It is a plane with the wings torn off, so you can only "fly" it for a very short period of time. I think the record is something like 23 seconds.
Getting the plane off the ground for extended periods of time is easy - controlling it in the air is the hard part. To get off the ground just push the nose down while accelerating on the runway - you really cannot keep it on the ground when the speed is high enough. Remember to pull nose really slow! Try 1st person view if this seems hard. I think you cannot do loop because it goes grazy when trying to to straight up and stalls really easy. Forget about getting more speed by going down too - this is not exactly the flight simulator. I still need to test what happens when you fly away enough from the islands. Of couse, you can just use cheats to fly anything...
Not counting the missions at the end I really love this game. It's pretty short though and I wouldn't recommend it to kiddies either.
Without a very high bitrate (much higher than 48kHz), a lot of the low frequencies are lost or distorted.
Uh... Do you know anything about physics behind producing sound? 48kHz sampling rate gives you 24kHz lowpass filter. Any sampling rate more than zero gives you ability to save frequencies down to zero. I don't know about you but I consider less than 200Hz as low frequency and you can encode that perfectly with 400Hz (0.4kHz) sampling rate. About what comes to vinyl giving "more clear and natural bass response" you probably just like fuzzier bass more. Digital system can practically output square wave if needed unlike vinyl. Granted it doesn't sound "natural" but it's correct.
Also I highly doubt that you can get needle to move even 24kHz needed to be better than plain old CD in the high frequency end.
the whole GUI in OS X is not hardware acellerated due to the fact that it is vector based. No current video cards support this...
I won't argue about whether or not OS X renders stuff as vectors but... Do you really think that 3D graphics are rendered as bitmaps instead of vectors? Have you heard about DRI? How about T&L acceleration? Why should displaying 2D graphics with 3D API be any harder than displaying full 3D view like games do? In fact, it's much simpler because you never need to move camera and all the stuff is rendered in plane... though cool effects could be easily achieved with some z-buffer fun.
3D APIs has not been used for full UIs simply because current 2D displays are good enough for the work you want. It's not like you would *really* want to see your desktop through the image you're trying to manipulate ("Damn, scratch... oh, it's my desktop. Never mind"). Yeah, there are some things I would want tranparency for but none of them would be interactive - just some informational stuff overlayed on top of my screen.
cell phone text messaging technology is aburdly stupid... we should really be investing in new voice recognition technologies... Only THEN will I buy these phones
Well, if you had option between a device with keyboard and 200h battery time and a device with voice recognition, 100h battery time and thrice the price would you buy the latter? Also current voice recognition tech has hit rate of roughly 90% on PC systems - I don't even want to know how much errors there would be with mobile hardware.
Perhaps after a couple of years but not yet. A small dictionary for clever keyboard input like T9 works much better with current crop of hardware.
Finland have had more mobiles than landline phones for quite some time now...
...and this has more to do with irrational high costs for landline than advantages of mobile tech. Yeah, mobile phones has been supported by government by not allowing bundling contracts with phones and receiving call or SMS is always free so people usually answer to their phones. Phones are more expensive but rates should go down because changing operator is easier. Unfortunately this doesn't really work because people keep using the same operator to keep their phone number. It's like using email address tied to your ISP - you really cannot discontinue contract if you want to keep your address working. I don't even own landline because mobile phone costs less. I have LAN connection to Internet though. By the way, if you couldn't figure it out I live in Finland.
one of the big size-limiting factors of making laptops much smaller than they are is the need for a keyboard
I think the real size-limiting factor is display. I mean, look at ads, they're advertising 15" displays for laptops and such. A quick question: how small device can contain 15" display? A device with 8" diameter? I don't see much need for this device as long as our displays are flat solid squares. After I have hi-res display built in my glasses I might be more interested. If I have to carry large display with cover I can use that cover as keyboard like nowadays. If I accept low-res PDA display I can use graffiti or stuff for input too.
Siemens phones can do this too. It's called T9 and I think typing 100+ L[etters]PM with this isn't hard dispite the fact I'm using my thumb only. Not too bad if you think that all the keys take like 1 square inch combined (siemens S35 I have)... Of course you can forget typing C code or shell scripts with it.
