Presumably "simply" isn't the right adjective, because it implies that converting from Direct3D to OpenGL is the better way of doing things
No, it only implies simplicity and simplicity in and of itself does pose no implied quality -- something can be done simply, but it may still be the inferior choice in the long run as opposed to a more complex solution.
- what's the problem with converting Direct3D commands to OpenGL? Slow?
To put it short: yes. The arguments passed to D3D functions, for example, may be of different formats, number and lengths than those passed to OpenGL and therefore will require translation in the middle, ie. several extra steps. Obviously having to do extra steps in-between will result in a performance hit.
Well, things are getting better with uploads at least. Not terribly useful, but way more than before for uploading backups. Welho's 100M connection has 10M up, 350M connection has 30 up.
Also you can get 100Mbit upload for both for double price (at least this was the case when these had still DNA branding, +49,90e for 100M. A bit pricey but not _too_bad if you need upload bw).
Have you noticed the coverage area? Those are available in the capital, that's it. Doesn't help the rest of the country in the least.
Here in Finland it's not the amount of data transferred that is the problem, it's the upload speeds that limit you. I mean, would anyone really consider a HDD with only 1mbps write speeds terribly useful? No? Then no, Dropbox et.al. won't replace traditional storage no matter how much they'd like to.
The big thing with stuff like Dropbox/Google Drive is that you can take a photo with your fun, have it automatically upload itself to the cloud, and then all your other devices automatically synchronise with it. Doing that with a physical drive requires extra effort. Seamlessness is what Dropbox offers.
Pretty much the only thing I keep on dropbox is an encrypted Keepass file - but it means that whether I add a password to it at work, on my mobile, or at home, I have access to it at any of those places in the future.
I use ownCloud for that, myself; the hardware is all mine so I don't have to worry about a 3rd party accessing my files, I can have as much storage as I can be arsed to buy, I don't have to pay anyone anything for it and so on. The only downside is that I am limited by my upload speeds, but alas, that haven't yet been an issue.
And before anyone claims Sony doesn't do this already, you've already got little promotional boxes and ads after you've booted up and automatically logged into your PSN on your PS3.
I didn't even know there were ads on the PS3, but after some googling it would seem that in some cases there are. I've never seen that myself, though.
Quick, name the religion of the 5 biggest perpetrators of mass murder in human history.
Does the whole church count as a mass-murderer in this case? E.g. the Crusades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades ) caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
The method is simple: Find a link to torrent, check it for copyright violation and try to download registering IPs of peers in process.
Alas, not everyone is necessarily sharing, and in many countries just the act of downloading copyrighted material without sharing it is not illegal or constitutes a copyright violation. It is, for example, possible to download from BitTorrent like this, though not many people seem to know how.
People say that all the time, but if you know of a country that offers citizens stronger assurances and greater practical liberties, we'd love to hear about it. (Preferably, those liberties should extend to immigrants as well as natives.)
Besides, content publishing codecs like this are completely unsuitable for production work. After only a generation or two the artifacts would render an alpha channel effectively useless for production quality.
You do realize there's a lossless-mode in VP9? There are no worries with artifacting.
Great, so it's the fault of the manufacturers. But seeing as VP9 takes several times more processing power to decode in software than VP8, which would you serve up to a mobile phone: h265 that has hardware decode or VP9 that provides the exact same video quality/size but will choke on playback even as the battery life drops by the second?
Oh, we have an oracle here, someone who can predict before-hand that there won't be hardware with VP9-support. That's nice. As for the question: I would obviously choose the one with H/W-support, whichever one it was.
x264, the open-source H264 encoder, is the best video encoder on the planet. x264 gives the best quality for filesize. x264 gives the best quality for encoding speed. x264 gives the best quality for low latency streaming. x264 does it all, and does it fantastically well.
x264 is free. x264 does NOT come from the NSA R+D division we know as Google.
Aaaand all that is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if x264 is open-source, it's still patent-encumbered. In any country where the H.264 - patents are valid x264 is infringing on them.
VP8 is really slow. Unknown if reason is lack of hardware support or if codec is actually poorly designed.
Do you mean compression or decompression? VP8's compression-end of things is slow by design -- more work is done at the compression-phase so that the decompression can be sped up and tests have shown several times now that decompressing VP8 is actually a bit faster and less resource-heavy than decompressing H.264, if done on the CPU. Now, neither AMD or NVIDIA provide VP8 decompression - support, so obviously H/W - accelerated H.264 will be faster, but that's not the fault of the codec, it's the fault of the manufacturers.
