Writing a decent rendering engine really isn't that hard.
That could just possible be true if the definition of "decent" didn't keep changing. Last year, you could write a 3D maze-style portal engine with basic animation, using algorithms you read about 3 years ago in Dr Dobbs (mainly available there because id put them there) - this year you can't. This year you'd better have dynamically adaptive geometry, detailed physics, skeletal animation, etc. etc.
The easiest thing to do is to write a game engine over again that's already been written. Maybe that's a good strategy for the OS, as proven by Linux, but it just doesn't fly for game engines. In short, be prepared to make a massive investment in your game engine, or start thinking about using somebody else's.
I agree that id's main source of income is licensing the engines. I don't really agree with that as being a valid source of income. Really, when I buy a Quake-engine game I want to buy it for the game, not for the engine behind it. I bought Quake for the game, not the technology.
With Quake, the technology makes the game - there isn't the slightest doubt about it. As all Quake players know, it's all about frame rate, twitch response, and stunning graphics. Of course, the art in Quake, and all the games id ever did (cmdr keen anyone?) is stunning. But, as all quake players also know, game play is merely ok, sounds are of variable quality, music is slightly above average, story lines suck absolutely - in other words, most of the value is in the engine. Sounds like you'd like to take that away, and turn ID into just a level design company.
Perhaps I speak for many players when I say I buy id games for the engine, and everything else is secondary.
On the other hand, I agree completely with the idea that outside developers could really help with the quality of games, and why shouldn't there always be a phase of game development where outside developers are invited to participate? Advantages:
better product quality
unexpected technology improvements
better relations with developer community
best chance in the world to recruit good developers
best chance in the world for aspiring game programmers to get in with the company they want
Disadvantages:
some code and algorithms might escape prematurely
competitors might find out too much about your new project
programmers already employed might suffer from bruised egos
Personally, I think the advantages are strong and the disadvantages are weak. Lets see who realizes it first.
I'm as glad as anyone that Corel saw the error in their ways and fixed it when we (read: Bruce) asked them nicely.
Hmm, putting it that way makes it sound like Bruce didn't necessarily have the support of the communittee. That is just plain wrong IMHO - to convince yourself of that, look here and here - the original slashdot discussions.
But part of me thinks that a trial-by-fire would have been useful. We need the GPL to be tested.
You could also test the efficiency of the fire department by burning your house down.
We need legal precedents to establish a secure position.
Yes, but we don't need to get them by entrapping those that are supporting us.
Corel wasn't intentionally trying to steal rights,
You don't know that. My take on it is that it is natural enough for a corporation, as it is for an individual, to try and carve out a little extra turf for itself wherever it can. Children do it, Corel does it, even you and I do it. It's called testing. When testing happens, with children and friendly corporations, the correct response is a gentle push back to the straight and narrow.
but what if a larger company tried something like this (not mentioning any names: Sun, AOL, MS) - maybe it would've been easier to take Corel to task.
In other words, you're suggesting that we collectively beat up on the weakest guy out there. I for one wouldn't support that - that is the kind of tactic we despise when those big bad corporations use it on little tiny corporations and private individuals. Not something to be emulated. When the time comes for the fight, we will fight fairly. I sincerely hope.
I code for WinNT for a living, so I push it pretty hard. My box crashes maybe once every couple weeks. Now, that's not perfect, but given what I do to the thing daily, it isn't too bad, either.
Since I installed Linux for the first time, in Apr, having abused it in all kinds of ways, including running less-than-stable X-servers, early-release IDE's, and horrible versions of Gnome, the number of OS crashes I've had? Zero. The number of times either Gnome or KDE has crashed back to the shell? Zero. The number of times I've had to reinstall? Zero. The number of times I've been forced to reboot to recover system resources? Zero. And this is pretty much a early version of gui-based Linux. Now that is good enough. Thankyou.
Sorry, Bill, but the rules have changed. You can't kill Linux with FUD any more than you can buy it.
This was recognized by Microsoft itself in the infamous Halloween document - at least, some clueful person at MS recognized it. Not Bill, apparently. hehe. "Learn by doing". hehe. Go ahead, Bill, make our day. hehe. Hmm... I'll stop now - too many stupid jokes to write in this small space. The bottom line is: the attempting Fudding of Linux just turns into more free advertising. Hmmm. "Linux: even the advertising is free." hehe. OK, I promised to stop, I'll stop now:)
Not. I use HTML for writing technical documents, it being quite a few cuts above MS.doc format in terms of transportability, compactness, other considerations. I haven't got time to type "
" at the end of every paragraph. Etc.
