And if the just about impossible task of developing practical teleportation were accomplished, you figure its impact on society would be to get you to work faster?
It's amazing how the first thought that pops into the minds of people when faced with the possibility of instantaneous teleportation is "wow, I can avoid the traffic going to work". It is incredibly shortsighted.
David Brin wrote a wonderful short story where he theorizes about a world where cheap, reliable teleportation was commonplace. Customs control is impossible, smuggling is rife, crime increases exponentially, police are powerless, war supplies cannot be stopped, privacy is destroyed, people visit the few last pieces of untouched wilderness in droves thus destroying it.
Teleportation would be the end of civilisation as we know it. For the previous person to equate it with something as trivial as the light bulb! I think you were incredibly restrained to not call him a freaking idiot.
Your examples are not discrimination, just suitability for a job.
My point, which you apparently didn't get, is that employers already make decisions about your suitability for jobs based on physical appearance: the crudest form of genetic screening possible. Real scientific genetic screening isn't going to change how employers act, it just gives them some real data to work with rather than bad opinions and misguided prejudices. This can only be better for the employer and the employee. I certainly wouldn't want to work in a high-stress situation if it turned out I had a genetic tendency to die quickly from heart failure in high-stress situations!
Because rejecting an unfit and uncoordinated slob applying for an aerobics instructor position is a form of discrimination. And I'm sure it's a form that nobody here would disagree with.
The 3 examples I gave all show that physical characteristics are sometimes important to the job. It doesn't take much intelligence to imagine that there are MANY jobs where genetic screening can help employers make better choices. Would you want a pilot who suffers from epilepsy? How about a childcare worker with a tendency to launch into violent fits of rage? Or a trained athelete with heart problems? How about a male masseur applying for a position in a "womens only" gym?
Discrimination isn't terrible. It can be used in terrible ways (to discriminate based on skin colour where skin colour is irrelevant) but it's also possible to discriminate in positive ways.
I wasn't the person you directed this comment towards, but I feel obliged to respond to it.
Please avoid making derogatory comments like these. Issues such as these are already heavily charged with emotion. To show disrespect to the other side simply makes it harder to discuss the topic.
I would say that your comment shows outright hostility and contempt for the other person. You have seemingly assumed that they are rash and stupid, simply because they don't have the same opinion as you do!
Nonsense, people are already "branded" according to their genetic makeup.
People who wear spectacles have a harder time getting jobs flying aeroplanes.
People who aren't coordinated or fit have a harder time getting jobs as aerobic instructors.
People who are short have a hard time getting jobs as basketball players.
Discrimination is nothing new, nor is it necessarily something to worry about. Genetic testing just increases the range of knowledge beyond the first glance. Picking the wrong person for the job is detrimental to the employer AND the employee.
only applications run with proper permissions can access the video hardware. DRI is a purely direct rendering interface
Correct.
it doesn't abstract away desctructive parts of the card (i.e. if users had access
to the accelerated instructions, they could basically 'blit' a new kernel image from graphics
memory, to get around the normal memory protection and security permissions).
False. Several of the drivers do special things because of these security issues. For example, cards with programmable DMA destinations have those parts of the cards hidden as kernel ioctls.
Because of this, you must be root, or applications must be setUID root in order to get direct
rendering - otherwise they will render in software.
False. One of the design goals of the DRI was non-root direct hardware access. There is further discussion of this topic here.
http://www.precisioninsight.com/dr/drm.html
In particular... "The direct-rendering clients,
however, do not run as root, but still require similar mappings. Like/dev/mem, the DRM device
interface allows clients to create these mappings..."
Part of the purpose of projects like GGI/KGI have been the long-standing goal of creating a kernel
API to allow as direct as possible access to the video card without allowing the user to damage the
system.
The KGI has different design goals. It is closer in spirit to linux-fb. It is arguably not suitable for high speed 3D like the DRI.
Your understanding is a little flawed. There is some very good information on dri.sourceforge.net and www.precisioninsight.com. The whitepapers on Precision Insight's website are excellent.
SDL was not written by Loki, they use it, it was started/written by ken slouken...
Well, I was just going from the FAQ...
Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer for Loki Entertainment Software. Loki Entertainment is a company devoted to porting top games to Linux. You can find out more at http://www.lokigames.com/
Background:
Author of the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
That's from http://www.libsdl.org/intro/author.html
One followup question...in Xfree4, if you have DRI working, is all 3d rendering through Mesa
done as direct rendering? Windowed and fullscreen?