Then change what you do if you can. If you feel the brands were secretly helping the gov try:
Alas, I am a nerd; I do not associate myself with the average folk, I do not support their hobbies or views, I do not endorse their idols, and for all these things I am considered an outlier, someone they cannot relate with. This, quite obviously, creates an effect where it seems like there's a firewall between me and everyone else -- no matter what I say or how I say it, it really has no effect and no one listens to me, the message never seems to get through. This is exactly what I was saying with my previous comment: there's a bubble between them and between you, and the harder you push the stronger the bubble gets and sooner or later nothing you say will get through at all.
To be honest, I feel all this will amount to some huffing and puffing at first, but in the end nothing will really change and the Average Jane and Joe will just live happily knowing their government is doing all this to stop those evil terrorists. They simply have no reason to believe anything to the contrary.
Interesting opinion. I think Windows is just a mess. You mention Ssh. In Linux Ssh is already installed and all you need is to enter "ssh-add". Even if Ssh would not be installed, just do "yum install open-ssh" and you good to go. Last time I spend hours in Windows to setup Ssh and it's still no way convenient as in Linux.
Hours?:S Installing freeSSHd or something takes like 3 minutes, including downloading the package and configuring the settings. Not that I would want to use Windows as an SSH-server myself, but each to their own, I guess.
Under Windows, not only you have to go to Oracle, accept some licenses, install some "updater app", then Java is still not working because the entry in the PATH is missing. You have to navigate in this tiny little dialog to add your path.
You can hardly blame the OS for the fact that Oracle sucks, though. Alas, I agree with your point.
When I restart Windows then I'm greeted with at least 5 update apps. Java, Hp, and some other stupid popups. In Linux I just get a full working desktop without any updater apps or popup annoyances. (no I have no viruses it's just the usual programs that always on autostart in Windows).
Why do you keep all of them running on start?
The GUI of Windows is still years behind Gnome or KDE, or even Xfce. No tabs in Explorer? No multiple desktops? Try to remap your Control Key. Try to switch languages (for the whole desktop and all apps). etc. etc. it's just amateurish and lacks a lot of features of a modern Linux desktop.
I've never needed tabs in Explorer myself nor have I found it useful in Nautilus or Dolphin, I prefer to open file-managers in multiple windows. Also, I haven't found myself wanting multiple desktops, either, though there are multiple utilities for Windows that do add that feature. Haven't had a need to remap keys, either. Switching languages only works in Windows 7 Ultimate or earlier Windows - versions which I find silly.
I use Windows primarily for gaming myself, too, but even without games I still wouldn't have any wish to run Linux on my desktop. It's just too much of a mess to my taste. I do programming and the kinds via SSH or inside a VM and all the other stuff that I generally do runs just fine under Windows, too, without all the aggravation wrt. running Linux.
if a program cannot build easily on a standard linux machine, its not going to be adopted by hundred of millions of people and its not going to topple an installed standard with a huge userbase
Average Janes and Joes won't be installing from sources, you know?
get the thing to compile out of the box or dont ship it. a simple philosophy. we have cmake, autoconf, scons, choose your poison
Compiling Firefox doesn't work "out of the box" either, yet people are happily using it. You do need to install all the dependencies, like e.g. a huge amount of devel-versions of packages to compile such, it sure ain't "out of the box" then. It ain't no different with Wayland at all.
I was personally thinking of all the various settings relating to looks and themes: there's like 10 different places where to look for, some of the dialogs are split into tabs, some are behind buttons that open new modal dialogs, some overuse drop-down lists, there's no explanation anywhere for what everything actually does and heck, even something as simple as installation of new themes is completely broken -- in some places it opens up a dialog that can download and install themes from the Internet or install from local files, some dialogs only allow for installation from local files, some dialogs allow for adding the configuration files for the theme to be added to the list, but actual installation of the theme must be done on the command-line and so on.
KDE really, really needs some professional UI-designers to consolidate settings, how and what is presented to the user and to work on making everything work consistently.
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What is this, a high school paper?
No, a high-school paper would imply at least some sort of quality control.
Presumably "simply" isn't the right adjective, because it implies that converting from Direct3D to OpenGL is the better way of doing things
No, it only implies simplicity and simplicity in and of itself does pose no implied quality -- something can be done simply, but it may still be the inferior choice in the long run as opposed to a more complex solution.
