The gaming industry on Linux is still young - we have now, mainly thanks to Loki with kudos to Hyperion and Tribsoft, a fair group of 3D FPS games along with a handful of strategy and sim type games. These are all native ports.
We also have games which currently run well under Wine - Halflife is the obvious choice here, along with Starcraft and several others.
Transgamings Direct3D port promises to allow us to run more Windows games under Linux, and for the ardent gamer who does not wish to switch-boot to Windows or even maybe just have a Windows machine, this port is of the utmost importance.
But looking into the long term view, the most important thing for Linux gaming is the Linux is viewed as a viable gaming platform by the game manufacturers. They have to see dollars in order to think about a port. What most game producers watch are the sales figures. Here we are cursed by the difficulties of separating the figures apart - the highest profile port up until very recently was Quake 3 Arena. Because Linux gamers could buy the Windows release and use the data files with Linux binaries, it is impossible to tell how many people are actually running Quake 3 Arena on Linux from the sales figures. And yet the sales of pure Linux Q3A boxes will be affecting the decision of game producers now considering Linux releases.
Loki has, for the most part, made sure that you can't use one of it's Linux release with the Windows data files to ensure that a small market is not further eroded. It's not a popular decision but I feel that it was a necessary one.
Loki should also come in for some serious praise for their commitment to the quality of the ports it does, both at initial release and in continuing to bug fix and improve the original release (for example, adding an OpenGL renderer to Myth II at least 12 months after the original went on sale). And I hope it is quality that will get gamers to use the Linux releases - in the marketplace, people want the best possible game. If the Linux release is smoother, faster, easier to set up a game server, then people will switch.
While I think that the WineX stuff will help increase the number of games on Linux, I don't view it as making Linux a more important gaming platform in the eyes of the game producers. It may make Direct X ports easier but in an ideal world, we'd all be using crossplatform toolkits from day one.
I'm hoping my perpetual lack stable mozilla, across multiple machines, OSs, and stable / nighly / beta builds, is some bizzarre coincidence. I'd like to find out. Could you do the following:
1. Click a menu item. Eg, 'Tasks'
2. Hit the left arrow ten times
Does the web browser fail to provide any response whatsoever for you too?
Hmm. Click 'Tasks'. Menu drops down. Press left 10 times. Menus drop down for each item on the left, cycling round and finishing at Tasks menu again. Click on 'Tools->History'. History page pops up.
If I was in bugzilla, this one would be labelled 'WORKSFORME'.
Current build 2001050521 on Linux - that was one of the last 0.9 branch before the release.
If you rely entirely on selling software, open source could be viewed as a threat. If your product fails to perform as well as the equivalent open source package, its time to find another market because you have effectively lost this one.
However, not every part of the software map is likely to be covered open source software immediately, or even the medium or long term. The key components that most people use every day are the ones that are likely to have good quality, completely functional open source packages - so this includes the core OS, mail and browser, office suite as these are used by pretty much everyone. That this fairly squarely knocks a huge chunk out of Microsoft's product line is a problem for Microsoft.
Software companies who depend on less mainstream products, such as graphic suites, music creation suites, 3D design suites are in less immediate danger - the number of people who use each of these packages is only a third or less of those who use, say, an email package and consequently the number of open source developers who might want to build their own software is less. So niche players have a smaller problem - they just have to keep ahead in providing a better package than the open source equivalent.
Eventually though, most desktop software packages hit a feature wall - beyond the wall, only minor or incremental improvements are possible. Look at the number of key features added to, say MS Word between Word 7 and Word XP - how much of that 'innovation' actually affects your ability to write a letter? So even niche market software players have a problem - they can't keep adding features forever to stay ahead of the open source solution. That said, this doesn't automatically mean the end of the road for that software maker - they are still likely to have a considerable user base for a while.
The same is partly true for commercial middleware. Working on RDBMS, I don't see that feature wall coming for many years yet - there are many requests made by customers for features and enough things we want to get done internally to last another quarter-century at least. And the commercial databases vendors also sell service terms along with the database to ensure that the customer isn't left without support. But I feel that on the lower end, we will see more companies deploying open source database solutions for less critical tasks. It is at the high end, high availability, high transaction end of life that will give database vendors most room to breathe for quite a while yet. Even when postgresql or sapdb or whatever reach the feature wall along with the rest of us, there will still be room to sell services bound around each product, and support requires a high level of knowledge about the software in detail at many levels.
I often wonder how people manage to continously create some of the most useful open sourced products when they are not getting paid for it. Don't get me wrong I understand life isn't all about money, but you have to sometimes look at the realities of life, and you do need money to pay your bills.
Yes - but most open source developers have normal paying jobs providing their income. The development of a lot of the software you see on Sourceforge and elsewhere is being created in their spare time - if you are in the software business because you love coding, it shouldn't be a surprise when people go home and create something of their own to tackle a problem, create a game, provide them with a better debugging environment or whatever, without the pressures of commercial development.
Recently, there have been more companies providing salaries to fund development of particular open source projects - this speeds up the development process enormously, but it doesn't reduce the fact that people are still able to contribute their own skills to further these projects regardless of they are being paid by RedHat or Ximian or whoever. Don't think that Open Source development will disappear if all the commercial companies who contribute go out of business - it might grab less headlines, but it will go on.
In order for non-commercial operating systems to succeed, they must deliver competitive software in the following areas:
Single User applications (mail readers, etc.)
Games
Content delivery daemons (apache)
Group-oriented corporate programs
The first 3 fields are being actively conquered. Sure, there's much room for improvement, but hey -- we've come a long way, baby. The fourth segment is the most crucial for truly capturing the corporate market. Apps like Outlook still remain essentially untouched by the open source movement. (I believe/. did a story on this some time ago). It's still the area which needs the most improvement.
Yes - for corporate adoption, groupware is critical. But tings aren't as bad as you make out. From the commercial side, Lotus Notes Domino server runs on Linux - while much villified and hated, it does fulfil the needs of collaborative groupware. On the Outlook/Outlook Express front, take a look at the abilities of Evolution (GNOME project) - this is getting close to a 1.0 release and has the integrated email/calendar/timekeeping tools needed for groupware.
