And would you call browsing the web with lynx stealing? (You cannot see all those ads, can you?) Also graphical browsers with option to disable image downloading should be made illegal? _________________________
OpenGL isn't the way to go for 2D rendering - it carries too much overhead with it
I don't agree. Graphics adapters push many million polygons per second when using OpenGL nowadays. Drawing window borders (or button or scrollbar) is no job for recent graphics adapter. With OpenGL you get texturing, anti-aliasing, alpha-blending and z-buffering (I can imagine many nice effects with z-buffering in window manager) practically for free (because those are implemented in hardware). Also GLX makes pretty good use of network bandwidth in my experience. _________________________
Perhaps there is reason that author decided to release source under GPL! If you want to sell a game you should own the parts you want to sell. For example you may take Quake (1) engine and make a game out of it by creating new graphics and improving AI. You would be required to release modified source but you could still sell the game because you own the data (textures and levels etc).
Sure it would hurt you to be required to release your (superior) AI modifications but I think that it's the price you need to pay when using GPLed software. When compared to buying prorietary source (in this case Quake from ID - you surely can do it) I consider the price really low. There is no free lunch (or was it spoon?). _________________________
as a binary file they are encrypting the contents of a copyrighted work
IMHO compiling is only translation to another language (for example from C to assembler - not necessarely binary format although it's pretty same). Like in real (spoken) languages translating back to original language does not have to be identical even though contents is. I think that encrypting should be something that can be returned to original form. I wouldn't count translating text from English to French encryption though it could prevent me from reading it (without babelfish that is). _________________________
download the XServer module
I'm pretty sure you need to apply some kind of license to be able to download XServer module for nVidia powered card. And just that license especially denies your right to reverce engineer it - if you don't apply it you cannot legally download module. Of course IANAL. _________________________
While I completely agree that nVidia should release hw specs you are exaggerating when you say "why should I buy something without documentation". Did you get hw documentation to flash your bios or read values of all those sensors with your mobo? I did not.
On the other hand I have already changed my TNT to G400 because matrox has opened documentation and their image quality is much better (why cannot nVidia use good ramdacs?). I'm still hoping to get direct rendering without root. _________________________
Are you using X server prior 3.3.5? I have a logitech wheel mouse with zilog chip and it doesn't work with anything less than 3.3.6. _________________________
all new additions of DirectX are done thru implementing a new interface IDirectDraw3, IDirectDraw5, etc. A DirectX 3.0 game will work fine in DirectX 8.0.
And this is great? I cannot see how this differs from having DirectX3.DLL, DirectX5.DLL etc in your system. If you never change older dll you cannot break things up (hopefully, there is still registry thingy under windows). _________________________
... (in namely one Finnish web site) was a rumour that one possible solution would be Microsoft losing it's copyright to IE. This solution while not perfect wouldn't have that bad consecuences as invalidating copyright of Windows but it would surely hurt Microsoft - consider the time it has taken for mozilla to be developed.
Furthermore, this wouldn't (or shouldn't) break things because all new browsers created from the sources should be HTML compatible, not IE compatible. With more usable browsers content providers (read: web admins) would be required to write according to HTML standards instead of supporting only one or two (IE & NS) browsers. There would simply be too many browsers to write own code for each.
I haven't found any confirmation about this though... _________________________
I think that he was talking about new games. Next to all new (windows) games require at least DX6 and what comes to DX7 and windows 2000 I wouldn't embrace it yet (It surely shows some promises but at least with my hardware it's still even more unstable than win98). _________________________
This game is the last Final Fantasy game for the PlayStation, as future FF games will be for the PlayStation2.
I'm seeing this as the end of PS1 (new games will be PS2 only). FFX and FFXI will be relased for PS2 but there is already rumours about PS3 and PS4 here. _________________________
Well, first off, my system performance improved alot more by shuffling off IDE and moving to a fast SCSI HDD than the jump from 350 to 700 MHz.
What are you doing with your computer? I'm pretty sure that 350+IDE->700+IDE will make your kernel to compile faster, games running better and so on than 350+IDE->350+fast SCSI.
Of course with 700 Mhz CPU you need SCSI to boost your system even faster, though UDMA66 should work pretty well also. _________________________
We need to keep browser in user space because sooner or later it will crash and if it's part of OS it will take whole system down. Haven't you ever crashed windows with IE. I have. Much less often with netscape though.
In addition we want to keep OS simple - we don't need display, mouse or keyboard to run it - but browser without GUI is pretty useless. [I admit that I use lynx sometimes but reading/. with it is a pain in ass.] _________________________
Also, there is speculation about AMD releasing the Sledgehammer with multiple chips on a single die.