Netscape composer is a solution made in heaven, as far as I'm concerned... sure, it has it flaws but it works well enough to get the job done and the HTML it produces works pretty well, and looks pretty reasonable in source form too.
To whoever clued me in about Amaya - thanks, it looks interesting.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are still 7 binary orders of magnitude to go to get from 100-atom transistors to single-atom switches, there is a new phenomenon that will become dominant, starting right now: multiple independent CPU's on a single chip. Right now, the focus is on multi-mega-transistor behemoths like the K7, 22 million transistors, but wouldn't you rather have 22 1 million transistor CPU's in your computer? I know I would.
The enabling technology for the shift to SMP is none other than Linux: its crossplatform nature allows us to switch easily to alternative, more transitor-efficient architectures such as ARM (n.b.: also offered by Intel, make of that what you will) and at the same time provides the multi-CPU support we need, without costing an arm and a leg:)
This is the first milestone release where where the gif's on idsoftware's site don't look broken and out of position. I don't know what the problem was before - maybe the site was off-standard and happened to work in netscape/i.e., or maybe it was just Mozilla bugs... the point it, it works now. Obviously, development is going fine. I found one site that didn't load text correctly, but I'm not panicing. This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer. Hmmm, I'm looking into my crystal ball, and I can see a whole lot of programmers, myself included, jumping into the Mozilla project in the near future. Gotta scratch those itches, you know, and who would pass up the chance to lay a claim to having a part, however small, in building the new lizard?
...Mozilla gains market share as Linux does. This is enough of a presence to restrain incompatible web standards I hope
Don't forget that AOL will also be pushing Mozilla heavily, in its netscape 5 incarnation. Also, many teens will get Mozilla just to get Jabber - never discount that factor, it worked for ICQ. Then there is the fact that Microsoft won't be able to engage in much of it's usual strongarming with OEM's and ISP's, with the Justice department on it's tail...
I'm sure there are other factors also, like Mozilla just plain being a better, more stable product, with development that will never stop. The bottom line is that things are looking pretty good for Mozilla at this time.
The difference between ray casting and ray tracing is that tracing is done recursively while casting is not
Excuse me, I guess I'm niggling, and your post was otherwise good and accurate, but: what part of recursive depth=1 do you not understand? In other words, ray casting is a form of ray tracing.
To prove it to yourself, consider that the wolfenstein algorithm could easily be extended to do reflections by continuing each ray from the wall it hits, off in the appropriate direction until it hits another wall, and so on. In other words, exactly as in turner/whitted's original method. Incidently... I was there when they presented the paper, in Seattle siggraph 1980 I think it was... don't read anything into it, I just thought I'd mention it.
The solution is to not run out of memory. Since NC's are really glorified terminals and the real apps run on the server you know how big your app is before you start it running - the app on the NC app is just a big fancy XTerm or whatever. On the other hand, if you also support Java capability you just toss any code that doesn't fit in cache any more and reload it as necessary - for most users this won't happen (put in enough memory so it doesn't happen) and network traffic won't increased very much at all - perhaps it will still be less than the db accesses that happen constantly when the apps run on PC's.
Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering.
Not just in hardware. Ray tracing was used in John Carmack's Wolfenstein - a classic example of how ray tracing can outperform traditional polygon rendering. In Wolfenstien the simplifying assumption is that just one ray needs to be traced per column of pixels in the viewport. It obviously works, for the special-case scenes that Wolfenstien used. The ideas were generalized somewhat in Doom, to allow for ceilings and floors. Raytracing was abandoned in Quake, in favor of traditional polygon rendering, coupled with a kick-ass culling algorithm. But don't think that raytracing is out of the picture yet - hehe, pardon the pun.
So, Jane's figures out who to listen to, who actually know's their anal orifice from a hole in the ground, and is immediately ejected from the journalists club, for violating the unwritten code of conduct: NEVER write the truth - write what you want people to hear
Because of open source, we can re-compile an application that doesn't work with the system libraries we may have, thereby avoiding having to overwrite system libraries whenever we install an application. Therefore we can have small packages that update nothing but the problem.