Oh, and don't mention the Transaction Processing Performance Councel, by Performance or by price/tpmC (a hint: MS has 10 of the... top ten), or heck, just overall!
Yes, MS has made some mistakes in the past, but they are learning from them and are making a quiet comeback. Nothing comes close to touching thier data mining/warehousing product.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in terms of raw performance, MS SQL server 2000 doesn't cut it. Those performance figures are very interesting, so lets take a look in more detail.
In third place in raw performance is DB2 UDB, running on 128 700Mhz PIIIXeons. This manages 440879.96 TPC-C throughput.
In second place in raw performance is MS SQL2000, running on 192 700MHz PIIIXeons - 50% more processors than the DB2 UDB result. And the TPCC throughput? 505302.77 - a mere 15% more throughput. Not impressive.
In first place in this raw performance chart is another MS SQL2000 result, running on 280 900MHz PIIIXeons. Oh dear - they added another 50% more processors, upped the speed to 900MHz per chip and still only managed another 36% in TPCC throughput. I reckon that a linear fit should have shown about 55% more performance than their second place result to be competitive.
So you see - while MS has the money to buy lots of equipment to get impressive TPCC scores in raw performance, they need far more grunt from their hardware to provide equivalent performance to DB2.
1. -the GNOME team and/or Ximian DO NOT release packages on a timely basis when new versions of GNOME are out, users should not have to wait a month or more or in the case of Mandrake users for their distribution creator to release a new distro with the updated GNOME
Guess you don't appreciate that just because the source code is out, it's not necessarily an instantaneous process to make RPMs and test them thoroughly on all the distributions.
I have seen a ton of people complaining that Ximian hasn't released packages for GNOME 1.4. It's been three weeks since they were available. Ximian supports about 15 distributions and generally does a damn good job of bundling all the GNOME stuff together in one easy-to-install and easy-to-use set. Give them time to make sure that when they release Ximian GNOME 1.4 they get it right. The same moaners who are whinging and carping at the moment would be yelling blue murder if Ximian Evolution had corrupted their mail file or broken their IMAP setup, or if a minor glitch in Bonobo was causing grief with their GNOME subsystems.
For those of you who can't be bothered to build your own GNOME distro, be patient. The impatient can always install their own stuff on the day it comes out from the source code. If you don't have GNOME 1.4 running on your system at this point in time, that really is a result of the choices you have made.
IBM says client coming soon (some probs w/ libs). Remember, NOTES is on OS/2, AIX and Mac...all now have *nix desktops (thanx KDE and Gnome!) and now IBM will port to Linux. DB2 client/server==there...WebSphere Server==there...httpd==there (and FREE (gratis, not libre))...JDK==there...jikes==there...550 total sponsored OSS projects (and growing==THERE...Iron Penguin (Linux on a zOS/z390 LPAR)==there...u want more????YOU COULDN'T HANDLE MORE!!
While you are waiting for a proper Lotus Notes client port to Linux, you could do a lot worse than run Lotus Notes under Wine. I've migrated my development (DB2 UDB) desktop machine to a dual boot (WinNT/Linux) and since I got Lotus Notes on WINE running smoothly, I haven't rebooted into WinNT for over three weeks.
In my experience, Lotus Notes runs nearly seamlessly since the December 2000 WINE release. Currently its running on a 20010326 release compiled against a 2.2.19 kernel and I swear its more stable on WINE that it was on NT. Everything seems to work - mail, calendaring, attach/detach - hey even the Notes web browser works.
Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.
I guess you're one of those people who thinks that X uses 200MB+? Reading the output of top or ps isn't going to tell you how much memory the process is using - it merely tells you how much is mapped. The problem is that two or more threads may have mapped the same memory area several times, making it look like an 800lb gorilla rather than a marmot. For example, Mozilla has around 20-30 threads active all the time. Chances are pretty good that all you are seeing is the same memory used by multiple threads in Nautilus as well.
the big DB companies all ban publishing benchmark results through terms in their license agreements. This is incredibly irritating because it undermines the free market principle of "perfect information" (markets with "asymetric information" are known to be ineffecient, something laissez-faire Randites never seem to learn).
This would be bad if it were totally true. Oracle has benchmark clauses in its licence agreement. So does MS SQL Server. But DB2 UDB does not - take it, download it, play with it and publish the results. Not being able to publicize benchmark results is a really dumb way to try and tilt the market.
Note: I'm a developer for DB2 UDB so I'm hardly unbiased.
Funny this happens. I run Oracle Applications under several linux boxes. Wouldn't it suck for any business of any size to be running production erp applications to have some critical numbers off becuase of a flawed arithmatic algorythm in the standard libc libraries?
Firstly, as so many posts have pointed out, floating point is inexact and you can easily fall foul of rounding errors when casting to integer.
More importantly, this is why databases go to the trouble of providing DECIMAL type as part of the SQL standard. Floating point variables have 'interesting' rounding errors, and most businesses, especially those doing any sort of accounting, can't afford to lose any precision. All DECIMAL type calculation are therefore done to the limit of the precision of the type and have well-understood rounding limitations which should not manifest themselves like this.
Quite honestly, if you are using floating point numbers for any sort of simulation, doing the error analysis is a complete pain in the neck. In many respects you are better off using integer values, maybe with scaling offsets, because at least then you can control and understand all the cases where you drop precision.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzztttt. Wrong!
Pedant alert: The Ogg in Ogg Vorbis is taken from the move in Netrek - to Ogg an opponent. The full definition is here but to summarize the Netrek definition: "to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions". Quite appropriate really.
Using slightly different compression methods, how does OGG performance compare to MP3? Systems being as fast as they are, nowadays, this isn't that *big* of an issue, but it is nonetheless with older systems in mind and those with heavy load.
In my experience, an Ogg Vorbis file compressed with variable bit rate centred on 160kb with minimum 128 and maximum 192 is the same size or smaller than a 128 kb MP3 file compressed from the same source CD. The quality of the encoding is excellent - I'm extremely impressed with the fidelity and sound of the Ogg Vorbis output, and I've now standardized on the Ogg Vorbis encoder for all my on-disk music.