Yes, one of the design goals of the DRI was accelerated windowed 3D. Sometimes a certain feature might only be available when fullscreen rendering (eg, page-flipping) but these are exceptions to the rule.
Another design goal of the DRI was multiple simultaneous 3D clients. At the moment you might lose hardware acceleration for some clients if you've got too many OpenGL clients running at the same time. It depends on the hardware.
Is there any text that explains the new XFree 4 infrastructure in plain english?
Ok, here goes...
GL: Graphics Language. More commonly called OpenGL, a graphics
library developed at SGI. SGI owns the OpenGL trademark but they recently
relaxed the licensing and released conformance tests for OpenGL. There
used to be literally dozens of 3D APIs but only OpenGL and Direct3D
seem to have decent marketshare/mindshare these days. OpenGL abstracts
3D so the programmer doesn't have to know about projections, lighting,
rendering, texturing, etc.
GLU: OpenGL is pretty good but doing some common operations is
a regular pain in the proverbial. GLU is a platform independent library
that will build spheres, test collisions between 3D shapes, determine if
a point is inside or outside a 3D shape, etc. GLU works on top of OpenGL.
GLUT: OpenGL is platform independent but certain operations
(like creating windows, receiving mouse clicks, resizing windows) change
across OpenGL platforms. GLUT lets you write a single application that
will compile and work on Windows, X11, MacOS, etc. GLUT is quite limited
and is primarily used for simple demonstration programs rather than full
blown applications.
GLX: X11 is a networked windowing system. Your client and your
server might be on different machines. GLX packages up OpenGL commands
into network packets, spits them across the X11 network pipe, then unpacks
them at the other end. This lets you run accelerated 3D remotely: the
client could be running on a mainframe, crunching through millions of FP
operations, and your 3D display could be a cheap Linux/NVIDIA box. This
is sometimes called INDIRECT RENDERING.
Mesa: Brian Paul wrote a free open-source implementation of
OpenGL called Mesa. The name has no hidden meaning, it just sounds nice.
The original versions of Mesa only did software rendering. More recent
versions have had accelerated drivers for Glide, DRI, Direct3D, etc.
DRI: Indirect Rendering is slow. SGI figured this out many
years ago and created something called Direct Rendering. Direct Rendering
lets the client talk directly to the video hardware. On UNIX this is
quite complicated (because of permissions, multiple users, security,
hardware contention) so an intricate software design called the Direct
Rendering Infrastructure coordinates everything. The DRI used on Linux
(designed and implemented by Precision Insight, now part of VA Linux)
requires certain features only available in XFree86 4.0.
Utah-GLX: An Indirect Rendering implementation which runs on
XFree86 3.3. It is indirect because every OpenGL command gets stuffed
into a packet, sent over the X11 network connection, unpacked at the other
end, then rendered. There is a "Direct Rendering Hack" which only works
with the Utah-GLX Matrox driver. Utah-GLX is slightly slower than the DRI
but had the advantage of being simpler to implement, so it was available
with more drivers much earlier than the DRI was.
SDL: OpenGL only defines graphics (2D and 3D). The people at
Loki needed to handle cdroms, audio, mixers, joysticks, keyboards, mpeg
playback, etc. They created a library called SDL which abstracts all the
things that games need. SDL relies heavily on libraries like Mesa to do
the grunt work. You can think of SDL as a more powerful version of GLUT.
Does DRI replace Mesa?
No. Your client software speaks to Mesa. Mesa has a DRI driver which
sets things up with XFree86 4.0, gets hardware access to the card (using
the card-specific kernel module), then starts blitting away merrily on
the card (Direct Rendering).
Does Utah GLX replace DRI for cards it supports?
No. You can think of Utah-GLX and DRI as two seperate projects trying
to achieve the same end-result, but in different ways. The DRI is probably
the best long-term solution. The two projects seem to work in cooperation
fairly well. Many Utah-GLX developers are also DRI developers.
Is Mesa even needed?
Most definitely.
Is plain Mesa included in the Xfree source tree, or is it a fork?
The Mesa in the XFree86 tree is the Real Official Mesa. The Mesa project
is still run independently but the code is regularly "synced" with XFree86.
If I don't have a 3d card, does mesa still install as a software renderer?
Yes.
Does this give better performace over the 1fps syndrome in xfree3/windows95?
No.
Are any of the projects I named obsoluted by the new infrastructure? (utah glx comes to mind...)
Utah-GLX is the only 3D accelerated option for XFree86 3.3, so it isn't
an obsoleted project yet.
Quake III under Linux will never have the performance of Quake III under Windows 98.
