if the renderer actually allowed simple wire frames with basic z buffering, "hard" core gamers would set it that way
No. And that's because no consumer level card supports HW wire frame rendering. In 95% of all cases polygon rendering is faster than wire frame (some versions of GeForce support HW line rendering though). _________________________
Well, the back side of this is that if I do want all of the thigs, the start to take 3 times more space than monolitic application because of all plugin-layers out there.
I don't think so. I don't believe that you need for example HTML component (Mozilla) and Word Processor component (KOffice or something like that) and Photoshop component (GIMP, if it will ever make as a component) in the same time. With monolitic application all of those would be in the memory all the time.
Of course if all you want is HTML component with file manager component it could be smaller with one monilitic app. If it ever seems to be an issue I'm pretty sure someone can create such a monolitic monster from sources (shouldn't be that hard to convert that layer static?). And have you tried IE lately? I'm pretty pleased with the speed of it no matter how much components it uses - and no, I'm not pleased with netscape with all its monolitic scrap. _________________________
Well I don't know about you but I cannot afford for too many boxes for home usage (I have LAN connection via university) and I still want a bunch of services. This being the case I'm limited to all-in-one wonder box. Though I'm running a very limited set of services in it I'm aware that there are possible security problems because of this.
What makes the difference is that I'm aware of these risks - but it doesn't remove the problem. Before you start flaming me: I currently have only http, ssh and scp open to 'net so there shouldn't be that much holes anyway. _________________________
Maybe if you reason this well and there are no licencing issues this could change if you contact RH. Whining in/. can change it too - but why not speed things up? _________________________
Making a program look identical on different platforms is a popular form of user abuse.
I don't agree. Making program look identical and feel different is user abuse. Think about netscape - how many times you have tried to press ctrl-d/alt-k to bookmark page or pressed middle button to open link in new window? If program looks identical it should work that way also. If program doesn't follow general guidelines of OS it doesn't matter that much - again think about MSIE3 or MSIE4 when it came out. It was quite different from anything else in that time. Think about ICQ or 3DSMax. Taking QuickTime as an example is like taking some poor shareware program as an example. If UI sucks in any platform copying it to another as identical won't make it great neither. On the other hand if UI is really slick on one platform it will be that also in some another platform - even if all the other programs in that another platform sucked. If no program ever differs from UI convention of any given platform GUI never advances.
But in some cases it does matter if program follows GUI guidelines (for example when browser is integrated as file manager) and therefore I would like to see more programs like mozilla where not only looks change with themes but also feel. For example if I could change that floating QuickTime menubar under windows to bright green (or change that brushed steel look to plain one color) with some theme wouldn't help much. On the other hand if some theme could attach that menubar to main window would help a lot no matter how ugly it would the looks make.
I would love to see each copy Mozilla with default themes of *n*x, Win and Mac and you could select any one no matter which platform you currently were using. That way user could select use mozilla with convetional UI or UI (s)he is used to. _________________________
This simply depends on how you define superiority. Perl is nice for some jobs, VB for some others.
Though I have to admit that I cannot imagine any job I would prefer VB to perl.
For GUI prototyping with perl I would give a shot with Glade - last time I checked it was far from perfect but it's developing pretty fast. _________________________
This gives nice future for OSS?
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 1
Think about it. If MS is going to rent software again each year they better have to make that very cheap every year or it's out of business. Linux (and other unix variants) has taken a big part in server marketplace even now - imagine how W2K goes down if MS is qoing to charge for it each year when one can get for example linux for free. Clustering becoming more commonplace, this change will be even faster because one needs lots of licences for W2K cluster (if that would be possible...), each year.
After linux is in servers it's not that far from desktop anymore. IMHO it would be that much easier for admins - just mount/usr over NFS on employee machine and never visit it again. If you need to install/update software just install it on server and it's done. With OSS licences aren't an issue.
On the other hand, if MS is going to keep rents low enough it could be success for MS. Nowadays it's licence costs that prevents business from updating to newest MS-OS (in this case W2K) but if those business paid rent each year and always got newest software for their rent there isn't high one-time cost for upgrading and people wouldn't complain about issues like word95 vs. word97 file format compability because businesses would automatically have newest software (and imagine how hard it would be competitors to stay compatible with those secret file formats - changing every year). And it wouldn't cost MS more than today if they distributed new software over 'net. Sure it would hurt individuals but that isn't where the money is. I'm pretty sure I will use Linux, thank you.