Currently the encoder I'm using (the beta3 release under CDex on my WinNT box and under Grip on my Linux box) encodes at about 1xCD data rate on a 400MHz PII machine. Thats not as fast as some of the MP3 Encoders - the x86 assembler ones can acheive around 2.5x on the same machine. But it is early days for the Vorbis encoder - I expect it to get a lot faster once the 1.0 release is out.
For those who say OGG is late, consider the factors in it not being so pushed for. There was never a huge consumer demand for an MP3 alternative. People own gigs and gigs of MP3s... telling them to convert because of a patent that will affect them when they purchase a commercial product by a few dollars doesn't mean much to them, as they commonly use only XMMS/Winamp and Napster/Gnapster.
I don't see a lot of people immediately switching all of their collection to Ogg Vorbis. However, all the important players support Vorbis codecs now and therefore it is a snap to start adding.ogg files into the collection. I am slowly replacing my remaining.mp3s with.ogg versions as I get time and anything new is automatically encoded as.ogg.
Companies looking to market commercial digital music players and/or software, on the other hand, plagued with the prospect of paying the MP3 patent owner money for each product they sell, must be more interested. But, again, it is very dependent on the consumer since they would have to convert the MP3 to OGG without help from any software supplied by the commercial company supplying the product -- but software supplied from a non-commercial entity, such as Ogg Vorbis creators, could be downloaded.... Packaged, though? I don't think it could be packaged with the product, regardless of it being "free" or not, because it would be included as part of a commercial product. The best a company could do would be an automatic download (of course with yes/no prompt and license agreement) of the extension from Vorbis to their uploading software.
Ah - but here the use of a BSD license is important. Because the Commercial packages can compile the Vorbis support into their own systems and not be forced to distribute the source code, modified or otherwise, they have no real reason to neglect this format - they can add it for free and add yet another feature to those marketing tick-lists. Like I said, conversion from MP3 to OGG is probably a non-starter but once this format starts to attract the attention it deserves, I would expect it to become fairly popular fairly quickly.
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
Cranking the Gamma on this monitor improved the movie no-end, so I expect the game will be the same. Think of the Quake3TeamArena demo level - with the gamma slider at the lowest setting you could barely see anything.
I'm amazed at the number of people who seem to think that DOOM3 should be some multicoloured bright-light party. Thats what Nintendo games are for. Doom's legacy demands dark rooms, illuminated by flickering flourescent lights, monsters which appear out of the shadows or drop on the player from the ceiling.
And seriously, looking at the video footage of Doom 3, this is going to be a game to give you nightmares. The characters are going to be closer to realistic images than ever before - those Maya-produced animations are pushing several thousand polys when up close (I assume that the meshes will have Level-Of-Detail) - playing this is going to be like starring in a good (or maybe even a bad:-) ) horror movie. I fully expect to see some Army Of Darkness mods based on this engine:-)
Don't expect Doom3 to be a game for kids. This one will earn a 'Mature' rating almost straight off the bat.
Weren't both CDE and Motif controlled by a "foundation"? And, well you know...
And the source to CDE and Motif is available where? Now do you see the difference? Additionally, the GNOME Foundation does not do the coding, nor implement the current ideas. It is a talking shop for where to go next and to raise the visibility (and funding) of GNOME. It does not dictate the GNOME development decisions
You forgot IBM's AIX, although I don't see that on a desktop or using X in any way. Still, they're a UNIX vendor.
Two things. First, AIX comes with CDE as standard running on X, so it does get used on a desktop (mine for example) by virtue of remote access through an X server.
Secondly, IBM has already announced that the Linux Toolkit for AIX (versions 4.3.3+ and 5L) and this contains both GNOME and KDE2 ports, so for those of us who make extensive use of AIX life just got a lot easier.
Those are CPUs where the commercial compilers, such as Sun Workshop (SunPro) and xlc (or Visual Age C or whatever IBM calls it these days), frankly kick the crap out of gcc. Gcc is only a good compiler when you use it to build x86 code, and "maybe" Alpha code. Then again the Itanium might look like a joke once the 21364 Alpha (if it ever comes) and the POWER4 hit the market.
I agree with you about GCC as far as producing the fastest code on UltraSparc and POWER processors. If you think that GCC produces optimal x86 code, you haven't used some of the commercial compilers, such as Intels own proton compiler. Intel gave part of its Pentium II optimisations to GCC (back in 1999 if I remember correctly through Cygnus), but I feel it's lagging again. What I'd really like to see is AMD give some major help to the agcc project in terms of best optimisations, effective 3DNow extension use and efficient floating/integer interleaving. But that is another story.
Back to the main thread. You have to have a common baseline when trying to do comparisons. GCC produces an intermediate code which is then transformed into the machine code for the target processor. This means that before optimisation the actual machine code is fairly similar and therefore is as close as you can get to the ideal comparison. Exploring the various optimisations will then give you an insight into branch prediction, cache handling, etc.
Why oh why are they testing IA32 code on the Itanium? That is hardly likely to show the performance of the processor in a good light. It's like running an Amiga emulator on x86 and complaining that the copper tricks don't work as quickly.
The Itanium is supposed to be the first in a new line, so I wouldn't be surprised if its IA32 bit convertor was a bolt-on solution for those who can't release themselves from 32bit (I hesistate to mention that 64 bit Windows apps may be a little short on the ground for a while yet...).
The other aspect of benchmarking a system is to have equivalent compilers - different compilers can produce code varying in speed by as much as a factor of two on the same architecture and other factors such as optimizer flags can have a serious impact on the eventual speed.
The obvious set up to compare the Itanium against the competition (which really should include the Alpha, Ultra Sparc and the 64 bit POWER chips, not just x86 architectures) and pick an OS which runs on all of these. Not let me think... Then use GCC in unoptimized mode and compare code length and execution speed, and then optimize progressively.
