You know, you dont HAVE to use ATI's driver. I have a RADEON 7500 and it's totally 100% accelerated for 2D and 3D by completely free drivers that reside in the kernel and XOrg builds.
ALL RADEON cards have full 2D acceleration in the latest from XOrg (and xfree as well, IIRC). The 3D support usually lags a while behind the hottest cards.
Right now the best ATI card you can get fully-free 3D acceleration on is the RADEON 9200, which ain't a bad card at all.
Alright, I work at a school. I recommend Apple boxes where the little kids go precisely because they don't have NEARLY as many cables for the kids to mangle. A headless Apple box might hit the financial sweet-spot, but the VALUE of lower IT costs, simplicity, and the just-works philosophy would be lowered, not to mention the 'image' of the product. It's a lot easier to market a whole package than an aluminum box.
Personally, I'd like to see the PC world head in this direction. It would make a LOT of people's jobs a lot easier if computers were one-piece units. Do you have any idea how much trouble a PC is on a desk when you've got at least six cables going to and fro? Imagine that it's your job to set up or maintain several hundred machines exposed to six year olds, and you have a choice between one-piece units or Dell boxen.
Mac OS X is much prettier running at higher-resolutions than XP is. When I run Windows at home I keep the 15" at 1024X768, but Mac OS X looks about the same at 1280X1024. XP just doesn't look pretty at really high resolution.
Also, try using a sans-serif font in Safari, it makes a world of difference for small text.
But really, at work we had to use some third-party KDC because some of our other third-party boxes wouldn't tie-in with the KDC included with the AD. That's what the admin said, and he was die-hard Microsoft.
I heard the MS implentation is little-endian, which is not the standard for network communications, too.
If you can't offer it 'everywhere' you should at least offer wireless near the town hall. It will attract the 'right kind' of people to hang around the center of government and chat with their local officials. Most town halls have something of a 'park atmosphere' to them, with benches and trees on well-kept grounds, they also tend to be near schools, shopping centers, and commercial districts.
Judging by how well Microsoft's kerberos plays with others, I'd say it's less of a 'clean room' implementation and more of a 'bachelor pad' or 'dorm suite' implementation.
Because eventually they'll call me and ask why they get twelve-thousand popups when they log in, I'll reinstall XP from a slipstreamed CD and they'll pay me $120. No problem from there on, but when unpatched, everyone's machine eventually ends up on my lab table.
Re:I've got mine on pre-order.
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Port-A-Nuke
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Good, I could really go for housing prices to go down. The way the market is structured these days I'll never be able to afford one myself, even if I get a 50% raise and get married.
I think that's one of the reasons no politicians seem to want to massively deport illegal immigrants, having 9 million extra beds free would drop inner-city housing costs quite a bit, hurting property-owner's pockets.
People shouldn't be buying houses as a form of investment, it might be a good investment for you, but it's not sustainable over the long-term and it's already leading to major issues with housing affordability. If you buy a house for $200K and flip it in three years for $400K, you're really lining the bank's pockets, and pricing the product out-of-range for most people.
I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, I'm just saying it immoral.:-)
Your ATI card is new enough that there aren't open drivers for it (R300 or later) yet, and you actually use 3D in Linux.
I myself use a RADEON 7500 and it has fully-accelerated 2D/3D in XFree86 and XOrg, and it has for a LONG time now. The native support in the latest XOrg release has across-the-board full 2D acceleration for all RADEON chipsets, even the new ones.
GPL'd linux drivers are usually a bit behind the cutting-edge hardware, because there's a lag time for the hardware manufacturer to document their interfaces. It's really no big deal though.
Honestly, how much of your time is spent in 3D in Linux? I estimate that under 0.05% of mine is. All I need is decent 2D for my needs. 3D is nice, but it's 99.5% useless to me, since it only gets used when I kick back and play QuakeII.
I think the fscking puppy is the WORST thing about XP. Why on earth would I click 'search' in my 'file manager' if I wasn't searching for a FILE? I despise any 'improvement' to Windows that makes me use my mouse any more than I already do. If Microsoft knew what they were doing the search would START with files, with an option to do all the other crap on the sidelines.