In the end I think that Linux can take over server market because it's IMO better and more stable for server usage (yes, I have used W2K). For desktop we still have long way to go - how we can still mess up backspace, del, home and end or DnD or simple copy-paste? At least we have better looking window borders! _________________________
but your computing experience isn't 64 times as fast as it was in 1991, even if your modem is.
The problem is that only bandwidth is 64 times better. That has nothing to do with being faster - no matter what modem manufacturers are telling you. Latency of modem in 1991 was 150 ms and it's 130 ms today. How much advance you can see here?
Of course when moving large files bandwidth has some meaning, but for user experience it's latency that matters. One rarely uses even 1/10 th of the bandwidth of 10Mbps LAN but experiences speed to be high because with LAN have latency of 1 ms or less. _________________________
and longer before that, and power consumption has similarly been slow to come down.
The thing is - as I see it - that you can use Moore's law for either doubling capacity or halving power consumption, not both. Think about how low power comsumption 486 processor could be made today. Has it been done? No, because we are still after performance only.
I'm aware that Moore's law doesn't actually say anything about power comsumption but if we can fit equal number of transistors in a half area we can decrease power comsumption. However, usually we just double the number of transistors.
What I find exceptional in Crusoe is that is has both low power comsumption and pretty good performance. If we still had display with lower power comsumption than those used today... _________________________
More like someone is trying to set your house on fire, and the fire department demolishes it to keep it from burning down the whole neighborhood. _________________________
There is only one problem: server needs to be able to tell when information has gone old. Often when you generate content on the fly you cannot say if it's going to be old after one second or after one week (or perhaps even year). Only possible place to cache this is in the browser (like nowadays) because it's up to you how old information you accept to increase speed. For example I have set my limit to reload when I after I have restarted my browser or press reload. I would hate if my ISP (in case ISP provided such cache) decided that I don't need new slashdot frontpage more often than once a week. _________________________
I don't see COTS design as failure here. I see it more as a selection. As said many times before it's the games that matter when it's about consoles.
Using COTS desing MS is making it easier for all those PC only game companies to support X-Box. And it surely doesn't make their work of porting w2k to X-Box harder. I'm pretty sure that CPU in X-Box is quite adequate for the job given and I'm expecting pretty much from NV-25 (or is it NV-20?) also.
After all one has to learn first how to use PC before programming any console and after you are know PC it's pretty easy to program X-Box. I'm pretty sure that all console game programmers have started as PC programmers. _________________________
The processor will be, what, 3 to 5 ghz or something, which should be plenty for speech recognition and photorealistic 3D graphics
Not so fast. There is estimate that one needs 80M polygons per frame to present photorealistic graphics. GeForce can currently draw about 80K polygons/frame (real-time graphics). If we double computing speed each year (in optimal case) it takes 10 years to gain enough power. Plus when we add FSAA, stereo-vision, increased resolution etc. we need much more computing power - at least a couple of years.
And you know GeForce today isn't the coolest (in temperature) chip. You wouldn't want to hit that in your pocket, would you? In addition the size does not decrease if we are increasing the speed at this rate so forget it in portable devices.
And you need pretty much memory to store all that information required to render 80Mpps. But perhaps a terabyte isn't that expensive.
Maybe after 20 years...
About cars I would want to say that there isn't much development in last 20 years. Cars still need lots of fuel and cannot even drive into garage by themselves. Perhaps there is cd-player inside and powered windows but thats like putting a new icon on your desktop once a year. _________________________
I'm also wondering why not to check for errors in read(2)? It doesn't hurt you much to check results of all system calls - in particular this is not time-critical operation. Simple if (read(fd, &RandBuf, count) == -1) bail_out(); instead of used code would do the work. And if everybody used to use return values of system calls to check for errors instead of anything else one wouldn't get errors like described in this article.
Of course in this particular case I cannot imagine how that read() could fail. Perhaps/dev/random could be a device driver in protected space and die before returning result - without crashing the whole kernel. _________________________
to the fases of the coding process before the actual code-writing. If you spend enough time designing (as in specifications, etc) before coding you can get pretty close to flawless code....
This isn't true. For example the error described in PGP was because of incorrect use of read(2), not because of improper design. I'm still studing in local university and I hate when all these "systems designers" tell me that design is all that matters - you may use trained chimps to type in your code after good design phase. I surely cannot agree with this. (Although, I agree that good design does not harm you.) _________________________
None of the new toys coming out today seem as interesting and fun as that first color monitor did.