That the Itanium can't hold a candle to a Pentium I 100MHz on some 32 bit code is amusing, but not a real indicator of speed. That said, I still feel that the Itanium is a weak competitor against the assembled 64 bit processors already on the market, but Intel probably has sufficient clout to carve itself a niche.
To me, this looks like a major hiccup for Microsoft. Under the terms of this agreement, MS has permanently lost the rights to the Java Compatible trademark. From the Sun press release:
With the contract terminated, Sun and Microsoft have agreed to end the current litigation, initiated in October, 1997 before Judge Ronald M. Whyte in U.S. District Court in San Jose, under the following general terms:
The Court will enter a permanent injunction barring Microsoft from using the JAVA COMPATIBLE trademark. Previously, the Court found that Microsoft had distributed incompatible implementations of the Java technology, and the court entered a preliminary injunction barring Microsoft from using the JAVA COMPATIBLE trademark on these incompatible products.
To protect developers and consumers who have already invested in Microsofts implementations of the Java technology, Sun has agreed to grant Microsoft a limited license to continue shipping essentially as is its currently shipping implementations of the outdated 1.1.4 version of the Java technology. Those products have already been modified to comply with injunctions secured by Sun in the litigation. The license covers only the products that already contain the Java technology, and lasts only for seven years.
Beyond that, Microsoft has no rights to distribute the Java technology, or to otherwise use any of Suns intellectual property.
To those who believe this sounds the death knell for Java, think again. Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of not being able to use the most widely recognised java trademark, while its competitors (Sun, Netscape and others) will be able to capitalize on it. This agreement is even wider than Java, stopping MS from licensing, distributing or making use of any of Suns Intellectual Property either. That may make C#'s passage into the world a little tricky if Sun has much of the Java technology patented...
C# doesn't cut it. It's not here now and Java is and has been for six years.C# is still months off release and even at the first release it won't get wide use until the development tools and toolkits catch up. That will hurt.
I always hear this argument when it comes to copy protection. "It's not fair because people have legitimate uses."
This might be true, but the fact is that most of the uses are not legitimate. This stuff about being denied access to these things unfairly is wrong.
So you would outlaw lockpicks for example, because they are obviously buglary tools with only limited fair use? Or would you go further, and outlaw guns, because you can kill people with guns? Or crikey - you would outlaw hammers, because they can be used to bludgeon someone to death? Or outlaw writeable CDs, because obviously everyone uses them to copy their friends CDs (actually that is legal in Canada). Or eradicate any knowledge about encryption, since this information will, in part, be used to decrypt copy-protected information?
If you go down this road, we will be living in a society that is living in the equivalent of a padded cell. Anything which can have illegal use is banned. Anything that could remove someone's (people or corporations) job or income today will disappear.
And people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too.
When mechanisation arrived, thousands of agriculture workers lost their jobs. When steam powered looms were invented, the number of people needed to make cloth in quantity shrunk by at least an order of magnitude. The industrial revolution changed the working patterns of society. All major changes in production or techonolgy obsoletes certain ways of life. Puts people out of work. What you fail to recognise is that out of this change comes new opportunities. There is often a period of difficulties and resentment by those who are affected - this is natural and understandable.
Don't stop the train just because you can't see the destination.
This is just my point. Why the hell shouldn't companies be allowed to protect their property? The big word there is copyrighted - like 'owned by'. The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust. Piracy increases the costs for people who aren't thieves. Piracy means that some great software just doesn't reach you. If we remove the tools, we remove the crime, and the world is better off in the end.
Fair use. Do you really want to live in a world where criticism of any work is not possible because content restrictions stop you publishing any of it, even it's name? Would you be happy knowing that you could not record you own musical or video creations and distribute them to a purchasing public, because everyone else has equipment that will only play 'trusted' media because of content restrictions?
Piracy happens. The biggest threat to income is not the home user making MP3s of their music collection so they can listen to any track in any order. It is the CD pressing plants turning out thousands and thousands of copies of the latest Brittany Spears album (why, I don't know) or copies of Windows 2000 Professional (to be sold at $50 a shot). Organized crime makes vast profits from copying goods. Even DVDs, with all their encryption, access controls and region codes, can be churned out by a DVD pressing plant if you have one original to work from without having to break the original codes. Just make a bit copy which includes the key codes.
Piracy does hurt the consumer. But why hurt the consumer further by limiting the consumers rights through technological barriers?
Actually, there IS another major motion picture set in the Blade Runner UNIVERSE (though not technically a "sequel"): Soldier , starring Kurt Russel and written by David Webb Peoples, the writer of Blade Runner. See this info at the IMDB (also quoted below): Writer David Peoples has said that Solider is a "side-quel" to Blade Runner (which he also wrote) because it takes place in the same universe and in fact the vehicles used by the Blade Runners, spinners, are also used in Solider. All of this is not, of course, to negate your point, which is that Hollywood has a habit of screwing up perfectly wonderful movies with sequels-that-never-should-have-been.
Are you suggesting that David Peoples wrote Bladerunner? Thats a little strong. He co-wrote the screenplay with Hampton Fancher, which in turn is based on the book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K. Dick.
Similarly, while there are references to Blade Runner in the scenary and the script, there are references to a whole host of other movies as well such as Aliens, Star Trek II and others. I'd hardly class that as a sequel to BladeRunner. I know David Peoples is quoted as calling it a 'side-quel' but I personally find that a bit rich - simply associating your own screenplay with another one you co-wrote based on someone elses novel does not give you automatic kudos.
The M18 milestone of Mozilla has binaries with the MathML support compiled in, so you might like to give that a try. If you feel a little more adventurous, here are some pages with more recent binaries with MathML support -
Linux and Win32. These also have SVG support compiled in as well for vector images and the Linux binaries have XSL as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The gaming industry on Linux is still young - we have now, mainly thanks to Loki with kudos to Hyperion and Tribsoft, a fair group of 3D FPS games along with a handful of strategy and sim type games. These are all native ports.
We also have games which currently run well under Wine - Halflife is the obvious choice here, along with Starcraft and several others.