Apple has a really good search tool, it's simple but lets you string together conditions intuitively. KDE seems pretty decent too.
No. The iBlade is part of Apple's upcoming media-enabled kitchen set, the XBlade would be the lean and tough IBM 970 blade with enough Mac in it to boot OS X.
But if the specs are open, there will be cool modules. Where I work we don't need a full blade of CPUs, and our 2TB storage could probably fit in the empty half of the bladecenter, so we could consolidate our entire server rack to one bladecenter, and save thousands monthly on cooling, electricity, and administration costs.
IBM isn't going to make cool blade add-ons, other companies will. It'd be nice if Cisco had a 'direct to blade backplane' switch to the outside, Apple could make an XBlade, Sun could make one. You could pack all the stuff that used to need real estate into one big box.
IBM already lets you mix-and-match PowerPC and x86 blades, the other vendors are going to (hopefully) add other cool functionality.
what sort of idiot would think that we'd make energy by splitting up water and then recombining it?
Sadly, most of the people out there. We were talking about energy dependence at work and I was the only one of ten folks who understood that moving to a 'hydrogen economy' would just make huge demand for electricity to MAKE the hydrogen. I tried explaining it, but nobody really grasped that just because your exhaust pipe would be clean doesn't mean that the air would be cleaner overall. The first law of thermodynamics escapes people.
I don't think the politicians know this either, if they did grasp the concept in high school, they probably wouldn't have followed politics as a career. Based on what the politicians SAY about the future of hydrogen, they seem to think that it's all over the place in a form ready to use.
I disagree, I run WindowMaker, and most kids who come over and sit at my desk figure it out quickly enough, they really dig the dock, and they LOVE the 'start menu whenever I right-click the background'. Almost everyone figures out the multiple-desktop thing too, when they see the pager with eight screens that shows a mini-screen for each one.
It helps that my menu items are named after the FUNCTION rather than the application that provides it. When you see 'music' it runs juk, when you click 'web' it opens firefox, etc.
The Windows-style taskbar interface is pretty weak if you intend to keep your session running for days or weeks instead of hours.
Everyone remarks how 'clean' and 'simple' my layout is, and the geekier note that 'it takes a lot less mousing around to get stuff done'.
The trick is that every corporate desktop needs to be uniform and MANAGED by someone who does the stuff like rename menu items to functions and remove all the excess cruft that the heavier desktop environments populate interfaces with.
Well, it's about the size of Palm's M500 series, but instead of a board with all those chips soldered on, it would be a screen with ONE chip on the back of it with all the integrated components. The 'functional' part would then be molded (not placed) inside a sealed plastic casing (not an openable shell). Interface should be low-end wireless like bluetooth, and the charging adapter (which ONLY charges, as data interface is wireless) would be in a deep hole in the case with a rubber plug over it.
As for features? All I want it for is to run PalmOS 4, on a 16-33MHz coldfire chip, with 2 to 8MB RAM. I think a high-contrast black on white screen would suffice, though it should be higher resolution than Palm standard, so I can fit more text on the page.
I want the indestructable yet disposable $40 PDA, and if there weren't stupid feature wars I would have had it by now. Instead we have people willing to shell out massive money for fragile PDAs that break after a year's use, and then need replacement.
All most of us want is something to carry around to jot notes in, keep a to do list, calendar, and contacts, maybe READ email or RSS headlines offline. I need a portable recon-unit, not a digital swiss-army knife. All that functionality works better on the cell phones anyway, as it gives you an easy way to SEND pictures, voice, email, and video. Why ask for ti in a PDA if you already have wireless data services to your phone?
I do Palm support for about 25 users at my work, and only three use advanced features or third-party apps on their Palm OS units. PDAs commonly need replacing before they reach two years of age, they break or get loopy quite often, and their connectors/cradles leave much to be desired (though the tungstens seem nice in that dept).
