If it had been microsoft I would have felt the same way. For the same reason we protect the KKKs freedom of speach I would also support a very harsh punishment for the person if they did it to MS.
I don't like MS personally but that is also not an excuse to attack them. I want opensource to win in the long term fair and square. These attacks are pathetic no matter who they are done against.
Well when you start doing webapps instead of just webpages you will see how much IE bites. Netscape may not have all the rendering right but dealing with it server side is far better then IE. Ie lies about support content types, ignores the http/1.1 caching directive headers and many other issues. It really bites when you click on an item on the page and the page does not change because IE cached it despite being told not to.
I even went to microsoft.com and found the headers that tell IE not to cache in their knowledge base and it still does. You see the problem is IE is a very broken browser and caches by url so when you are doing stuff purely server side so you can change the page without changing the url IE will often show the wrong version.
IE iimplemented the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 spec very badly and it causes me many problems because they can't build a working web browser.
I have explained to many customers what the problem is and none have had a problem using netscape, mozilla, netscape 6, or konqueror to work with the web apps.
Despite what many think IE is not making the web more content rich it is holding it back. You can do things server side to completely replace frames, make 100% spec pages that render beautifully on everything except for IE which will ignore much of it because of its stupid caching issues.
That is why there are very few web programmers because they get sick and tired of dealing with IE and all of the crap it causes.
They can't do that. MS was convicted of being a monopoly under US law. They have appealed the penalty but not the ruling. As such they still operate under monopoly regulations. If they tie their browser to their server like that the company will face heavy monotary fines or may ever have its corporate charter revoked.
You also forget MS is nothing compared to IBM. Check out where the real influence is and the market is showing that. More companies are adopting linux becuase of IBMs influence. This would be a direct attack on IBM and would most likely blow up in MS's face.
That is why for web work I use zope. I can assign acl on a per function basic in my python code. It would slow it down if I did it on everything however if judiciously used you can make solutions near impossible to crack.
I would love to have zope type acl capabilities in linux and am happy that a group is working on it to replace this user/group/world thing.
Check out the kind of security problems zope has had. Almost every one is actually an admin error that got "fixed" so others could not make that mistake. Ie making things essentially suid root. I think if linux had full ACLs with very find grain control and large list sizes the security problems in linux would drop like a rock.
I think many overlook it not because it is not used as much but because no one makes a big deal out of its use. Zope is a good example of this. It is used in some very large organizations and it is a very powerful product. Many still confuse it with a web server though when in reality that is only the smallest part of its capabilities. What it really is good for is publishing python objects to the web, other servers via xml-rpc and other number of other things.
I know a lot who use python because it gets the job done cleanly and efficiently however they rarely make a big deal out of which tool they used and most don't care what the solutions was coded in since it works pretty much without fail. Kind of how some people don't know their servers run unix because they have never had a need to know but everyone who has a windows server pretty much knows it because the server calls attention to itself.
Do to the structure of python code tends to be designed rather then hacked together which in the end gives better running programs that have fewer bugs and are more modular, thus easier to fix and extend.
XForms look very impressive and coupled with DOM3, CSS3, XHTML 1.1, and SVG some very impressive apps could be made making the web far richer then it is now.
Too bad browsers won't adhere to standards. Well at least not most of them. There are so many things that could be done on web pages right now that would make them very rich. Unfortunately Mozilla would be about the only browser that could then render the page.
Actually both Mandrake and Suse are making money with linux. Suse closed out most of their USA office because that one office was not very profitable and are concentrating mainly in europe.
Also look at zope by digital creations. That is open source and they do make a profit off of it. In fact it is far better now and used by more people then it was when it was closed.
So stop spreading FUD troll. In just about all environments most businesss go out of business for having bad business models. Open Source stuff is no different. Most companies tried to sell on hype rather then a real service and they are dieing. Just like any brick and mortar store that would try the same thing.
Guess that means don't even drive down a mountain with a truck behind you. It keeps applying it breaks to slow down the breaks blow and it comes barreling down at you. Meanwhile you keep going at the same speed and get smashed by the truck.
Hard speed limits are not good since there are many situations in which you have to move faster to be safe.