Transgamings Direct3D port promises to allow us to run more Windows games under Linux, and for the ardent gamer who does not wish to switch-boot to Windows or even maybe just have a Windows machine, this port is of the utmost importance.
But looking into the long term view, the most important thing for Linux gaming is the Linux is viewed as a viable gaming platform by the game manufacturers. They have to see dollars in order to think about a port. What most game producers watch are the sales figures. Here we are cursed by the difficulties of separating the figures apart - the highest profile port up until very recently was Quake 3 Arena. Because Linux gamers could buy the Windows release and use the data files with Linux binaries, it is impossible to tell how many people are actually running Quake 3 Arena on Linux from the sales figures. And yet the sales of pure Linux Q3A boxes will be affecting the decision of game producers now considering Linux releases.
Loki has, for the most part, made sure that you can't use one of it's Linux release with the Windows data files to ensure that a small market is not further eroded. It's not a popular decision but I feel that it was a necessary one.
Loki should also come in for some serious praise for their commitment to the quality of the ports it does, both at initial release and in continuing to bug fix and improve the original release (for example, adding an OpenGL renderer to Myth II at least 12 months after the original went on sale). And I hope it is quality that will get gamers to use the Linux releases - in the marketplace, people want the best possible game. If the Linux release is smoother, faster, easier to set up a game server, then people will switch.
While I think that the WineX stuff will help increase the number of games on Linux, I don't view it as making Linux a more important gaming platform in the eyes of the game producers. It may make Direct X ports easier but in an ideal world, we'd all be using crossplatform toolkits from day one.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I'm hoping my perpetual lack stable mozilla, across multiple machines, OSs, and stable / nighly / beta builds, is some bizzarre coincidence. I'd like to find out. Could you do the following:
1. Click a menu item. Eg, 'Tasks'
2. Hit the left arrow ten times
Does the web browser fail to provide any response whatsoever for you too?
Hmm. Click 'Tasks'. Menu drops down. Press left 10 times. Menus drop down for each item on the left, cycling round and finishing at Tasks menu again. Click on 'Tools->History'. History page pops up.
If I was in bugzilla, this one would be labelled 'WORKSFORME'.
Current build 2001050521 on Linux - that was one of the last 0.9 branch before the release.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If you rely entirely on selling software, open source could be viewed as a threat. If your product fails to perform as well as the equivalent open source package, its time to find another market because you have effectively lost this one.
However, not every part of the software map is likely to be covered open source software immediately, or even the medium or long term. The key components that most people use every day are the ones that are likely to have good quality, completely functional open source packages - so this includes the core OS, mail and browser, office suite as these are used by pretty much everyone. That this fairly squarely knocks a huge chunk out of Microsoft's product line is a problem for Microsoft.
Software companies who depend on less mainstream products, such as graphic suites, music creation suites, 3D design suites are in less immediate danger - the number of people who use each of these packages is only a third or less of those who use, say, an email package and consequently the number of open source developers who might want to build their own software is less. So niche players have a smaller problem - they just have to keep ahead in providing a better package than the open source equivalent.
Eventually though, most desktop software packages hit a feature wall - beyond the wall, only minor or incremental improvements are possible. Look at the number of key features added to, say MS Word between Word 7 and Word XP - how much of that 'innovation' actually affects your ability to write a letter? So even niche market software players have a problem - they can't keep adding features forever to stay ahead of the open source solution. That said, this doesn't automatically mean the end of the road for that software maker - they are still likely to have a considerable user base for a while.
The same is partly true for commercial middleware. Working on RDBMS, I don't see that feature wall coming for many years yet - there are many requests made by customers for features and enough things we want to get done internally to last another quarter-century at least. And the commercial databases vendors also sell service terms along with the database to ensure that the customer isn't left without support. But I feel that on the lower end, we will see more companies deploying open source database solutions for less critical tasks. It is at the high end, high availability, high transaction end of life that will give database vendors most room to breathe for quite a while yet. Even when postgresql or sapdb or whatever reach the feature wall along with the rest of us, there will still be room to sell services bound around each product, and support requires a high level of knowledge about the software in detail at many levels.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I often wonder how people manage to continously create some of the most useful open sourced products when they are not getting paid for it. Don't get me wrong I understand life isn't all about money, but you have to sometimes look at the realities of life, and you do need money to pay your bills.
Yes - but most open source developers have normal paying jobs providing their income. The development of a lot of the software you see on Sourceforge and elsewhere is being created in their spare time - if you are in the software business because you love coding, it shouldn't be a surprise when people go home and create something of their own to tackle a problem, create a game, provide them with a better debugging environment or whatever, without the pressures of commercial development.
Recently, there have been more companies providing salaries to fund development of particular open source projects - this speeds up the development process enormously, but it doesn't reduce the fact that people are still able to contribute their own skills to further these projects regardless of they are being paid by RedHat or Ximian or whoever. Don't think that Open Source development will disappear if all the commercial companies who contribute go out of business - it might grab less headlines, but it will go on.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
In order for non-commercial operating systems to succeed, they must deliver competitive software in the following areas:
The first 3 fields are being actively conquered. Sure, there's much room for improvement, but hey -- we've come a long way, baby. The fourth segment is the most crucial for truly capturing the corporate market. Apps like Outlook still remain essentially untouched by the open source movement. (I believe /. did a story on this some time ago). It's still the area which needs the most improvement.
Yes - for corporate adoption, groupware is critical. But tings aren't as bad as you make out. From the commercial side, Lotus Notes Domino server runs on Linux - while much villified and hated, it does fulfil the needs of collaborative groupware. On the Outlook/Outlook Express front, take a look at the abilities of Evolution (GNOME project) - this is getting close to a 1.0 release and has the integrated email/calendar/timekeeping tools needed for groupware.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Oh, and don't mention the Transaction Processing Performance Councel, by Performance or by price/tpmC (a hint: MS has 10 of the... top ten), or heck, just overall!
Yes, MS has made some mistakes in the past, but they are learning from them and are making a quiet comeback. Nothing comes close to touching thier data mining/warehousing product.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but in terms of raw performance, MS SQL server 2000 doesn't cut it. Those performance figures are very interesting, so lets take a look in more detail.
