Of course, once we have backing store it is a small step to provide (unaccelerated) translucent windows.
The *really* important thing to do after that is to provide an extension to use the backing store of each window as a pixmap, and as a OpenGL texture.
This will allow a window manager to do nice tricks. * On a window move, unmap the window, get its backing store as a GL texture, and do all the flippy rolly effects that have got everybody salivating over longhorn and OSX. * Expose like effects. See if those patents (or the will to sue) hold up;-)
It could also allow desktop pagers to get an accurate picture of whats on the screen, and maybe provide a slightly improved performance for remote desktops like NX and x0rfb. Not as good as a drawing command redirect, as I said here.
For some really nice currently available eyecandy, see 3ddesktop . This should make clear that its not neccessary to shove too much into the server to get nice things done.
Erm, you have NEVER EVER EVER had to reboot to change a setting like this in any release of linux.
The ONLY thing you have to reboot for is a kernel upgrade, new hardware that you can't hotplug, or fucked hardware ( IE shitty nVidia drivers just raped the AGP bus. )
All of your attacks seem to be based on Windows 95. Some are still valid with Win2k, but none seem valid directed against linux.
Sky News is now viewed by many people as being every bit as good as BBC News 24.
Who actually thinks that? Have they actually watched the channels in question? Sky News is so fucking amateurish, and they constantly interject their Murdoch sponsered opinions into stories....
Anybody who thinks the licence fee is a bad deal needs their head examined. Really, do you like adverts? I just don't believe that anyone can live in the UK, and not feel that the BBC has provided them with at least 110 worth of entertainment and information in a year. Its just plain churlish.
The BBC is unquestionably good for consumers. Is it good for other producers? No. Boo fucking hoo. They actually have to make a bit of an effort to get viewers.
Also, thanks for pointing out that the Murdoch-owned Times will support any crazy schemes that Newscorp tries to pull.
Hm... interestingly, I work for an investment bank. I'm fairly sure I've got a much better grip on capitalism and free markets than you.
There is no widely accepted economic theory that supports the idea that an entirely free market will produce the best content, unless you accept the somewhat odd proposition that cheap "good enough" content is you definition of the best.
The fact is that the BBC pushes the quality of the other producers way up. Have you seen the TV in Germany and France? Its nearly as bad as Sky.
The Rupert Murdoch owned media has become increasingly shrill about the BBC. Recently a top Sky (Fox equivalent in the UK ) executive made a speech about what he wants done to the BBC:
* Forced auction of any good programs the BBC makes to Sky and ITV (Honestly!! Anything good should be reaped from where it was produced, and interrupted with reams of shite car adverts.) * Enforced licence fee reductions * Banned from buying US imports (24, Buffy, etc) * All kinds of other random restrictions to make life easier for the bottom feeders at Newscorp.
The Sun and Times, Murdochs bought rags, have also been consistently ragging on about the bullshit Iraq dossier affair, in which a BBC journalist is accused of actually telling the truth.
This is the ultimate reply.
" Fuck with us, we'll bury your "Footballers Wives" and "Sex in trashy Greek holiday resorts" crap in 70 years of quality broadcasting!"
This is almost too good to be true. Have to see if Tony gets a call from Rupert, and poor old Greg Dyke gets his marching orders.
we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.
What you meant to say was: We need to communicate that we are willing to give up our freedom and put up with binary crapware, just as long as we can use our leet new toys.
Some of us care more about freedom than HDTV. We need to encourage hardware companies to open their specs. Linux is not alone in the world as an alternative OS, and I sure as fuck hope that something better does come along some day. I don't think we want to be stuck emulating shifting Linux kernel interfaces to use some hardware on our shiny new EROS boxes ( yeah, right) in 2010.
Many (most?) people also don't want to know how to add, solve a quadratic equation, spell "ridiculous" and "then" properly, learn the history of their country and their political system, how they evolved, or to speak another language.
Does that mean the education system should not try to teach them these things?
Democracy is a horrific way to run an education system.
"I think we should learn how to tax dodge in school!" "I want my sons to know how to get away with a bit of date rape!"
Computing is a pervasive aspect of modern life. To leave it to the few people who can be bothered to seek it out is purposefully lessening our ability to progress. The level of computing taught in schools is excremental, they are taught as if a computer is an appliance - not a general problem solver.
The point is not to get people to use spreadsheets better. Its to get them never to consider spreadsheets in the first place, as they are very rarely the best tool for anything even mildly complex.
The awful truth is that some very large corporations are run on cobbled together Excel worksheets.