If this is going to be real, I'm wondering how difficult it's for linux to support such SMP system. Think how long it has taken for true SMP support that is promised to be in 2.4. Of course this could be emulated by motherboard as normal SMP system but I think that kind of mobos would not be cheap!
Maybe the GUI really is the difference. In NT I go start>programs>administrative tools>user manager. In Linux I find a command prompt and type useradd. Or I can hunt through the new Gnome based tools...
...or you type "linuxconf" in linux and configure whole system with it (it can do practically anything NT's GUI tools can). And it works in both text and GUI mode. (I'm not sure but i guess there is linuxconf in both kde and gnome menus in standard distributions - I'm using icewm)
[offtopic] A desktop environment that can look like a Mac. The latter we pretty much have. The former two are just a port away, and at least Adobe has shown interest in Linux.
You are missing the point that people like to use MacOS not only because of it's looks but because it has working clipboard - something linux cannot provide today.
I'm wondering if Adobe is able to fix this. After all they fixed Mac font rendering with their ATM (Adobe Type Manager)...
Mac once accounted for over 10% of the desktop market. Linux now accounts for about 4%.
I have no idea where you get these figures from but anyway (suppose these figures are right). There is one great difference between mac and linux on their run for common desktop environment. That is linux has a fair share of server market to support desktop market. I don't know about OS X but mac has never had stability or performance for server environment.
Why I think this makes difference is that I think windows is where it is now because of its LAN integration (yes, they are finally catching up with tcp/ip but its LANs where their products are usable IMHO) and exchange.
No standards on GUI looks - Yes, I fully agree with that.
On the other hand, "a comprehensive set of interface guidelines" doesn't really need to specify looks. For example I really want
menus of every program to look the same. Best way to achieve this would be to require menu support from wm (I hate when one of my programs has GTK+ style menu whereas another has Gnome or QT or Mozilla style menu),
keyboard shortcuts (at least for window management - if I'm used to alt-f4 to close window, it should work automatically after changing window manager and if i have configured alt-ctrl-1 for desktop 1 it should work in *every* wm I have)
standard default keys: one for cancel (e.g. ESC) and one for default action (e.g. ENTER). These should be required from every form.
copy-paste (IMHO current X protocol sucks a lot - after you have closed window you have copied from you cannot paste anymore! This isn't really part of interface, at least in traditional sense, but this should be fixed),
[offtopic] Well - I was using STL classes heavily in my project and I was having a bug in code that modified a list<template> of hash_map<template,template,template,template>s and I can assure you that DDD was not able to show anything usefull about data I was handling. The only way to debug was to use printfs.
I would really want to see automake generating Makefile enabling me to do "make rpm" in addition to "make dist" and "make rpmcheck" in addition to "make distcheck".
Automake already makes Makefile that has install and uninstall and it takes care of all files that should be installed into system (of course you may hack your way around this, but it's not intented that way) so generating file list for rpm shouldn't be an issue?
I haven't used.deb format but I really like uninstall via "rpm -e packagename".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure you cannot fit entire spec in one cookie. Nice idea though.
_________________________
And would you call browsing the web with lynx stealing? (You cannot see all those ads, can you?) Also graphical browsers with option to disable image downloading should be made illegal?
_________________________
I don't agree. Graphics adapters push many million polygons per second when using OpenGL nowadays. Drawing window borders (or button or scrollbar) is no job for recent graphics adapter. With OpenGL you get texturing, anti-aliasing, alpha-blending and z-buffering (I can imagine many nice effects with z-buffering in window manager) practically for free (because those are implemented in hardware). Also GLX makes pretty good use of network bandwidth in my experience.
_________________________
umm... NOT. Have you tried to make your own "style sheets" with LaTeX? Pretty hard I would say. Editing .css-files is a joy compared to that.
Though I have to admit that for math markup there is no real competitor.
_________________________
Sure it would hurt you to be required to release your (superior) AI modifications but I think that it's the price you need to pay when using GPLed software. When compared to buying prorietary source (in this case Quake from ID - you surely can do it) I consider the price really low. There is no free lunch (or was it spoon?).
_________________________
IMHO compiling is only translation to another language (for example from C to assembler - not necessarely binary format although it's pretty same). Like in real (spoken) languages translating back to original language does not have to be identical even though contents is. I think that encrypting should be something that can be returned to original form. I wouldn't count translating text from English to French encryption though it could prevent me from reading it (without babelfish that is).
