Continental electricity grids are only possible because of transformers to step up the voltage for long distance transmission, and tansformers in turn only work with AC.
Just a comment on this... not all long distance distribution is done with AC. I think the biggest example we have is here in Brazil. OK, it does need AC in some point of the line, but most of the transmission is done with DC.
What happens here is that we have a huge hydroelectrical plant (Itaipu, the biggest in the world AFAIK) that is shared between Brazil and Paraguay. As our neighbours do not use all their energy, Brazil buys it back from them. The problem is that they use 50 Hz, and we use 60. So, what they do?
They could have transformed the AC from 50 to 60 and transmitted it as usual... but after many calculations, they found out it was more cost-effective to transmit this energy in DC (as it is a very long distance line, the added costs of having the conversion stations are covered by the savings you get from using less cables and thus having less maintenance in the transmission lines).
Alright, that doesn't cut the need for AC transformers (within cities, for example), but I think this was worth a comment. =)
Could someone from the staff *please* fix the HTML from this news? The last anchor ("Darby Daemon Adventure") is not closed, what makes the first page on/. unusable if you're using Mozilla.
Well, I do not understand fully what happens, but the fact is that the performance of NVIDIA cards under Linux is driver limited. That means that the card has potential, but the drivers lock it to the current level of performance (which is quite low compared to the other cards).
The reason for this, as explained several times in the Utah-GLX maling lists (http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net, as far as I remember) is that the NVIDIA drivers can't do DMA, and the absence os low-level specs prevent the developers from modifying the drivers so that they can profit from DMA, just like the other ones (based on the released specs from Matrox, ATI and S3 up to now) do.
So, unless NVIDIA open the spec for their chips, or come with a DMA-enabled drivers, not much can be done except wait.
One thing I read about in reviews of the Corel Linux OS is that Corel uses a modified version of the Qt 1.4x library. How are these changes licensed, and what's Troll Tech relationship with them? Also, is it planned to incorporate these changes in sort of a "Qt 1.45", or will these changes remain "Corel only"?
On the same topic, how do Corel plan to realease their enhanced File Manager and other tools, if you plan to release them to the open at all?
By the way you're putting the problem, it seems that XSLT is the answer for your questions.
The Apache XML project has a XSLT processor called Xalan that can take care of much of that part (I haven't tested any other XSL processors yet). Just link your XML document / DOM Tree to a style sheet and you have a transformed document to the format you like.
The only reason I see that this is needed is because nowadays only IE 5 and Mozilla can work natively with XML files and linked Style Sheets (and that locks you to CSS for Mozilla), so if you plan to use XML with any other device, AFAIK, you will have to use some kind of tranformation processor. It can be used to tranform a XML doc to another XML doc, but that escapes from the presentation field.
Just take a look at their page and make some tests. They're pretty nice tools, and quite easy to work with.
Decided to take a look before filing a bug, and it seems that it's a problem with Xfree86 3.3.6, not with the packages...
It seems that the new build has a broken SVGA driver for my card (it uses an ancient NV1 chip from NVIDIA). I downgraded the X server to the 3.3.5 version and everything now seems fine.
I've been running potato for a long time, and as have been already pointed out, when anything breaks, it's rapidly fixed.
As to to every rule, I have yesterday found an exception... the latest Xfree86 packages (3.3.6) for potato seems to be broken, at least in my system... all fonts are screwed up, and that makes X unusable. There were some updates today, but none of them fixed that...:-(
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Continental electricity grids are only possible because of transformers to step up the voltage for long distance transmission, and tansformers in turn only work with AC.
Just a comment on this... not all long distance distribution is done with AC. I think the biggest example we have is here in Brazil. OK, it does need AC in some point of the line, but most of the transmission is done with DC.
What happens here is that we have a huge hydroelectrical plant (Itaipu, the biggest in the world AFAIK) that is shared between Brazil and Paraguay. As our neighbours do not use all their energy, Brazil buys it back from them. The problem is that they use 50 Hz, and we use 60. So, what they do?
They could have transformed the AC from 50 to 60 and transmitted it as usual... but after many calculations, they found out it was more cost-effective to transmit this energy in DC (as it is a very long distance line, the added costs of having the conversion stations are covered by the savings you get from using less cables and thus having less maintenance in the transmission lines).
Alright, that doesn't cut the need for AC transformers (within cities, for example), but I think this was worth a comment. =)
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Could someone from the staff *please* fix the HTML from this news? The last anchor ("Darby Daemon Adventure") is not closed, what makes the first page on /. unusable if you're using Mozilla.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Well, I do not understand fully what happens, but the fact is that the performance of NVIDIA cards under Linux is driver limited. That means that the card has potential, but the drivers lock it to the current level of performance (which is quite low compared to the other cards).
The reason for this, as explained several times in the Utah-GLX maling lists (http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net, as far as I remember) is that the NVIDIA drivers can't do DMA, and the absence os low-level specs prevent the developers from modifying the drivers so that they can profit from DMA, just like the other ones (based on the released specs from Matrox, ATI and S3 up to now) do.
So, unless NVIDIA open the spec for their chips, or come with a DMA-enabled drivers, not much can be done except wait.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
One thing I read about in reviews of the Corel Linux OS is that Corel uses a modified version of the Qt 1.4x library. How are these changes licensed, and what's Troll Tech relationship with them? Also, is it planned to incorporate these changes in sort of a "Qt 1.45", or will these changes remain "Corel only"?
On the same topic, how do Corel plan to realease their enhanced File Manager and other tools, if you plan to release them to the open at all?
--
Marcelo Vanzin
By the way you're putting the problem, it seems that XSLT is the answer for your questions.
The Apache XML project has a XSLT processor called Xalan that can take care of much of that part (I haven't tested any other XSL processors yet). Just link your XML document / DOM Tree to a style sheet and you have a transformed document to the format you like.
The only reason I see that this is needed is because nowadays only IE 5 and Mozilla can work natively with XML files and linked Style Sheets (and that locks you to CSS for Mozilla), so if you plan to use XML with any other device, AFAIK, you will have to use some kind of tranformation processor. It can be used to tranform a XML doc to another XML doc, but that escapes from the presentation field.
Just take a look at their page and make some tests. They're pretty nice tools, and quite easy to work with.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Decided to take a look before filing a bug, and it seems that it's a problem with Xfree86 3.3.6, not with the packages...
It seems that the new build has a broken SVGA driver for my card (it uses an ancient NV1 chip from NVIDIA). I downgraded the X server to the 3.3.5 version and everything now seems fine.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
I've been running potato for a long time, and as have been already pointed out, when anything breaks, it's rapidly fixed.
As to to every rule, I have yesterday found an exception... the latest Xfree86 packages (3.3.6) for potato seems to be broken, at least in my system... all fonts are screwed up, and that makes X unusable. There were some updates today, but none of them fixed that... :-(
Hope they can fix that soon.
--
Marcelo Vanzin