In third place in raw performance is DB2 UDB, running on 128 700Mhz PIIIXeons. This manages 440879.96 TPC-C throughput.
In second place in raw performance is MS SQL2000, running on 192 700MHz PIIIXeons - 50% more processors than the DB2 UDB result. And the TPCC throughput? 505302.77 - a mere 15% more throughput. Not impressive.
In first place in this raw performance chart is another MS SQL2000 result, running on 280 900MHz PIIIXeons. Oh dear - they added another 50% more processors, upped the speed to 900MHz per chip and still only managed another 36% in TPCC throughput. I reckon that a linear fit should have shown about 55% more performance than their second place result to be competitive.
So you see - while MS has the money to buy lots of equipment to get impressive TPCC scores in raw performance, they need far more grunt from their hardware to provide equivalent performance to DB2.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
DB2 developer and therefore biased :-)
1. -the GNOME team and/or Ximian DO NOT release packages on a timely basis when new versions of GNOME are out, users should not have to wait a month or more or in the case of Mandrake users for their distribution creator to release a new distro with the updated GNOME
Guess you don't appreciate that just because the source code is out, it's not necessarily an instantaneous process to make RPMs and test them thoroughly on all the distributions.
I have seen a ton of people complaining that Ximian hasn't released packages for GNOME 1.4. It's been three weeks since they were available. Ximian supports about 15 distributions and generally does a damn good job of bundling all the GNOME stuff together in one easy-to-install and easy-to-use set. Give them time to make sure that when they release Ximian GNOME 1.4 they get it right. The same moaners who are whinging and carping at the moment would be yelling blue murder if Ximian Evolution had corrupted their mail file or broken their IMAP setup, or if a minor glitch in Bonobo was causing grief with their GNOME subsystems.
For those of you who can't be bothered to build your own GNOME distro, be patient. The impatient can always install their own stuff on the day it comes out from the source code. If you don't have GNOME 1.4 running on your system at this point in time, that really is a result of the choices you have made.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
IBM says client coming soon (some probs w/ libs). Remember, NOTES is on OS/2, AIX and Mac...all now have *nix desktops (thanx KDE and Gnome!) and now IBM will port to Linux. DB2 client/server==there...WebSphere Server==there...httpd==there (and FREE (gratis, not libre))...JDK==there...jikes==there...550 total sponsored OSS projects (and growing==THERE...Iron Penguin (Linux on a zOS/z390 LPAR)==there...u want more????YOU COULDN'T HANDLE MORE!!
While you are waiting for a proper Lotus Notes client port to Linux, you could do a lot worse than run Lotus Notes under Wine. I've migrated my development (DB2 UDB) desktop machine to a dual boot (WinNT/Linux) and since I got Lotus Notes on WINE running smoothly, I haven't rebooted into WinNT for over three weeks.
In my experience, Lotus Notes runs nearly seamlessly since the December 2000 WINE release. Currently its running on a 20010326 release compiled against a 2.2.19 kernel and I swear its more stable on WINE that it was on NT. Everything seems to work - mail, calendaring, attach/detach - hey even the Notes web browser works.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.
I guess you're one of those people who thinks that X uses 200MB+? Reading the output of top or ps isn't going to tell you how much memory the process is using - it merely tells you how much is mapped. The problem is that two or more threads may have mapped the same memory area several times, making it look like an 800lb gorilla rather than a marmot. For example, Mozilla has around 20-30 threads active all the time. Chances are pretty good that all you are seeing is the same memory used by multiple threads in Nautilus as well.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
ie.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "ExpertMouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ThinkingMousePS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psm0"
Option "Buttons" "4"
EndSection
More details at XFree86
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
the big DB companies all ban publishing benchmark results through terms in their license agreements. This is incredibly irritating because it undermines the free market principle of "perfect information" (markets with "asymetric information" are known to be ineffecient, something laissez-faire Randites never seem to learn).
This would be bad if it were totally true. Oracle has benchmark clauses in its licence agreement. So does MS SQL Server. But DB2 UDB does not - take it, download it, play with it and publish the results. Not being able to publicize benchmark results is a really dumb way to try and tilt the market.
Note: I'm a developer for DB2 UDB so I'm hardly unbiased.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
*sigh* no one got the joke :/
Don't worry - I think a fair number did. While the original posting was quietly amusing, the responses here are a complete howler ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Version inflation?
Emacs 20.7. Say no more.
Good thing that Emacs 21 is due out soon then ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Funny this happens. I run Oracle Applications under several linux boxes. Wouldn't it suck for any business of any size to be running production erp applications to have some critical numbers off becuase of a flawed arithmatic algorythm in the standard libc libraries?
Firstly, as so many posts have pointed out, floating point is inexact and you can easily fall foul of rounding errors when casting to integer.
More importantly, this is why databases go to the trouble of providing DECIMAL type as part of the SQL standard. Floating point variables have 'interesting' rounding errors, and most businesses, especially those doing any sort of accounting, can't afford to lose any precision. All DECIMAL type calculation are therefore done to the limit of the precision of the type and have well-understood rounding limitations which should not manifest themselves like this.
Quite honestly, if you are using floating point numbers for any sort of simulation, doing the error analysis is a complete pain in the neck. In many respects you are better off using integer values, maybe with scaling offsets, because at least then you can control and understand all the cases where you drop precision.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Nanny Ogg
Deacon Vorbis
It's all Terry Pratchett.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzztttt. Wrong!
Pedant alert: The Ogg in Ogg Vorbis is taken from the move in Netrek - to Ogg an opponent. The full definition is here but to summarize the Netrek definition: "to execute kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying strategic positions". Quite appropriate really.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Using slightly different compression methods, how does OGG performance compare to MP3? Systems being as fast as they are, nowadays, this isn't that *big* of an issue, but it is nonetheless with older systems in mind and those with heavy load.
In my experience, an Ogg Vorbis file compressed with variable bit rate centred on 160kb with minimum 128 and maximum 192 is the same size or smaller than a 128 kb MP3 file compressed from the same source CD. The quality of the encoding is excellent - I'm extremely impressed with the fidelity and sound of the Ogg Vorbis output, and I've now standardized on the Ogg Vorbis encoder for all my on-disk music.