The situation is this: Take some very intelligent people, and provide them with a braindead tool that can, in the end, get the job done. Very few of them will have enough time to find something better, or even to know that there is something better. They will use the tool, and inadvertantly create a nightmare for whoever has to clean up after them.
A multidimensional array of variant, often executable data, with links to a broken-by-design half-object-oriented crudfest of a language, and a horrific hack of the C++ type system, is clearly not the route to computing nirvana.
The world would be a nicer place if these people knew about Python, Haskell, and Prolog, for example, which would accomplish their goals in a cleaner, more efficient and maintainable but ultimately less approachable way.
How do we get this to happen? Education. Only when computing (not "How to use some applications"), and multiple models of computing (procedural/OO, functional, and logical), are taught in schools at a young age ( 11 upwards), as a basic subject as fundamental as other sciences and humanities, will people do things "right" from the beginning.
Will it happen? Doubtful. All we can hope for is that someone comes up with something that strikes a balance, and lets people do their work easily, without creating a horrific mess. Also doubtful.
It was the level of the outrage. The initial assumption was that the NYT is gospel, and never lies, has some vaunted "journalistic integrity", etc. No one would really believe that about any media source in the UK, it just would not shock people as much. It'd be a big story, true, but it would not be a revelation.
I mean normal people. Almost all Israelis I have ever met are shocked by the bias of the American media. They still believe they are in the right, and have a right to live where they do - but they don't take the exceedingly unbalanced view of the American press. The really sickening thing is the white wash - the fact that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis who are presented to the American people look very European.
I was in New Zealand, traveling around for a while with an Israeli jewish guy. He, like a lot of Israelis, has a generally semitic look - ie he could pass for an Arab. We met some American girls in a hostel, and when he said he was from Israel, you could see the thoughts going through their heads - "You must be Muslim, I'm scared, you must be a terrorist! Argh!!!". He had to spend a good five minutes assuring them that he was in fact Jewish, but he had some Palestinian friends, and that not all Muslims are terrorists. It was embarrassing.
I don't claim that a large proportion of Americans would act this extreme, or are this ignorant, but I just wasn't that surprised by this behaviour after seeing the kind of media coverage the conflict gets in the US.
I am talking about exporting your whole local session to another box. The server side, not the client side. The server side of NX makes a whole other X server, ie a new session. I'm talking about taking your normal X session, and exporting that.
Look at KDEs remote desktop feature. At the moment, it is a horrible hack, which takes screen shots and uses the VNC protocol to send them over the network. In an ideal world, it would just connect to the X server, say "I want all the drawing commands from now on.", and the X server would send that, which would be then translated to VNC or RFB or NX. This would be far less heavy weight, and far more responsive.
Only the proxy is GPLed, the Xlib stuff is X11. The proxy is a separate program, so thats ok.
What is really needed is a driver for the XServer that will duplicate the current X command stream. This could then be sent to the NX proxy, and actually use it as a remote desktop. Also could use VNC, and it could also be useful for providing desktop pagers with full update capability.
I don't think that anybody is claiming that non-American news sources are peachy clean and experience things without a perceptual or cultural bias. That is a fact of the human condition - we can only know things within our perceptual framework - blah Descartes blah Heidegger blah.
The difference with American news sources is that this cultural distortion seems to be ignored, and as a result, much greater in effect. As a Brit, I was shocked when in New York at the one sidedness of reports on Israel-Palestine. And the whole NYT fabrication stuff - this would not have been so big an issue in almost any other country, because the assumption is that all the media has some slant. I was surprised at how a lot of Americans were so shocked that journalists are not transferring direct knowledge of deep reality into their minds.
I would say that American media is far more insular, and far more likely to distort the truth. They are not uniquely different in having a bias and twisting the truth - they are just plain worse than a lot of the rest of the western worlds media.
This article has a few oddities. The idea that everyone will be connected to "one" grid is misleading. There will always be multiple grids, and interconnectors between them. This can be thought of similarly to ISPs peering arrangements.
The article is really saying that it may be economically feasible to have extremely long interconnectors, eg across Siberia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, or up the length of Africa.
I have some reservations with this. When power is transmitted, there is a loss through the resistance of the transmission lines. This clearly becomes more acute the longer the transmission. In most grids in europe, the costs of these losses ( and the requirement to cover them with reserve power) is built into the fees to become a trading company within those countries. There are exceptions -eg the UK -> France interconnector - there is ~ 1.5% loss which the trading party must bear. This is for a 26 mile link. So 3000 miles might be a bit hopeful... I can't be arsed to do the math, but...
It is very hard to see how exploiting the varying liquidity of these markets would offset the huge transmission losses. Especially when compared to the ability to ship huge amounts of oil and gas in pipelines and tankers, with little loss, even at the expense of flexibility.
If this is about some new technology for power transmission ( eg superconductors) this could be great.
Australia could do pretty damn well by covering WA with solar. This could be transmitted to China, converting the Three Gorges Dam - an ecological crime, but its there, I've seen it;-( - into partially stored hydro... could be interesting.
The great leap forward caused the biggest famine in history, as there were massive areas of the country with no agricultural tools, leading to no food...
GUI Builder != VB. In fact, VB has just about the worst GUI builder still in serious use.
VB is a nightmare. It is not simple in any way at all, and leads most to produce the worst and least usable guis possible. Execution speed wise - there are tons of gotchas that will slow you down. Messing with big strings is one. Its really not predictable unless you spend ages researching it. VB use in any area is a sign of brain damage.
Raw Win32 API is an interesting way to fuck up your brain. I wouldn't recommend it, very little requires it. Use a real toolkit, eg QT if you like C++ or SWT if you are Java bound( which has no free gui builder...yet ). wxWindows is also not bad. QT is probably the most complete solution, but for commercial stuff its pricey.
Hm, I bet you had a nice time with your BSD and Apache system without ever using the GNU toolchain.
Was it fun paying through the nose for a compiler? Or are you lying through your teeth?
Your argument is absolutely amazing. And absolutely clueless. Do you not understand that the GPL is a grant of rights? How, in any possible system that allowed sublicencing, could the GPL be invalid?
Do you understand that people have the right to choose the licence for their work? And you can choose not to use it, rather than campaign for your right to steal?
In what way is that strange? Most of eastern europe is populated by amazing looking women. The Czech Republic, Croatia and Bulgaria are my top picks;-)
Yes, I agree, if a programmer or company is idiotic enough to buy into the nightmare that is MSC++/COM/ATL/MFC crap, they will probably kill themselves about a week earlier than the same programmer working with VB.
Its just sad that people think Microsoft make a good developement platform. Well, maybe they have one now with.Net, but that offers no advantage to me over Java / SWT.... except maybe for legacy COM stuff. JIntegra is fucking expensive.
TBH, I do windows gui stuff in Python/QT if I possibly can. Non-gui COM is a doddle from there, and its just quick... unfortunately a lot of companys mandate stuff like Java, etc.
Not to support a right wing looney, but the Great Leap Forward in China did kill from 30 to 60 million Chinese. Thats got to be the largest death toll for a purely economic policy.
However, this was the result of a command economy/ state capitalism, where the state acts a giant corporation, not a Communist one. The only vaguely large scale implementation of a Communist economy was in Spain during the Civil War. Didn't do too badly, till they lost. Its hard to tell how stable that would be long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, once we have backing store it is a small step to provide (unaccelerated) translucent windows.
;-)
The *really* important thing to do after that is to provide an extension to use the backing store of each window as a pixmap, and as a OpenGL texture.
This will allow a window manager to do nice tricks.
* On a window move, unmap the window, get its backing store as a GL texture, and do all the flippy rolly effects that have got everybody salivating over longhorn and OSX.
* Expose like effects. See if those patents (or the will to sue) hold up
It could also allow desktop pagers to get an accurate picture of whats on the screen, and maybe provide a slightly improved performance for remote desktops like NX and x0rfb. Not as good as a drawing command redirect, as I said here.
For some really nice currently available eyecandy, see 3ddesktop . This should make clear that its not neccessary to shove too much into the server to get nice things done.
Erm, you have NEVER EVER EVER had to reboot to change a setting like this in any release of linux.
The ONLY thing you have to reboot for is a kernel upgrade, new hardware that you can't hotplug, or fucked hardware ( IE shitty nVidia drivers just raped the AGP bus. )
All of your attacks seem to be based on Windows 95. Some are still valid with Win2k, but none seem valid directed against linux.
Yes, lets hide away the development process, and make sure that nobody really knows what the fuck is going on under the hood.
Clue: This is not for Joe User.
Mass market:
Red hat upgrades - click "Software updates".
in soviet russia...
C++ programmers are familiar with libraries
Sky News is now viewed by many people as being every bit as good as BBC News 24.
Who actually thinks that? Have they actually watched the channels in question? Sky News is so fucking amateurish, and they constantly interject their Murdoch sponsered opinions into stories....
Anybody who thinks the licence fee is a bad deal needs their head examined. Really, do you like adverts? I just don't believe that anyone can live in the UK, and not feel that the BBC has provided them with at least 110 worth of entertainment and information in a year. Its just plain churlish.