Re:Artificial Black Holes
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
I want the first person who tries to make an artifcial black hole hauled off and shot. The second person would pray to have the fate of the first person. I am not sure if most people understand the danger of an artifical black hole.
Black holes do damage through tidal forces the smaller they are they more damaging they are to the immediate area. Also there is not way to control it. There is nothing that can hold it in one place. If you try to hold it then you feed it mass and it gets bigger. Right now with our tech if you make a black hole the world is over. The thing will eat the entire planet in fairly short order and as it undertakes simple harmonic motion through the earths core growing as it goes.
IE this is a one way death sentence. If they want to experiment with artificial black hole at least do it around the orbit of pluto. Then if we fsck up there we will have time to leave the solar system. Still not a good option but a better one.
Too many people confuse ease of use on a mac with ease of learning. A mac is easy to learn and easy for very simple tasks however for complex tasks I find it far harder then any unix.
I have had times where the mac would not intialize the nic in 100TX mode and found no way to force it to do so in the OS. Or install a modm that it will not detect. I did not find any utility in the OS to make it do what I wanted without any questions.
Macs and Windows machines operate under the asusmption that the user does not know what they are doing. Unix assumes the user is always right. If you put in the time to understand how unix works it is easier to use then the others because it won't ask questions about things. You just tell it to do something and it will. With this power though comes a lot of responsibility.
I spent a while setting up my boxes, more then what it would take to set up a windows or mac machines, however in the last two years the only time they have ever gone down is to have new hardware or kernels put in them. They have been very low maintenance boxes. They check automatically for signed updates to the os I have already locked them down etc etc. I find my boxes to be very easy to use because I don't have to think about the underlying os all the time I know it will just keep working no matter what I do.
If I forget one of my virtual desktops has 20 apps open on it no big deal the os can take it just fine. Vi is probably the best app to exemplify this idea. It is a pain to learn to use. However once learned it is very easy to use and very fast. Emacs is the same way.
Since I have to spend most of my time working on computers, fixing them, securing them etc, it is worth it to me to put the time in now to really learn the tools to use them to the best of my ability.
GUI environments are nice but slow to do things. Think of how long it takes you to explain something to a person using pictures vs text. Maybe it is just that I don't think graphically but I can do things far faster by typing in commands then I can by using a gui for most applications. I have never met a person yet doing regular sys admin stuff via a gui that I could not beat.
What I have noticed among friends who have linux is that most are not into games like quake. Instead they own games like RailRoad Tycoon 2, Civ:CTP, Heroes 3 etc all purchased from loki games. All those programs have worked flawlessly on all the boxes I have tried. What I have seen is strategy games are far more popular on linux then twitch action games. I think it is just a different kind of market. Most of the people I know that use linux tend to be a lot more savy about computers and many are programmers. In that group thought games do better then twitch games.
What ID got was the people who decided to use linux because it is cool but who really know nothing about it. Since they were not tech savy they did not know how to set things up and thus support costs were higher for it. Honestly in any sales system you have to know your market. Considering the difficulty right now of setting up 3d graphics in linux they should not have marketted a twitch game on linux.
However this does not mean the linux game market is dead by any means. It just means that games have to be marketed more carefully. Windows is a huge market so the odds are any program will find a niche somewhere. Linux is smaller and also more specialized so mismarketing a product can be a killer.
Look at all the.com s that failed because they mistargeted their market. It was not that the internet was a bad place to do business which some assumed it was that they were trying to sell to a demographic that was very rare to find on the internet and those that were there were targetted badly enough they felt insulted by the site.
Reply I found IE is often the cause of netscape crashes. If you can install an original Win95 and apply service pack 1. This will not include IE. The run netscape 4.76 it should be very stable. After running that for a while install a new IE and watch netscape start crashing. You can not do this test on a new version of windows because they include IE. I think much of the stability problems with netscape on windows are IE. Under linux I have seen a different problems. Under linux netscape seems to do synchronous dns. So when a dns request locks up the whole app does. What I found fixed that and many other problems while making things run faster and use less memory is to use squid. I turn off the caches on all browsers I have netscape, konqueror, mozilla, netscape 6, and opera then set them to run through the squid cache. That gives me one big cache to share between all browers which is more efficient and it is very good at what it does. So in 12 megs of ram it does better at caching then netscape does in 16 or more. Also squid and reiserfs are very sweet together. There has been a lot of optimization between them. Thus browsers of any kind very rarely crash on my linux boxes and they run very fast.
What I have found out is IE is no where near as standards compliant as many think it is. I learned C++ and python far before I learned html. When I went to learn html I picked up the w3c html 4.01 and CSS2 specs and learned from those. Strangely enough netscape was displaying the pages with almost no problems and ie was broken as hell. However the pages validated as 100% compliant.
What I have found is paying lipservice to the spec which most html writers do tends to work better in ie then netscape. When you actually rely 100% on spec netscape does a better job then ie. Many of the CSS changes I would make showed up fine in netscape 4.7x but were broken badly in all versions of ie. To those of you who think IE 5 on the mac is 100% CSS1 compliant you are full of shit. My stylesheet and code have both qualified as 100% compliant and it had a very wrong rendering of it.
The more I write webpages the more I hate the thought of IE. Where I work all day on something it views fine in Konqueror, Mozilla nightly, Netscape 6 and Netscape 4.7x and breaks horribly in any version of IE. The closer I adhere to specs the more IE breaks. I hope MS gets nailed to the fscking wall during the court case.
What I do is set memory and disk cache to 0 on all browsers and use squid. That has worked a lot faster then any of the browsers caches every has. Since I have a raid I just made it a 400 meg cache. I have not ever seen a problem of loading old pages. It runs very fast. Also strangely enough netscape with no cache running through a proxy is more stable. One reason I think is that 4.x can't do async dns requests which squid will do for it.
Re:Still closed drivers
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 1
However they do crash for me when running and writing opengl apps. Also restarting x is just hiding the problem not fixing it. I don't think it is okay for software to fail ever with the exception of hardware error. There are lots of software I am upset with. Thankfully opensource seems to be very into fixing these problems.
This new card may be nice but I still will not support nvidia till they open their drivers. Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux. Yeah it is nice they are fast but not at the cost of stability. I also don't like binary only kernel mods. I have no idea what might be in that driver and what it might do in the kernel. Also when updating kernels that driver break a lot since it is binary only. If it were open it would probably work a lot better.
Look at the sblive for an example of this. In the beginning it was closed and a pain in the ass to get working under linux. There were kernel version mismatches etc. When they opnened the driver it progressed much faster and it got incorporated into the kernel. Now the sblive is one of the best cards to get for linux since it is supported by every major dist out of the box. In some dists they even use the alsa driver instead of the oss one which is even more capable.
I am not going to get locked into nvidias way of doing things again. When I bought the card they had announcements about how they were going to open their drivers. This did not happen. My next card is going to be an ATI, Matrox, or 3DFX. I am waiting a bit on the radeon till I see the open drivers for them. However the matrox cards and 3dfx cards do have open drivers. I do like 3d but I like stability more and the box with the g200 here has never crashed in x. The nvidia geforce box crashes a lot more often then that.
So please even if you like their hardware don't support them till they open the drivers. In the long run it will help us a lot more. Teaching companies that drivers alone are not enough.
The game client is not trusted. We decided a while ago that we will only send data to clients that your character can perceive. So yes we will be doing los calculations. So if someone is invisible you won't see them. If they are sneaking behind you very quitely you won't see them. However if you hear them something will show up there indicating a sound. As you skills improve you might know what kind of creature it is by the sound of it.
I don't think this is quite as hard as some people make it out to be. It will certainly be challenge as as cpu speeds increase hopefully this will become less of an issue.
When I first opened konqueror on kde2 I was very impressed. It is a fast browser. The kde folks are really doing well on this one. I figure in a few more months they will have most of the rest of the display bugs worked out.
You must not have used konqueror recently. I have been using CSS on my website and it does about the best job of any of the browsers so far at displaying the CSS. I validated both the page and the CSS using validator.w3.org and konqueror most correctly renders it. Konqueror however does still have some table issues that are being addressed. Considering how good this browser has gotten in this short of a time span I can't complain. It is fairly stable, fast, and standards compliant. It needs more work in places but I now use it almost exclusively. IE is just not an option since I don't have windows. Couldn't justifty the cost of continuing to use it when all the work I have to do is done on unix type boxes.