Currently the encoder I'm using (the beta3 release under CDex on my WinNT box and under Grip on my Linux box) encodes at about 1xCD data rate on a 400MHz PII machine. Thats not as fast as some of the MP3 Encoders - the x86 assembler ones can acheive around 2.5x on the same machine. But it is early days for the Vorbis encoder - I expect it to get a lot faster once the 1.0 release is out.
For those who say OGG is late, consider the factors in it not being so pushed for. There was never a huge consumer demand for an MP3 alternative. People own gigs and gigs of MP3s... telling them to convert because of a patent that will affect them when they purchase a commercial product by a few dollars doesn't mean much to them, as they commonly use only XMMS/Winamp and Napster/Gnapster.
I don't see a lot of people immediately switching all of their collection to Ogg Vorbis. However, all the important players support Vorbis codecs now and therefore it is a snap to start adding .ogg files into the collection. I am slowly replacing my remaining .mp3s with .ogg versions as I get time and anything new is automatically encoded as .ogg.
Companies looking to market commercial digital music players and/or software, on the other hand, plagued with the prospect of paying the MP3 patent owner money for each product they sell, must be more interested. But, again, it is very dependent on the consumer since they would have to convert the MP3 to OGG without help from any software supplied by the commercial company supplying the product -- but software supplied from a non-commercial entity, such as Ogg Vorbis creators, could be downloaded.... Packaged, though? I don't think it could be packaged with the product, regardless of it being "free" or not, because it would be included as part of a commercial product. The best a company could do would be an automatic download (of course with yes/no prompt and license agreement) of the extension from Vorbis to their uploading software.
Ah - but here the use of a BSD license is important. Because the Commercial packages can compile the Vorbis support into their own systems and not be forced to distribute the source code, modified or otherwise, they have no real reason to neglect this format - they can add it for free and add yet another feature to those marketing tick-lists. Like I said, conversion from MP3 to OGG is probably a non-starter but once this format starts to attract the attention it deserves, I would expect it to become fairly popular fairly quickly.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Yes, DOOM3 is dark, but probably not as dark as what you are seeing in the screenshots-- look at those shots on a Mac or SGI instead of a PC and you'll be surprised how bright they are.
Cranking the Gamma on this monitor improved the movie no-end, so I expect the game will be the same. Think of the Quake3TeamArena demo level - with the gamma slider at the lowest setting you could barely see anything.
I'm amazed at the number of people who seem to think that DOOM3 should be some multicoloured bright-light party. Thats what Nintendo games are for. Doom's legacy demands dark rooms, illuminated by flickering flourescent lights, monsters which appear out of the shadows or drop on the player from the ceiling.
And seriously, looking at the video footage of Doom 3, this is going to be a game to give you nightmares. The characters are going to be closer to realistic images than ever before - those Maya-produced animations are pushing several thousand polys when up close (I assume that the meshes will have Level-Of-Detail) - playing this is going to be like starring in a good (or maybe even a bad :-) ) horror movie. I fully expect to see some Army Of Darkness mods based on this engine :-)
Don't expect Doom3 to be a game for kids. This one will earn a 'Mature' rating almost straight off the bat.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Weren't both CDE and Motif controlled by a "foundation"? And, well you know...
And the source to CDE and Motif is available where? Now do you see the difference? Additionally, the GNOME Foundation does not do the coding, nor implement the current ideas. It is a talking shop for where to go next and to raise the visibility (and funding) of GNOME. It does not dictate the GNOME development decisions
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
You forgot IBM's AIX, although I don't see that on a desktop or using X in any way. Still, they're a UNIX vendor.
Two things. First, AIX comes with CDE as standard running on X, so it does get used on a desktop (mine for example) by virtue of remote access through an X server.
Secondly, IBM has already announced that the Linux Toolkit for AIX (versions 4.3.3+ and 5L) and this contains both GNOME and KDE2 ports, so for those of us who make extensive use of AIX life just got a lot easier.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Those are CPUs where the commercial compilers, such as Sun Workshop (SunPro) and xlc (or Visual Age C or whatever IBM calls it these days), frankly kick the crap out of gcc. Gcc is only a good compiler when you use it to build x86 code, and "maybe" Alpha code. Then again the Itanium might look like a joke once the 21364 Alpha (if it ever comes) and the POWER4 hit the market.
I agree with you about GCC as far as producing the fastest code on UltraSparc and POWER processors. If you think that GCC produces optimal x86 code, you haven't used some of the commercial compilers, such as Intels own proton compiler. Intel gave part of its Pentium II optimisations to GCC (back in 1999 if I remember correctly through Cygnus), but I feel it's lagging again. What I'd really like to see is AMD give some major help to the agcc project in terms of best optimisations, effective 3DNow extension use and efficient floating/integer interleaving. But that is another story.
Back to the main thread. You have to have a common baseline when trying to do comparisons. GCC produces an intermediate code which is then transformed into the machine code for the target processor. This means that before optimisation the actual machine code is fairly similar and therefore is as close as you can get to the ideal comparison. Exploring the various optimisations will then give you an insight into branch prediction, cache handling, etc.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Why oh why are they testing IA32 code on the Itanium? That is hardly likely to show the performance of the processor in a good light. It's like running an Amiga emulator on x86 and complaining that the copper tricks don't work as quickly.
The Itanium is supposed to be the first in a new line, so I wouldn't be surprised if its IA32 bit convertor was a bolt-on solution for those who can't release themselves from 32bit (I hesistate to mention that 64 bit Windows apps may be a little short on the ground for a while yet ...).
The other aspect of benchmarking a system is to have equivalent compilers - different compilers can produce code varying in speed by as much as a factor of two on the same architecture and other factors such as optimizer flags can have a serious impact on the eventual speed.
The obvious set up to compare the Itanium against the competition (which really should include the Alpha, Ultra Sparc and the 64 bit POWER chips, not just x86 architectures) and pick an OS which runs on all of these. Not let me think ... Then use GCC in unoptimized mode and compare code length and execution speed, and then optimize progressively.
