMACS and whatnot. The point is, the majority of the real world (tm) out there isn't going to care.
Without the GNU tools, the real world (tm) wouldn't be noticing Linux. There wouldn't have been a base of freely developable base tools with which to build other things. Actually, reading your totally uninformed views reminds me of a quote that is extremely applicable.
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.-- Voltaire
One of the things you want to do as a Linux gamer who really cares about getting the last few FPS out of a box should be to set up dedicated gaming sessions as part of the login process. This means that the only thing running in the box will be whatever minimal services you need, X and the actualy game you are running.
If you use gdm for your logins, then create a script named, say, 'Quake3' in/etc/gdm/Sessions which has contents like:
Make sure this is executable (chmod 755/etc/gdm/Sessions/Quake3) and you should be set.
Then when you login to your box, choose the Quake3 session in the top left and type in your user name and password as normal. The game will launch immediately with nothing else running at all. The main benefit of this is that you free as many of the resources available to be dedicated to game playing.
Lets add armor and weapons to these things and we got autonomous robot wars! Personally, I've always wished that those robot-battle type shows on tv were autonomous instead of remote controlled. Now THAT would be a challenge.
If you're short of spare parts, you could do worse than muck around with a virtual equivalent.
I'd be interested to know how anybody could tell if you've shared the music and what this 'digital watermarking' is all about. If you made MP3s from the CD you make, how would UMG know you violated the copyright? Is my iTunes gonna email them when I play the pirated MP3?
I'd be interested in knowing about a watermarking scheme that survives being encoded into an OGG or MP3 format. After all, there is little point in watermarking audio if you can hear the watermarking distorting the original sound. As most compression techniques take the most important components of the sound (fourier transforms, wavelet transforms, whatever) I suspect that the watermarks are at least damaged by using lossy compressions and may be untraceable. If the watermark is only present in the highest frequencies of the recording, then a simple low pass filter will remove it. If it is present in the least significant bit of each sample, then it will span all frequencies with equal amplitude, but will almost certainly be lost when encoded to OGG/MP3.
Income taxes? $3,684,000,000 [yahoo.com] for the year ended June 30, 2000. Or were you talking about sales and other taxes?
Very very interesting (by the way the figures you give are for 2002, not 2000). MS's total revenue has increased by $6 billion over the last three years, but their tax bill has decreased by over $1.2 billion (i.e. since George W. got into the Whitehouse - I'd be interested to see a breakdown on the taxes to see why). However, net income is down $1.6 billion dollars, despite vastly improved revenue and lower taxes.
Except I am browsing at 3 right now, and there are 29 "Reply to This" links, 4 viewable on my screen. Which means I have to sort through at least 4, or at most 29 links to get to the one I want. Seems easier to just move my hand.
Well - try identifying some unique word just before or after the link you are after.
In getting to and replying to your message, type
/hand
Hit TAB and the "reply to this" link is selected. Hit Enter and you're done.
I found a lot of complaints about the UI of the program (see one here [slashdot.org])
But you will also find a ton of people who like the UI just fine. Once you get used to the UI, it is fast, powerful and practical. Blender does have a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you have that over with, the package shows its power.
You might think that the 'vi of 3D modelling' is an insulting term. Others might view it as high praise.
That said, I still prefer Emacs:-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:Why Red Hat won't beat windows on the desktop
on
Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
I'm inclined to agree with you - in order for the linux desktop to really make it in the business workplace, there need to be Linux clients for the major ERP applications. Now if you have total control over your own workplace machine and Lotus Notes is your only sticking point against moving to Linux, then format that harddrive now. Lotus Notes runs really very well on Wine these days, and while the performance isn't quite as snappy as I would like, it's certainly good enough even on an old cranky PII400.
I live in hope that we might see a Lotus Notes client make it out into the wild in some shape or form. I think Lotus might be surprised at how many development shops would welcome the flexibility to run Lotus Notes on a Unix-like platform rather than being limited to Windows platforms only.