The BBC is unquestionably good for consumers. Is it good for other producers? No. Boo fucking hoo. They actually have to make a bit of an effort to get viewers.
Also, thanks for pointing out that the Murdoch-owned Times will support any crazy schemes that Newscorp tries to pull.
Hm... interestingly, I work for an investment bank. I'm fairly sure I've got a much better grip on capitalism and free markets than you.
There is no widely accepted economic theory that supports the idea that an entirely free market will produce the best content, unless you accept the somewhat odd proposition that cheap "good enough" content is you definition of the best.
The fact is that the BBC pushes the quality of the other producers way up. Have you seen the TV in Germany and France? Its nearly as bad as Sky.
But the adverts are not in the middle of programs. Which is a lot better than pay crap or ITV.
But those baloons and dancers do get annoying.
The Rupert Murdoch owned media has become increasingly shrill about the BBC. Recently a top Sky (Fox equivalent in the UK ) executive made a speech about what he wants done to the BBC:
* Forced auction of any good programs the BBC makes to Sky and ITV (Honestly!! Anything good should be reaped from where it was produced, and interrupted with reams of shite car adverts.)
* Enforced licence fee reductions
* Banned from buying US imports (24, Buffy, etc)
* All kinds of other random restrictions to make life easier for the bottom feeders at Newscorp.
The Sun and Times, Murdochs bought rags, have also been consistently ragging on about the bullshit Iraq dossier affair, in which a BBC journalist is accused of actually telling the truth.
This is the ultimate reply.
" Fuck with us, we'll bury your "Footballers Wives" and "Sex in trashy Greek holiday resorts" crap in 70 years of quality broadcasting!"
This is almost too good to be true. Have to see if Tony gets a call from Rupert, and poor old Greg Dyke gets his marching orders.
"I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue"
It was on radio 4, then Channel 4, NOT a BBC channel.
we have to convey the message that we find it acceptable to pay for some software that will run in Linux.
What you meant to say was:
We need to communicate that we are willing to give up our freedom and put up with binary crapware, just as long as we can use our leet new toys.
Some of us care more about freedom than HDTV. We need to encourage hardware companies to open their specs. Linux is not alone in the world as an alternative OS, and I sure as fuck hope that something better does come along some day. I don't think we want to be stuck emulating shifting Linux kernel interfaces to use some hardware on our shiny new EROS boxes ( yeah, right) in 2010.
Many (most?) people also don't want to know how to add, solve a quadratic equation, spell "ridiculous" and "then" properly, learn the history of their country and their political system, how they evolved, or to speak another language.
Does that mean the education system should not try to teach them these things?
Democracy is a horrific way to run an education system.
"I think we should learn how to tax dodge in school!"
"I want my sons to know how to get away with a bit of date rape!"
Computing is a pervasive aspect of modern life. To leave it to the few people who can be bothered to seek it out is purposefully lessening our ability to progress. The level of computing taught in schools is excremental, they are taught as if a computer is an appliance - not a general problem solver.
The point is not to get people to use spreadsheets better. Its to get them never to consider spreadsheets in the first place, as they are very rarely the best tool for anything even mildly complex.
The awful truth is that some very large corporations are run on cobbled together Excel worksheets.
The situation is this: Take some very intelligent people, and provide them with a braindead tool that can, in the end, get the job done. Very few of them will have enough time to find something better, or even to know that there is something better. They will use the tool, and inadvertantly create a nightmare for whoever has to clean up after them.
A multidimensional array of variant, often executable data, with links to a broken-by-design half-object-oriented crudfest of a language, and a horrific hack of the C++ type system, is clearly not the route to computing nirvana.
The world would be a nicer place if these people knew about Python, Haskell, and Prolog, for example, which would accomplish their goals in a cleaner, more efficient and maintainable but ultimately less approachable way.
How do we get this to happen? Education. Only when computing (not "How to use some applications"), and multiple models of computing (procedural/OO, functional, and logical), are taught in schools at a young age ( 11 upwards), as a basic subject as fundamental as other sciences and humanities, will people do things "right" from the beginning.
Will it happen? Doubtful. All we can hope for is that someone comes up with something that strikes a balance, and lets people do their work easily, without creating a horrific mess. Also doubtful.
It was the level of the outrage. The initial assumption was that the NYT is gospel, and never lies, has some vaunted "journalistic integrity", etc. No one would really believe that about any media source in the UK, it just would not shock people as much. It'd be a big story, true, but it would not be a revelation.
You really need to go and talk to some Israelis.