You'll have to wait until real 3D displays come out. It can take a while though.
As a user of glasses I'm wondering why there isn't small semi-transparent SVGA displays integrated in my lenses. Imagine: one 640x480 display for each eye - true flicker-free 3D. And you could watch those displays while doing other things because you could see through them.
Back to the topic I wouldn't try to compare DeCSS to VCR because DeCSS doesn't allow you to save anything, it just decrypts data files of special kind. On the other hand right to quote (from DVD) could be one good argument. _________________________
XHTML would be nice. (It would be readable with older browsers also.)
XML itself does not solve anything. I might write XML document like: ... <news> <newsheader article="https://www.domain.com/articles?id=1255" link="http://www.slashdot.org/">Slashdot supports XML!</newsheader> </news> ... but what browser could render that? There are no rules how to present information in XML. You need CSS or XLS also and AFAIK there are no browsers that support all of CSS or XLS correctly. _________________________
I can't understand it and many other people can't understand it either! You're just making things unnecessary difficult.
And because YOU don't understand perl, it shouldn't be done? We should NEVER create any new programming languages because YOU (or your friends) don't know it already?? Yes, I'm aware of many problems perl can cause but if you have ever used it for text manipulation you wouldn't hate it so much.
Just like the GNU coding standards say: use only C, not C++. This rules should also be extended to Perl, Python and other inferior languages.
Again, please show me how easily you can generate part of HTML page (plain text source) on the fly and perhaps join/replace some strings on the way using C. After that I'll show the same in perl. Lets see how much time/code lines it takes for each implementation.
But for web pages I think we cannot use client side perl because we wouldn't be any better than those authors that use BASIC or some other non-standard client-side scripting in web pages. You know idea behind HTML is that you are not required to use some specified browser - we all love lynx and w3m anyway.
Maybe we still get good text editor on top of Mozilla (I would love to use REAL perl syntax in search/replace/macros in text editor). Security issues should be solved first - we don't need outlook-like-viruses for Mozilla. _________________________
It takes a heck of a lot longer for someone to navigate even two(2) menu sub-trees than it takes for me to type in a 56-char command line.
huh - you must type in really speedy. Of course it depends how you use those menus: with some jumpy dirty mouse or good mouse w/ keyboard.
For example say I want to start netscape (or new netscape window if it's already running). I press following keys: ctrl-esc (root menu) n(etscape). On the other hand to start it by typing ctrl-alt-t (for terminal window) and after that "n e t s c a p e" and pressing enter would be slower (but again for my typing speed) or even ctrl-alt-t n e t s c tab enter.
And image doesn't change even if application that I need to start is not in the root menu because I can open each one of the submenus with one keypress. For example ctrl-esc a(pplications) w(ww-browsers) l(ynx) would start lynx with with equal number of keypresses as using cli and you could do that even if you wouldn't remember program's name in the beginning (because you see possible choices in the menu in each step).
Of course if I want to do something like "replace all references to your old email user@domain1.com to user2@domain2.org in text files under your home directory" I would do it with perl from command line. But trying to explain/teach that to Average Joe would be pain in a butt and he would probably do it faster by opening one file at time and fixing it.
I'm aware that I'm not average user and that some people use more mouse in GUI but if you are going to teach average people to use CLI I would consider other choices also.
Now go spend some quality time here. _________________________
I have only small 19 inch screen but still I'm not feeling like (un)shading windows. Icofication works fine for me though I usually keep a few windows open at once (partially overlapping each other).
In addition, I'm alt-tabbing through open windows only to make it faster to switch between applications in use - still trying to figure out how to easily select *the one* of iconized windows I want, using only keyboard. _________________________
possibility to shade/unshade... I got so addicted to it, that I keep double-clicking on the title bar
Maximize/Restore - I got so addicted to it that I kept double-clicking title bar in MacOS (and in some window managers) getting the *opposite* result. That's why I want window manager to be configurable. For example in my current configuration double-clicking with left mouse button in title bar maximizes/restores and double-clicking with left middle button shades/unshades. I'm pretty pleased with it though I rarely shade windows.
Still have to figure out how to iconize/deiconize windows easily... (iconize part is easy - for example double-click with right mouse button, but how to restore application without moving mouse?? Currently I'm using "taskbar".) _________________________
Just wanted to add that if you have (cheap enough) memory with low latency you already have memory with low latency and high bandwidth. Just interleave those memory chips and you are done.