- what's the problem with converting Direct3D commands to OpenGL? Slow?
To put it short: yes. The arguments passed to D3D functions, for example, may be of different formats, number and lengths than those passed to OpenGL and therefore will require translation in the middle, ie. several extra steps. Obviously having to do extra steps in-between will result in a performance hit.
Well, things are getting better with uploads at least. Not terribly useful, but way more than before for uploading backups. Welho's 100M connection has 10M up, 350M connection has 30 up.
Also you can get 100Mbit upload for both for double price (at least this was the case when these had still DNA branding, +49,90e for 100M. A bit pricey but not _too_bad if you need upload bw).
Have you noticed the coverage area? Those are available in the capital, that's it. Doesn't help the rest of the country in the least.
Here in Finland it's not the amount of data transferred that is the problem, it's the upload speeds that limit you. I mean, would anyone really consider a HDD with only 1mbps write speeds terribly useful? No? Then no, Dropbox et.al. won't replace traditional storage no matter how much they'd like to.
That I can host my own server for.
http://owncloud.org/
Synchronization.
The big thing with stuff like Dropbox/Google Drive is that you can take a photo with your fun, have it automatically upload itself to the cloud, and then all your other devices automatically synchronise with it. Doing that with a physical drive requires extra effort. Seamlessness is what Dropbox offers.
Pretty much the only thing I keep on dropbox is an encrypted Keepass file - but it means that whether I add a password to it at work, on my mobile, or at home, I have access to it at any of those places in the future.
I use ownCloud for that, myself; the hardware is all mine so I don't have to worry about a 3rd party accessing my files, I can have as much storage as I can be arsed to buy, I don't have to pay anyone anything for it and so on. The only downside is that I am limited by my upload speeds, but alas, that haven't yet been an issue.
And before anyone claims Sony doesn't do this already, you've already got little promotional boxes and ads after you've booted up and automatically logged into your PSN on your PS3.
I didn't even know there were ads on the PS3, but after some googling it would seem that in some cases there are. I've never seen that myself, though.
Quick, name the religion of the 5 biggest perpetrators of mass murder in human history.
Does the whole church count as a mass-murderer in this case? E.g. the Crusades ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades ) caused the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
The method is simple: Find a link to torrent, check it for copyright violation and try to download registering IPs of peers in process.
Alas, not everyone is necessarily sharing, and in many countries just the act of downloading copyrighted material without sharing it is not illegal or constitutes a copyright violation. It is, for example, possible to download from BitTorrent like this, though not many people seem to know how.
People say that all the time, but if you know of a country that offers citizens stronger assurances and greater practical liberties, we'd love to hear about it. (Preferably, those liberties should extend to immigrants as well as natives.)
Finland. Nuff said.
The fact that the Navy blasted XBONE ( http://www.navytimes.com/article/20130614/OFFDUTY02/306140030 ) is probably the biggest reason Microsoft took such a drastic 180, not us regular consumers.
Besides, content publishing codecs like this are completely unsuitable for production work. After only a generation or two the artifacts would render an alpha channel effectively useless for production quality.
You do realize there's a lossless-mode in VP9? There are no worries with artifacting.
Great, so it's the fault of the manufacturers. But seeing as VP9 takes several times more processing power to decode in software than VP8, which would you serve up to a mobile phone: h265 that has hardware decode or VP9 that provides the exact same video quality/size but will choke on playback even as the battery life drops by the second?
Oh, we have an oracle here, someone who can predict before-hand that there won't be hardware with VP9-support. That's nice. As for the question: I would obviously choose the one with H/W-support, whichever one it was.
x264, the open-source H264 encoder, is the best video encoder on the planet. x264 gives the best quality for filesize. x264 gives the best quality for encoding speed. x264 gives the best quality for low latency streaming. x264 does it all, and does it fantastically well.
x264 is free. x264 does NOT come from the NSA R+D division we know as Google.
Aaaand all that is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if x264 is open-source, it's still patent-encumbered. In any country where the H.264 - patents are valid x264 is infringing on them.
VP8 is really slow. Unknown if reason is lack of hardware support or if codec is actually poorly designed.
Do you mean compression or decompression? VP8's compression-end of things is slow by design -- more work is done at the compression-phase so that the decompression can be sped up and tests have shown several times now that decompressing VP8 is actually a bit faster and less resource-heavy than decompressing H.264, if done on the CPU. Now, neither AMD or NVIDIA provide VP8 decompression - support, so obviously H/W - accelerated H.264 will be faster, but that's not the fault of the codec, it's the fault of the manufacturers.