Without page-flipping on both platforms, the performance of Quake III on Linux already exceeds Quake III on Windows 98 for several cards.
Page-flipping is being added soon. Given that without page-flipping the Mach64 is (just for an example) 10% faster on Linux than Windows, with page-flipping it will totally obliterate Windows.
The public benchmarks for the tdfx driver are showing Linux exceeding Windows in every single viewperf benchmark. On some benchmarks the ratio of Linux to Windows is better than 2:1.
I think you misunderestimate the potential of good design. The DRI allows data to be streamed faster than the hardware can cope. Windows 98 is surviving by myth (the myth that Direct3D is in some way faster than OpenGL) and myth alone.
Re:Still closed drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
NVidia wanted to release specs (they even made a good start)...
I've seen you repeat this a number of times, but I'm afraid it's completely misleading. The information on the nvidia site is not specs at the register level, and it's not even useful information for writing an open source driver. As proof of this claim, try using that information to write a driver for FreeBSD.
This URL has been floating about for months now and every now and then someone repeats on the utah-glx mailing list "hey look nvidia has full register level specs on their website". Each and every time the person is corrected immediately. So please stop spreading this misinformation.
Re:How much memory is Nvidia's X *really* using?
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
Another poster in another forum explained that
this apparently huge virtual size was due to
virtual-memory-mapping of various bit planes and color depths in the VRAM into virtual memory.
Then this other poster was simply wrong. The large virtual size is due to memory mapping of the framebuffer (32/64megabytes on modern cards) and mapping of the AGP space (128megabytes or more).
The various "bit planes and color depths" are called visuals and they'll occupy at most a few hundred bytes each as structures within the X11 server.
But you got to remember, those tech columnists/"the average desktop
user" doesn't want choice,
But this can't be true, because every 2 years Microsoft releases a brand new "look & feel" for Windows, and the tech writers lap it up like the capitalist lackey dogs that they are.
I think what they really don't want is choice which involves choosing between Microsoft and non-Microsoft. When it's Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Microsoft Windows 95 or Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows Whistler (which are all so completely different as to be entirely alien to each other) why THEN it's fine.
Basically anything that gets you out of X, which is exceptionally primitive,
Oh really, let's see why you think this...
lacking as it does alpha blending,
Xrender does this, and it is an X11 extension.
true type fonts,
XFree86 4.0 supports TrueType and Type-1 fonts.
etc., and being useful only for people running software over a network.
All shared resource systems need some form of IPC between the clients (many) and the resource (single). In Windows this is message passing. In XFree86 it is named pipes. Named pipes are more primitive (and faster) than message passing. X11 is not slow. This is a MYTH.
The problem is that people confuse windowing systems (many clients, 1 framebuffer) with games and other direct rendering problems (1 client, 1 framebuffer). They conclude that any windowing system which can't perform as quickly as a plain framebuffer is "broken", "stupid" or "only good for networked graphics". This is plain wrong.
For direct rendering, which is where you have a single client and a single resource, then the highest speed is achieved by locking the resource and performing Direct Rendering. You might have noticed that Windows only recently offered direct rendering as a feature: years after SGI offered direct rendering for OpenGL over X11. XFree86 now offers two forms of direct rendering: DGA or DRI.
We have the fastest possible IPC for indirect rendering (named pipes) and the fastest possible methods for direct rendering. So why is there a still pervasive myth that X11 is broken? Display Postscript, Direct Rendering, OpenGL, Type-1 and TrueType fonts... WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?
Sure, X11 isn't perfect, but this is because it's a non-trivial system and it certainly seems people prefer to whine about it rather than help out in development.
If you prefer to do things, rather than talk about it, then go to www.xfree86.org and join up for development. There are many things that need to be done and far too few people working on it.
So how many people are actually submitting patches to the StarOffice source?
Hundreds (perhaps thousands) are subscribed to the developer's lists.
Where can I download it?
www.openoffice.org
Is there a CVS tree open?
Yes.
I remember when we all bitched and moaned that Sun had bought StarOffice and didn't release the source. Now they have released the source (I guess) and I have this terrible feeling that no-one is doing anything on it.
With all due respect, it sounds like you don't know what the hell is going on, so I hardly think you're the best authority to claim "no-one is doing anything".
Sun coordinated with COLLAB.NET to make sure the launch of staroffice included mailing lists, CVS archives, bug trackers, build instructions, and working source. The 60 meg source downloads and builds with zero effort if you read the very clear instructions.
Of course, you didn't do any of that, and you didn't even bother looking at the source, but that didn't stop you voicing your damn ignorant opinion.