For example if I have SDRAM (64 bit bus) PC133 10 ns memory with bandwidth of 1.06GB/s and RDRAM (16 bit bus) PC800 20 ns memory with 1.6GB/s which ones I can interleave to get memory with latency of 12 ns and bandwidth of 4GB/s (256 bit)? (I have really no idea of real latencies of those memory types and it hugely depends how you measure it - time it takes for chip to read bits or processor to receive required bits. But what I know is that SDRAM has much lower latency)
I'm not aware of motherboards supporting SDRAM interleaving but Intel already does this with RDRAM in its new mobos so it should be possible. I think that this is because SDRAM already provides enough bandwidth in most cases.
Note that when using DDR SDRAM you can double the bandwidth (for SDRAM) and one can only wonder why is/was Intel trying to push something like RDRAM into market?
For those still wondering the answer to second paragraph I will give a hint: you cannot reduce latency with interleaving. _________________________
in general yes, but how about making a simple program that first allocates as much memory as possible and after that tries to write (intentionally) into illegal addresses. If system doesn't go down - fine.
Test like this is important from programmer's view. And of course it does matter to end user also - raise your hand if you haven't seen program that isn't prefect. When I'm programming in Linux I don't have to be afraid to test my program even if there is some problem with pointers - even when my box is running on low memory resourses (and if my program crashes I get a core dump that can be used for debugging). I cannot test this with MacOS 9 (I don't have one) but according to my experiences to MacOS 8 I wouldn't expect too much.
if (corporate_bullshit) s/program/solution/g; _________________________
You don't honestly think that Microsoft writes all the drivers for IBM hardware do you?
Of course not, but neither does any other company.
I was trying to point out that you can select (virtually) any PCI or AGP card from local store and it will work with your PC (in this case with windows because that's what manufacturers are supporting). If there reads "Mac" in the box it will work in the mac just in the same way as box which has text "linux" works in linux.
And I cannot see how for example cards having nVidia chip can be supported under mac in any better way than under linux if nVidia is not going to release specs or give direct support. I'm sure you wouldn't buy $300+ for a graphics card that your OS can support only via VBE or similar (generic/rather slow) interface.
So don't say that it's Apple's fault that there are fewer pieces of hardware immediately available for it. 'Cos it's not.
But I think that wasn't the point in the post but hardware that is usable under mac. _________________________
I cannot believe that you are telling that if I buy a "winmodem" or any video card from local store it works under MacOS.
Show me a mac that can use, say GeForce2 or G450 as it's video card (with acceleration, not in basic (S)VGA mode!) and any software modem. Suddenly it seems that Apple isn't manufacturing all those parts you were listing...
I'm pretty sure that linux/x86 can support more hardware than MacOS/ppc. (btw, I think that listing those hard disk types as an example is simply naive because all of those are using standard protocolls. It's the same as saying that my NE2000 10Mbps ethernet card works with my friend 3Com card in the same net *only* because I'm running superior linux operating system!) _________________________
Slashdot Mirror
No. And that's because no consumer level card supports HW wire frame rendering. In 95% of all cases polygon rendering is faster than wire frame (some versions of GeForce support HW line rendering though).
_________________________
I don't think so. I don't believe that you need for example HTML component (Mozilla) and Word Processor component (KOffice or something like that) and Photoshop component (GIMP, if it will ever make as a component) in the same time. With monolitic application all of those would be in the memory all the time.
Of course if all you want is HTML component with file manager component it could be smaller with one monilitic app. If it ever seems to be an issue I'm pretty sure someone can create such a monolitic monster from sources (shouldn't be that hard to convert that layer static?). And have you tried IE lately? I'm pretty pleased with the speed of it no matter how much components it uses - and no, I'm not pleased with netscape with all its monolitic scrap.
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Well I don't know about you but I cannot afford for too many boxes for home usage (I have LAN connection via university) and I still want a bunch of services. This being the case I'm limited to all-in-one wonder box. Though I'm running a very limited set of services in it I'm aware that there are possible security problems because of this.
What makes the difference is that I'm aware of these risks - but it doesn't remove the problem. Before you start flaming me: I currently have only http, ssh and scp open to 'net so there shouldn't be that much holes anyway.