One way to reduce netscape memory, speed it up and reduce the crashes is to use squid. I now set up squid locally on all of my boxes to have them be the web cache. It works really well and squid is a lot faster and better at caching then netscape is. You can even set the caches up to talk to each other if they are on a fast network to make it even more efficient.
I am using linux 2.4.0test7 + reiserfs + ingo's low latency patch + promise ATA-100 patch support. On a K6-2 500 with 128 megs of ram I can unzip at least 2 kernels at a time without causing xmms to skip and it has about 128kb buffer. I can get the load up to at least 20 on my system with no audio skipping. I did a make -j on the kernel and the audio never broke up. Of course due to the vm bug in 2.4test7 when it ran out of vm it pretty much locked up but that is what I get for using a devel kernel;)
Ingo's low latency patches make a huge difference. However they will not be incorporated into the kernel until cleaned up more. That is something both Ingo and Linus agreed on.
Okay here is the strange thing. Between windows 98 and Mandrake 7.1 my USB logitech mouse works better in mandrake. It detected the mouse just fine and all the buttons work in x including the wheel. In windows however the mouse turns off every so often. I then have to unplug it and plug it back in again. I have never seen this behavior in linux.
So while the mouse was slightly easier to get working in windows to begin with it is a pain on the upkeep. While the linux version was slighter more difficult it has never failed.
Just because Quake does not sell well does not mean there is no real linux gaming market. I have bought most of the games that loki has ported because I like those games. I however have not bought any of the ID games since I don't like quake. I find Heroes 3, Civ:CTP, Railroad Tycoon 2 and others are all great games. I also have a number of friends who have been buying linux games and none of those linux based games has been quake.
So far I have found that almost every game that loki has ported has been worthy of buying since they only port the good games.
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If it had been microsoft I would have felt the same way. For the same reason we protect the KKKs freedom of speach I would also support a very harsh punishment for the person if they did it to MS.
I don't like MS personally but that is also not an excuse to attack them. I want opensource to win in the long term fair and square. These attacks are pathetic no matter who they are done against.
Well when you start doing webapps instead of just webpages you will see how much IE bites. Netscape may not have all the rendering right but dealing with it server side is far better then IE. Ie lies about support content types, ignores the http/1.1 caching directive headers and many other issues. It really bites when you click on an item on the page and the page does not change because IE cached it despite being told not to.
I even went to microsoft.com and found the headers that tell IE not to cache in their knowledge base and it still does. You see the problem is IE is a very broken browser and caches by url so when you are doing stuff purely server side so you can change the page without changing the url IE will often show the wrong version.
IE iimplemented the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 spec very badly and it causes me many problems because they can't build a working web browser.
I have explained to many customers what the problem is and none have had a problem using netscape, mozilla, netscape 6, or konqueror to work with the web apps.
Despite what many think IE is not making the web more content rich it is holding it back. You can do things server side to completely replace frames, make 100% spec pages that render beautifully on everything except for IE which will ignore much of it because of its stupid caching issues.
That is why there are very few web programmers because they get sick and tired of dealing with IE and all of the crap it causes.
They can't do that. MS was convicted of being a monopoly under US law. They have appealed the penalty but not the ruling. As such they still operate under monopoly regulations. If they tie their browser to their server like that the company will face heavy monotary fines or may ever have its corporate charter revoked.
You also forget MS is nothing compared to IBM. Check out where the real influence is and the market is showing that. More companies are adopting linux becuase of IBMs influence. This would be a direct attack on IBM and would most likely blow up in MS's face.
That is why for web work I use zope. I can assign acl on a per function basic in my python code. It would slow it down if I did it on everything however if judiciously used you can make solutions near impossible to crack.
I would love to have zope type acl capabilities in linux and am happy that a group is working on it to replace this user/group/world thing.
Check out the kind of security problems zope has had. Almost every one is actually an admin error that got "fixed" so others could not make that mistake. Ie making things essentially suid root. I think if linux had full ACLs with very find grain control and large list sizes the security problems in linux would drop like a rock.