Agreed, this is key. Perhaps even more important though is the ability to statically link, so that binary releases can be built, a la Netscape, with everything version-independent (except for kernel dependencies which are few & far between thanks to the efforts of people like Torvalds and Cox). So you can download the binary app and expect to have it work, as it nearly always does when built this way [ed note: and when declared stable;-)].
Another factor of crucial importance is for this linking process to be carried out by anyone who wants to do it, i.e., access to the source code is important just as you say, but not necessarily for the same reason. Also consider - it's possible to re-link a dynamicly linked app to become a statically linked app using a linkage editor... I don't know if Linux has such utilities because I'm a relative newcomer to these development tools. But if they're not they're, we need them badly.
And therefore GNU/Linux will, unlike some other OS, have a massive share of the total server installations for many years to come.
According to the press release the "founders" are CNET and techies.com... hmm, sounds like CNET and and CNET to me. This is just a scam to get lots of hits on a new.com site. Hmm. Save your hits for sites that deserve it.
So far the commercial offerings are pretty even with open source offerings. Everything crashes.
On my planet, the open-source OS I use... Linux... doesn't crash nearly as often as closed-source windows (95/08/NT, take your pick). Furthermore, most of the open-source apps I use exhibit a far higher level of base stability than their closed-source commercial counterparts, even though the open-source apps are generally far younger. On your planet, things may be different.
No, it depends on what you're doing
on
700 MHz Athlon
·
· Score: 2
Are there STILL people out there that think their processor is the bottleneck of their system? It's everything else!!!
As always, it depends on what you're doing. If you're like me and you spend all your time doing processor-intensive rendering operations that you've carefully designed to fit entirely in cache (and that 3D cards are incapable of performing) then the processor is still very much the limitation. In fact, I find that in most of what I do, the processor is the biggest bottleneck. Your milieage may vary.
Just keep bumping that clock rate up, AMD - we love you!
This *IS* market fragmentation.. and NOT what we need. IS groups run stable systems, IS groups will upgrade workstations for the latest and greatest, but never a rollout on such a short product cycle would happen in any instituin of a good size.
Err, wait a sec, please don't say "we", because at least one of us, namely me, does need this. There is nothing I want more from Red Hat at the moment than an update to the oh-so-nearly excellent 6.0 release. Lets have some bug fixes. Lets have a better kernel than 2.2.5. Let's have a gnome that works. Let's have more great KDE apps, updates to MySQL and PostGreSQL, Code Crusader... etc. etc. etc. I'll stop now, the list goes on for about 1,000 apps... and that doesn't even count the bazillions of subtle system fixes that have been done since 6.0.
Arguing against regular updates is pretty much the same as arguing against motherhood.
With all due respect, Dvorak seems pretty clueless about IRC. Can somebody explain to me why Dalnet's services are always down, and when they're up, they lag like crazy? Perhaps a bit of reworking by the Linux hordes would improve the situation. But I digress. The real point he's trying to make is that Linux doesn't cut it in server apps. He's wrong. Here are the top few os's out there in web server-land right now:
Host OS recognized
--------------------------- 1.( ) Linux 31.3% +2.8 2.( ) Windows 95/98/NT 24.3% -0.1 3.( ) Solaris/SunOS 16.7% -1.0 4.( ) BSD Family 14.6% -0.4 5.( ) IRIX 4.6% -0.7 6.( 7.) Mac/Apple 2.1% +0.5
(Percent of totals servers, %change from previous survey) Sorry about the formatting. Check out The Internet Operating System Counter for yourself. (Too bad there isn't a more recent survey - the trend would be interesting indeed.
Hmm, now Dvorak finally concluded by allowing that Linux is likely to be a killer on the low end, so, hmm, I don't really see where he's coming from. He certainly comes across as pretty clueless this time.
I'd just like to draw attention to one problem with the current moderation forms. In flat mode, you select a moderation action from the list (+1/-1, comment) then you scroll down to read the next article. Unfortunately, the text focus stays in the selection list (BAD DESIGN, netscape). You hit an arrow key, the screen doesn't move, so instead you use the mouse or whatever. In the meantime, you just changed your moderation selection - it's way off screen, so you don't notice it until you hit the "moderation" button at the bottom of the screen. Then you see this nice little list of moderation actions you did, some of which you never intended, with no way to undo it. ****There has to be an "undo-moderation" button****. This is a very frustrating user-interface issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Writing a decent rendering engine really isn't that hard.