Your implication (that Nine Inch Nails isn't cultural dialectic) is naive at best. If anything NIN is a perfect example of modern culture. The fact that it's also good music is irrelevant, but they ARE talented and their music IS good.
I enjoy a good symphony as well, but it's just arrogance to imply that all pop bands have to be untalented or removed from culture. I can agree a lot of pop bands are shit, but there's talent in there if you look hard and long enough.
Ok, I'm Australian, and I find the American political system perhaps slightly more boring than even our own dodgy political system. But I have been interested in what appears to be, even to the casual international observer, character assassination of everyone but Bush.
For example, Ralph Nader is known even over here in Australia (at least if you've had more than a rudimentary education). He's clearly a smart guy, yet it seems he's getting the sharp end of the stick at every turn. Why?
And Al Gore. We've all seen the 100s of posts in his defence disproving his "gaffes", pointing out that they're not gaffes but blatant lies and misrepresentations by the media. So why do the lies and misrepresentations continue?
I say it's for entertainment. It's clearly a bad news-day/week/month and the media is playing your election up for all it's worth. If they were honest and portrayed the candidates in a fair and unbiased light then you'd have no contest. It'd be like a boxing match between Tyson and Pee-Wee Herman (and that fully exhausts my knowledge of American celebrities). Your Tyson is of course Al Gore. Not only is Al Gore obviously smarter than his #1 competitor, he also has more experience, he did better at school, he looks better on TV, he has more hair, his teeth are much shinier and whiter, and he's taller than everyone else too. What more do you Americans want from a President?
Nobody would watch the debates if the media had portrayed the candidates fairly. So in an attempt to boost TV ratings and newspaper sales, your media is doing a snow-job on Bush and a smear-campaign on Gore and ignoring all the other candidates (because you can't have a fair and unbiassed election if there are more than two choices! everybody knows this).
Your presidents are picked by TV. I think you lot should know this by now. The TV conglomerates not only pick the winner they force it to happen through media attention and persuasion. Who cares who becomes president when there's a buck to be made! I think you should all vote Rupert Murdoch for president and acknowledge who the real leader of your country is, once and for all!
On 16 Robots Take Over, I think you're forgetting Asimov's Foundation series, in which robots took over the entire Galactic Empire - they were just subtle about it, so none of us carbon-based folk noticed.
Um, robots didn't take over in the Foundation series. In fact, if you only count the original Foundation series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, 2nd Foundation) then there weren't any robots at all. In the extra books (Foundation's Edge, Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Earth) that were written so long after Foundation became popular, then at best you can say robots were guiding humanity. In the end the power that takes over the Galactic Empire is decidingly non-robotic!
If that's true, why are so many of the robot stories about pseudo-technical issues? He's famous for the "Laws of Robotics" that he invented mainly to indulge his love of cute little puzzles.
You yourself say "the most technical thing..." and this I think proves my point. Asimov didn't go the terrible route some authors travel where they try and explain the technology in terrible excruciating detail: Arthur C. Clarke does this all the time and I personally can't stand it.
Asimov instead gave pseudo-science answers like "positrons" then hastily moved on. Clearly the pseudo-science was irrelevant to the story. I think Asimov was far more interested in ethical and social problems like interpreting the three laws and imagining the various ways humans/robots would interact.
Too many sci-fi authors spend time talking about the science. I find it far more interesting when the author says "this science exists which can do this, I'm not going to explain how it does this, but I will try and find out how it would change us for better or for worse". This is what I enjoy. Asimov's short story Election is a perfect example of this.
I'm not hero-worshipping Asimov. I just think that he has a damn good ratio of hits to misses.
I seem to recall enjoying all of Brin's short fiction. I often think the short story is where SF works best. Unfortunately, what the marketplace seems to want is thousand-page overplotted, overpopulated, underedited sagas, padded even further with half-baked rants on meaningless topics. Which is why such nonsense accounts for 90% of Brin's output.
You're so right! I hate long-winded sci-fi novels. They are almost without exception boring. Michael Crichton has to be the worst offender IMO, but there are so many others competing for the title.
It's interesting that the doyen of Robot SF never developed this theme. But maybe not suprising -- Asimov never really developed any serious understanding of computing, cypernetics, or robotics. His robot stories are really a combination of old-fashioned handwaving (can "don't kill people" really be made into a mathematical principle?) and social comentary (notice the stories where robots are addressed as "boy"!).
I disagree. I think Asimov decided to explore robot sci-fi from a non-technical position on purpose, instead exploring the nature of human & robot social interaction. Bicentennial man is easily his best story demonstrating this. Others include robot-as-pathos (Bard) and the blurring between robots and humans (Segregationist).