I have does things like: {double A = B/C; if (C!=0) do_something(A);}
Why not: if(C!=0) {A=B/C; do_something(a);}
You might use former as optimization. You tell compiler to calculate A in every case. While you're doing it you can check if C happens to be zero or not. After the check is done you have probably calculated A and decided if you need to do something with it.
The latter one is more clear and compiler should be able to convert it to former internally if it increases performance and is supported by platform.
"- me: clena up page dirty handling"
English speak first language, yes?
AFAIK, "me" refers to Linus and his first language isn't English. Though I think that Linus knows English well enough to write correctly if needed. This has probably more to do with the fact that he doesn't care. In short: If you cannot decode this you don't need to know...
Unless the kernel has some new feature or fixes a major secutiy hole, I personally don't see how interesting each minor release is. Slashdot isn't freshmeat.
How about publishing all the news covering software releases (including kernel releases) under new topic called "software releases" and people like you can opt-out in preferences. Others, including me, can read about these from/. because we don't read both slashdot and freshmeat.
How was this possible? I mean, was U.S. Bank giving PayPal rights to modify account information? Or was PayPal trusting that user owned that account and had enough money to withdraw in which case it would have hurt PayPal, not account owner. If some website could modify my bank account, without me granting the right for transaction to my bank, I'd sue my bank instead of that website.
those who know they know nothing and are comfortable with it, and those who know knothing but nonetheless pretend they are power users
I have also encountered those that know nothing and are confirmed they cannot ever understand nor remember anything. This leads to problem that no matter what you say they keep saying "this is too hard", "I don't understand this computer thing", "I should probably write that down". Usually they are afraid to try anything by their own because they could break something too. There's pretty much no hope with these kind of people nor the people that think they know everything already. Of course you could give them something that cannot be broken and in the same time gives perspective to computers and computing in whole that they realize they are allowed to try, allowed to make mistakes and they never can know everything. This something remains to be found.
I think that making everything transparent and "easy" to use is problem. Computers are compared to cars every now and then and cars are claimed to be easy to use. If you didn't know anything about cars you couldn't even get into one! Think about it. Your average car user knows about fuel, engine, wheels, lights and stuff. One isn't allowed to drive before going through course. Beginners are allowed to use new computers without teaching anything because "windows is easy to use". New users should be told briefly about CPUs, different kinds of memory (system memory, CD, HDD here) and idea behind multitasking and networking. They don't need to know details unless they want to. They need to know something about internals to make them sure about themself to be able to try things.
Linux doesn't need to be another windows or macos to be successive on desktop. We need programs that work (not that copy'n'paste by select, click middle button - if you have one - and hope it works), some basic tools with simple interface and cool background pictures. CLI shouldn't be avoided. Saying what you want is intuitive. You should be able to type/say "browser" or "internet" instead of clicking that "e" looking icon that's told to be browser. "image editor" or "view" instead of clicking eye with text "Adobe Photoshop" and so on. UNIX isn't much better here (netscape, emacs, vi, chdir, sed, gimp; would you know from name what they're used for?)
The new ReplayTV 4000 box actually has an option to completely skip commercials, automatically.
How can it detect commercials? Does TV station send description stream with video and sound telling "The Simpsons, season 7, episode 3, part 2 of 2, currently running 12:17 min of 22:02 min" and "Commercials, currently running 1:05 min of 3:15 min"? And then they blame us for using devices to rip of commercials?
In Finland, where I live, stations send PDC signal that tells VCRs when show is delayed and recoding is automatically delayed correctly. It also tells if show is running late and recording time is fixed accordingly. Commercial channels tell that "the show starts now" when actually the ads before it start and again tell that "the show ends now" after last ad after the show is over. When show is interrupted by ad the signal tells the show is still running.
Of course you can still try analyze images and stuff to recognize ads automatically but you need pretty much computing power for stuff like that and it's not bullet proof.
...you could have picked up a pair of noise canceling headphones that would also have had other uses as well...
Those headphones cancel only 10dB of noice. You'll end up with quieter setup with clear part choices plus you don't have to wear headphones always. Using GeForce3 isn't one of them.