FYI, 'our signal reaching' and 'able to be detected' are two VERY different things. You could shine a flashlight at jupiter right now and the photons will get there in a few hours, but that doesn't mean anyone on jupiter is going to be able to determine if there's a flashlight pointed at them.
I can barely pick up FM radio from 40 miles away, do you really think those signals are detectably leaving our solar system? Even our ionosphere?
Um, it has some VERY important features besides 'feels like a mac app'.
I master the images where I work, and we're behind a proxy, but have over 100 users with laptops that need to work outside the proxy too. On the OSX machines we have the 'locations' set so when you're on-campus, you use the proxy, and off-campus you go straight to the 'net. This is great, except that firefox has it's OWN proxy control, so merely switching the 'location' doesn't work.
Camino gets as many SETTINGS as possible by querying the OS, firefox is an island unto itself.
I don't think the 'lack of upgradeability' is a drawback. A typical PC gets three or four years out in the field before it costs too much to fix than it's worth. Do you really think it would make a difference to most people if they can jack-up their video card?
I repair and upgrade Macs and PCs for a living, and have for almost a decade, and I've only done video card upgrades three or four times if the card was right from the get-go. It's not like I'll pop the top off one of these in three years and say 'that's your problem, an nVidia card, their stuff was all crap!'.
BTW, a friend just bought a consumer-line Dell tower and it's got Intel ICH graphics and the AGP slot wasn't installed, so there's no way to upgrade that video either, and it won't even play Deer Hunter 2004 on the ICH.
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You know, you dont HAVE to use ATI's driver. I have a RADEON 7500 and it's totally 100% accelerated for 2D and 3D by completely free drivers that reside in the kernel and XOrg builds.
ALL RADEON cards have full 2D acceleration in the latest from XOrg (and xfree as well, IIRC). The 3D support usually lags a while behind the hottest cards.
Right now the best ATI card you can get fully-free 3D acceleration on is the RADEON 9200, which ain't a bad card at all.
Alright, I work at a school. I recommend Apple boxes where the little kids go precisely because they don't have NEARLY as many cables for the kids to mangle. A headless Apple box might hit the financial sweet-spot, but the VALUE of lower IT costs, simplicity, and the just-works philosophy would be lowered, not to mention the 'image' of the product. It's a lot easier to market a whole package than an aluminum box.
Personally, I'd like to see the PC world head in this direction. It would make a LOT of people's jobs a lot easier if computers were one-piece units. Do you have any idea how much trouble a PC is on a desk when you've got at least six cables going to and fro? Imagine that it's your job to set up or maintain several hundred machines exposed to six year olds, and you have a choice between one-piece units or Dell boxen.
um, it's called SDL, it provides APIs similar to DirectX, covers video, animation, audio, sprites, etc.
It's been around for a long time.
Mac OS X is much prettier running at higher-resolutions than XP is. When I run Windows at home I keep the 15" at 1024X768, but Mac OS X looks about the same at 1280X1024. XP just doesn't look pretty at really high resolution.
Also, try using a sans-serif font in Safari, it makes a world of difference for small text.
I just saw an opportunity for a joke.
But really, at work we had to use some third-party KDC because some of our other third-party boxes wouldn't tie-in with the KDC included with the AD. That's what the admin said, and he was die-hard Microsoft.
I heard the MS implentation is little-endian, which is not the standard for network communications, too.
If you can't offer it 'everywhere' you should at least offer wireless near the town hall. It will attract the 'right kind' of people to hang around the center of government and chat with their local officials. Most town halls have something of a 'park atmosphere' to them, with benches and trees on well-kept grounds, they also tend to be near schools, shopping centers, and commercial districts.
Judging by how well Microsoft's kerberos plays with others, I'd say it's less of a 'clean room' implementation and more of a 'bachelor pad' or 'dorm suite' implementation.
Because eventually they'll call me and ask why they get twelve-thousand popups when they log in, I'll reinstall XP from a slipstreamed CD and they'll pay me $120. No problem from there on, but when unpatched, everyone's machine eventually ends up on my lab table.
Good, I could really go for housing prices to go down. The way the market is structured these days I'll never be able to afford one myself, even if I get a 50% raise and get married.