_________________________
download the XServer module
I'm pretty sure you need to apply some kind of license to be able to download XServer module for nVidia powered card. And just that license especially denies your right to reverce engineer it - if you don't apply it you cannot legally download module. Of course IANAL.
_________________________
On the other hand I have already changed my TNT to G400 because matrox has opened documentation and their image quality is much better (why cannot nVidia use good ramdacs?). I'm still hoping to get direct rendering without root.
_________________________
Are you using X server prior 3.3.5? I have a logitech wheel mouse with zilog chip and it doesn't work with anything less than 3.3.6.
_________________________
And this is great? I cannot see how this differs from having DirectX3.DLL, DirectX5.DLL etc in your system. If you never change older dll you cannot break things up (hopefully, there is still registry thingy under windows).
_________________________
Furthermore, this wouldn't (or shouldn't) break things because all new browsers created from the sources should be HTML compatible, not IE compatible. With more usable browsers content providers (read: web admins) would be required to write according to HTML standards instead of supporting only one or two (IE & NS) browsers. There would simply be too many browsers to write own code for each.
I haven't found any confirmation about this though...
_________________________
How about real standards like CORBA, OpenGL and PHP or PERL. What comes to sound OpenAL is very promising.
_________________________
I think that he was talking about new games. Next to all new (windows) games require at least DX6 and what comes to DX7 and windows 2000 I wouldn't embrace it yet (It surely shows some promises but at least with my hardware it's still even more unstable than win98).
_________________________
I'm seeing this as the end of PS1 (new games will be PS2 only). FFX and FFXI will be relased for PS2 but there is already rumours about PS3 and PS4 here.
_________________________
What are you doing with your computer? I'm pretty sure that 350+IDE->700+IDE will make your kernel to compile faster, games running better and so on than 350+IDE->350+fast SCSI.
Of course with 700 Mhz CPU you need SCSI to boost your system even faster, though UDMA66 should work pretty well also.
_________________________
In addition we want to keep OS simple - we don't need display, mouse or keyboard to run it - but browser without GUI is pretty useless. [I admit that I use lynx sometimes but reading /. with it is a pain in ass.]
_________________________
If this is going to be real, I'm wondering how difficult it's for linux to support such SMP system. Think how long it has taken for true SMP support that is promised to be in 2.4. Of course this could be emulated by motherboard as normal SMP system but I think that kind of mobos would not be cheap!
A desktop environment that can look like a Mac. The latter we pretty much have. The former two are just a port away, and at least Adobe has shown interest in Linux.
You are missing the point that people like to use MacOS not only because of it's looks but because it has working clipboard - something linux cannot provide today.
I'm wondering if Adobe is able to fix this. After all they fixed Mac font rendering with their ATM (Adobe Type Manager)...
I have no idea where you get these figures from but anyway (suppose these figures are right). There is one great difference between mac and linux on their run for common desktop environment. That is linux has a fair share of server market to support desktop market. I don't know about OS X but mac has never had stability or performance for server environment.
Why I think this makes difference is that I think windows is where it is now because of its LAN integration (yes, they are finally catching up with tcp/ip but its LANs where their products are usable IMHO) and exchange.
That cannot be the reason - or intel marketdroids had come with 0.9 GHz Pentium...
On the other hand, "a comprehensive set of interface guidelines" doesn't really need to specify looks. For example I really want
- menus of every program to look the same. Best way to achieve this would be to require menu support from wm (I hate when one of my programs has GTK+ style menu whereas another has Gnome or QT or Mozilla style menu),
- keyboard shortcuts (at least for window management - if I'm used to alt-f4 to close window, it should work automatically after changing window manager and if i have configured alt-ctrl-1 for desktop 1 it should work in *every* wm I have)
- standard default keys: one for cancel (e.g. ESC) and one for default action (e.g. ENTER). These should be required from every form.
- copy-paste (IMHO current X protocol sucks a lot - after you have closed window you have copied from you cannot paste anymore! This isn't really part of interface, at least in traditional sense, but this should be fixed),
and these can be achieved by those "guidelines".[offtopic]
Well - I was using STL classes heavily in my project and I was having a bug in code that modified a list<template> of hash_map<template,template,template,template>s and I can assure you that DDD was not able to show anything usefull about data I was handling. The only way to debug was to use printfs.
Automake already makes Makefile that has install and uninstall and it takes care of all files that should be installed into system (of course you may hack your way around this, but it's not intented that way) so generating file list for rpm shouldn't be an issue?
I haven't used .deb format but I really like uninstall via "rpm -e packagename".