I have silent power supply, a 10cm 12V fan running with 7V, CPU cooler running at 3000RPM and IBM 75GXP HDD. Not counting the harddrive this is really quiet setup though I have done some arrangements to get noise down for it too. I have Duron 650 and I'm running at 38C/case, 42C/CPU. I HAD to rip off cooler from my ATI Radeon because it made more noise than the rest of the computer! It's slower retail version so it works fine without cooler;)
Do you honestly believe that one day we'll be able to read CDs, and the next we won't? Rubbish. Technology evolves. And during that evolution the data can be migrated from the old storage to the new.
The problem is with the CDs that you know nothing about. A CD which contains the information you really want could be lost for 20 years or so and when you find it there would be very few readers in the world, if any.
However, I think that at least all optical medium should be safe, because at least the documentation about how the media works would be saved. Just like there's information available how text was encoded to be send it 100 years ago. I wouldn't be highly impressed if somebody come with a program that reads CDs via image scanner. With high enough quality scan one should be able to decode a CD with software.
If you find 50 years old HDD which stores information in magnetism you're pretty much out of luck unless the drive has been properly stored.
No, no. DOS was trivial to crash. DOS itself didn't cause the crash, but the programs that run under it crash all the time, and usually/often take DOS with it. (emphasis added)
As I said you practically couldn't crash DOS. Running an app that crashes and takes DOS with it was outside the spec. DOS wasn't supposed to survive something like that. "Heck, Linux cannot even BOOT on C64! Therefore Linux must suck!" - something wrong here? When linux crashes because of broken driver made by nVidia is it Linux that's broken? Or is it the software you happened to use?
Re:I still wouldnt get an Athlon or any AMD chip.
on
AMD And THG update
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· Score: 1
As long as you cool the AMD properly and feed it clean power, it does just fine.
Yep, it seems to me that Intel CPUs handle bad power much better than AMD equivalents. It really doesn't matter when you get a decent power but cheap PCs are usually equipped with el cheapo power supplies - as well as with [almost] broken memory. Sometimes this gets AMD bad name for no reason.
Nor am I about to rewrite my code to take advantage of proprietary sse2 instructions to get that performance either.
AFAIK, Hammer supports SSE2 so you should at least start to think supporting it. As I see it SSE+SSE2 is going to kill x87. Athlons look really cheap though... perhaps I should upgrade my Duron 650?
DOS -never- caused my computer to crash, and I used it for years and years..
I agree. There's practically no way to make DOS crash. Perhaps if you have broken hardware... DOS is practically a boot strapper go get you going. Many people still use it to start linux with loadlin. This allows simple command line with a file system before booting the system. GRUB is a fix for this hack but MS keeps overwriting it without asking when you reinstall Windows again.
I'm aware that this doesn't mean they've met in person, but it shows that Moshe has discussed things with Rik before AA's VM was written. So I think he holds nothing agains Rik, he just likes aa's VM better.
In addition to this it seems that he has implemented VM with reverse mapping also. Therefore it should be clear that he previously thought this was the best method. I've understood that the issue between Rik's and AA's VMs is that Rik's is optimized for normal swapping and AA's for OOM case. Because VM performance really matters only when OOM happens I think AA's should be superior. The real difference depends on benchmark, of course.
Both systems seem to be somewhat equal. AA's needs less swap but Rik's is claimed to be better performer. If AA's system is simpler then that's what should be used. Select maintainability over questionable performance increase. This is like quicksort - there's a point when you usually get better performance bubble sorting the little pieces quicksort generates during the whole sort. The smart version isn't always the best. Nowadays CPUs can easily do a bunch of dumb operations faster than one smart operation.
In supporting 480p, the Gamecube offers a true 60 fps, as the entire screen updates every frame. With a standard television, running at 480i, you will really only effectively get 30fps, as it takes 2 frames to draw a full image.
Actually, as already explained by others, you get 60 fps with standard television also. The difference is that your display cannot show full resolution so you practically show 60 fps with half the resolution.
About what comes to interlacing I'm all for dumping it, but I have to say (as an owner of a CRT projector and a CRT monitor) that as long as your device is designed for interlaced signals (in my case CRT projector designed to be used as TV) they look pretty good. I mean playing GT3 with PS2 displayed on 80" screen via CRT projector looks good despite the fact that the image is interlaced. On the other hand the same image transferred through upscaler/deinterlacer to LCD projector ends up to look not so good because of interlacing.
Generally I'd say that with lower quality displays (like televisions) interlacing is better. If you have digital communication and fixed pixel display there's absolutely no reason to use interlaced image. Because in the future all our displays are probably fixed pixel I really hate the fact that HDTV uses so much interlaced modes.
For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform.
I wouldn't use ext2 for any server even if I didn't need journaling. ReiserFS should be faster during reading especially if you happen to have many small files or a couple huge files. Journaling shouldn't matter performance if you aren't updating anything. And if you're, you should be using journaling anyway. So in the end, if you choose ReiserFS over ext2 you should get at least better performance. You might also get journaling as an added bonus.
I don't know if ReiserFS is the best journaling filesystem, but it's the one I have used and it has never disappointed me. OTOH, I have lost ext2 partition once... The only reason to use ext2 is either you're really low on memory (kernel size) or you have to use ext2 for backwards compatibility - for example I know about driver to read ext2 partitions from windows but I haven't found a one for reiserfs. Another way is obviously a piece of cake.
corrupted files after a crash are just as intolerable as a corrupted filesystem.
But journaling data doesn't get you too far if the programs you use aren't clever enough. Far too often an editor replaces file during saving instead of first writing a new one, after that removing old one and renaming new file to old filename. If your editor doesn't do this you're pretty much fscked up whether or not your filesystem supports journaling of data or not.
On the other hand if you're editing big file the feature that editor replaces the file is must because you might not have enough disk space or quota to store it twice. The same applies for databases and stuff that needs to keep files open for acceptable performance. If an editor does write changes to new file first and only after that removes old file and still data is missing after crash it's simply unacceptable. There should be very few cases where data journaling actually helps.
In fact, most criticisms levelled at X are actually criticisms of some ancient X reference implementation that's years old, that modern XFree 4 has relatively little in common with, since it's modular rewrite.
Actually, I think most of the criticism of X is due to highly limited protocol specification - I mean you don't have alpha, only 1-bit mouse cursor and stuff that was undestandable year 1985 but not today. Sure, it has extension protocol and that's pretty much all we run nowadays if possible. This is pretty much the same thing as with OpenGL right now. You can do all the stuff with the officially supported protocol, but you really want to use all those extensions to get yourself off the ground. To say that X as a protocol is the way to go is obviously wrong. Creating a fresh protocol for network transparent windowing is the way to go - for example Berlin shows a great promise but seems to take eternity to complete. Hell, you shout out loud when we see another x86 compatible chip how we should drop backwards compability for better ISA and in the same time you don't want to drop ancient API to get better results. It's only software for Pete's sake.
Get a grip moderators. Just because a comment knocks MS|non-OSS software|IE (delete as applicable), etc. doesn't necessarily make it "3, Funny".
Uh.. I didn't see any mention about any of those pieces of software you mention in the post that was moderated as "Funny". If $RANDOM_CLOSED_SOURCE_APPLICATION brings some MS apps into your mind it's your problem only. Considering the stunt that MS pulled with MSN yesterday it would be fair to use their browser here though. Too bad it cannot be removed from their system...
Slashdot Mirror
Getting the plane off the ground for extended periods of time is easy - controlling it in the air is the hard part. To get off the ground just push the nose down while accelerating on the runway - you really cannot keep it on the ground when the speed is high enough. Remember to pull nose really slow! Try 1st person view if this seems hard. I think you cannot do loop because it goes grazy when trying to to straight up and stalls really easy. Forget about getting more speed by going down too - this is not exactly the flight simulator. I still need to test what happens when you fly away enough from the islands. Of couse, you can just use cheats to fly anything...
Not counting the missions at the end I really love this game. It's pretty short though and I wouldn't recommend it to kiddies either.
Uh... Do you know anything about physics behind producing sound? 48kHz sampling rate gives you 24kHz lowpass filter. Any sampling rate more than zero gives you ability to save frequencies down to zero. I don't know about you but I consider less than 200Hz as low frequency and you can encode that perfectly with 400Hz (0.4kHz) sampling rate. About what comes to vinyl giving "more clear and natural bass response" you probably just like fuzzier bass more. Digital system can practically output square wave if needed unlike vinyl. Granted it doesn't sound "natural" but it's correct.
Also I highly doubt that you can get needle to move even 24kHz needed to be better than plain old CD in the high frequency end.
I won't argue about whether or not OS X renders stuff as vectors but... Do you really think that 3D graphics are rendered as bitmaps instead of vectors? Have you heard about DRI? How about T&L acceleration? Why should displaying 2D graphics with 3D API be any harder than displaying full 3D view like games do? In fact, it's much simpler because you never need to move camera and all the stuff is rendered in plane... though cool effects could be easily achieved with some z-buffer fun.
3D APIs has not been used for full UIs simply because current 2D displays are good enough for the work you want. It's not like you would *really* want to see your desktop through the image you're trying to manipulate ("Damn, scratch... oh, it's my desktop. Never mind"). Yeah, there are some things I would want tranparency for but none of them would be interactive - just some informational stuff overlayed on top of my screen.
I still want good anti-aliasing with good fonts.
Well, if you had option between a device with keyboard and 200h battery time and a device with voice recognition, 100h battery time and thrice the price would you buy the latter? Also current voice recognition tech has hit rate of roughly 90% on PC systems - I don't even want to know how much errors there would be with mobile hardware.
Perhaps after a couple of years but not yet. A small dictionary for clever keyboard input like T9 works much better with current crop of hardware.
I think the real size-limiting factor is display. I mean, look at ads, they're advertising 15" displays for laptops and such. A quick question: how small device can contain 15" display? A device with 8" diameter? I don't see much need for this device as long as our displays are flat solid squares. After I have hi-res display built in my glasses I might be more interested. If I have to carry large display with cover I can use that cover as keyboard like nowadays. If I accept low-res PDA display I can use graffiti or stuff for input too.
Siemens phones can do this too. It's called T9 and I think typing 100+ L[etters]PM with this isn't hard dispite the fact I'm using my thumb only. Not too bad if you think that all the keys take like 1 square inch combined (siemens S35 I have)... Of course you can forget typing C code or shell scripts with it.
Why not: if(C!=0) {A=B/C; do_something(a);}
You might use former as optimization. You tell compiler to calculate A in every case. While you're doing it you can check if C happens to be zero or not. After the check is done you have probably calculated A and decided if you need to do something with it.
The latter one is more clear and compiler should be able to convert it to former internally if it increases performance and is supported by platform.
English speak first language, yes?
AFAIK, "me" refers to Linus and his first language isn't English. Though I think that Linus knows English well enough to write correctly if needed. This has probably more to do with the fact that he doesn't care. In short: If you cannot decode this you don't need to know...
English isn't my first language either.
How about publishing all the news covering software releases (including kernel releases) under new topic called "software releases" and people like you can opt-out in preferences. Others, including me, can read about these from /. because we don't read both slashdot and freshmeat.
Anyone with a U.S. bank account could be affected.
How was this possible? I mean, was U.S. Bank giving PayPal rights to modify account information? Or was PayPal trusting that user owned that account and had enough money to withdraw in which case it would have hurt PayPal, not account owner. If some website could modify my bank account, without me granting the right for transaction to my bank, I'd sue my bank instead of that website.
I have also encountered those that know nothing and are confirmed they cannot ever understand nor remember anything. This leads to problem that no matter what you say they keep saying "this is too hard", "I don't understand this computer thing", "I should probably write that down". Usually they are afraid to try anything by their own because they could break something too. There's pretty much no hope with these kind of people nor the people that think they know everything already. Of course you could give them something that cannot be broken and in the same time gives perspective to computers and computing in whole that they realize they are allowed to try, allowed to make mistakes and they never can know everything. This something remains to be found.
I think that making everything transparent and "easy" to use is problem. Computers are compared to cars every now and then and cars are claimed to be easy to use. If you didn't know anything about cars you couldn't even get into one! Think about it. Your average car user knows about fuel, engine, wheels, lights and stuff. One isn't allowed to drive before going through course. Beginners are allowed to use new computers without teaching anything because "windows is easy to use". New users should be told briefly about CPUs, different kinds of memory (system memory, CD, HDD here) and idea behind multitasking and networking. They don't need to know details unless they want to. They need to know something about internals to make them sure about themself to be able to try things.
Linux doesn't need to be another windows or macos to be successive on desktop. We need programs that work (not that copy'n'paste by select, click middle button - if you have one - and hope it works), some basic tools with simple interface and cool background pictures. CLI shouldn't be avoided. Saying what you want is intuitive. You should be able to type/say "browser" or "internet" instead of clicking that "e" looking icon that's told to be browser. "image editor" or "view" instead of clicking eye with text "Adobe Photoshop" and so on. UNIX isn't much better here (netscape, emacs, vi, chdir, sed, gimp; would you know from name what they're used for?)
How can it detect commercials? Does TV station send description stream with video and sound telling "The Simpsons, season 7, episode 3, part 2 of 2, currently running 12:17 min of 22:02 min" and "Commercials, currently running 1:05 min of 3:15 min"? And then they blame us for using devices to rip of commercials?
In Finland, where I live, stations send PDC signal that tells VCRs when show is delayed and recoding is automatically delayed correctly. It also tells if show is running late and recording time is fixed accordingly. Commercial channels tell that "the show starts now" when actually the ads before it start and again tell that "the show ends now" after last ad after the show is over. When show is interrupted by ad the signal tells the show is still running.
Of course you can still try analyze images and stuff to recognize ads automatically but you need pretty much computing power for stuff like that and it's not bullet proof.
Those headphones cancel only 10dB of noice. You'll end up with quieter setup with clear part choices plus you don't have to wear headphones always. Using GeForce3 isn't one of them.
I have silent power supply, a 10cm 12V fan running with 7V, CPU cooler running at 3000RPM and IBM 75GXP HDD. Not counting the harddrive this is really quiet setup though I have done some arrangements to get noise down for it too. I have Duron 650 and I'm running at 38C/case, 42C/CPU. I HAD to rip off cooler from my ATI Radeon because it made more noise than the rest of the computer! It's slower retail version so it works fine without cooler ;)
The problem is with the CDs that you know nothing about. A CD which contains the information you really want could be lost for 20 years or so and when you find it there would be very few readers in the world, if any.
However, I think that at least all optical medium should be safe, because at least the documentation about how the media works would be saved. Just like there's information available how text was encoded to be send it 100 years ago. I wouldn't be highly impressed if somebody come with a program that reads CDs via image scanner. With high enough quality scan one should be able to decode a CD with software.
If you find 50 years old HDD which stores information in magnetism you're pretty much out of luck unless the drive has been properly stored.
As I said you practically couldn't crash DOS. Running an app that crashes and takes DOS with it was outside the spec. DOS wasn't supposed to survive something like that. "Heck, Linux cannot even BOOT on C64! Therefore Linux must suck!" - something wrong here? When linux crashes because of broken driver made by nVidia is it Linux that's broken? Or is it the software you happened to use?
Yep, it seems to me that Intel CPUs handle bad power much better than AMD equivalents. It really doesn't matter when you get a decent power but cheap PCs are usually equipped with el cheapo power supplies - as well as with [almost] broken memory. Sometimes this gets AMD bad name for no reason.
Nor am I about to rewrite my code to take advantage of proprietary sse2 instructions to get that performance either.
AFAIK, Hammer supports SSE2 so you should at least start to think supporting it. As I see it SSE+SSE2 is going to kill x87. Athlons look really cheap though... perhaps I should upgrade my Duron 650?
I agree. There's practically no way to make DOS crash. Perhaps if you have broken hardware... DOS is practically a boot strapper go get you going. Many people still use it to start linux with loadlin. This allows simple command line with a file system before booting the system. GRUB is a fix for this hack but MS keeps overwriting it without asking when you reinstall Windows again.
In addition to this it seems that he has implemented VM with reverse mapping also. Therefore it should be clear that he previously thought this was the best method. I've understood that the issue between Rik's and AA's VMs is that Rik's is optimized for normal swapping and AA's for OOM case. Because VM performance really matters only when OOM happens I think AA's should be superior. The real difference depends on benchmark, of course.
Both systems seem to be somewhat equal. AA's needs less swap but Rik's is claimed to be better performer. If AA's system is simpler then that's what should be used. Select maintainability over questionable performance increase. This is like quicksort - there's a point when you usually get better performance bubble sorting the little pieces quicksort generates during the whole sort. The smart version isn't always the best. Nowadays CPUs can easily do a bunch of dumb operations faster than one smart operation.
Actually, as already explained by others, you get 60 fps with standard television also. The difference is that your display cannot show full resolution so you practically show 60 fps with half the resolution.
About what comes to interlacing I'm all for dumping it, but I have to say (as an owner of a CRT projector and a CRT monitor) that as long as your device is designed for interlaced signals (in my case CRT projector designed to be used as TV) they look pretty good. I mean playing GT3 with PS2 displayed on 80" screen via CRT projector looks good despite the fact that the image is interlaced. On the other hand the same image transferred through upscaler/deinterlacer to LCD projector ends up to look not so good because of interlacing.
Generally I'd say that with lower quality displays (like televisions) interlacing is better. If you have digital communication and fixed pixel display there's absolutely no reason to use interlaced image. Because in the future all our displays are probably fixed pixel I really hate the fact that HDTV uses so much interlaced modes.
From the link: "The target storage subsystem is a 10-drive RAID-1 array of 169 GB that is connected via a Qlogic IPS2200 fibre channel controller."
Not exactly the system I'm using... I have to admit that ext2 seems to be pretty fast with that kind of hardware.
I wouldn't use ext2 for any server even if I didn't need journaling. ReiserFS should be faster during reading especially if you happen to have many small files or a couple huge files. Journaling shouldn't matter performance if you aren't updating anything. And if you're, you should be using journaling anyway. So in the end, if you choose ReiserFS over ext2 you should get at least better performance. You might also get journaling as an added bonus.
I don't know if ReiserFS is the best journaling filesystem, but it's the one I have used and it has never disappointed me. OTOH, I have lost ext2 partition once... The only reason to use ext2 is either you're really low on memory (kernel size) or you have to use ext2 for backwards compatibility - for example I know about driver to read ext2 partitions from windows but I haven't found a one for reiserfs. Another way is obviously a piece of cake.
But journaling data doesn't get you too far if the programs you use aren't clever enough. Far too often an editor replaces file during saving instead of first writing a new one, after that removing old one and renaming new file to old filename. If your editor doesn't do this you're pretty much fscked up whether or not your filesystem supports journaling of data or not.
On the other hand if you're editing big file the feature that editor replaces the file is must because you might not have enough disk space or quota to store it twice. The same applies for databases and stuff that needs to keep files open for acceptable performance. If an editor does write changes to new file first and only after that removes old file and still data is missing after crash it's simply unacceptable. There should be very few cases where data journaling actually helps.
Actually, I think most of the criticism of X is due to highly limited protocol specification - I mean you don't have alpha, only 1-bit mouse cursor and stuff that was undestandable year 1985 but not today. Sure, it has extension protocol and that's pretty much all we run nowadays if possible. This is pretty much the same thing as with OpenGL right now. You can do all the stuff with the officially supported protocol, but you really want to use all those extensions to get yourself off the ground. To say that X as a protocol is the way to go is obviously wrong. Creating a fresh protocol for network transparent windowing is the way to go - for example Berlin shows a great promise but seems to take eternity to complete. Hell, you shout out loud when we see another x86 compatible chip how we should drop backwards compability for better ISA and in the same time you don't want to drop ancient API to get better results. It's only software for Pete's sake.
Uh.. I didn't see any mention about any of those pieces of software you mention in the post that was moderated as "Funny". If $RANDOM_CLOSED_SOURCE_APPLICATION brings some MS apps into your mind it's your problem only. Considering the stunt that MS pulled with MSN yesterday it would be fair to use their browser here though. Too bad it cannot be removed from their system...