:-)
I think that's one of the reasons no politicians seem to want to massively deport illegal immigrants, having 9 million extra beds free would drop inner-city housing costs quite a bit, hurting property-owner's pockets.
People shouldn't be buying houses as a form of investment, it might be a good investment for you, but it's not sustainable over the long-term and it's already leading to major issues with housing affordability. If you buy a house for $200K and flip it in three years for $400K, you're really lining the bank's pockets, and pricing the product out-of-range for most people.
I'm not saying I wouldn't do it, I'm just saying it immoral.
Don't stress, your card will work, it just won't have accelerated 3D until someone figures out how to get it done without ATI's help.
It's really no big deal, you'll have a nice 2D accelerated experience, which is where you'll be spending the vast majority of your time anyway.
How often are you actually using 3D in Linux? Be honest.
WOAH!
That's only true under these conditions:
Your ATI card is new enough that there aren't open drivers for it (R300 or later) yet, and you actually use 3D in Linux.
I myself use a RADEON 7500 and it has fully-accelerated 2D/3D in XFree86 and XOrg, and it has for a LONG time now. The native support in the latest XOrg release has across-the-board full 2D acceleration for all RADEON chipsets, even the new ones.
GPL'd linux drivers are usually a bit behind the cutting-edge hardware, because there's a lag time for the hardware manufacturer to document their interfaces. It's really no big deal though.
Honestly, how much of your time is spent in 3D in Linux? I estimate that under 0.05% of mine is. All I need is decent 2D for my needs. 3D is nice, but it's 99.5% useless to me, since it only gets used when I kick back and play QuakeII.
Except she's from New Jersey. I have a with that.
Waitaminute. it says on her homepage that she's the only one not from Jersey. nevermind. We love you Kelly!
I think the fscking puppy is the WORST thing about XP. Why on earth would I click 'search' in my 'file manager' if I wasn't searching for a FILE? I despise any 'improvement' to Windows that makes me use my mouse any more than I already do. If Microsoft knew what they were doing the search would START with files, with an option to do all the other crap on the sidelines.
Apple has a really good search tool, it's simple but lets you string together conditions intuitively. KDE seems pretty decent too.
I has a 'welcome to Windows Media" clip, a sample clip of Beck's latest, and all the I/O ports are epoxied shut.
Enjoy your media!
No. The iBlade is part of Apple's upcoming media-enabled kitchen set, the XBlade would be the lean and tough IBM 970 blade with enough Mac in it to boot OS X.
but that wouldn't happen, you'd have to scramble to boost electricity generation, and you'd just entrench the fossil-fuel industry even more.
But if the specs are open, there will be cool modules. Where I work we don't need a full blade of CPUs, and our 2TB storage could probably fit in the empty half of the bladecenter, so we could consolidate our entire server rack to one bladecenter, and save thousands monthly on cooling, electricity, and administration costs.
IBM isn't going to make cool blade add-ons, other companies will. It'd be nice if Cisco had a 'direct to blade backplane' switch to the outside, Apple could make an XBlade, Sun could make one. You could pack all the stuff that used to need real estate into one big box.
IBM already lets you mix-and-match PowerPC and x86 blades, the other vendors are going to (hopefully) add other cool functionality.
what sort of idiot would think that we'd make energy by splitting up water and then recombining it?
Sadly, most of the people out there. We were talking about energy dependence at work and I was the only one of ten folks who understood that moving to a 'hydrogen economy' would just make huge demand for electricity to MAKE the hydrogen. I tried explaining it, but nobody really grasped that just because your exhaust pipe would be clean doesn't mean that the air would be cleaner overall. The first law of thermodynamics escapes people.
I don't think the politicians know this either, if they did grasp the concept in high school, they probably wouldn't have followed politics as a career. Based on what the politicians SAY about the future of hydrogen, they seem to think that it's all over the place in a form ready to use.
LOL! Maybe you didn't hear, I use WindowMaker. My screen looks like a background image and a VERY rudimentary 'dock' alongside the left, that's all.
When I right-click I get a menu with my apps and options.
I'm not sure how to get a screenie, but if I do I'll post a URL.
I disagree, I run WindowMaker, and most kids who come over and sit at my desk figure it out quickly enough, they really dig the dock, and they LOVE the 'start menu whenever I right-click the background'. Almost everyone figures out the multiple-desktop thing too, when they see the pager with eight screens that shows a mini-screen for each one.
It helps that my menu items are named after the FUNCTION rather than the application that provides it. When you see 'music' it runs juk, when you click 'web' it opens firefox, etc.
The Windows-style taskbar interface is pretty weak if you intend to keep your session running for days or weeks instead of hours.
Everyone remarks how 'clean' and 'simple' my layout is, and the geekier note that 'it takes a lot less mousing around to get stuff done'.
The trick is that every corporate desktop needs to be uniform and MANAGED by someone who does the stuff like rename menu items to functions and remove all the excess cruft that the heavier desktop environments populate interfaces with.
What's my DREAM PDA?
Well, it's about the size of Palm's M500 series, but instead of a board with all those chips soldered on, it would be a screen with ONE chip on the back of it with all the integrated components. The 'functional' part would then be molded (not placed) inside a sealed plastic casing (not an openable shell). Interface should be low-end wireless like bluetooth, and the charging adapter (which ONLY charges, as data interface is wireless) would be in a deep hole in the case with a rubber plug over it.
As for features? All I want it for is to run PalmOS 4, on a 16-33MHz coldfire chip, with 2 to 8MB RAM. I think a high-contrast black on white screen would suffice, though it should be higher resolution than Palm standard, so I can fit more text on the page.
I want the indestructable yet disposable $40 PDA, and if there weren't stupid feature wars I would have had it by now. Instead we have people willing to shell out massive money for fragile PDAs that break after a year's use, and then need replacement.
All most of us want is something to carry around to jot notes in, keep a to do list, calendar, and contacts, maybe READ email or RSS headlines offline. I need a portable recon-unit, not a digital swiss-army knife. All that functionality works better on the cell phones anyway, as it gives you an easy way to SEND pictures, voice, email, and video. Why ask for ti in a PDA if you already have wireless data services to your phone?
I do Palm support for about 25 users at my work, and only three use advanced features or third-party apps on their Palm OS units. PDAs commonly need replacing before they reach two years of age, they break or get loopy quite often, and their connectors/cradles leave much to be desired (though the tungstens seem nice in that dept).
FYI, 'our signal reaching' and 'able to be detected' are two VERY different things. You could shine a flashlight at jupiter right now and the photons will get there in a few hours, but that doesn't mean anyone on jupiter is going to be able to determine if there's a flashlight pointed at them.
I can barely pick up FM radio from 40 miles away, do you really think those signals are detectably leaving our solar system? Even our ionosphere?
Um, it has some VERY important features besides 'feels like a mac app'.
I master the images where I work, and we're behind a proxy, but have over 100 users with laptops that need to work outside the proxy too. On the OSX machines we have the 'locations' set so when you're on-campus, you use the proxy, and off-campus you go straight to the 'net. This is great, except that firefox has it's OWN proxy control, so merely switching the 'location' doesn't work.
Camino gets as many SETTINGS as possible by querying the OS, firefox is an island unto itself.
Sweet. I've been looking for an excuse to douse my righ with lighter fluid for a while now. Film at 11.
I don't think the 'lack of upgradeability' is a drawback. A typical PC gets three or four years out in the field before it costs too much to fix than it's worth. Do you really think it would make a difference to most people if they can jack-up their video card?
I repair and upgrade Macs and PCs for a living, and have for almost a decade, and I've only done video card upgrades three or four times if the card was right from the get-go. It's not like I'll pop the top off one of these in three years and say 'that's your problem, an nVidia card, their stuff was all crap!'.
BTW, a friend just bought a consumer-line Dell tower and it's got Intel ICH graphics and the AGP slot wasn't installed, so there's no way to upgrade that video either, and it won't even play Deer Hunter 2004 on the ICH.