_________________________
Maybe if you reason this well and there are no licencing issues this could change if you contact RH. Whining in /. can change it too - but why not speed things up?
_________________________
I don't agree. Making program look identical and feel different is user abuse. Think about netscape - how many times you have tried to press ctrl-d/alt-k to bookmark page or pressed middle button to open link in new window? If program looks identical it should work that way also. If program doesn't follow general guidelines of OS it doesn't matter that much - again think about MSIE3 or MSIE4 when it came out. It was quite different from anything else in that time. Think about ICQ or 3DSMax. Taking QuickTime as an example is like taking some poor shareware program as an example. If UI sucks in any platform copying it to another as identical won't make it great neither. On the other hand if UI is really slick on one platform it will be that also in some another platform - even if all the other programs in that another platform sucked. If no program ever differs from UI convention of any given platform GUI never advances.
But in some cases it does matter if program follows GUI guidelines (for example when browser is integrated as file manager) and therefore I would like to see more programs like mozilla where not only looks change with themes but also feel. For example if I could change that floating QuickTime menubar under windows to bright green (or change that brushed steel look to plain one color) with some theme wouldn't help much. On the other hand if some theme could attach that menubar to main window would help a lot no matter how ugly it would the looks make.
I would love to see each copy Mozilla with default themes of *n*x, Win and Mac and you could select any one no matter which platform you currently were using. That way user could select use mozilla with convetional UI or UI (s)he is used to.
_________________________
This simply depends on how you define superiority. Perl is nice for some jobs, VB for some others.
Though I have to admit that I cannot imagine any job I would prefer VB to perl.
For GUI prototyping with perl I would give a shot with Glade - last time I checked it was far from perfect but it's developing pretty fast.
_________________________
After linux is in servers it's not that far from desktop anymore. IMHO it would be that much easier for admins - just mount /usr over NFS on employee machine and never visit it again. If you need to install/update software just install it on server and it's done. With OSS licences aren't an issue.
On the other hand, if MS is going to keep rents low enough it could be success for MS. Nowadays it's licence costs that prevents business from updating to newest MS-OS (in this case W2K) but if those business paid rent each year and always got newest software for their rent there isn't high one-time cost for upgrading and people wouldn't complain about issues like word95 vs. word97 file format compability because businesses would automatically have newest software (and imagine how hard it would be competitors to stay compatible with those secret file formats - changing every year). And it wouldn't cost MS more than today if they distributed new software over 'net. Sure it would hurt individuals but that isn't where the money is. I'm pretty sure I will use Linux, thank you.
In the end I think that Linux can take over server market because it's IMO better and more stable for server usage (yes, I have used W2K). For desktop we still have long way to go - how we can still mess up backspace, del, home and end or DnD or simple copy-paste? At least we have better looking window borders!
_________________________
The problem is that only bandwidth is 64 times better. That has nothing to do with being faster - no matter what modem manufacturers are telling you. Latency of modem in 1991 was 150 ms and it's 130 ms today. How much advance you can see here?
Of course when moving large files bandwidth has some meaning, but for user experience it's latency that matters. One rarely uses even 1/10 th of the bandwidth of 10Mbps LAN but experiences speed to be high because with LAN have latency of 1 ms or less.
_________________________
The thing is - as I see it - that you can use Moore's law for either doubling capacity or halving power consumption, not both. Think about how low power comsumption 486 processor could be made today. Has it been done? No, because we are still after performance only.
I'm aware that Moore's law doesn't actually say anything about power comsumption but if we can fit equal number of transistors in a half area we can decrease power comsumption. However, usually we just double the number of transistors.
What I find exceptional in Crusoe is that is has both low power comsumption and pretty good performance. If we still had display with lower power comsumption than those used today...
_________________________
More like someone is trying to set your house on fire, and the fire department demolishes it to keep it from burning down the whole neighborhood.
_________________________
There is only one problem: server needs to be able to tell when information has gone old. Often when you generate content on the fly you cannot say if it's going to be old after one second or after one week (or perhaps even year). Only possible place to cache this is in the browser (like nowadays) because it's up to you how old information you accept to increase speed. For example I have set my limit to reload when I after I have restarted my browser or press reload. I would hate if my ISP (in case ISP provided such cache) decided that I don't need new slashdot frontpage more often than once a week.