He also explored the Frankenstein complex in short stories like Thou Art Mindful Of Him.
Sure, some of Asimov's stories were supposed to be fun (the Powell & Donovan series) and some were meant to ask "what if" (the Calvin series). I think this demonstrated that Asimov was trying hard to explore robots from all angles: social, economic, pathological, psychological. One of my favourite Asimov short stories revolves around the idea of a robot growing tired with life (and I won't give the name to avoid spoiling it).
Asimov wasn't cyberpunk like Gibson, but I don't think it's at all fair to say Asimov never developed a "serious understanding". He mightn't have developed a technical understanding, that I will admit, but I think Asimov had one of the most serious understandings of the human/robot relationship of any sci-fi author, living or dead.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
You really are amazing, Chris Johnson. You clearly don't know anything about signals. Your understanding of Fourier is non-existent. You've had numerous people point out the hideous flaws in your arguments. That one about 14.7kHz pulses was a hoot! How you managed to score 5 points for some of your nonsense is simply beyond me.
Now you're claiming audio amplifiers amplify linearly up to the megahertz range? Hell, the science department at the university is going to be over the moon about this. They pay thousands of dollars for equipment that can do this and all they needed was a NAD amp at $200 from the local hifi dealer!
You're an idiot, Chris Johnson. I haven't seen a single sensible word out of you yet.
PS: I'll read a stereo review magazine the day hell freezes over. These are the same idiots that recommend colouring your CDs in with green marker pens, demagnetizing your CDs, and using gold CDRs instead of blue CDRs "to improve the warmth and depth of the recording". They know less than you do and that's really saying something.
You're not wrong here: there are no cheap and commercially available 24-bit dacs, and noones hi-fi comes even close to 24-bit fidelity from source to speaker, but you're missing my point.
Just as in playback where the 44.1kHz signal is oversampled, during recording the signal is often recorded at much higher frequencies. The extra data samples allows you to reduce error and this lets you increase the sample size. It isn't a direct measurement that gives them 24 bits per sample. It's an indirect calculation based on nearby samples with a realistic 20-bit ADC (or whatever studios use these days).
Now it doesn't matter that at no stage will a 24-bit DAC or ADC be used. You get 24-bits of information per sample into a 44.1kHz recording by sampling at a higher frequency. You can use the extra information during playback because your sample interpolation will be more accurate.
It's a matter of information. Increasing the stored sample size increases the amount of info on the disc. More information lets you reproduce the original signal more accurately. Ignore the practicality of the stored info: 24-bit isn't a very practical sample size, but it is more info, and the recording studio will have used clever techniques to ensure that they are using all 24 bits even if they don't have 24 bit ADCs.
Sorry, yes. The previous poster wrote "22050 + 150 = 24000". I was pointing out that "22050 + 1950 = 24000". I should have completed the entire line of reasoning rather than just point out the mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing how the first thought that pops into the minds of people when faced with the possibility of instantaneous teleportation is "wow, I can avoid the traffic going to work". It is incredibly shortsighted.
David Brin wrote a wonderful short story where he theorizes about a world where cheap, reliable teleportation was commonplace. Customs control is impossible, smuggling is rife, crime increases exponentially, police are powerless, war supplies cannot be stopped, privacy is destroyed, people visit the few last pieces of untouched wilderness in droves thus destroying it.
Teleportation would be the end of civilisation as we know it. For the previous person to equate it with something as trivial as the light bulb! I think you were incredibly restrained to not call him a freaking idiot.
My point, which you apparently didn't get, is that employers already make decisions about your suitability for jobs based on physical appearance: the crudest form of genetic screening possible. Real scientific genetic screening isn't going to change how employers act, it just gives them some real data to work with rather than bad opinions and misguided prejudices. This can only be better for the employer and the employee. I certainly wouldn't want to work in a high-stress situation if it turned out I had a genetic tendency to die quickly from heart failure in high-stress situations!
Because rejecting an unfit and uncoordinated slob applying for an aerobics instructor position is a form of discrimination. And I'm sure it's a form that nobody here would disagree with.
The 3 examples I gave all show that physical characteristics are sometimes important to the job. It doesn't take much intelligence to imagine that there are MANY jobs where genetic screening can help employers make better choices. Would you want a pilot who suffers from epilepsy? How about a childcare worker with a tendency to launch into violent fits of rage? Or a trained athelete with heart problems? How about a male masseur applying for a position in a "womens only" gym?