The good, ol' "It doesn't affect me, therefore it is irrelevant!" - argument. You do realize how silly and short-sighted an argument that is?
Then change what you do if you can. If you feel the brands were secretly helping the gov try:
Alas, I am a nerd; I do not associate myself with the average folk, I do not support their hobbies or views, I do not endorse their idols, and for all these things I am considered an outlier, someone they cannot relate with. This, quite obviously, creates an effect where it seems like there's a firewall between me and everyone else -- no matter what I say or how I say it, it really has no effect and no one listens to me, the message never seems to get through. This is exactly what I was saying with my previous comment: there's a bubble between them and between you, and the harder you push the stronger the bubble gets and sooner or later nothing you say will get through at all.
To be honest, I feel all this will amount to some huffing and puffing at first, but in the end nothing will really change and the Average Jane and Joe will just live happily knowing their government is doing all this to stop those evil terrorists. They simply have no reason to believe anything to the contrary.
This is what I was going to suggest myself, too!
Interesting opinion. I think Windows is just a mess. You mention Ssh. In Linux Ssh is already installed and all you need is to enter "ssh-add". Even if Ssh would not be installed, just do "yum install open-ssh" and you good to go. Last time I spend hours in Windows to setup Ssh and it's still no way convenient as in Linux.
Hours? :S Installing freeSSHd or something takes like 3 minutes, including downloading the package and configuring the settings. Not that I would want to use Windows as an SSH-server myself, but each to their own, I guess.
Under Windows, not only you have to go to Oracle, accept some licenses, install some "updater app", then Java is still not working because the entry in the PATH is missing. You have to navigate in this tiny little dialog to add your path.
You can hardly blame the OS for the fact that Oracle sucks, though. Alas, I agree with your point.
When I restart Windows then I'm greeted with at least 5 update apps. Java, Hp, and some other stupid popups. In Linux I just get a full working desktop without any updater apps or popup annoyances. (no I have no viruses it's just the usual programs that always on autostart in Windows).
Why do you keep all of them running on start?
The GUI of Windows is still years behind Gnome or KDE, or even Xfce. No tabs in Explorer? No multiple desktops? Try to remap your Control Key. Try to switch languages (for the whole desktop and all apps). etc. etc. it's just amateurish and lacks a lot of features of a modern Linux desktop.
I've never needed tabs in Explorer myself nor have I found it useful in Nautilus or Dolphin, I prefer to open file-managers in multiple windows. Also, I haven't found myself wanting multiple desktops, either, though there are multiple utilities for Windows that do add that feature. Haven't had a need to remap keys, either. Switching languages only works in Windows 7 Ultimate or earlier Windows - versions which I find silly.
I use Windows primarily for gaming myself, too, but even without games I still wouldn't have any wish to run Linux on my desktop. It's just too much of a mess to my taste. I do programming and the kinds via SSH or inside a VM and all the other stuff that I generally do runs just fine under Windows, too, without all the aggravation wrt. running Linux.
if a program cannot build easily on a standard linux machine, its not going to be adopted by hundred of millions of people and its not going to topple an installed standard with a huge userbase
Average Janes and Joes won't be installing from sources, you know?
get the thing to compile out of the box or dont ship it. a simple philosophy. we have cmake, autoconf, scons, choose your poison
Compiling Firefox doesn't work "out of the box" either, yet people are happily using it. You do need to install all the dependencies, like e.g. a huge amount of devel-versions of packages to compile such, it sure ain't "out of the box" then. It ain't no different with Wayland at all.
I have never seen a good argument for this.
Read the article, then.
Why not fix X?
The simplest and most obvious answer: it's easier and faster to just not bother and start from scratch.
I was personally thinking of all the various settings relating to looks and themes: there's like 10 different places where to look for, some of the dialogs are split into tabs, some are behind buttons that open new modal dialogs, some overuse drop-down lists, there's no explanation anywhere for what everything actually does and heck, even something as simple as installation of new themes is completely broken -- in some places it opens up a dialog that can download and install themes from the Internet or install from local files, some dialogs only allow for installation from local files, some dialogs allow for adding the configuration files for the theme to be added to the list, but actual installation of the theme must be done on the command-line and so on.
KDE really, really needs some professional UI-designers to consolidate settings, how and what is presented to the user and to work on making everything work consistently.