That could just possible be true if the definition of "decent" didn't keep changing. Last year, you could write a 3D maze-style portal engine with basic animation, using algorithms you read about 3 years ago in Dr Dobbs (mainly available there because id put them there) - this year you can't. This year you'd better have dynamically adaptive geometry, detailed physics, skeletal animation, etc. etc.
The easiest thing to do is to write a game engine over again that's already been written. Maybe that's a good strategy for the OS, as proven by Linux, but it just doesn't fly for game engines. In short, be prepared to make a massive investment in your game engine, or start thinking about using somebody else's.
With Quake, the technology makes the game - there isn't the slightest doubt about it. As all Quake players know, it's all about frame rate, twitch response, and stunning graphics. Of course, the art in Quake, and all the games id ever did (cmdr keen anyone?) is stunning. But, as all quake players also know, game play is merely ok, sounds are of variable quality, music is slightly above average, story lines suck absolutely - in other words, most of the value is in the engine. Sounds like you'd like to take that away, and turn ID into just a level design company.
Perhaps I speak for many players when I say I buy id games for the engine, and everything else is secondary.
On the other hand, I agree completely with the idea that outside developers could really help with the quality of games, and why shouldn't there always be a phase of game development where outside developers are invited to participate?
Advantages:
better product quality
unexpected technology improvements
better relations with developer community
best chance in the world to recruit good developers
best chance in the world for aspiring game programmers to get in with the company they want
Disadvantages:
some code and algorithms might escape prematurely
competitors might find out too much about your new project
programmers already employed might suffer from bruised egos
Personally, I think the advantages are strong and the disadvantages are weak. Lets see who realizes it first.
Ok, I rambled
Is it really a victory?
Yes it is.
I'm as glad as anyone that Corel saw the error in their ways and fixed it when we (read: Bruce) asked them nicely.
Hmm, putting it that way makes it sound like Bruce didn't necessarily have the support of the communittee. That is just plain wrong IMHO - to convince yourself of that, look here and here - the original slashdot discussions.
But part of me thinks that a trial-by-fire would have been useful. We need the GPL to be tested.
You could also test the efficiency of the fire department by burning your house down.
We need legal precedents to establish a secure position.
Yes, but we don't need to get them by entrapping those that are supporting us.
Corel wasn't intentionally trying to steal rights,
You don't know that. My take on it is that it is natural enough for a corporation, as it is for an individual, to try and carve out a little extra turf for itself wherever it can. Children do it, Corel does it, even you and I do it. It's called testing. When testing happens, with children and friendly corporations, the correct response is a gentle push back to the straight and narrow.
but what if a larger company tried something like this (not mentioning any names: Sun, AOL, MS) - maybe it would've been easier to take Corel to task.
In other words, you're suggesting that we collectively beat up on the weakest guy out there. I for one wouldn't support that - that is the kind of tactic we despise when those big bad corporations use it on little tiny corporations and private individuals. Not something to be emulated. When the time comes for the fight, we will fight fairly. I sincerely hope.
Homeless... I thought his shell account got cancelled...
/me shivers at the thought
I code for WinNT for a living, so I push it pretty hard. My box crashes maybe once every couple weeks. Now, that's not perfect, but given what I do to the thing daily, it isn't too bad, either.
Since I installed Linux for the first time, in Apr, having abused it in all kinds of ways, including running less-than-stable X-servers, early-release IDE's, and horrible versions of Gnome, the number of OS crashes I've had? Zero. The number of times either Gnome or KDE has crashed back to the shell? Zero. The number of times I've had to reinstall? Zero. The number of times I've been forced to reboot to recover system resources? Zero. And this is pretty much a early version of gui-based Linux. Now that is good enough. Thankyou.
What I want is a book from O'Reilly called "PalmPilot - The Ultimate Programmer's Guide"
Sorry, Bill, but the rules have changed. You can't kill Linux with FUD any more than you can buy it.
:)
This was recognized by Microsoft itself in the infamous Halloween document - at least, some clueful person at MS recognized it. Not Bill, apparently. hehe. "Learn by doing". hehe. Go ahead, Bill, make our day. hehe. Hmm... I'll stop now - too many stupid jokes to write in this small space. The bottom line is: the attempting Fudding of Linux just turns into more free advertising. Hmmm. "Linux: even the advertising is free." hehe. OK, I promised to stop, I'll stop now
If it's got a winmodem, (i.e. incompatible software modem with secret spec) don't bother.