From where I'm sitting, Sun can't be about to push a load of cheap linux boxes out for the average user. That would be commercial suicide - the PC market is already too cut-throat for there to be any margins to work with.
Sun probably isn't that worried about getting a vast income from pushing StarOffice for schools either - the benefit to Sun from this initiative is that students will be familiar with StarOffice rather than MS Office.
Sun's likely push here is to move in and replace all those Windows boxes in places like call centres, POS terminals and sales rooms where a centralized server provides much of the grunt and the terminals actually don't do much. Being able to replace existing Windows installs with PC + Linux makes a lot of cost sense - network installs, locked down to prevent fiddling, with the needed apps either on the Linux machines or on a central (Solaris?) server is likely to be a winner on TCO.
occlusion detection? Is that used for detecting the occult?
I can see how it might be usefull for games like Quake, Doom etc, but I'm not so sure about GTA etc
Actually, occlusion detection will have a massive impact on GTA3. Basically, occlusion detection determines whether the pixel/block of pixels currently being rendered will be obscured by some other pixel/block of pixels closer to the viewer. It is most effective when you have a lot of objects to render which overlap - a cityscape like GTA3 will benefit the most from this sort of processing. Consider that at most you can normally see about 15 or twenty buildings in GTA3 even with maximum viewing distance set, although there are hundreds you could potentially see if you had xray vision. If the card can skip rendering any of those buildings you can't see, you get faster performance.
I try to use Mozilla but I'm always drawn back to IE because its just snappier. I think that Microsoft pins the IE pages also. Even when I keep Mozilla resident, my system swaps like no tomorrow when using Mozilla on a PIII 866Mhz system w/ 384mb RAM
What the hell do you have loaded? With five tabbed pages in Moz with maybe forty sites visited, my memory usage (Linux) is clocking eight processes sharing 57MB. My TOTAL memory usage for the whole system is around 197MB (of which 110MB is currently in RAM, the rest is swapped out) and that includes Emacs, Lotus Notes running on Wine, Gnumeric and all the GNOME libs supporting that, system monitors, IM app running on Java and about 25 remote processes running through XFree. If you are swapping on 384MB RAM, you need to tune your system more carefully or something else is swallowing your memory, cause Moz is not the problem. And yes, all those processes are running on a PII 400MHz with 256MB ram so it's not as though I'm sitting on a God-like box.
By the way, vi is way too restrictive for the uses I put Emacs to. Maybe if vi gets a Lisp engine I'd use it for more than basic editing:-)
b) at this stage upgrading is not easy at all. I upgrade KDE fairly regularly, and even though I use binary packages built specifically for my Mandrake distro (the supposedly user-friendly one), I still have to slog through the dependency swamp every time I install it. And God forbid you should try to build source....Even installing a new version of OpenOffice involves dealing.sversionrc, and figuring out how the hell to install it so everyone can use it.
Complete and utter, utter nonsense. You're obviously stuck in the 'I have to do this by the command line...' rut.
Take, for example, updating a Mandrake distro from 7.2 to 8.2. Stick CD in drive. Click pretty buttons. Upgrade completes. Everything works.
Or, say, you fancy playing with the Ximian Gnome distro. You download their automatic installer. More pretty buttons. Upgrade completes. Everything... just... works.
Now you're on a roll. You subscribe to the OpenOffice channel. You click on the OpenOffice package and it installs. Wow. It works first time.
So now you're bored with the basic Ximian and Mandrake stuff. Add the cooker channel to the MandrakeUpdate list using MandrakeUpdates GUI. It whirrs off into the net and brings you a larger list of packages. Now you want a package but it needs other dependencies met. Bingo - it pulls them in.
Now you want something which isn't offered in MandrakeUpdate or RedCarpet? So you download the RPMs. Load up RedCarpet again and use the 'Install local packages' - it tells you what you are missing and most of the time it will be able to pull those dependencies off the Mandrake or Ximian packages.
And that is ignoring the wonders of urpmi, apt-get or other command line tools. The 'software is too difficult to install on Linux' line is wearing VERY thin.
So here we are, umpteen months after the launch of the XBox and the debut of Halo on Xbox. Its been a while since the launch of the XBox and for a lot of that time, Halo has been the only thing worthy of buying an Xbox for.
Now we get the announcement that the PC/Mac version will be another 12 months away. Odd that a game which was originally developed for the PC/Mac should take so long to reach it's original target platform.
Such a delay can be interpretted in many ways and unless hanging around on the hbo servers making a nuisance until questions are answered actually has an effect, we'll probably never know precisely why the timeline looks like it does.
My personal rumour mill suggests that moving the project to the XBox opened out the graphic capabilities and closed down the outright flexibility of the game. Given any console controller, there is a limit to the number of controls and options you can present to a player. A mouse is actually the perfect tool for directing strategy on a map. Keyboards allow for many 'fast' commands and more complex controls. So the first thing you cull when moving to a console is the complexity of the interface between player and game.
PC/Macs also offer a more established platform for excessive memory usage, something which tends to be tight on a console. So the next thing to bin on a console is enormous worlds loading in the background as you cross 'tile' boundaries.
So Halo is another year away. And no Linux version either. Lets hope that the restrictions that the console version imposed are loosened/removed from the PC/Mac version. And lets hope that some of the more exotic ideas that originally made Halo sound like the next generation of gaming actually make it back in.
Well for a start, this is a browser where themability is built into the lowest to the highest levels. If you fancy fixing something in the XUL descriptions to make something behaviour in a more intuitive fashion for you, it can be done. There are different graphics available if you don't like the modern theme, and now the APIs are frozen, you can expect there to be more on the way.
Or maybe you mean like Galeon for those with Gnome. Or maybe Skipstone which is just GTK+ based? Or K-meleon if you are on Windows? There are projects galore out there playing with the Moz codebase.
You can plug almost any GUI you want on the front of the Gecko rendering engine. A lot of the projects listed above have been done to improve the connectivity between the Gecko engine and other related parts of the UI environment - imagine Bonobo-integration of the Gecko engine to provide a central, capable HTML engine for all GNOME components..
So if you don't like the UI, you can fix it at many levels. For me, it works fine.
I hope somebody's going to write some automatic conversion tools because going back to one even a few days later is a hairy experience indeed.
Guess you haven't seen txt2regex? It doesn't support Perl 6 yet - but it supports about 20 languages at this point so I think you can reasonably expect to see more in the future:-)
So Redhat has done some significant work on the TUX webserver and it's patentable. They should DEFINTELY file those patents.
Now don't get me wrong. Software patents are generally bad news - they are too long (even 10 years in software is an eternity) and a lot aren't even worth the paper they are written on. But for the software industry today they are part and parcel of developing software and protecting the work that a software company has put in.
Patents aren't like trademarks - there is no 'patent dilution' to worry about. So RedHat can be extremely selective about who is allowed to benefit from the patent (even free of charge) and who is never going to get a license. This is particularly important - MS has a vested interest in watching over a lot of the developments in the TUX webserver as TUX is the main performance competitor to IIS. If RedHat patents its best ideas, it makes a public record of the 'invention'. If MS patents something that RedHat came up with, yes, prior art may be used to fight a legal battle to have the patent nulled but that is considerably more expensive than simply patenting the good stuff first.
Now I look forward to the day when software patents last 3 years from filing (because I dont see software patents ever going away totally). I look forward to the day when all software patents are published PRIOR to the patent being awarded so that many eyes may suggest prior art challenges. But until that day comes, Free and Open source companies had better use the weapons at hand to protect their assets. And if that means filing patents so be it.
The Intel compiler has been known to ignore possible pointer-aliasing (variable accessed directly and also accessed via a pointer).
Its not the only compiler that has problems with pointer aliasing. Optimizing aliased pointers will give you trouble on lots of platforms - careful reading of the ANSI standard says quite a lot about valid C coding and avoiding aliasing situations.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this at all like the way the human eye sees?
This foveon system is like the human eye inasmuchas the light photons penetrate multiple layers and register at more than one levels in the same spot. For example, take a look at this cross section of the human retina.
Current CCDs only collect one waveband of light at one area. To simulate colour, they collect three different wavebands in adjacent areas on the surface of the CCD. Hence the funky moire patterns you that you see in tightly patterned cloth on the sample piccies on the site.
I hate pixel noise in my digital pictures. I have heard that since red color has to be detected at the deepest part of the silicon there is an abudance of noise in the reds.
If the upper layers are completely transparent in the red, then your concerns don't apply. As long as the actual transparency of the upper layers is reasonable, then there is little cause to worry - traditionally CCDs are far more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum than the blue so even modest photon loss at the red end is unlikely to seriously degrade the pictures.
The other nice thing about this technology is that the spatial size of the light bins is approximately three times larger than that for the equivalent physical sized CCD - that means better signal-to-noise ratios for this new technology.
Anyway, the presentations look compelling. I await cameras with reasonable numbers of megapixels (say 4Mpixels +) and reviews...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Short of John Carmack actually revealing how much money id software makes for each copy of Quake 3 sold, you probably can't get hard figures. But I think your estimate of around $3 profit per game is about right, especially once you factor in material costs, packaging and transport costs.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Most people don't use Ogg Vorbis for the quality. They use it for the license.
Speak for yourself - I use it for the quality, especially now that the audio artefacts that were so obvious in early development releases are fixed.
In high bitrate modes, there is little difference between properly encoded MP3s and OGG files. And high bitrate is what really matters, unless you are streaming over a low bandwidth connection (in which OGG is the clear winner due to size).
Personal blind testing between Ogg VBR 160kbit and MP3 192kbit was pretty even - very few people could tell the difference and where there were impressions of 'better' it fell on the Ogg side. Given that Ogg VBR 160kbit is about 25% smaller than the MP3 at 192kbit, that's pretty useful.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yes, sure they can "give out" GCC, bash, EMACS and whatnot. The point is, the majority of the real world (tm) out there isn't going to care.
Without the GNU tools, the real world (tm) wouldn't be noticing Linux. There wouldn't have been a base of freely developable base tools with which to build other things. Actually, reading your totally uninformed views reminds me of a quote that is extremely applicable.
Have a nice day,
... of that James Bond coat that inflated to turn the wearer into an oversized inflatable golf-ball-like object.
Be the envy of your friends - turn into a bouncy ball at the touch of button. Be known as Pinball forever.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
One of the things you want to do as a Linux gamer who really cares about getting the last few FPS out of a box should be to set up dedicated gaming sessions as part of the login process. This means that the only thing running in the box will be whatever minimal services you need, X and the actualy game you are running.
If you use gdm for your logins, then create a script named, say, 'Quake3' in /etc/gdm/Sessions which has contents like:
#!/bin/sh /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession /usr/bin/Quake3
exec
Make sure this is executable (chmod 755 /etc/gdm/Sessions/Quake3) and you should be set.
Then when you login to your box, choose the Quake3 session in the top left and type in your user name and password as normal. The game will launch immediately with nothing else running at all. The main benefit of this is that you free as many of the resources available to be dedicated to game playing.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Lets add armor and weapons to these things and we got autonomous robot wars! Personally, I've always wished that those robot-battle type shows on tv were autonomous instead of remote controlled. Now THAT would be a challenge.
If you're short of spare parts, you could do worse than muck around with a virtual equivalent.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I think Bill has problems stringing sentences together, after all he droped out.
Looks like it's contagious :-)
I'd be interested to know how anybody could tell if you've shared the music and what this 'digital watermarking' is all about. If you made MP3s from the CD you make, how would UMG know you violated the copyright? Is my iTunes gonna email them when I play the pirated MP3?
I'd be interested in knowing about a watermarking scheme that survives being encoded into an OGG or MP3 format. After all, there is little point in watermarking audio if you can hear the watermarking distorting the original sound. As most compression techniques take the most important components of the sound (fourier transforms, wavelet transforms, whatever) I suspect that the watermarks are at least damaged by using lossy compressions and may be untraceable. If the watermark is only present in the highest frequencies of the recording, then a simple low pass filter will remove it. If it is present in the least significant bit of each sample, then it will span all frequencies with equal amplitude, but will almost certainly be lost when encoded to OGG/MP3.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I am in the final stages of a book on .NET Server Security (okay, have a good laugh)
Laugh? I on my way to the hospital right now to have the splits in my sides sewn up...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Income taxes? $3,684,000,000 [yahoo.com] for the year ended June 30, 2000. Or were you talking about sales and other taxes?
Very very interesting (by the way the figures you give are for 2002, not 2000). MS's total revenue has increased by $6 billion over the last three years, but their tax bill has decreased by over $1.2 billion (i.e. since George W. got into the Whitehouse - I'd be interested to see a breakdown on the taxes to see why). However, net income is down $1.6 billion dollars, despite vastly improved revenue and lower taxes.
No wonder MS is worried about the GPL :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Except I am browsing at 3 right now, and there are 29 "Reply to This" links, 4 viewable on my screen. Which means I have to sort through at least 4, or at most 29 links to get to the one I want. Seems easier to just move my hand.
Well - try identifying some unique word just before or after the link you are after.
In getting to and replying to your message, type
/hand
Hit TAB and the "reply to this" link is selected. Hit Enter and you're done.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I found a lot of complaints about the UI of the program (see one here [slashdot.org])
But you will also find a ton of people who like the UI just fine. Once you get used to the UI, it is fast, powerful and practical. Blender does have a steep learning curve to begin with, but once you have that over with, the package shows its power.
You might think that the 'vi of 3D modelling' is an insulting term. Others might view it as high praise.
That said, I still prefer Emacs :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I work as the systems administrator for my company, and let me tell you one thing about real companies, "THEY DON'T JUST USE MS OFFICE". Almost all major companies have some sort of ERP solution (Enterprise Resource Planning). Over at my company we use Lotus Notes, but some other companies use SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards... Now you know what all these ERPs have in common? The user applcations are ALL BUILT FOR WINDOWS. Some of these companies, like mine, might run Linux (RH) on their servers, but I would never switch my users to linux just because RH 8.0 has a new cool UI with OpenOffice.
For linux to make it to the desktop seen, companies like Oracle, SAP, Lotus, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards will have to start supporting linux in a serious way. If they can provide apps that run on Linux and that can connect and properly function with the accounting system, the accounts receivable system, the inventory system, the CRM systems and so on, then Linux will be able and probably even beat windows in the desktop market.
I'm inclined to agree with you - in order for the linux desktop to really make it in the business workplace, there need to be Linux clients for the major ERP applications. Now if you have total control over your own workplace machine and Lotus Notes is your only sticking point against moving to Linux, then format that harddrive now. Lotus Notes runs really very well on Wine these days, and while the performance isn't quite as snappy as I would like, it's certainly good enough even on an old cranky PII400.
I live in hope that we might see a Lotus Notes client make it out into the wild in some shape or form. I think Lotus might be surprised at how many development shops would welcome the flexibility to run Lotus Notes on a Unix-like platform rather than being limited to Windows platforms only.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
From where I'm sitting, Sun can't be about to push a load of cheap linux boxes out for the average user. That would be commercial suicide - the PC market is already too cut-throat for there to be any margins to work with.
Sun probably isn't that worried about getting a vast income from pushing StarOffice for schools either - the benefit to Sun from this initiative is that students will be familiar with StarOffice rather than MS Office.
Sun's likely push here is to move in and replace all those Windows boxes in places like call centres, POS terminals and sales rooms where a centralized server provides much of the grunt and the terminals actually don't do much. Being able to replace existing Windows installs with PC + Linux makes a lot of cost sense - network installs, locked down to prevent fiddling, with the needed apps either on the Linux machines or on a central (Solaris?) server is likely to be a winner on TCO.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
occlusion detection? Is that used for detecting the occult?
I can see how it might be usefull for games like Quake, Doom etc, but I'm not so sure about GTA etc
Actually, occlusion detection will have a massive impact on GTA3. Basically, occlusion detection determines whether the pixel/block of pixels currently being rendered will be obscured by some other pixel/block of pixels closer to the viewer. It is most effective when you have a lot of objects to render which overlap - a cityscape like GTA3 will benefit the most from this sort of processing. Consider that at most you can normally see about 15 or twenty buildings in GTA3 even with maximum viewing distance set, although there are hundreds you could potentially see if you had xray vision. If the card can skip rendering any of those buildings you can't see, you get faster performance.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I try to use Mozilla but I'm always drawn back to IE because its just snappier. I think that Microsoft pins the IE pages also. Even when I keep Mozilla resident, my system swaps like no tomorrow when using Mozilla on a PIII 866Mhz system w/ 384mb RAM
What the hell do you have loaded? With five tabbed pages in Moz with maybe forty sites visited, my memory usage (Linux) is clocking eight processes sharing 57MB. My TOTAL memory usage for the whole system is around 197MB (of which 110MB is currently in RAM, the rest is swapped out) and that includes Emacs, Lotus Notes running on Wine, Gnumeric and all the GNOME libs supporting that, system monitors, IM app running on Java and about 25 remote processes running through XFree. If you are swapping on 384MB RAM, you need to tune your system more carefully or something else is swallowing your memory, cause Moz is not the problem. And yes, all those processes are running on a PII 400MHz with 256MB ram so it's not as though I'm sitting on a God-like box.
By the way, vi is way too restrictive for the uses I put Emacs to. Maybe if vi gets a Lisp engine I'd use it for more than basic editing :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
b) at this stage upgrading is not easy at all. I upgrade KDE fairly regularly, and even though I use binary packages built specifically for my Mandrake distro (the supposedly user-friendly one), I still have to slog through the dependency swamp every time I install it. And God forbid you should try to build source....Even installing a new version of OpenOffice involves dealing .sversionrc, and figuring out how the hell to install it so everyone can use it.
Complete and utter, utter nonsense. You're obviously stuck in the 'I have to do this by the command line ...' rut.
Take, for example, updating a Mandrake distro from 7.2 to 8.2. Stick CD in drive. Click pretty buttons. Upgrade completes. Everything works.
Or, say, you fancy playing with the Ximian Gnome distro. You download their automatic installer. More pretty buttons. Upgrade completes. Everything ... just ... works.
Now you're on a roll. You subscribe to the OpenOffice channel. You click on the OpenOffice package and it installs. Wow. It works first time.
So now you're bored with the basic Ximian and Mandrake stuff. Add the cooker channel to the MandrakeUpdate list using MandrakeUpdates GUI. It whirrs off into the net and brings you a larger list of packages. Now you want a package but it needs other dependencies met. Bingo - it pulls them in.
Now you want something which isn't offered in MandrakeUpdate or RedCarpet? So you download the RPMs. Load up RedCarpet again and use the 'Install local packages' - it tells you what you are missing and most of the time it will be able to pull those dependencies off the Mandrake or Ximian packages.
And that is ignoring the wonders of urpmi, apt-get or other command line tools. The 'software is too difficult to install on Linux' line is wearing VERY thin.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Now we get the announcement that the PC/Mac version will be another 12 months away. Odd that a game which was originally developed for the PC/Mac should take so long to reach it's original target platform.
Such a delay can be interpretted in many ways and unless hanging around on the hbo servers making a nuisance until questions are answered actually has an effect, we'll probably never know precisely why the timeline looks like it does.
My personal rumour mill suggests that moving the project to the XBox opened out the graphic capabilities and closed down the outright flexibility of the game. Given any console controller, there is a limit to the number of controls and options you can present to a player. A mouse is actually the perfect tool for directing strategy on a map. Keyboards allow for many 'fast' commands and more complex controls. So the first thing you cull when moving to a console is the complexity of the interface between player and game.
PC/Macs also offer a more established platform for excessive memory usage, something which tends to be tight on a console. So the next thing to bin on a console is enormous worlds loading in the background as you cross 'tile' boundaries.
So Halo is another year away. And no Linux version either. Lets hope that the restrictions that the console version imposed are loosened/removed from the PC/Mac version. And lets hope that some of the more exotic ideas that originally made Halo sound like the next generation of gaming actually make it back in.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Can't anything be done to fix it?
Well for a start, this is a browser where themability is built into the lowest to the highest levels. If you fancy fixing something in the XUL descriptions to make something behaviour in a more intuitive fashion for you, it can be done. There are different graphics available if you don't like the modern theme, and now the APIs are frozen, you can expect there to be more on the way.
Or maybe you mean like Galeon for those with Gnome. Or maybe Skipstone which is just GTK+ based? Or K-meleon if you are on Windows? There are projects galore out there playing with the Moz codebase.
You can plug almost any GUI you want on the front of the Gecko rendering engine. A lot of the projects listed above have been done to improve the connectivity between the Gecko engine and other related parts of the UI environment - imagine Bonobo-integration of the Gecko engine to provide a central, capable HTML engine for all GNOME components..
So if you don't like the UI, you can fix it at many levels. For me, it works fine.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I hope somebody's going to write some automatic conversion tools because going back to one even a few days later is a hairy experience indeed.
Guess you haven't seen txt2regex? It doesn't support Perl 6 yet - but it supports about 20 languages at this point so I think you can reasonably expect to see more in the future :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Perfect, Nvidia's drivers aren't. About as good as you can get, they are.
Reviewer like Yoda speak, yes? Graphics chip reviews inverted sentences need like head with hole ... hmmm?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
So Redhat has done some significant work on the TUX webserver and it's patentable. They should DEFINTELY file those patents.
Now don't get me wrong. Software patents are generally bad news - they are too long (even 10 years in software is an eternity) and a lot aren't even worth the paper they are written on. But for the software industry today they are part and parcel of developing software and protecting the work that a software company has put in.
Patents aren't like trademarks - there is no 'patent dilution' to worry about. So RedHat can be extremely selective about who is allowed to benefit from the patent (even free of charge) and who is never going to get a license. This is particularly important - MS has a vested interest in watching over a lot of the developments in the TUX webserver as TUX is the main performance competitor to IIS. If RedHat patents its best ideas, it makes a public record of the 'invention'. If MS patents something that RedHat came up with, yes, prior art may be used to fight a legal battle to have the patent nulled but that is considerably more expensive than simply patenting the good stuff first.
Now I look forward to the day when software patents last 3 years from filing (because I dont see software patents ever going away totally). I look forward to the day when all software patents are published PRIOR to the patent being awarded so that many eyes may suggest prior art challenges. But until that day comes, Free and Open source companies had better use the weapons at hand to protect their assets. And if that means filing patents so be it.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The Intel compiler has been known to ignore possible pointer-aliasing (variable accessed directly and also accessed via a pointer).
Its not the only compiler that has problems with pointer aliasing. Optimizing aliased pointers will give you trouble on lots of platforms - careful reading of the ANSI standard says quite a lot about valid C coding and avoiding aliasing situations.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes