That is because the X developers do not want to break old programs.
Consider the case where you draw a string to a window. Then you want to erase the text without altering parts of the window outside of the text, so you draw the text again, but this time using the background colour.
With X as it is at the moment, this works fine. After adding anti aliasing, you may get some artifacts after erasing the text.
There were probably similar problems with windows using antialiased text.
As well as having Multihead support, it also has the Xinerama extension. This allows you to join two screens to form a single display (a 2560x1024 display sounds nice:)
The reason the small fonts do not look as good under X windows is because it doesn't anti alias them.
It would be possible to get the X server to antialias text that is drawn with XDrawText(), but this would probably break some other applications (eg drawing the text again in the background colour to erase it may leave artifacts if antialiasing is used).
By using the freetype library directly, or rendering to a pixmap then reducing the size of the pixmap, it is possible to do antialiased text, but it is difficult.
The other option is to get a higher resolution monitor and run X in 100dpi mode:)
Have you actually tried out the latest G200 glx drivers? I did a few days back, and was very impressed. It ran quake 2 very smoothly at 640x480 (the X server was running with a 16-bit visual). I tried out q3test, and after turning down the texture detail (the game still looked very good), it also ran smoothly (same res/depth).
The best thing is that this driver will get better and faster. From what I hear, they are working on something that may allow them to use the WARP engine, which should give a good speed up. Also there are many places where the driver can be optimised.
Note that this is a beta driver, and does have bugs, and a few memory leaks (you may want to restart your X server after a few games of quake).
I am not saying that other cards will not give better performance, but the G200 gives great 2D performance, and gives fairly good 3D performance, and looks like it will improve.
If you want more information about the G200 glx drivers, go to http://www.on.openprojects.net/glx/
I just tried out the G200 GLX driver with quake 2, and was very impressed. (I have never owned a voodoo or TNT card, so am not comparing it to them -- the graphics looked very nice though).
My only gripes were that I could not change the brightness/gamma (changing the option had no effect), and I couldn't use the mouse for input (this is probably a quake thing, but it may have something to do with GL contexts -- I am not sure).
If anyone knows how to fix either of these things, I would to hear how.
Another slightly off topic question, why would someone choose a card that can render at > 100 frames per second if their monitor runs 60 or 70 Hz?
CORBA is great as a standard IPC mechanism. Rather than writing your own IPC or networking protocol, you can use a nice standard one.
I could just as easily argue that KDE's koffice does not require CORBA. They could have invented a totally new IPC mechanism for communication between components. You could of course argue that it makes sense to use a standard IPC mechanism like CORBA in this instance though (and I would not argue with you).
As you can see, you can say that CORBA is not needed for any IPC tasks.
I could turn things round and say that a new IPC mechanism is NOT needed for use with panel applets, since there is CORBA.
If people are considering releasing a program under a BSD licence, but don't want other people/corporations to make closed improvements to the program, then you have chosen the wrong licence.
There is no point getting pissed off about this kind of thing happening after the fact. If you didn't want your program closed off, then you should have released it under a licence that matches your intentions.
I use GPL for most of my packages, since it reflects my intention for future use/expansion of it.
Re:Program output GPL'd??
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 3
An example would be the cat program. After compiling it, depending on how we run it, the output may be considered a derived work.
Running it as "cat --help" would probably count as a work derived from the program. The output of "cat ~/my-text-file" would not. The reason for the wording is to stop people claiming the output of "cat cat.c" (printing out the program's own source code) is not covered by any licence.
In cases like gcc and bison, where the output contains some output that is the same for reguardless of input file (gcc's crt1.o, or bison's standard code for all parsers) and this output would reasonably be considered derived from the program, there are usually special exceptions to clear up any confusion.
Old article, and not a good one at that
on
BSD vs GPL
·
· Score: 2
This article was posted on linux today over a week ago. It was flamed then for its inaccuracies, and it will get flamed then.
I could point out the many problems with the article, but that has already been done. Take a look at the comments at Linux Today. There are a lot of interesting comments there.
No one can claim that GPL is communistic, when we have both commercial entities and cooperative groups using the licence for their produces. And a lot of the uncertainty about the clauses in the GPL, where there is uncertainty, you usually find a clarification as an exception/addition to the licence.
If we are talking about a higher level graphics API like OpenGL, going through X (using GLX) can sometimes increase speed.
Consider the situation where the opengl driver for a card needs to do a bit of non trivial preprocessing of the gl commands before sending them off to the graphics card (the extreme of this is software rendering). Now AFAIK gl is not thread safe, so this processing would occurin the same thread of execution as the program.
Now with GLX and a multi processor machine, the render preprocessing would occur in a separate process, in effect giving your program a separate render thread that could run on the other processor.
As for X connections being slow, the X protocol spec defines how information should be sent accross the network. For local connections (eg:0.0), the data can be sent using the most efficient method to the X server. If you know of a faster method than unix domain sockets/pipes, the XFree86 team may be interested in your input.
Do you have any links for info about the driver? I wouldn't mind testing out the 3D capabilities of my card (don't have windows on my machine. Don't plan on installing it).
Considering the fact that the survey specifically says not to answer Q1 if you have contributed (I think blank responses are not shown on the results page), the answers to Q1 would NOT be a good source for statistical analysis.
Why should the labor MPs vote for the GST? They were elected by people who are under the impression that labor will oppose it. You could say all that all the labor MPs and senators who were voted in had a mandate to try to prevent the GST. I guess the mandate argument only works when it is for something that you are in favour of.
The independent senators only have balance of power when the two major parties disagree. What makes you think that Harradine should not be allowed to cast his own vote, rather than being forced to vote with the liberal? (the whole point of being an independent is not following a party line)
As for blocking the budget, the method of raising the money for the budget was by selling off a profitable publically owned company (Telstra for those who don't know). The majority in the senate were against loosing control of Telstra, so they voted against it.
As for the percieved problems in the distribution of power, you will never find a totally fair political system (I think some mathematician proved it once). I don't know what the best system is, but I wouldn't discard the current system just because of this problem. There are many systems that are worse.
What is the difference from Starbuck?
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Well I know that there is a newer version of my program gnorpm (the new GUI front end that replaces glint). This one has fewer bugs, and a few changes to the web find window to make it more usable.
That's part of the truth
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
Everyone has there own motivations. I agree with RMS on a number of things. Free Software is a Good Thing (the two GNOME applications I have written are GPL'd), but there are reasons why you might want to LGPL components of the GNOME system.
For one thing, some developers may not have contributed to gnome-libs at all, if there was no chance that they could use the code they wrote for GNOME at work (I don't know of any people off hand, but it is a possibility).
If I started checking in code to gnome-libs that had standard GPL copyrights on it, or marking my modifications as being GPL'd, my code would probably be backed out, and I may also loose my account. If there was going to be a GPL'd gnome-libs, either everyone would have to agree on it, or it would be a splinter project. Neither of these options are very likely to occur.
(once again, only speaking for myself)
You couldn't be more wrong.
on
Red Hat 6.0
·
· Score: 1
It is possible for anyone to release a GPL'd copy of gnome-libs (or kdelibs for that matter). The LGPL specifically says that the licence can be changed in this direction by anyone. This would not stop you from getting the official LGPL'd release though.
If you look at the headers of gnome-libs, you will see many people claim copyright to sections of gnome-libs (a lot of us have not, and don't plan to, assigned copyright to FSF). This together with the fact that releases are not handled by the FSF means that FSF can't unilaterally change the licence on gnome-libs (the only set of librarys that are required to get the GNOME look and feel).
There are no plans to change the licence on gnome-libs to GPL. If there was, it would be discussed quite widely.
James. (one of the gnome developers -- speaking for myself only)
With all the computers I have put together, I have never been able to break the computer while the case was off. Maybe I didn't use enough force. In climates like here in Perth, leaving a fan disconnected (or if it stops) will do a lot more damage.
Over the years, I have destroyed two network cards -- one through overheating (the computer was in a room with bad ventilation and it was 40 degrees C outside. There was smoke comming out through the fan) and two by lightning, a motherboard (it was a long time ago, but I know a capacitor exploded), and a few other components.
Microsoft sinks heaps of money into software development. In all their years, they must have come up with something good right? So why not use that (and ignore all the crud).
As for document model interaction between KDE and GNOME, Miguel is planning on writing Qt/KDE bindings for bonobo, the GNOME document model. It is concievable that this could then be wrapped in KDE's OpenParts thing allowing interaction.
I would not recommend writing an app to either doc model yet, as they will both probably change more (bonobo is still being coded, and has yet to be integrated into any GNOME apps) before stabilising.
It is true that there were bugs in GNOME 1.0.0, but the increased user base also increased the number of bug reports that were comming in. The latest versions have a minimal number of bugs (lets face it -- every project has its bugs and problems), and we wouldn't have found them as quickly without the larger user base and good bug tracking system.
Your analogy to microsoft falls down since 1.0.0 is no longer the latest version -- we fixed many of the bugs (rather than denying their existance or calling them features, which MS seems to do). If projects didn't release new versions till they were completely bug free, you wouldn't see linux 2.2 yet (and many of the subsequent bugs would not have been found and fixed, because the user base would be an order of magnitude smaller).
The most common situation for this happening was when using a pixmap based theme. It was caused by a bad interaction between the GnomePixmap widget and imlib while pixmap caching was turned on.
I was under the impression that Sony made most of their playstation profits off royalties from all the games written for the platform (I know they get money for each game sold -- I assume it from licencing the base libraries), rather than the hardware itself.
So if it was possible to run playstation games on more platforms, more games would be sold and Sony would make more money. So by selling an emulator for PCs/Macs/Unix themselves, they would be expanding their custommer base.
It would also lower the entry cost for developing for the platform (a CD burner is a lot cheaper than a development model playstation -- you could probably also afford a normal playstation to test the games on with the money you saved:).
Maybe Sony is annoyed that it is not them who is profiting from the emulators. With Sony's inside knowledge, they should be able to write quite an efficient one. Such an emulator may also extend the life of a platform such as the playstation when it gets superceeded (noone still buys sega master systems, but if you could play the games on your computer, some people may consider buying the games).
There is the argument about pirating, but you get that problem with every platform (like the cartridge dumpers for older systems like Mega Drive). It is impossible to prevent piracy of this type while still allowing people to make a backup of the software they bought (which I think they should be allowed to do -- they bought a licence to use the software, not just the distribution medium).
Slashdot Mirror
That is because the X developers do not want to break old programs.
Consider the case where you draw a string to a window. Then you want to erase the text without altering parts of the window outside of the text, so you draw the text again, but this time using the background colour.
With X as it is at the moment, this works fine. After adding anti aliasing, you may get some artifacts after erasing the text.
There were probably similar problems with windows using antialiased text.
As well as having Multihead support, it also has the Xinerama extension. This allows you to join two screens to form a single display (a 2560x1024 display sounds nice :)
There is a set of nice type 1 fonts that you can use with XFree and ghostscript that suck much less.
I think the name of the package was URW-fonts or something. It was available from www.gimp.org a while back.
Using that, the standard X fonts look a lot cleaner.
The reason the small fonts do not look as good under X windows is because it doesn't anti alias them.
:)
It would be possible to get the X server to antialias text that is drawn with XDrawText(), but this would probably break some other applications (eg drawing the text again in the background colour to erase it may leave artifacts if antialiasing is used).
By using the freetype library directly, or rendering to a pixmap then reducing the size of the pixmap, it is possible to do antialiased text, but it is difficult.
The other option is to get a higher resolution monitor and run X in 100dpi mode
Have you actually tried out the latest G200 glx drivers? I did a few days back, and was very impressed. It ran quake 2 very smoothly at 640x480 (the X server was running with a 16-bit visual). I tried out q3test, and after turning down the texture detail (the game still looked very good), it also ran smoothly (same res/depth).
The best thing is that this driver will get better and faster. From what I hear, they are working on something that may allow them to use the WARP engine, which should give a good speed up. Also there are many places where the driver can be optimised.
Note that this is a beta driver, and does have bugs, and a few memory leaks (you may want to restart your X server after a few games of quake).
I am not saying that other cards will not give better performance, but the G200 gives great 2D performance, and gives fairly good 3D performance, and looks like it will improve.
If you want more information about the G200 glx drivers, go to http://www.on.openprojects.net/glx/
I just tried out the G200 GLX driver with quake 2, and was very impressed. (I have never owned a voodoo or TNT card, so am not comparing it to them -- the graphics looked very nice though).
My only gripes were that I could not change the brightness/gamma (changing the option had no effect), and I couldn't use the mouse for input (this is probably a quake thing, but it may have something to do with GL contexts -- I am not sure).
If anyone knows how to fix either of these things, I would to hear how.
Another slightly off topic question, why would someone choose a card that can render at > 100 frames per second if their monitor runs 60 or 70 Hz?
CORBA is great as a standard IPC mechanism. Rather than writing your own IPC or networking protocol, you can use a nice standard one.
I could just as easily argue that KDE's koffice does not require CORBA. They could have invented a totally new IPC mechanism for communication between components. You could of course argue that it makes sense to use a standard IPC mechanism like CORBA in this instance though (and I would not argue with you).
As you can see, you can say that CORBA is not needed for any IPC tasks.
I could turn things round and say that a new IPC mechanism is NOT needed for use with panel applets, since there is CORBA.
If people are considering releasing a program under a BSD licence, but don't want other people/corporations to make closed improvements to the program, then you have chosen the wrong licence.
There is no point getting pissed off about this kind of thing happening after the fact. If you didn't want your program closed off, then you should have released it under a licence that matches your intentions.
I use GPL for most of my packages, since it reflects my intention for future use/expansion of it.
An example would be the cat program. After compiling it, depending on how we run it, the output may be considered a derived work.
Running it as "cat --help" would probably count as a work derived from the program. The output of "cat ~/my-text-file" would not. The reason for the wording is to stop people claiming the output of "cat cat.c" (printing out the program's own source code) is not covered by any licence.
In cases like gcc and bison, where the output contains some output that is the same for reguardless of input file (gcc's crt1.o, or bison's standard code for all parsers) and this output would reasonably be considered derived from the program, there are usually special exceptions to clear up any confusion.
I could point out the many problems with the article, but that has already been done. Take a look at the comments at Linux Today. There are a lot of interesting comments there.
No one can claim that GPL is communistic, when we have both commercial entities and cooperative groups using the licence for their produces. And a lot of the uncertainty about the clauses in the GPL, where there is uncertainty, you usually find a clarification as an exception/addition to the licence.
If we are talking about a higher level graphics API like OpenGL, going through X (using GLX) can sometimes increase speed.
:0.0), the data can be sent using the most efficient method to the X server. If you know of a faster method than unix domain sockets/pipes, the XFree86 team may be interested in your input.
Consider the situation where the opengl driver for a card needs to do a bit of non trivial preprocessing of the gl commands before sending them off to the graphics card (the extreme of this is software rendering). Now AFAIK gl is not thread safe, so this processing would occurin the same thread of execution as the program.
Now with GLX and a multi processor machine, the render preprocessing would occur in a separate process, in effect giving your program a separate render thread that could run on the other processor.
As for X connections being slow, the X protocol spec defines how information should be sent accross the network. For local connections (eg
Do you have any links for info about the driver? I wouldn't mind testing out the 3D capabilities of my card (don't have windows on my machine. Don't plan on installing it).
Considering the fact that the survey specifically says not to answer Q1 if you have contributed (I think blank responses are not shown on the results page), the answers to Q1 would NOT be a good source for statistical analysis.
Why should the labor MPs vote for the GST? They were elected by people who are under the impression that labor will oppose it. You could say all that all the labor MPs and senators who were voted in had a mandate to try to prevent the GST. I guess the mandate argument only works when it is for something that you are in favour of.
The independent senators only have balance of power when the two major parties disagree. What makes you think that Harradine should not be allowed to cast his own vote, rather than being forced to vote with the liberal? (the whole point of being an independent is not following a party line)
As for blocking the budget, the method of raising the money for the budget was by selling off a profitable publically owned company (Telstra for those who don't know). The majority in the senate were against loosing control of Telstra, so they voted against it.
As for the percieved problems in the distribution of power, you will never find a totally fair political system (I think some mathematician proved it once). I don't know what the best system is, but I wouldn't discard the current system just because of this problem. There are many systems that are worse.
Well I know that there is a newer version of my program gnorpm (the new GUI front end that replaces glint). This one has fewer bugs, and a few changes to the web find window to make it more usable.
Everyone has there own motivations. I agree with RMS on a number of things. Free Software is a Good Thing (the two GNOME applications I have written are GPL'd), but there are reasons why you might want to LGPL components of the GNOME system.
For one thing, some developers may not have contributed to gnome-libs at all, if there was no chance that they could use the code they wrote for GNOME at work (I don't know of any people off hand, but it is a possibility).
If I started checking in code to gnome-libs that had standard GPL copyrights on it, or marking my modifications as being GPL'd, my code would probably be backed out, and I may also loose my account. If there was going to be a GPL'd gnome-libs, either everyone would have to agree on it, or it would be a splinter project. Neither of these options are very likely to occur.
(once again, only speaking for myself)
It is possible for anyone to release a GPL'd copy of gnome-libs (or kdelibs for that matter). The LGPL specifically says that the licence can be changed in this direction by anyone. This would not stop you from getting the official LGPL'd release though.
If you look at the headers of gnome-libs, you will see many people claim copyright to sections of gnome-libs (a lot of us have not, and don't plan to, assigned copyright to FSF). This together with the fact that releases are not handled by the FSF means that FSF can't unilaterally change the licence on gnome-libs (the only set of librarys that are required to get the GNOME look and feel).
There are no plans to change the licence on gnome-libs to GPL. If there was, it would be discussed quite widely.
James. (one of the gnome developers -- speaking for myself only)
I wonder how well it works if I use a mirror (or maybe even a smooth single colour surface) as the mouse pad?
With all the computers I have put together, I have never been able to break the computer while the case was off. Maybe I didn't use enough force.
In climates like here in Perth, leaving a fan disconnected (or if it stops) will do a lot more damage.
Over the years, I have destroyed two network cards -- one through overheating (the computer was in a room with bad ventilation and it was 40 degrees C outside. There was smoke comming out through the fan) and two by lightning, a motherboard (it was a long time ago, but I know a capacitor exploded), and a few other components.
Are you thinking of OctobrX? He is the themes.org site owner. In any case, if you hate the people running a site so much, why do you bother returning?
Microsoft sinks heaps of money into software development. In all their years, they must have come up with something good right? So why not use that (and ignore all the crud).
As for document model interaction between KDE and GNOME, Miguel is planning on writing Qt/KDE bindings for bonobo, the GNOME document model. It is concievable that this could then be wrapped in KDE's OpenParts thing allowing interaction.
I would not recommend writing an app to either doc model yet, as they will both probably change more (bonobo is still being coded, and has yet to be integrated into any GNOME apps) before stabilising.
It is true that there were bugs in GNOME 1.0.0, but the increased user base also increased the number of bug reports that were comming in. The latest versions have a minimal number of bugs (lets face it -- every project has its bugs and problems), and we wouldn't have found them as quickly without the larger user base and good bug tracking system.
Your analogy to microsoft falls down since 1.0.0 is no longer the latest version -- we fixed many of the bugs (rather than denying their existance or calling them features, which MS seems to do). If projects didn't release new versions till they were completely bug free, you wouldn't see linux 2.2 yet (and many of the subsequent bugs would not have been found and fixed, because the user base would be an order of magnitude smaller).
The most common situation for this happening was when using a pixmap based theme. It was caused by a bad interaction between the GnomePixmap widget and imlib while pixmap caching was turned on.
This problem has been fixed with this release.
I was under the impression that Sony made most of their playstation profits off royalties from all the games written for the platform (I know they get money for each game sold -- I assume it from licencing the base libraries), rather than the hardware itself.
:).
So if it was possible to run playstation games on more platforms, more games would be sold and Sony would make more money. So by selling an emulator for PCs/Macs/Unix themselves, they would be expanding their custommer base.
It would also lower the entry cost for developing for the platform (a CD burner is a lot cheaper than a development model playstation -- you could probably also afford a normal playstation to test the games on with the money you saved
Maybe Sony is annoyed that it is not them who is profiting from the emulators. With Sony's inside knowledge, they should be able to write quite an efficient one. Such an emulator may also extend the life of a platform such as the playstation when it gets superceeded (noone still buys sega master systems, but if you could play the games on your computer, some people may consider buying the games).
There is the argument about pirating, but you get that problem with every platform (like the cartridge dumpers for older systems like Mega Drive). It is impossible to prevent piracy of this type while still allowing people to make a backup of the software they bought (which I think they should be allowed to do -- they bought a licence to use the software, not just the distribution medium).