Not. I use HTML for writing technical documents, it being quite a few cuts above MS .doc format in terms of transportability, compactness, other considerations. I haven't got time to type "
" at the end of every paragraph. Etc.
Netscape composer is a solution made in heaven, as far as I'm concerned... sure, it has it flaws but it works well enough to get the job done and the HTML it produces works pretty well, and looks pretty reasonable in source form too.
To whoever clued me in about Amaya - thanks, it looks interesting.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are still 7 binary orders of magnitude to go to get from 100-atom transistors to single-atom switches, there is a new phenomenon that will become dominant, starting right now: multiple independent CPU's on a single chip. Right now, the focus is on multi-mega-transistor behemoths like the K7, 22 million transistors, but wouldn't you rather have 22 1 million transistor CPU's in your computer? I know I would.
:)
The enabling technology for the shift to SMP is none other than Linux: its crossplatform nature allows us to switch easily to alternative, more transitor-efficient architectures such as ARM (n.b.: also offered by Intel, make of that what you will) and at the same time provides the multi-CPU support we need, without costing an arm and a leg
This is the first milestone release where where the gif's on idsoftware's site don't look broken and out of position. I don't know what the problem was before - maybe the site was off-standard and happened to work in netscape/i.e., or maybe it was just Mozilla bugs... the point it, it works now. Obviously, development is going fine. I found one site that didn't load text correctly, but I'm not panicing. This isn't supposed to be ready to browse with yet... BTW, what about Mozilla's html composer? I'm asking myself..., see, I'm starting to get excited about this. I guess it's reasonable to assume I'll be browsing with Mozilla in another 2-3 months or so, but still composing with Netscape composer. Hmmm, I'm looking into my crystal ball, and I can see a whole lot of programmers, myself included, jumping into the Mozilla project in the near future. Gotta scratch those itches, you know, and who would pass up the chance to lay a claim to having a part, however small, in building the new lizard?
...Mozilla gains market share as Linux does. This is enough of a presence to restrain incompatible web standards I hope
Don't forget that AOL will also be pushing Mozilla heavily, in its netscape 5 incarnation. Also, many teens will get Mozilla just to get Jabber - never discount that factor, it worked for ICQ. Then there is the fact that Microsoft won't be able to engage in much of it's usual strongarming with OEM's and ISP's, with the Justice department on it's tail...
I'm sure there are other factors also, like Mozilla just plain being a better, more stable product, with development that will never stop. The bottom line is that things are looking pretty good for Mozilla at this time.
The difference between ray casting and ray tracing is that tracing is done recursively while casting is not
Excuse me, I guess I'm niggling, and your post was otherwise good and accurate, but: what part of recursive depth=1 do you not understand? In other words, ray casting is a form of ray tracing.
To prove it to yourself, consider that the wolfenstein algorithm could easily be extended to do reflections by continuing each ray from the wall it hits, off in the appropriate direction until it hits another wall, and so on. In other words, exactly as in turner/whitted's original method. Incidently... I was there when they presented the paper, in Seattle siggraph 1980 I think it was... don't read anything into it, I just thought I'd mention it.
So what do you do when you run out of memory?
The solution is to not run out of memory. Since NC's are really glorified terminals and the real apps run on the server you know how big your app is before you start it running - the app on the NC app is just a big fancy XTerm or whatever. On the other hand, if you also support Java capability you just toss any code that doesn't fit in cache any more and reload it as necessary - for most users this won't happen (put in enough memory so it doesn't happen) and network traffic won't increased very much at all - perhaps it will still be less than the db accesses that happen constantly when the apps run on PC's.
Raytracing has a reputation for being very processing-intensive, but I am convinced that it could be done efficiently in hardware, and the quality of the graphics would be far greater than polygon rendering.
Not just in hardware. Ray tracing was used in John Carmack's Wolfenstein - a classic example of how ray tracing can outperform traditional polygon rendering. In Wolfenstien the simplifying assumption is that just one ray needs to be traced per column of pixels in the viewport. It obviously works, for the special-case scenes that Wolfenstien used. The ideas were generalized somewhat in Doom, to allow for ceilings and floors. Raytracing was abandoned in Quake, in favor of traditional polygon rendering, coupled with a kick-ass culling algorithm. But don't think that raytracing is out of the picture yet - hehe, pardon the pun.
So, Jane's figures out who to listen to, who actually know's their anal orifice from a hole in the ground, and is immediately ejected from the journalists club, for violating the unwritten code of conduct: NEVER write the truth - write what you want people to hear
After reading Tom's in-depth analysis of RAMBUS vs SDRAM months ago, I concluded that RAMBUS was a zombie duck...
Thanks Tom, for getting it right *once again*
Because of open source, we can re-compile an application that doesn't work with the system libraries we may have, thereby avoiding having to overwrite system libraries whenever we install an application. Therefore we can have small packages that update nothing but the problem.
;-)].
Agreed, this is key. Perhaps even more important though is the ability to statically link, so that binary releases can be built, a la Netscape, with everything version-independent (except for kernel dependencies which are few & far between thanks to the efforts of people like Torvalds and Cox). So you can download the binary app and expect to have it work, as it nearly always does when built this way [ed note: and when declared stable
Another factor of crucial importance is for this linking process to be carried out by anyone who wants to do it, i.e., access to the source code is important just as you say, but not necessarily for the same reason. Also consider - it's possible to re-link a dynamicly linked app to become a statically linked app using a linkage editor... I don't know if Linux has such utilities because I'm a relative newcomer to these development tools. But if they're not they're, we need them badly.
And therefore GNU/Linux will, unlike some other OS, have a massive share of the total server installations for many years to come.
(a) That and 1,000,000 other reasons
(b) It already does. (Check the situation as of last spring)
According to the press release the "founders" are CNET and techies.com... hmm, sounds like CNET and and CNET to me. This is just a scam to get lots of hits on a new .com site. Hmm. Save your hits for sites that deserve it.
Who ever thought such a big ship could make such a sharp turn with such a small rudder?
So far the commercial offerings are pretty even with open source offerings. Everything crashes.
On my planet, the open-source OS I use... Linux... doesn't crash nearly as often as closed-source windows (95/08/NT, take your pick). Furthermore, most of the open-source apps I use exhibit a far higher level of base stability than their closed-source commercial counterparts, even though the open-source apps are generally far younger. On your planet, things may be different.
Are there STILL people out there that think their processor is the bottleneck of their system? It's everything else!!!
As always, it depends on what you're doing. If you're like me and you spend all your time doing processor-intensive rendering operations that you've carefully designed to fit entirely in cache (and that 3D cards are incapable of performing) then the processor is still very much the limitation. In fact, I find that in most of what I do, the processor is the biggest bottleneck. Your milieage may vary.
Just keep bumping that clock rate up, AMD - we love you!
And, oh yeah, we just love that 200 MHz bus, too
This *IS* market fragmentation.. and NOT what we need. IS groups run stable systems, IS groups will upgrade workstations for the latest and greatest, but never a rollout on such a short product cycle would happen in any instituin of a good size.
Err, wait a sec, please don't say "we", because at least one of us, namely me, does need this. There is nothing I want more from Red Hat at the moment than an update to the oh-so-nearly excellent 6.0 release. Lets have some bug fixes. Lets have a better kernel than 2.2.5. Let's have a gnome that works. Let's have more great KDE apps, updates to MySQL and PostGreSQL, Code Crusader... etc. etc. etc. I'll stop now, the list goes on for about 1,000 apps... and that doesn't even count the bazillions of subtle system fixes that have been done since 6.0.
Arguing against regular updates is pretty much the same as arguing against motherhood.
(Percent of totals servers, %change from previous survey) Sorry about the formatting. Check out The Internet Operating System Counter for yourself. (Too bad there isn't a more recent survey - the trend would be interesting indeed.
Hmm, now Dvorak finally concluded by allowing that Linux is likely to be a killer on the low end, so, hmm, I don't really see where he's coming from. He certainly comes across as pretty clueless this time.
I'd just like to draw attention to one problem with the current moderation forms. In flat mode, you select a moderation action from the list (+1/-1, comment) then you scroll down to read the next article. Unfortunately, the text focus stays in the selection list (BAD DESIGN, netscape). You hit an arrow key, the screen doesn't move, so instead you use the mouse or whatever. In the meantime, you just changed your moderation selection - it's way off screen, so you don't notice it until you hit the "moderation" button at the bottom of the screen. Then you see this nice little list of moderation actions you did, some of which you never intended, with no way to undo it. ****There has to be an "undo-moderation" button****. This is a very frustrating user-interface issue.