That the Itanium can't hold a candle to a Pentium I 100MHz on some 32 bit code is amusing, but not a real indicator of speed. That said, I still feel that the Itanium is a weak competitor against the assembled 64 bit processors already on the market, but Intel probably has sufficient clout to carve itself a niche.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
To me, this looks like a major hiccup for Microsoft. Under the terms of this agreement, MS has permanently lost the rights to the Java Compatible trademark. From the Sun press release:
With the contract terminated, Sun and Microsoft have agreed to end the current litigation, initiated in October, 1997 before Judge Ronald M. Whyte in U.S. District Court in San Jose, under the following general terms:
- The Court will enter a permanent injunction barring Microsoft from using the JAVA COMPATIBLE trademark. Previously, the Court found that Microsoft had distributed incompatible implementations of the Java technology, and the court entered a preliminary injunction barring Microsoft from using the JAVA COMPATIBLE trademark on these incompatible products.
- To protect developers and consumers who have already invested in Microsofts implementations of the Java technology, Sun has agreed to grant Microsoft a limited license to continue shipping essentially as is its currently shipping implementations of the outdated 1.1.4 version of the Java technology. Those products have already been modified to comply with injunctions secured by Sun in the litigation. The license covers only the products that already contain the Java technology, and lasts only for seven years.
Beyond that, Microsoft has no rights to distribute the Java technology, or to otherwise use any of Suns intellectual property.To those who believe this sounds the death knell for Java, think again. Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of not being able to use the most widely recognised java trademark, while its competitors (Sun, Netscape and others) will be able to capitalize on it. This agreement is even wider than Java, stopping MS from licensing, distributing or making use of any of Suns Intellectual Property either. That may make C#'s passage into the world a little tricky if Sun has much of the Java technology patented...
C# doesn't cut it. It's not here now and Java is and has been for six years.C# is still months off release and even at the first release it won't get wide use until the development tools and toolkits catch up. That will hurt.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I always hear this argument when it comes to copy protection. "It's not fair because people have legitimate uses."
This might be true, but the fact is that most of the uses are not legitimate. This stuff about being denied access to these things unfairly is wrong.
So you would outlaw lockpicks for example, because they are obviously buglary tools with only limited fair use? Or would you go further, and outlaw guns, because you can kill people with guns? Or crikey - you would outlaw hammers, because they can be used to bludgeon someone to death? Or outlaw writeable CDs, because obviously everyone uses them to copy their friends CDs (actually that is legal in Canada). Or eradicate any knowledge about encryption, since this information will, in part, be used to decrypt copy-protected information?
If you go down this road, we will be living in a society that is living in the equivalent of a padded cell. Anything which can have illegal use is banned. Anything that could remove someone's (people or corporations) job or income today will disappear.
And people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
They are wrong. The people working for record and computer companies have jobs and families too.
When mechanisation arrived, thousands of agriculture workers lost their jobs. When steam powered looms were invented, the number of people needed to make cloth in quantity shrunk by at least an order of magnitude. The industrial revolution changed the working patterns of society. All major changes in production or techonolgy obsoletes certain ways of life. Puts people out of work. What you fail to recognise is that out of this change comes new opportunities. There is often a period of difficulties and resentment by those who are affected - this is natural and understandable.
Don't stop the train just because you can't see the destination.
This is just my point. Why the hell shouldn't companies be allowed to protect their property? The big word there is copyrighted - like 'owned by'. The fact is that piracy makes companies go bust. Piracy increases the costs for people who aren't thieves. Piracy means that some great software just doesn't reach you. If we remove the tools, we remove the crime, and the world is better off in the end.
Fair use. Do you really want to live in a world where criticism of any work is not possible because content restrictions stop you publishing any of it, even it's name? Would you be happy knowing that you could not record you own musical or video creations and distribute them to a purchasing public, because everyone else has equipment that will only play 'trusted' media because of content restrictions?
Piracy happens. The biggest threat to income is not the home user making MP3s of their music collection so they can listen to any track in any order. It is the CD pressing plants turning out thousands and thousands of copies of the latest Brittany Spears album (why, I don't know) or copies of Windows 2000 Professional (to be sold at $50 a shot). Organized crime makes vast profits from copying goods. Even DVDs, with all their encryption, access controls and region codes, can be churned out by a DVD pressing plant if you have one original to work from without having to break the original codes. Just make a bit copy which includes the key codes.
Piracy does hurt the consumer. But why hurt the consumer further by limiting the consumers rights through technological barriers?
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Actually, there IS another major motion picture set in the Blade Runner UNIVERSE (though not technically a "sequel"): Soldier , starring Kurt Russel and written by David Webb Peoples, the writer of Blade Runner. See this info at the IMDB (also quoted below): Writer David Peoples has said that Solider is a "side-quel" to Blade Runner (which he also wrote) because it takes place in the same universe and in fact the vehicles used by the Blade Runners, spinners, are also used in Solider. All of this is not, of course, to negate your point, which is that Hollywood has a habit of screwing up perfectly wonderful movies with sequels-that-never-should-have-been.
Are you suggesting that David Peoples wrote Bladerunner? Thats a little strong. He co-wrote the screenplay with Hampton Fancher, which in turn is based on the book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' by Philip K. Dick.
Similarly, while there are references to Blade Runner in the scenary and the script, there are references to a whole host of other movies as well such as Aliens, Star Trek II and others. I'd hardly class that as a sequel to BladeRunner. I know David Peoples is quoted as calling it a 'side-quel' but I personally find that a bit rich - simply associating your own screenplay with another one you co-wrote based on someone elses novel does not give you automatic kudos.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The M18 milestone of Mozilla has binaries with the MathML support compiled in, so you might like to give that a try. If you feel a little more adventurous, here are some pages with more recent binaries with MathML support - Linux and Win32. These also have SVG support compiled in as well for vector images and the Linux binaries have XSL as well.
For more general information, take a look at the Mozilla MathML page.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes