Well, we will want something to attack the RIAA, but make sure we don't hit the artist in the process. Perhaps, we could make the arguement that it's morally wrong to charge money for anything but the distribution of music, and that if your doing your own distribution that it would be wrong to take away your "right" to do that yourself. So you pay money for the first CD, the one that they distribute, and then you make your own distributions. They get the money for the work they did, you get whatever benefit/payment for the work you do. The Artist ofcourse, gets the exposure so that they can earn money through concerts. We could make a pamphlet that's backed by technology and law "experts". Maybe make a cute webpage with a little talking cartoon puppy or something, and have the RIAA take his bone away.
A. The typical computer user wants a consistent interface above everything else. The MacOS was the best operating system in this department for many years, and only lately has started to develop cracks with the introduction of things like QuickTime4. (Really a shame, though I'm not the biggest fan of macos anyway.)
B. There are *many* interfaces much simpler to use than windows. If the intent of the user for instance is simply to run a set number of programs, a Command line interface, or a gui mouse driven interface, with a list of those programs displayed on the screen is about as simple as you can get. Considering that we are talking about the "average" user, I wouldn't recommend making access to utilities to delete files readily available at all. Nearly every "average" user who has asked me for help because software stopped working on their system did so because either they A. installed software that overwrote files. B. Accidently deleted files that were ciritical to the system. or C. Changed opperating system settings that the peice of software was dependent on. Getting back to the issue of "ease", the keyboard requires less motor precesion than the mouse does to select a menu choice, so it will initially be easier for someone with no experience using a computer (or mouse) to select from a list using arrow keys. Eventually a mouse may be desired, or if the person naturally has the motor skills to use one efficently.
C. Linux certainly could very well be used on 98% of the computers that windows runs on, if you are willing to "cheat" when it comes to cloning unix in terms of the interface. If you want to get technical, linux is simply the kernel. Of course most people describe linux as the kernel plus the suite of utilities and software the often comes bundled with it. However it wouldn't necessarily be hard to make use of something like mtools, so that files on disks could be read whenever you insert them into the disk drive, nor would it be impossible to create a distribution of linux that automatically logs you in, and pops up a friendly menu with netscape, staroffice (or wordperfect), a mp3/cdaudio player, perhaps solitare. Granted, this would have the effect of taking away much of the multitasking capibilties of even windows, but you have to weigh that against simplicity. It really depends on what the end user wants. Does the average user really multitask that much? If they do, is it something they really care about, and can it be implemented in such a way as to allow users who want it to easily use it, but not be ubtrusive to users who don't? Of course, if the applications that the end user wants don't run on linux, that's another story entirely, though if you were to replace 98% of the windows market with linux anyway, you can bet that those voids would fill in fairly quickly.
D. In the next paragraph you talk about "windows" staying up as long as linux, but you reference in the same paragraph windows NT, which means I'm guessing that this is what your speaking of. Considering the Average user does NOT use windows NT, it's a non-issue. I'm also familiar with HPUX, having supported several K and V class servers at my previous job. While there are many patches you can download and apply individually, you can of course download and install the various patch sets offered on HP's support site much as you would with service packs for NT. Installing, individually, 275 patches, even on a 10.20 box is rather unecessary. We never exceeded more than 100, and often times it was applied with a patchset, not individually. I don't believe we had any 11 boxes that had nearly that many patches applied.
E. The case with dos is interesting. While you certainly had a choice of which dos you wanted to use, there are still the issues dealing with microsoft implementing code that caused windows not to run with drdos. Now, this is still up in the air, though if it indeed is true, then the end user did not have a choice as to which dos he could run, if he wanted to run windows, or any of the programs that require windows. It may be that the person didn't want windows at all, but simply wanted to run the newest version of microsoft word. This could not be accomplished without windows (possibly OS/2 as long as the program was 16bit). If windows couldn't be run without ms-dos, then they do indeed have to buy and run ms-dos to run that application. So you do indeed have the choice to run drdos in that case, but you only have that choice if you are willing to give up the peice of software you want to run. This idea, brought up in the finding of facts, (the applications barrier) describes the general situation better than I can here, and I'll leave it to the reader to make a discission regarding wether or not MS has overstepped it's bounds.
And yes, I grudgingly chose windows until in windows95 one day it's bundled backup software did the equivelant of GPF bringing the system down and destroyed a backup tape of 3 years of graphics work I had spent countless hours working on. Soon after I switched to OS/2, which I ran for about a year. Due to the lack of a good web browser (Netscape 2.02 was horribly buggy at the time, and Web expolorer just didn't cut it for me) I decided to switch to linux.
You make a couple good points as to the uses of various systems for different purposes. The highend unix's for servers for example. Windows however tries to appeal to both the novice user and the power user, and I don't believe it does so particularly well due to over simplification in certain areas of the interface for the power user, and complexities in other areas of the interface for novices. The benefit of linux in this case is that the interface is entirely and easily configurably (and legally!) by any vendor who wants to ship it.
Actually, his prices looked a bit high to me for some of the stuff I've recently bought. About 2 months ago I got a deal from www.tccomputers.com for dual celeron 400s on a bp6 with 2 fans for $229US. Granted, this was a weekend deal, but I've seen the same setup for about $260-$270 on pricewatch. At the local bestbuy type stores, they've had 17" monitors priced at $200 for a good while now. Both my mouse and keyboard were $5, and my mouse (a 3button) has lasted me about 2 years and still works beautifully. My friend recently bought a gateway PIII 550Mhz system, and the mouse cable developed problems after only a couple months. My keyboard is also one of the nicest "standard" keyboards I've used in a long time, certainly better than the imac. (I really have problems typing on the smaller form factor). Also, the mouse on the imac makes it very hard to tell if it's oriented correctly. (not to mention it's only got 1 button, and seems to cause muscles in my hand to cramp up after prolonged use.)
For being a small form factor machine, fairly well integrated, and reasonably powerful, the imac doesn't do all that bad a job. However, I think for the same amount of money you pay for the imac, you can build a good deal more powerful PC. (not quite the same thing as what the other guy was saying.)
Freeciv isn't too bad. It's obviously not everyone's cup of tea, and it's a bit behind in the graphics and sound department when you compare it to alpha centauri or Call to Power, but it's atleast enjoyable to play. Unfortunately, this is the only game that I can think of that is opensource that I've really gotten into. Golgatha could possibly be good if someone finishes it, though there hasn't been much activity lately on it from what I've seen.
Re:Would of had a KDE Gimp months ago
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KDE 2.0 in Action
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Why didn't they just distribute it anyway? It's GPLed code, if they followed the rules, then it shouldn't matter what the gimp people think about it.
I actually ran windowmaker for nearly a year when E was at DR0.14. It was indeed fast, and much faster than E0.13 was (especially with neuromancer loaded). However, when I switched around DR0.15, E no longer had the lag it did at.13, and imho, was comparable to WindowMaker in terms of speed. Certain themes certainly can slow it down if they arn't designed well, especially if things like translucent window moves are also enabled. This isn't something that is forced on you in E though, and you don't need to use them if you don't want to. Over the summer, I used Enlightenment on a 486dx2/66 with 32megs of ram at work, and it was actually suprisingly responsive. Enough so that I kept it on the system. Now, maybe on your system, E wasn't as responsive as you wanted it to be, but that doesn't mean that it can't be fast. There are a lot of variables that come into play.
Re:Meet the new Windows, same as the old Windows
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KDE 2.0 in Action
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Simply looking at package size can be a bit misleading. Depending on how many icons and graphics you include, how big they are, and what color depth, it can drastically change those sizes. Sound files, additional programs, even graphical help files or desktop backgrounds can have a large effect. I'm not going to say either way which is more bloated, or how much bloat in each case could be removed from the code, because I really don't know. I'm partial to gnome myself for other reasons.
Hrm.. I run E with gtk themes on a P150mmx laptop with only 16megs of ram. Granted, it's not the fastest in the world due mostly to ram contrants, but if you've got 64megs of ram and a Mil2, it shouldn't be all *that* slow. Might want to make sure you've got the newest gtk and gnome stuff, it should help out. (particularly the newer gtks)
You will see that the fastest system listed running NT is an Athlon 600mhz which took 47 seconds to complete the scene. A 600mhz athlon running RedHat 6.0 was reported as finishing the same scene in 37 seconds, which is roughly a 21-22% speed increase. Granted, I don't trust the povbench page, as many of the entries seem questionable. Regardless, most of the entries at the top seem to be running linux.
Have any of you guys considered that maybe he never really was from microsoft and just said that thinking he may get better support? First things first. Microsoft would spend most of their testing time on office applications as that's where linux could potentially hit them hardest. If all of a sudden linux and star office became as viable as win95 and office (already is for me) and are free on top of it, microsoft could have some problems. Game development is a secondary issue. if linux has games, it helps linux, but it really doesn't detract anything from MS. (the people that want the games on linux likely already want to take the plung) I suppose it's possible that MS just wanted to *install* the application and the guy never had much intention to really play it, but to just see how the install process went. Perhaps the phone call was a setup to see how fast loki's tech support is. Or, perhaps the guy just thought it'd make him sound more important.
Well, my point with it being harmful was mainly dealing with if infact something supernatural is going on. That is mostly dealing with the soul, not physical harm. I'm not honestly sure what it does, or how it works, so I guess I don't know. I can only say that I personally would consider it harmful to myself if I were to practice it for whatever reason. About the thing with the relationship with god, yeah, I know how it goes. A lot of issues that have to be dealt with, and some of them require changes in the way you think. I still haven't completely given up on the idea of "god", but in the scientific community, it's not the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of questions out there, and it seems like every day you have to be ready to accept that what you currently believe might not be right. Though at the same time, "popular" science has certainly been proven wrong in the past.. Ah well, as long as people keep open minds...
It doesn't have to be, which was my point. The board itself is an inanimate object, but the way that people use them can be harmful. I'm not going to profess that I'm an expert in the realm of the supernatural, it's not something I am really intersted in. However, if you are using it to call or talk to spirits, or the devil himself, I think your openning yourself up to things (self-induced or not) that are dangerous, and most likely evil in nature. It's not something to be taken lightly. Even if your not doing anything supernatural when using it, your then fooling yourself to put your trust into the supposed abilities of an inanimate object, which in my opinion isn't that much different than calling apon an idol for favor. Take it for what you will, some will say it's a harmless action, some will say you'll burn in hell. I tend to just think it's counter productive and hurts your relationship with God.
I've been a christian all my life, and while some of your examples I do agree with, (The usage of Ouija Boards in particular) I think you've missed the point a bit when it comes to the mascot. As someone else pointed out earlier, it's an inside joke having to do with processes running on the system. A picture, or a word, or even an Ouija board in and of itself can not be evil. They are inanimate objects. We as humans like to put labels on things based on a connection with an evil action, but in and of itself, and object is just that, an object. Now, that object may be used in an evil way, and the resulting action would therefor be evil, But I think that it's a far stretch to say that the FreeBSD mascot is being used in any evil way. Rather, it's used in a constructive, and humourous fashion. One thing that we as christians need to remember, is that pride is a trap that is much easier to fall into, than say, accepting the cartoon mascot the happens to resemble a characture of what we as humans often jokingly refer to satan as.
Uh, actually, I don't see how MS having control of the *web* really killing off linux. They need both server and client control, and they'd somehow have to stop the distribution of linux, which would basically be impossible. It'd be like the government trying to monitor all internet traffic, it's just not possible right now. besides, MS needs linux, how else do they have even a chance of evading monopoly status? Apple? Os/2? Solaris?
While I agree Maya's engine is pretty good, I'll play devils advocate a bit just to say that I like radiance's rendering engine better..;) When we see the Maya modelling environment though, we will *really* have something to be happy about. Especially in that radiance can import from AW/Maya.. >:) So now we just need to implement photon mapping into radiance, have a Maya-like opensource modeller, and when I finish writing me ecosystem/landscape generator, oh boy oh boy!;)
well, on the other hand this lets you do some neat stuff with say, antialiasing. with an aa depth of just 2, that 1600x1200 becomes 800x600 and so on. certainly it's not the most important feature around, but it can enhance the visual quality noticably...
You guys remember when bill got hit in the face with a pie on videotape for all the world to see? I think in some ways, we should feel some pity for bill. From what was said after the incident, he didn't take it very well. Now, many of us, myself included, would probably feel some embarassment if we were hit in the face with a pie, but could probably laugh it off. If I was the type of person that couldn't laugh that off though, I think despite having tons and tons of money, the world would seem like a much more bleak place. And while Bill sits looking over his shoulder for his enemies to plot his downfall, and while his enemies sit and watch over thier shoulders for him to come along and try to destroy them, all of us here in the opensource community can sit on irc and laugh and code and just have a merry old time.:)
With all that in mind, I think in some ways you and I, here, where we can benefit from everyone else's work for free, and with the ability to give freely back to those around us, have it better than bill with his stacks of money, paranoid friends and enemies, and life of coldness and business.
Guys, I could be wrong here, but some of you have mentioned that he shouldn't have gpled his software if he wanted the money. This goes deeper than the money though. If you'll notice, he mentioned more than a couple of times that the letter had been sent out, though after his hopes had been raised, he found out that the business world didn't think him qualified enough to invest. He poured his heart and soul into something that he believed in, and redhat wanted to reward him for that, yet he now finds out, based on someone else's critia that he doesn't have what it takes to persue that reward, no matter if it turns out to be good or bad. I'm not saying that Etrade is necessarily the "big bad evil guy" here, but that they should never have been the only way for people that were sent the letter to invest. Whatever their motives are for disallowing certain people from investing, they are taking a responsibility on themselves that goes against what many people in the opensource community hold dear. I mean, no one stopped opensource developers from working on code, even if it wasn't financially the most responsible thing to do, but someone *is* willing to deny them the right to invest their money? (and again, with the motive to "protect" them?) It seems more likely that Etrade is just trying to protect thier own butt, which they are certainly entitled to do. However, both they, and redhat, should have realized that if they send out letters to developers with invitations to invest in what many think will be a garanteed "win" (which is the real motivation, to be part of the winning team), and then retract them, the situation will be *much* worse than not having sent out the letter at all. It is precieved as the author described, waving a silver carrot infront of people's faces, and then snatching it away. It might not be that the author ever expected, or even asked for the carrot to be there, but when it's offered, and then taken back, it creates hard feelings, and ones that arn't easily erased. If the business world wants to make friends in the hacker community, they had better realize that they are dealing with fairly sensitive people. (suprised? It tends to be true from most geeks I know.) It seems that this really is just the bad implementation of a good intention. Unfortunately, good intentions don't always bring about good results, or happy people. The people that this unfortunate thing did happen to, need to remember the ideals that they programmed for, that redhat doesn't define the winning team, and that really, redhat is only a small part of a much greater thing. Redhat and Etrade I'd recomend sending an apology to those people that they offended, and to try to make ammends.
You know guys, amiga released some design images of the new amiga before as well. That was over a year ago. It looked more like your standard (well, a rather curvy) tower case, with polk speakers and a 17" monitor. A year later, we've got a couple mockups of a set top type box to show for it. Now, a year ago I was rather enthusiastic about the new amiga. It *did* really sound like they were getting thier act together and were going to come out with something rather neat. Even now, it *may* work. The thing is, that this has been promised for quite a while, and while we get nice box designs, a couple faked OS "designer" images, and some vague specs, there has virtually been no hard information you can trust. It took me about a year to loose any faith I had in Amiga inc. Others have lasted a lot longer, and I don't honestly know how you do it. I'd *like* to believe this thing will become a great system, but I just can't these days. I hope they prove me wrong. Otherwise, it's not a bad looking little box, reminds me a bit of the CD32, which someone else mentioned. I wonder what the upgradibility will be for one of these? Even the 3000s had some problems with the longer cards.
Phase5 isn't exactly known for shipping products on time, or shipping them at all in some cases. (Pre/Box and A/box come to mind). However, to their credit, they have shipped accelerators for the amiga and have some of the better ones around. They also have created some of the best videocards you can get for the amiga. (too bad everything is at a pretty steep price, but what do you expect with low quantities?) When you think about it, what has Amiga Inc. Actually *done* for the amiga community lately? Alot of promises, and perhaps an update to the OS, but beyond that they've mostly just spun PR around. I think Phase5 deserves a bit more credit than what has been shown on here. They've tried and failed just like amiga has, but who knows, maybe they'll actually be able to use what they learned from the A/box and Pre/box mistakes and do it right this time. I am somewhat skeptical that either will actually come out with a product, or atleast, that it will live up to the hype, but maybe they will prove me wrong. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. It should be interesting!
Ugh, I hope you were joking. If not, he was talking about Mandrake, the Enlightenment co-developer. A person, not the distribution. (Who existed long before the linux mandrake distribution was around btw).
perhaps, but it should scale fairly well. It'll be a while before we do stuff like hardware radiosity anyway, so until then we'll just do radiosity light maps using radiance. Considering how fast 3D hardware is getting, should be able to do curved surfaces fairly easily, and some other neat stuff. The lightscape scenes on the images page looked pretty impressive!
This really makes my day.:) This brings us a step closer to getting linux boxes in the visualization lab at school. I can't wait for Maya, that would complete it, we'd pretty much go totally with new linux boxes then unless there were some major reasons not to. I love it...:)~
Just to add more fuel to the fire here, the huamn eye *can* precieve more than 30fps, but there is a bandwidth limitation on the visual cortex. What you end up getting is aprox 30fps, but with what would be the equivelant of very very good motion bluring. The reason people claim that we can see the difference between 60fps and 30fps is that your eye is bluring the 60fps giving you the impression of smoother motion. However, if you played back the same sequence at 30fps with good motion bluring, you should get the same effect. Notice that you *can* precieve 60+ fps, if you look out of the corner of your eye at a white part on your monitor you maybe able to see the flicker. This however, doesn't mean that you will be able to notice this when trying to maximize detail and focus on moving scenes. One of the most important things is to keep a consistent framerate. a constant framerate will emmerse the viewer in what he's watching. It's as if the brain likes a steady pattern. It's almost a hypnotizing effect. When you have a variable or uneven framerate, you lose that effect. another interesting thing to note is that around the edges of your vision, the relative resolution is much lower. It'd be interesting if we could utilize that with virtual reality hardware.
We've actually got about 8 of them here. they are cube boxes, your probably describing two of them stacked. Yeah, the fans are great, just like a wind tunnel.;) I just got done installing 11 on a K/380 the other day, that's a nice box too, but nothing like the Vs..:)~
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Well, we will want something to attack the RIAA, but make sure we don't hit the artist in the process. Perhaps, we could make the arguement that it's morally wrong to charge money for anything but the distribution of music, and that if your doing your own distribution that it would be wrong to take away your "right" to do that yourself. So you pay money for the first CD, the one that they distribute, and then you make your own distributions. They get the money for the work they did, you get whatever benefit/payment for the work you do. The Artist ofcourse, gets the exposure so that they can earn money through concerts. We could make a pamphlet that's backed by technology and law "experts". Maybe make a cute webpage with a little talking cartoon puppy or something, and have the RIAA take his bone away.
A. The typical computer user wants a consistent interface above everything else. The MacOS was the best operating system in this department for many years, and only lately has started to develop cracks with the introduction of things like QuickTime4. (Really a shame, though I'm not the biggest fan of macos anyway.)
B. There are *many* interfaces much simpler to use than windows. If the intent of the user for instance is simply to run a set number of programs, a Command line interface, or a gui mouse driven interface, with a list of those programs displayed on the screen is about as simple as you can get. Considering that we are talking about the "average" user, I wouldn't recommend making access to utilities to delete files readily available at all. Nearly every "average" user who has asked me for help because software stopped working on their system did so because either they A. installed software that overwrote files. B. Accidently deleted files that were ciritical to the system. or C. Changed opperating system settings that the peice of software was dependent on. Getting back to the issue of "ease", the keyboard requires less motor precesion than the mouse does to select a menu choice, so it will initially be easier for someone with no experience using a computer (or mouse) to select from a list using arrow keys. Eventually a mouse may be desired, or if the person naturally has the motor skills to use one efficently.
C. Linux certainly could very well be used on 98% of the computers that windows runs on, if you are willing to "cheat" when it comes to cloning unix in terms of the interface. If you want to get technical, linux is simply the kernel. Of course most people describe linux as the kernel plus the suite of utilities and software the often comes bundled with it. However it wouldn't necessarily be hard to make use of something like mtools, so that files on disks could be read whenever you insert them into the disk drive, nor would it be impossible to create a distribution of linux that automatically logs you in, and pops up a friendly menu with netscape, staroffice (or wordperfect), a mp3/cdaudio player, perhaps solitare. Granted, this would have the effect of taking away much of the multitasking capibilties of even windows, but you have to weigh that against simplicity. It really depends on what the end user wants. Does the average user really multitask that much? If they do, is it something they really care about, and can it be implemented in such a way as to allow users who want it to easily use it, but not be ubtrusive to users who don't? Of course, if the applications that the end user wants don't run on linux, that's another story entirely, though if you were to replace 98% of the windows market with linux anyway, you can bet that those voids would fill in fairly quickly.
D. In the next paragraph you talk about "windows" staying up as long as linux, but you reference in the same paragraph windows NT, which means I'm guessing that this is what your speaking of. Considering the Average user does NOT use windows NT, it's a non-issue. I'm also familiar with HPUX, having supported several K and V class servers at my previous job. While there are many patches you can download and apply individually, you can of course download and install the various patch sets offered on HP's support site much as you would with service packs for NT. Installing, individually, 275 patches, even on a 10.20 box is rather unecessary. We never exceeded more than 100, and often times it was applied with a patchset, not individually. I don't believe we had any 11 boxes that had nearly that many patches applied.
E. The case with dos is interesting. While you certainly had a choice of which dos you wanted to use, there are still the issues dealing with microsoft implementing code that caused windows not to run with drdos. Now, this is still up in the air, though if it indeed is true, then the end user did not have a choice as to which dos he could run, if he wanted to run windows, or any of the programs that require windows. It may be that the person didn't want windows at all, but simply wanted to run the newest version of microsoft word. This could not be accomplished without windows (possibly OS/2 as long as the program was 16bit). If windows couldn't be run without ms-dos, then they do indeed have to buy and run ms-dos to run that application. So you do indeed have the choice to run drdos in that case, but you only have that choice if you are willing to give up the peice of software you want to run. This idea, brought up in the finding of facts, (the applications barrier) describes the general situation better than I can here, and I'll leave it to the reader to make a discission regarding wether or not MS has overstepped it's bounds.
And yes, I grudgingly chose windows until in windows95 one day it's bundled backup software did the equivelant of GPF bringing the system down and destroyed a backup tape of 3 years of graphics work I had spent countless hours working on. Soon after I switched to OS/2, which I ran for about a year. Due to the lack of a good web browser (Netscape 2.02 was horribly buggy at the time, and Web expolorer just didn't cut it for me) I decided to switch to linux.
You make a couple good points as to the uses of various systems for different purposes. The highend unix's for servers for example. Windows however tries to appeal to both the novice user and the power user, and I don't believe it does so particularly well due to over simplification in certain areas of the interface for the power user, and complexities in other areas of the interface for novices. The benefit of linux in this case is that the interface is entirely and easily configurably (and legally!) by any vendor who wants to ship it.
Actually, his prices looked a bit high to me for some of the stuff I've recently bought. About 2 months ago I got a deal from www.tccomputers.com for dual celeron 400s on a bp6 with 2 fans for $229US. Granted, this was a weekend deal, but I've seen the same setup for about $260-$270 on pricewatch. At the local bestbuy type stores, they've had 17" monitors priced at $200 for a good while now. Both my mouse and keyboard were $5, and my mouse (a 3button) has lasted me about 2 years and still works beautifully. My friend recently bought a gateway PIII 550Mhz system, and the mouse cable developed problems after only a couple months. My keyboard is also one of the nicest "standard" keyboards I've used in a long time, certainly better than the imac. (I really have problems typing on the smaller form factor). Also, the mouse on the imac makes it very hard to tell if it's oriented correctly. (not to mention it's only got 1 button, and seems to cause muscles in my hand to cramp up after prolonged use.)
For being a small form factor machine, fairly well integrated, and reasonably powerful, the imac doesn't do all that bad a job. However, I think for the same amount of money you pay for the imac, you can build a good deal more powerful PC. (not quite the same thing as what the other guy was saying.)
Freeciv isn't too bad. It's obviously not everyone's cup of tea, and it's a bit behind in the graphics and sound department when you compare it to alpha centauri or Call to Power, but it's atleast enjoyable to play. Unfortunately, this is the only game that I can think of that is opensource that I've really gotten into. Golgatha could possibly be good if someone finishes it, though there hasn't been much activity lately on it from what I've seen.
Why didn't they just distribute it anyway? It's GPLed code, if they followed the rules, then it shouldn't matter what the gimp people think about it.
I actually ran windowmaker for nearly a year when E was at DR0.14. It was indeed fast, and much faster than E0.13 was (especially with neuromancer loaded). However, when I switched around DR0.15, E no longer had the lag it did at .13, and imho, was comparable to WindowMaker in terms of speed. Certain themes certainly can slow it down if they arn't designed well, especially if things like translucent window moves are also enabled. This isn't something that is forced on you in E though, and you don't need to use them if you don't want to. Over the summer, I used Enlightenment on a 486dx2/66 with 32megs of ram at work, and it was actually suprisingly responsive. Enough so that I kept it on the system. Now, maybe on your system, E wasn't as responsive as you wanted it to be, but that doesn't mean that it can't be fast. There are a lot of variables that come into play.
Simply looking at package size can be a bit misleading. Depending on how many icons and graphics you include, how big they are, and what color depth, it can drastically change those sizes. Sound files, additional programs, even graphical help files or desktop backgrounds can have a large effect. I'm not going to say either way which is more bloated, or how much bloat in each case could be removed from the code, because I really don't know. I'm partial to gnome myself for other reasons.
Hrm.. I run E with gtk themes on a P150mmx laptop with only 16megs of ram. Granted, it's not the fastest in the world due mostly to ram contrants, but if you've got 64megs of ram and a Mil2, it shouldn't be all *that* slow. Might want to make sure you've got the newest gtk and gnome stuff, it should help out. (particularly the newer gtks)
PovBench Results
You will see that the fastest system listed running NT is an Athlon 600mhz which took 47 seconds to complete the scene. A 600mhz athlon running RedHat 6.0 was reported as finishing the same scene in 37 seconds, which is roughly a 21-22% speed increase. Granted, I don't trust the povbench page, as many of the entries seem questionable. Regardless, most of the entries at the top seem to be running linux.
Nite_Hawk
Have any of you guys considered that maybe he never really was from microsoft and just said that thinking he may get better support? First things first. Microsoft would spend most of their testing time on office applications as that's where linux could potentially hit them hardest. If all of a sudden linux and star office became as viable as win95 and office (already is for me) and are free on top of it, microsoft could have some problems. Game development is a secondary issue. if linux has games, it helps linux, but it really doesn't detract anything from MS. (the people that want the games on linux likely already want to take the plung) I suppose it's possible that MS just wanted to *install* the application and the guy never had much intention to really play it, but to just see how the install process went. Perhaps the phone call was a setup to see how fast loki's tech support is. Or, perhaps the guy just thought it'd make him sound more important.
Well, my point with it being harmful was mainly dealing with if infact something supernatural is going on. That is mostly dealing with the soul, not physical harm. I'm not honestly sure what it does, or how it works, so I guess I don't know. I can only say that I personally would consider it harmful to myself if I were to practice it for whatever reason. About the thing with the relationship with god, yeah, I know how it goes. A lot of issues that have to be dealt with, and some of them require changes in the way you think. I still haven't completely given up on the idea of "god", but in the scientific community, it's not the easiest thing to do. There are a lot of questions out there, and it seems like every day you have to be ready to accept that what you currently believe might not be right. Though at the same time, "popular" science has certainly been proven wrong in the past.. Ah well, as long as people keep open minds...
It doesn't have to be, which was my point. The board itself is an inanimate object, but the way that people use them can be harmful. I'm not going to profess that I'm an expert in the realm of the supernatural, it's not something I am really intersted in. However, if you are using it to call or talk to spirits, or the devil himself, I think your openning yourself up to things (self-induced or not) that are dangerous, and most likely evil in nature. It's not something to be taken lightly. Even if your not doing anything supernatural when using it, your then fooling yourself to put your trust into the supposed abilities of an inanimate object, which in my opinion isn't that much different than calling apon an idol for favor. Take it for what you will, some will say it's a harmless action, some will say you'll burn in hell. I tend to just think it's counter productive and hurts your relationship with God.
I've been a christian all my life, and while some of your examples I do agree with, (The usage of Ouija Boards in particular) I think you've missed the point a bit when it comes to the mascot. As someone else pointed out earlier, it's an inside joke having to do with processes running on the system. A picture, or a word, or even an Ouija board in and of itself can not be evil. They are inanimate objects. We as humans like to put labels on things based on a connection with an evil action, but in and of itself, and object is just that, an object. Now, that object may be used in an evil way, and the resulting action would therefor be evil, But I think that it's a far stretch to say that the FreeBSD mascot is being used in any evil way. Rather, it's used in a constructive, and humourous fashion. One thing that we as christians need to remember, is that pride is a trap that is much easier to fall into, than say, accepting the cartoon mascot the happens to resemble a characture of what we as humans often jokingly refer to satan as.
Uh, actually, I don't see how MS having control of the *web* really killing off linux. They need both server and client control, and they'd somehow have to stop the distribution of linux, which would basically be impossible. It'd be like the government trying to monitor all internet traffic, it's just not possible right now. besides, MS needs linux, how else do they have even a chance of evading monopoly status? Apple? Os/2? Solaris?
While I agree Maya's engine is pretty good, I'll play devils advocate a bit just to say that I like radiance's rendering engine better.. ;) When we see the Maya modelling environment though, we will *really* have something to be happy about. Especially in that radiance can import from AW/Maya.. >:) So now we just need to implement photon mapping into radiance, have a Maya-like opensource modeller, and when I finish writing me ecosystem/landscape generator, oh boy oh boy! ;)
well, on the other hand this lets you do some neat stuff with say, antialiasing. with an aa depth of just 2, that 1600x1200 becomes 800x600 and so on. certainly it's not the most important feature around, but it can enhance the visual quality noticably...
You guys remember when bill got hit in the face with a pie on videotape for all the world to see? I think in some ways, we should feel some pity for bill. From what was said after the incident, he didn't take it very well. Now, many of us, myself included, would probably feel some embarassment if we were hit in the face with a pie, but could probably laugh it off. If I was the type of person that couldn't laugh that off though, I think despite having tons and tons of money, the world would seem like a much more bleak place. And while Bill sits looking over his shoulder for his enemies to plot his downfall, and while his enemies sit and watch over thier shoulders for him to come along and try to destroy them, all of us here in the opensource community can sit on irc and laugh and code and just have a merry old time. :)
With all that in mind, I think in some ways you and I, here, where we can benefit from everyone else's work for free, and with the ability to give freely back to those around us, have it better than bill with his stacks of money, paranoid friends and enemies, and life of coldness and business.
Guys, I could be wrong here, but some of you have mentioned that he shouldn't have gpled his software if he wanted the money. This goes deeper than the money though. If you'll notice, he mentioned more than a couple of times that the letter had been sent out, though after his hopes had been raised, he found out that the business world didn't think him qualified enough to invest.
He poured his heart and soul into something that he believed in, and redhat wanted to reward him for that, yet he now finds out, based on someone else's critia that he doesn't have what it takes to persue that reward, no matter if it turns out to be good or bad.
I'm not saying that Etrade is necessarily the "big bad evil guy" here, but that they should never have been the only way for people that were sent the letter to invest. Whatever their motives are for disallowing certain people from investing, they are taking a responsibility on themselves that goes against what many people in the opensource community hold dear. I mean, no one stopped opensource developers from working on code, even if it wasn't financially the most responsible thing to do, but someone *is* willing to deny them the right to invest their money? (and again, with the motive to "protect" them?) It seems more likely that Etrade is just trying to protect thier own butt, which they are certainly entitled to do. However, both they, and redhat, should have realized that if they send out letters to developers with invitations to invest in what many think will be a garanteed "win" (which is the real motivation, to be part of the winning team), and then retract them, the situation will be *much* worse than not having sent out the letter at all. It is precieved as the author described, waving a silver carrot infront of people's faces, and then snatching it away. It might not be that the author ever expected, or even asked for the carrot to be there, but when it's offered, and then taken back, it creates hard feelings, and ones that arn't easily erased. If the business world wants to make friends in the hacker community, they had better realize that they are dealing with fairly sensitive people. (suprised? It tends to be true from most geeks I know.)
It seems that this really is just the bad implementation of a good intention. Unfortunately, good intentions don't always bring about good results, or happy people. The people that this unfortunate thing did happen to, need to remember the ideals that they programmed for, that redhat doesn't define the winning team, and that really, redhat is only a small part of a much greater thing. Redhat and Etrade I'd recomend sending an apology to those people that they offended, and to try to make ammends.
Anyway, I'm done. Time to get back to work..
You know guys, amiga released some design images of the new amiga before as well. That was over a year ago. It looked more like your standard (well, a rather curvy) tower case, with polk speakers and a 17" monitor. A year later, we've got a couple mockups of a set top type box to show for it. Now, a year ago I was rather enthusiastic about the new amiga. It *did* really sound like they were getting thier act together and were going to come out with something rather neat. Even now, it *may* work. The thing is, that this has been promised for quite a while, and while we get nice box designs, a couple faked OS "designer" images, and some vague specs, there has virtually been no hard information you can trust. It took me about a year to loose any faith I had in Amiga inc. Others have lasted a lot longer, and I don't honestly know how you do it. I'd *like* to believe this thing will become a great system, but I just can't these days. I hope they prove me wrong.
Otherwise, it's not a bad looking little box, reminds me a bit of the CD32, which someone else mentioned. I wonder what the upgradibility will be for one of these? Even the 3000s had some problems with the longer cards.
Phase5 isn't exactly known for shipping products on time, or shipping them at all in some cases. (Pre/Box and A/box come to mind). However, to their credit, they have shipped accelerators for the amiga and have some of the better ones around. They also have created some of the best videocards you can get for the amiga. (too bad everything is at a pretty steep price, but what do you expect with low quantities?) When you think about it, what has Amiga Inc. Actually *done* for the amiga community lately? Alot of promises, and perhaps an update to the OS, but beyond that they've mostly just spun PR around. I think Phase5 deserves a bit more credit than what has been shown on here. They've tried and failed just like amiga has, but who knows, maybe they'll actually be able to use what they learned from the A/box and Pre/box mistakes and do it right this time. I am somewhat skeptical that either will actually come out with a product, or atleast, that it will live up to the hype, but maybe they will prove me wrong. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. It should be interesting!
Ugh, I hope you were joking. If not, he was talking about Mandrake, the Enlightenment co-developer. A person, not the distribution. (Who existed long before the linux mandrake distribution was around btw).
perhaps, but it should scale fairly well. It'll be a while before we do stuff like hardware radiosity anyway, so until then we'll just do radiosity light maps using radiance. Considering how fast 3D hardware is getting, should be able to do curved surfaces fairly easily, and some other neat stuff. The lightscape scenes on the images page looked pretty impressive!
This really makes my day. :) This brings us a step closer to getting linux boxes in the visualization lab at school. I can't wait for Maya, that would complete it, we'd pretty much go totally with new linux boxes then unless there were some major reasons not to. I love it... :)~
Just to add more fuel to the fire here, the huamn eye *can* precieve more than 30fps, but there is a bandwidth limitation on the visual cortex. What you end up getting is aprox 30fps, but with what would be the equivelant of very very good motion bluring. The reason people claim that we can see the difference between 60fps and 30fps is that your eye is bluring the 60fps giving you the impression of smoother motion. However, if you played back the same sequence at 30fps with good motion bluring, you should get the same effect. Notice that you *can* precieve 60+ fps, if you look out of the corner of your eye at a white part on your monitor you maybe able to see the flicker. This however, doesn't mean that you will be able to notice this when trying to maximize detail and focus on moving scenes. One of the most important things is to keep a consistent framerate. a constant framerate will emmerse the viewer in what he's watching. It's as if the brain likes a steady pattern. It's almost a hypnotizing effect. When you have a variable or uneven framerate, you lose that effect. another interesting thing to note is that around the edges of your vision, the relative resolution is much lower. It'd be interesting if we could utilize that with virtual reality hardware.
We've actually got about 8 of them here. they are cube boxes, your probably describing two of them stacked. Yeah, the fans are great, just like a wind tunnel. ;) I just got done installing 11 on a K/380 the other day, that's a nice box too, but nothing like the Vs.. :)~