_________________________
Using COTS desing MS is making it easier for all those PC only game companies to support X-Box. And it surely doesn't make their work of porting w2k to X-Box harder. I'm pretty sure that CPU in X-Box is quite adequate for the job given and I'm expecting pretty much from NV-25 (or is it NV-20?) also.
After all one has to learn first how to use PC before programming any console and after you are know PC it's pretty easy to program X-Box. I'm pretty sure that all console game programmers have started as PC programmers.
_________________________
Not so fast. There is estimate that one needs 80M polygons per frame to present photorealistic graphics. GeForce can currently draw about 80K polygons/frame (real-time graphics). If we double computing speed each year (in optimal case) it takes 10 years to gain enough power. Plus when we add FSAA, stereo-vision, increased resolution etc. we need much more computing power - at least a couple of years.
And you know GeForce today isn't the coolest (in temperature) chip. You wouldn't want to hit that in your pocket, would you? In addition the size does not decrease if we are increasing the speed at this rate so forget it in portable devices.
And you need pretty much memory to store all that information required to render 80Mpps. But perhaps a terabyte isn't that expensive.
Maybe after 20 years...
About cars I would want to say that there isn't much development in last 20 years. Cars still need lots of fuel and cannot even drive into garage by themselves. Perhaps there is cd-player inside and powered windows but thats like putting a new icon on your desktop once a year.
_________________________
for(i = 0; i <= count; ++i) {
RandBuf = read(fd, &RandBuf, count);
I'm also wondering why not to check for errors in read(2)? It doesn't hurt you much to check results of all system calls - in particular this is not time-critical operation. Simple
if (read(fd, &RandBuf, count) == -1) bail_out();
instead of used code would do the work. And if everybody used to use return values of system calls to check for errors instead of anything else one wouldn't get errors like described in this article.
Of course in this particular case I cannot imagine how that read() could fail. Perhaps /dev/random could be a device driver in protected space and die before returning result - without crashing the whole kernel.
_________________________
This isn't true. For example the error described in PGP was because of incorrect use of read(2), not because of improper design. I'm still studing in local university and I hate when all these "systems designers" tell me that design is all that matters - you may use trained chimps to type in your code after good design phase. I surely cannot agree with this. (Although, I agree that good design does not harm you.)
_________________________
You'll have to wait until real 3D displays come out. It can take a while though.
As a user of glasses I'm wondering why there isn't small semi-transparent SVGA displays integrated in my lenses. Imagine: one 640x480 display for each eye - true flicker-free 3D. And you could watch those displays while doing other things because you could see through them.
Back to the topic I wouldn't try to compare DeCSS to VCR because DeCSS doesn't allow you to save anything, it just decrypts data files of special kind. On the other hand right to quote (from DVD) could be one good argument.
_________________________
XML itself does not solve anything. I might write XML document like:
...
...
<news>
<newsheader article="https://www.domain.com/articles?id=1255" link="http://www.slashdot.org/">Slashdot supports XML!</newsheader>
</news>
but what browser could render that? There are no rules how to present information in XML. You need CSS or XLS also and AFAIK there are no browsers that support all of CSS or XLS correctly.
_________________________
And because YOU don't understand perl, it shouldn't be done? We should NEVER create any new programming languages because YOU (or your friends) don't know it already?? Yes, I'm aware of many problems perl can cause but if you have ever used it for text manipulation you wouldn't hate it so much.
Just like the GNU coding standards say: use only C, not C++. This rules should also be extended to Perl, Python and other inferior languages.
Again, please show me how easily you can generate part of HTML page (plain text source) on the fly and perhaps join/replace some strings on the way using C. After that I'll show the same in perl. Lets see how much time/code lines it takes for each implementation.
But for web pages I think we cannot use client side perl because we wouldn't be any better than those authors that use BASIC or some other non-standard client-side scripting in web pages. You know idea behind HTML is that you are not required to use some specified browser - we all love lynx and w3m anyway.
Maybe we still get good text editor on top of Mozilla (I would love to use REAL perl syntax in search/replace/macros in text editor). Security issues should be solved first - we don't need outlook-like-viruses for Mozilla.
_________________________
huh - you must type in really speedy. Of course it depends how you use those menus: with some jumpy dirty mouse or good mouse w/ keyboard.
For example say I want to start netscape (or new netscape window if it's already running). I press following keys: ctrl-esc (root menu) n(etscape). On the other hand to start it by typing ctrl-alt-t (for terminal window) and after that "n e t s c a p e" and pressing enter would be slower (but again for my typing speed) or even ctrl-alt-t n e t s c tab enter.
And image doesn't change even if application that I need to start is not in the root menu because I can open each one of the submenus with one keypress. For example ctrl-esc a(pplications) w(ww-browsers) l(ynx) would start lynx with with equal number of keypresses as using cli and you could do that even if you wouldn't remember program's name in the beginning (because you see possible choices in the menu in each step).
Of course if I want to do something like "replace all references to your old email user@domain1.com to user2@domain2.org in text files under your home directory" I would do it with perl from command line. But trying to explain/teach that to Average Joe would be pain in a butt and he would probably do it faster by opening one file at time and fixing it.
I'm aware that I'm not average user and that some people use more mouse in GUI but if you are going to teach average people to use CLI I would consider other choices also.
Now go spend some quality time here.
_________________________
In addition, I'm alt-tabbing through open windows only to make it faster to switch between applications in use - still trying to figure out how to easily select *the one* of iconized windows I want, using only keyboard.
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Maximize/Restore - I got so addicted to it that I kept double-clicking title bar in MacOS (and in some window managers) getting the *opposite* result. That's why I want window manager to be configurable. For example in my current configuration double-clicking with left mouse button in title bar maximizes/restores and double-clicking with left middle button shades/unshades. I'm pretty pleased with it though I rarely shade windows.
Still have to figure out how to iconize/deiconize windows easily... (iconize part is easy - for example double-click with right mouse button, but how to restore application without moving mouse?? Currently I'm using "taskbar".)
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For example if I have SDRAM (64 bit bus) PC133 10 ns memory with bandwidth of 1.06GB/s and RDRAM (16 bit bus) PC800 20 ns memory with 1.6GB/s which ones I can interleave to get memory with latency of 12 ns and bandwidth of 4GB/s (256 bit)? (I have really no idea of real latencies of those memory types and it hugely depends how you measure it - time it takes for chip to read bits or processor to receive required bits. But what I know is that SDRAM has much lower latency)
I'm not aware of motherboards supporting SDRAM interleaving but Intel already does this with RDRAM in its new mobos so it should be possible. I think that this is because SDRAM already provides enough bandwidth in most cases.
Note that when using DDR SDRAM you can double the bandwidth (for SDRAM) and one can only wonder why is/was Intel trying to push something like RDRAM into market?
For those still wondering the answer to second paragraph I will give a hint: you cannot reduce latency with interleaving.
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in general yes, but how about making a simple program that first allocates as much memory as possible and after that tries to write (intentionally) into illegal addresses. If system doesn't go down - fine.
Test like this is important from programmer's view. And of course it does matter to end user also - raise your hand if you haven't seen program that isn't prefect. When I'm programming in Linux I don't have to be afraid to test my program even if there is some problem with pointers - even when my box is running on low memory resourses (and if my program crashes I get a core dump that can be used for debugging). I cannot test this with MacOS 9 (I don't have one) but according to my experiences to MacOS 8 I wouldn't expect too much.
if (corporate_bullshit) s/program/solution/g;
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Of course not, but neither does any other company.
I was trying to point out that you can select (virtually) any PCI or AGP card from local store and it will work with your PC (in this case with windows because that's what manufacturers are supporting). If there reads "Mac" in the box it will work in the mac just in the same way as box which has text "linux" works in linux.
And I cannot see how for example cards having nVidia chip can be supported under mac in any better way than under linux if nVidia is not going to release specs or give direct support. I'm sure you wouldn't buy $300+ for a graphics card that your OS can support only via VBE or similar (generic/rather slow) interface.
So don't say that it's Apple's fault that there are fewer pieces of hardware immediately available for it. 'Cos it's not.
But I think that wasn't the point in the post but hardware that is usable under mac.
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I cannot believe that you are telling that if I buy a "winmodem" or any video card from local store it works under MacOS.
Show me a mac that can use, say GeForce2 or G450 as it's video card (with acceleration, not in basic (S)VGA mode!) and any software modem. Suddenly it seems that Apple isn't manufacturing all those parts you were listing...
I'm pretty sure that linux/x86 can support more hardware than MacOS/ppc. (btw, I think that listing those hard disk types as an example is simply naive because all of those are using standard protocolls. It's the same as saying that my NE2000 10Mbps ethernet card works with my friend 3Com card in the same net *only* because I'm running superior linux operating system!)
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