Discrimination isn't terrible. It can be used in terrible ways (to discriminate based on skin colour where skin colour is irrelevant) but it's also possible to discriminate in positive ways.
I wasn't the person you directed this comment towards, but I feel obliged to respond to it.
Please avoid making derogatory comments like these. Issues such as these are already heavily charged with emotion. To show disrespect to the other side simply makes it harder to discuss the topic.
I would say that your comment shows outright hostility and contempt for the other person. You have seemingly assumed that they are rash and stupid, simply because they don't have the same opinion as you do!
Nonsense, people are already "branded" according to their genetic makeup.
People who wear spectacles have a harder time getting jobs flying aeroplanes.
People who aren't coordinated or fit have a harder time getting jobs as aerobic instructors.
People who are short have a hard time getting jobs as basketball players.
Discrimination is nothing new, nor is it necessarily something to worry about. Genetic testing just increases the range of knowledge beyond the first glance. Picking the wrong person for the job is detrimental to the employer AND the employee.
Correct.
False. Several of the drivers do special things because of these security issues. For example, cards with programmable DMA destinations have those parts of the cards hidden as kernel ioctls.
False. One of the design goals of the DRI was non-root direct hardware access. There is further discussion of this topic here.
In particular... "The direct-rendering clients, however, do not run as root, but still require similar mappings. Like /dev/mem, the DRM device
interface allows clients to create these mappings..."
The KGI has different design goals. It is closer in spirit to linux-fb. It is arguably not suitable for high speed 3D like the DRI.
Your understanding is a little flawed. There is some very good information on dri.sourceforge.net and www.precisioninsight.com. The whitepapers on Precision Insight's website are excellent.
Well, I was just going from the FAQ...
That's from http://www.libsdl.org/intro/author.html
Yes, one of the design goals of the DRI was accelerated windowed 3D. Sometimes a certain feature might only be available when fullscreen rendering (eg, page-flipping) but these are exceptions to the rule.
Another design goal of the DRI was multiple simultaneous 3D clients. At the moment you might lose hardware acceleration for some clients if you've got too many OpenGL clients running at the same time. It depends on the hardware.
Ok, here goes...
No. Your client software speaks to Mesa. Mesa has a DRI driver which sets things up with XFree86 4.0, gets hardware access to the card (using the card-specific kernel module), then starts blitting away merrily on the card (Direct Rendering).
No. You can think of Utah-GLX and DRI as two seperate projects trying to achieve the same end-result, but in different ways. The DRI is probably the best long-term solution. The two projects seem to work in cooperation fairly well. Many Utah-GLX developers are also DRI developers.
Most definitely.
The Mesa in the XFree86 tree is the Real Official Mesa. The Mesa project is still run independently but the code is regularly "synced" with XFree86.
Yes.
No.
Utah-GLX is the only 3D accelerated option for XFree86 3.3, so it isn't an obsoleted project yet.
Without page-flipping on both platforms, the performance of Quake III on Linux already exceeds Quake III on Windows 98 for several cards.
Page-flipping is being added soon. Given that without page-flipping the Mach64 is (just for an example) 10% faster on Linux than Windows, with page-flipping it will totally obliterate Windows.
The public benchmarks for the tdfx driver are showing Linux exceeding Windows in every single viewperf benchmark. On some benchmarks the ratio of Linux to Windows is better than 2:1.
I think you misunderestimate the potential of good design. The DRI allows data to be streamed faster than the hardware can cope. Windows 98 is surviving by myth (the myth that Direct3D is in some way faster than OpenGL) and myth alone.
I've seen you repeat this a number of times, but I'm afraid it's completely misleading. The information on the nvidia site is not specs at the register level, and it's not even useful information for writing an open source driver. As proof of this claim, try using that information to write a driver for FreeBSD.
This URL has been floating about for months now and every now and then someone repeats on the utah-glx mailing list "hey look nvidia has full register level specs on their website". Each and every time the person is corrected immediately. So please stop spreading this misinformation.
Then this other poster was simply wrong. The large virtual size is due to memory mapping of the framebuffer (32/64megabytes on modern cards) and mapping of the AGP space (128megabytes or more).
The various "bit planes and color depths" are called visuals and they'll occupy at most a few hundred bytes each as structures within the X11 server.
Your mother was your sister? How many fingers do you have?
But this can't be true, because every 2 years Microsoft releases a brand new "look & feel" for Windows, and the tech writers lap it up like the capitalist lackey dogs that they are.
I think what they really don't want is choice which involves choosing between Microsoft and non-Microsoft. When it's Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Microsoft Windows 95 or Microsoft Windows 2000 or Microsoft Windows Whistler (which are all so completely different as to be entirely alien to each other) why THEN it's fine.
Oh really, let's see why you think this...
Xrender does this, and it is an X11 extension.
XFree86 4.0 supports TrueType and Type-1 fonts.
All shared resource systems need some form of IPC between the clients (many) and the resource (single). In Windows this is message passing. In XFree86 it is named pipes. Named pipes are more primitive (and faster) than message passing. X11 is not slow. This is a MYTH.
The problem is that people confuse windowing systems (many clients, 1 framebuffer) with games and other direct rendering problems (1 client, 1 framebuffer). They conclude that any windowing system which can't perform as quickly as a plain framebuffer is "broken", "stupid" or "only good for networked graphics". This is plain wrong.
For direct rendering, which is where you have a single client and a single resource, then the highest speed is achieved by locking the resource and performing Direct Rendering. You might have noticed that Windows only recently offered direct rendering as a feature: years after SGI offered direct rendering for OpenGL over X11. XFree86 now offers two forms of direct rendering: DGA or DRI.
We have the fastest possible IPC for indirect rendering (named pipes) and the fastest possible methods for direct rendering. So why is there a still pervasive myth that X11 is broken? Display Postscript, Direct Rendering, OpenGL, Type-1 and TrueType fonts... WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?
Sure, X11 isn't perfect, but this is because it's a non-trivial system and it certainly seems people prefer to whine about it rather than help out in development.
If you prefer to do things, rather than talk about it, then go to www.xfree86.org and join up for development. There are many things that need to be done and far too few people working on it.
The dumber people are just speaking more often.
Hundreds (perhaps thousands) are subscribed to the developer's lists.
www.openoffice.org
Yes.
With all due respect, it sounds like you don't know what the hell is going on, so I hardly think you're the best authority to claim "no-one is doing anything".
Sun coordinated with COLLAB.NET to make sure the launch of staroffice included mailing lists, CVS archives, bug trackers, build instructions, and working source. The 60 meg source downloads and builds with zero effort if you read the very clear instructions.
Of course, you didn't do any of that, and you didn't even bother looking at the source, but that didn't stop you voicing your damn ignorant opinion.
Your implication (that Nine Inch Nails isn't cultural dialectic) is naive at best. If anything NIN is a perfect example of modern culture. The fact that it's also good music is irrelevant, but they ARE talented and their music IS good.
I enjoy a good symphony as well, but it's just arrogance to imply that all pop bands have to be untalented or removed from culture. I can agree a lot of pop bands are shit, but there's talent in there if you look hard and long enough.
Ok, I'm Australian, and I find the American political system perhaps slightly more boring than even our own dodgy political system. But I have been interested in what appears to be, even to the casual international observer, character assassination of everyone but Bush.
For example, Ralph Nader is known even over here in Australia (at least if you've had more than a rudimentary education). He's clearly a smart guy, yet it seems he's getting the sharp end of the stick at every turn. Why?
And Al Gore. We've all seen the 100s of posts in his defence disproving his "gaffes", pointing out that they're not gaffes but blatant lies and misrepresentations by the media. So why do the lies and misrepresentations continue?
I say it's for entertainment. It's clearly a bad news-day/week/month and the media is playing your election up for all it's worth. If they were honest and portrayed the candidates in a fair and unbiased light then you'd have no contest. It'd be like a boxing match between Tyson and Pee-Wee Herman (and that fully exhausts my knowledge of American celebrities). Your Tyson is of course Al Gore. Not only is Al Gore obviously smarter than his #1 competitor, he also has more experience, he did better at school, he looks better on TV, he has more hair, his teeth are much shinier and whiter, and he's taller than everyone else too. What more do you Americans want from a President?
Nobody would watch the debates if the media had portrayed the candidates fairly. So in an attempt to boost TV ratings and newspaper sales, your media is doing a snow-job on Bush and a smear-campaign on Gore and ignoring all the other candidates (because you can't have a fair and unbiassed election if there are more than two choices! everybody knows this).
Your presidents are picked by TV. I think you lot should know this by now. The TV conglomerates not only pick the winner they force it to happen through media attention and persuasion. Who cares who becomes president when there's a buck to be made! I think you should all vote Rupert Murdoch for president and acknowledge who the real leader of your country is, once and for all!
Um, robots didn't take over in the Foundation series. In fact, if you only count the original Foundation series (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, 2nd Foundation) then there weren't any robots at all. In the extra books (Foundation's Edge, Prelude to Foundation, Foundation and Earth) that were written so long after Foundation became popular, then at best you can say robots were guiding humanity. In the end the power that takes over the Galactic Empire is decidingly non-robotic!
You yourself say "the most technical thing..." and this I think proves my point. Asimov didn't go the terrible route some authors travel where they try and explain the technology in terrible excruciating detail: Arthur C. Clarke does this all the time and I personally can't stand it.
Asimov instead gave pseudo-science answers like "positrons" then hastily moved on. Clearly the pseudo-science was irrelevant to the story. I think Asimov was far more interested in ethical and social problems like interpreting the three laws and imagining the various ways humans/robots would interact.
Too many sci-fi authors spend time talking about the science. I find it far more interesting when the author says "this science exists which can do this, I'm not going to explain how it does this, but I will try and find out how it would change us for better or for worse". This is what I enjoy. Asimov's short story Election is a perfect example of this.
I'm not hero-worshipping Asimov. I just think that he has a damn good ratio of hits to misses.
You're so right! I hate long-winded sci-fi novels. They are almost without exception boring. Michael Crichton has to be the worst offender IMO, but there are so many others competing for the title.
I disagree. I think Asimov decided to explore robot sci-fi from a non-technical position on purpose, instead exploring the nature of human & robot social interaction. Bicentennial man is easily his best story demonstrating this. Others include robot-as-pathos (Bard) and the blurring between robots and humans (Segregationist).
He also explored the Frankenstein complex in short stories like Thou Art Mindful Of Him.
Sure, some of Asimov's stories were supposed to be fun (the Powell & Donovan series) and some were meant to ask "what if" (the Calvin series). I think this demonstrated that Asimov was trying hard to explore robots from all angles: social, economic, pathological, psychological. One of my favourite Asimov short stories revolves around the idea of a robot growing tired with life (and I won't give the name to avoid spoiling it).
Asimov wasn't cyberpunk like Gibson, but I don't think it's at all fair to say Asimov never developed a "serious understanding". He mightn't have developed a technical understanding, that I will admit, but I think Asimov had one of the most serious understandings of the human/robot relationship of any sci-fi author, living or dead.
I also like David Brin! His short stories are much better than his novels. Brin is very much like Asimov in that respect.
You really are amazing, Chris Johnson. You clearly don't know anything about signals. Your understanding of Fourier is non-existent. You've had numerous people point out the hideous flaws in your arguments. That one about 14.7kHz pulses was a hoot! How you managed to score 5 points for some of your nonsense is simply beyond me.
Now you're claiming audio amplifiers amplify linearly up to the megahertz range? Hell, the science department at the university is going to be over the moon about this. They pay thousands of dollars for equipment that can do this and all they needed was a NAD amp at $200 from the local hifi dealer!
You're an idiot, Chris Johnson. I haven't seen a single sensible word out of you yet.
PS: I'll read a stereo review magazine the day hell freezes over. These are the same idiots that recommend colouring your CDs in with green marker pens, demagnetizing your CDs, and using gold CDRs instead of blue CDRs "to improve the warmth and depth of the recording". They know less than you do and that's really saying something.
You're not wrong here: there are no cheap and commercially available 24-bit dacs, and noones hi-fi comes even close to 24-bit fidelity from source to speaker, but you're missing my point.
Just as in playback where the 44.1kHz signal is oversampled, during recording the signal is often recorded at much higher frequencies. The extra data samples allows you to reduce error and this lets you increase the sample size. It isn't a direct measurement that gives them 24 bits per sample. It's an indirect calculation based on nearby samples with a realistic 20-bit ADC (or whatever studios use these days).
Now it doesn't matter that at no stage will a 24-bit DAC or ADC be used. You get 24-bits of information per sample into a 44.1kHz recording by sampling at a higher frequency. You can use the extra information during playback because your sample interpolation will be more accurate.
It's a matter of information. Increasing the stored sample size increases the amount of info on the disc. More information lets you reproduce the original signal more accurately. Ignore the practicality of the stored info: 24-bit isn't a very practical sample size, but it is more info, and the recording studio will have used clever techniques to ensure that they are using all 24 bits even if they don't have 24 bit ADCs.
Sorry, yes. The previous poster wrote "22050 + 150 = 24000". I was pointing out that "22050 + 1950 = 24000". I should have completed the entire line of reasoning rather than just point out the mistake.
Irrelevant. Quantisation is the accuracy to which you can represent an intensity level. Vinyl has a limitation just like any recording medium.
You measure it indirectly with vinyl, using SNR readings from a single sinusoid.