I think many overlook it not because it is not used as much but because no one makes a big deal out of its use. Zope is a good example of this. It is used in some very large organizations and it is a very powerful product. Many still confuse it with a web server though when in reality that is only the smallest part of its capabilities. What it really is good for is publishing python objects to the web, other servers via xml-rpc and other number of other things.
I know a lot who use python because it gets the job done cleanly and efficiently however they rarely make a big deal out of which tool they used and most don't care what the solutions was coded in since it works pretty much without fail. Kind of how some people don't know their servers run unix because they have never had a need to know but everyone who has a windows server pretty much knows it because the server calls attention to itself.
Do to the structure of python code tends to be designed rather then hacked together which in the end gives better running programs that have fewer bugs and are more modular, thus easier to fix and extend.
Checkout http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/
XForms look very impressive and coupled with DOM3, CSS3, XHTML 1.1, and SVG some very impressive apps could be made making the web far richer then it is now.
Too bad browsers won't adhere to standards. Well at least not most of them. There are so many things that could be done on web pages right now that would make them very rich. Unfortunately Mozilla would be about the only browser that could then render the page.
Actually both Mandrake and Suse are making money with linux. Suse closed out most of their USA office because that one office was not very profitable and are concentrating mainly in europe.
Also look at zope by digital creations. That is open source and they do make a profit off of it. In fact it is far better now and used by more people then it was when it was closed.
So stop spreading FUD troll. In just about all environments most businesss go out of business for having bad business models. Open Source stuff is no different. Most companies tried to sell on hype rather then a real service and they are dieing. Just like any brick and mortar store that would try the same thing.
Guess that means don't even drive down a mountain with a truck behind you. It keeps applying it breaks to slow down the breaks blow and it comes barreling down at you. Meanwhile you keep going at the same speed and get smashed by the truck.
Hard speed limits are not good since there are many situations in which you have to move faster to be safe.
I want the first person who tries to make an artifcial black hole hauled off and shot. The second person would pray to have the fate of the first person. I am not sure if most people understand the danger of an artifical black hole.
Black holes do damage through tidal forces the smaller they are they more damaging they are to the immediate area. Also there is not way to control it. There is nothing that can hold it in one place. If you try to hold it then you feed it mass and it gets bigger. Right now with our tech if you make a black hole the world is over. The thing will eat the entire planet in fairly short order and as it undertakes simple harmonic motion through the earths core growing as it goes.
IE this is a one way death sentence. If they want to experiment with artificial black hole at least do it around the orbit of pluto. Then if we fsck up there we will have time to leave the solar system. Still not a good option but a better one.
Too many people confuse ease of use on a mac with ease of learning. A mac is easy to learn and easy for very simple tasks however for complex tasks I find it far harder then any unix.
I have had times where the mac would not intialize the nic in 100TX mode and found no way to force it to do so in the OS. Or install a modm that it will not detect. I did not find any utility in the OS to make it do what I wanted without any questions.
Macs and Windows machines operate under the asusmption that the user does not know what they are doing. Unix assumes the user is always right. If you put in the time to understand how unix works it is easier to use then the others because it won't ask questions about things. You just tell it to do something and it will. With this power though comes a lot of responsibility.
I spent a while setting up my boxes, more then what it would take to set up a windows or mac machines, however in the last two years the only time they have ever gone down is to have new hardware or kernels put in them. They have been very low maintenance boxes. They check automatically for signed updates to the os I have already locked them down etc etc. I find my boxes to be very easy to use because I don't have to think about the underlying os all the time I know it will just keep working no matter what I do.
If I forget one of my virtual desktops has 20 apps open on it no big deal the os can take it just fine. Vi is probably the best app to exemplify this idea. It is a pain to learn to use. However once learned it is very easy to use and very fast. Emacs is the same way.
Since I have to spend most of my time working on computers, fixing them, securing them etc, it is worth it to me to put the time in now to really learn the tools to use them to the best of my ability.
GUI environments are nice but slow to do things. Think of how long it takes you to explain something to a person using pictures vs text. Maybe it is just that I don't think graphically but I can do things far faster by typing in commands then I can by using a gui for most applications. I have never met a person yet doing regular sys admin stuff via a gui that I could not beat.
That is why div tags and CSS exist. You don't need spacers. Read the CSS2 and HTML 4.01 spec.
What I have noticed among friends who have linux is that most are not into games like quake. Instead they own games like RailRoad Tycoon 2, Civ:CTP, Heroes 3 etc all purchased from loki games. All those programs have worked flawlessly on all the boxes I have tried. What I have seen is strategy games are far more popular on linux then twitch action games. I think it is just a different kind of market. Most of the people I know that use linux tend to be a lot more savy about computers and many are programmers. In that group thought games do better then twitch games.
.com s that failed because they mistargeted their market. It was not that the internet was a bad place to do business which some assumed it was that they were trying to sell to a demographic that was very rare to find on the internet and those that were there were targetted badly enough they felt insulted by the site.
What ID got was the people who decided to use linux because it is cool but who really know nothing about it. Since they were not tech savy they did not know how to set things up and thus support costs were higher for it. Honestly in any sales system you have to know your market. Considering the difficulty right now of setting up 3d graphics in linux they should not have marketted a twitch game on linux.
However this does not mean the linux game market is dead by any means. It just means that games have to be marketed more carefully. Windows is a huge market so the odds are any program will find a niche somewhere. Linux is smaller and also more specialized so mismarketing a product can be a killer.
Look at all the
Reply I found IE is often the cause of netscape crashes. If you can install an original Win95 and apply service pack 1. This will not include IE. The run netscape 4.76 it should be very stable. After running that for a while install a new IE and watch netscape start crashing. You can not do this test on a new version of windows because they include IE. I think much of the stability problems with netscape on windows are IE. Under linux I have seen a different problems. Under linux netscape seems to do synchronous dns. So when a dns request locks up the whole app does. What I found fixed that and many other problems while making things run faster and use less memory is to use squid. I turn off the caches on all browsers I have netscape, konqueror, mozilla, netscape 6, and opera then set them to run through the squid cache. That gives me one big cache to share between all browers which is more efficient and it is very good at what it does. So in 12 megs of ram it does better at caching then netscape does in 16 or more. Also squid and reiserfs are very sweet together. There has been a lot of optimization between them. Thus browsers of any kind very rarely crash on my linux boxes and they run very fast.
What I have found out is IE is no where near as standards compliant as many think it is. I learned C++ and python far before I learned html. When I went to learn html I picked up the w3c html 4.01 and CSS2 specs and learned from those. Strangely enough netscape was displaying the pages with almost no problems and ie was broken as hell. However the pages validated as 100% compliant.
What I have found is paying lipservice to the spec which most html writers do tends to work better in ie then netscape. When you actually rely 100% on spec netscape does a better job then ie. Many of the CSS changes I would make showed up fine in netscape 4.7x but were broken badly in all versions of ie. To those of you who think IE 5 on the mac is 100% CSS1 compliant you are full of shit. My stylesheet and code have both qualified as 100% compliant and it had a very wrong rendering of it.
The more I write webpages the more I hate the thought of IE. Where I work all day on something it views fine in Konqueror, Mozilla nightly, Netscape 6 and Netscape 4.7x and breaks horribly in any version of IE. The closer I adhere to specs the more IE breaks. I hope MS gets nailed to the fscking wall during the court case.
What I do is set memory and disk cache to 0 on all browsers and use squid. That has worked a lot faster then any of the browsers caches every has. Since I have a raid I just made it a 400 meg cache. I have not ever seen a problem of loading old pages. It runs very fast. Also strangely enough netscape with no cache running through a proxy is more stable. One reason I think is that 4.x can't do async dns requests which squid will do for it.
However they do crash for me when running and writing opengl apps. Also restarting x is just hiding the problem not fixing it. I don't think it is okay for software to fail ever with the exception of hardware error. There are lots of software I am upset with. Thankfully opensource seems to be very into fixing these problems.
This new card may be nice but I still will not support nvidia till they open their drivers. Their drivers are among the most unstable drivers around for linux. Yeah it is nice they are fast but not at the cost of stability. I also don't like binary only kernel mods. I have no idea what might be in that driver and what it might do in the kernel. Also when updating kernels that driver break a lot since it is binary only. If it were open it would probably work a lot better.
Look at the sblive for an example of this. In the beginning it was closed and a pain in the ass to get working under linux. There were kernel version mismatches etc. When they opnened the driver it progressed much faster and it got incorporated into the kernel. Now the sblive is one of the best cards to get for linux since it is supported by every major dist out of the box. In some dists they even use the alsa driver instead of the oss one which is even more capable.
I am not going to get locked into nvidias way of doing things again. When I bought the card they had announcements about how they were going to open their drivers. This did not happen. My next card is going to be an ATI, Matrox, or 3DFX. I am waiting a bit on the radeon till I see the open drivers for them. However the matrox cards and 3dfx cards do have open drivers. I do like 3d but I like stability more and the box with the g200 here has never crashed in x. The nvidia geforce box crashes a lot more often then that.
So please even if you like their hardware don't support them till they open the drivers. In the long run it will help us a lot more. Teaching companies that drivers alone are not enough.
The game client is not trusted. We decided a while ago that we will only send data to clients that your character can perceive. So yes we will be doing los calculations. So if someone is invisible you won't see them. If they are sneaking behind you very quitely you won't see them. However if you hear them something will show up there indicating a sound. As you skills improve you might know what kind of creature it is by the sound of it.
I don't think this is quite as hard as some people make it out to be. It will certainly be challenge as as cpu speeds increase hopefully this will become less of an issue.
Kosh
You must have an issue on your end I just tried netscape 4.76 and konqueror 1.9.8. Both loaded the ms page just fine.
When I first opened konqueror on kde2 I was very impressed. It is a fast browser. The kde folks are really doing well on this one. I figure in a few more months they will have most of the rest of the display bugs worked out.
You must not have used konqueror recently. I have been using CSS on my website and it does about the best job of any of the browsers so far at displaying the CSS. I validated both the page and the CSS using validator.w3.org and konqueror most correctly renders it. Konqueror however does still have some table issues that are being addressed. Considering how good this browser has gotten in this short of a time span I can't complain. It is fairly stable, fast, and standards compliant. It needs more work in places but I now use it almost exclusively. IE is just not an option since I don't have windows. Couldn't justifty the cost of continuing to use it when all the work I have to do is done on unix type boxes.
One way to reduce netscape memory, speed it up and reduce the crashes is to use squid. I now set up squid locally on all of my boxes to have them be the web cache. It works really well and squid is a lot faster and better at caching then netscape is. You can even set the caches up to talk to each other if they are on a fast network to make it even more efficient.
I am using linux 2.4.0test7 + reiserfs + ingo's low latency patch + promise ATA-100 patch support. On a K6-2 500 with 128 megs of ram I can unzip at least 2 kernels at a time without causing xmms to skip and it has about 128kb buffer. I can get the load up to at least 20 on my system with no audio skipping. I did a make -j on the kernel and the audio never broke up. Of course due to the vm bug in 2.4test7 when it ran out of vm it pretty much locked up but that is what I get for using a devel kernel ;)
Ingo's low latency patches make a huge difference. However they will not be incorporated into the kernel until cleaned up more. That is something both Ingo and Linus agreed on.
Okay here is the strange thing. Between windows 98 and Mandrake 7.1 my USB logitech mouse works better in mandrake. It detected the mouse just fine and all the buttons work in x including the wheel. In windows however the mouse turns off every so often. I then have to unplug it and plug it back in again. I have never seen this behavior in linux.
So while the mouse was slightly easier to get working in windows to begin with it is a pain on the upkeep. While the linux version was slighter more difficult it has never failed.
Just because Quake does not sell well does not mean there is no real linux gaming market. I have bought most of the games that loki has ported because I like those games. I however have not bought any of the ID games since I don't like quake. I find Heroes 3, Civ:CTP, Railroad Tycoon 2 and others are all great games. I also have a number of friends who have been buying linux games and none of those linux based games has been quake.
So far I have found that almost every game that loki has ported has been worthy of buying since they only port the good games.