I mean normal people. Almost all Israelis I have ever met are shocked by the bias of the American media. They still believe they are in the right, and have a right to live where they do - but they don't take the exceedingly unbalanced view of the American press. The really sickening thing is the white wash - the fact that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis who are presented to the American people look very European.
I was in New Zealand, traveling around for a while with an Israeli jewish guy. He, like a lot of Israelis, has a generally semitic look - ie he could pass for an Arab. We met some American girls in a hostel, and when he said he was from Israel, you could see the thoughts going through their heads - "You must be Muslim, I'm scared, you must be a terrorist! Argh!!!". He had to spend a good five minutes assuring them that he was in fact Jewish, but he had some Palestinian friends, and that not all Muslims are terrorists. It was embarrassing.
I don't claim that a large proportion of Americans would act this extreme, or are this ignorant, but I just wasn't that surprised by this behaviour after seeing the kind of media coverage the conflict gets in the US.
The problem is, its GPLed ( uses vnc code. )
;-)
So it can't be used along with, say, nVidia or ATIs binary drivers. And it can't be integrated with X upstream.
But its a good first step
No. You've completely misunderstood.
I am talking about exporting your whole local session to another box. The server side, not the client side. The server side of NX makes a whole other X server, ie a new session. I'm talking about taking your normal X session, and exporting that.
Look at KDEs remote desktop feature. At the moment, it is a horrible hack, which takes screen shots and uses the VNC protocol to send them over the network. In an ideal world, it would just connect to the X server, say "I want all the drawing commands from now on.", and the X server would send that, which would be then translated to VNC or RFB or NX. This would be far less heavy weight, and far more responsive.
Only the proxy is GPLed, the Xlib stuff is X11. The proxy is a separate program, so thats ok.
What is really needed is a driver for the XServer that will duplicate the current X command stream. This could then be sent to the NX proxy, and actually use it as a remote desktop. Also could use VNC, and it could also be useful for providing desktop pagers with full update capability.
I don't think that anybody is claiming that non-American news sources are peachy clean and experience things without a perceptual or cultural bias. That is a fact of the human condition - we can only know things within our perceptual framework - blah Descartes blah Heidegger blah.
The difference with American news sources is that this cultural distortion seems to be ignored, and as a result, much greater in effect. As a Brit, I was shocked when in New York at the one sidedness of reports on Israel-Palestine. And the whole NYT fabrication stuff - this would not have been so big an issue in almost any other country, because the assumption is that all the media has some slant. I was surprised at how a lot of Americans were so shocked that journalists are not transferring direct knowledge of deep reality into their minds.
I would say that American media is far more insular, and far more likely to distort the truth. They are not uniquely different in having a bias and twisting the truth - they are just plain worse than a lot of the rest of the western worlds media.
Disclaimer: I work in the power trading business.
;-( - into partially stored hydro... could be interesting.
This article has a few oddities. The idea that everyone will be connected to "one" grid is misleading. There will always be multiple grids, and interconnectors between them. This can be thought of similarly to ISPs peering arrangements.
The article is really saying that it may be economically feasible to have extremely long interconnectors, eg across Siberia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, or up the length of Africa.
I have some reservations with this. When power is transmitted, there is a loss through the resistance of the transmission lines. This clearly becomes more acute the longer the transmission. In most grids in europe, the costs of these losses ( and the requirement to cover them with reserve power) is built into the fees to become a trading company within those countries. There are exceptions -eg the UK -> France interconnector - there is ~ 1.5% loss which the trading party must bear. This is for a 26 mile link. So 3000 miles might be a bit hopeful... I can't be arsed to do the math, but...
It is very hard to see how exploiting the varying liquidity of these markets would offset the huge transmission losses. Especially when compared to the ability to ship huge amounts of oil and gas in pipelines and tankers, with little loss, even at the expense of flexibility.
If this is about some new technology for power transmission ( eg superconductors) this could be great.
Australia could do pretty damn well by covering WA with solar. This could be transmitted to China, converting the Three Gorges Dam - an ecological crime, but its there, I've seen it
The great leap forward caused the biggest famine in history, as there were massive areas of the country with no agricultural tools, leading to no food...
Try:
QT Designer
Glade
Interface Builder
etc etc.
GUI Builder != VB. In fact, VB has just about the worst GUI builder still in serious use.
VB is a nightmare. It is not simple in any way at all, and leads most to produce the worst and least usable guis possible.
Execution speed wise - there are tons of gotchas that will slow you down. Messing with big strings is one. Its really not predictable unless you spend ages researching it. VB use in any area is a sign of brain damage.
Raw Win32 API is an interesting way to fuck up your brain. I wouldn't recommend it, very little requires it. Use a real toolkit, eg QT if you like C++ or SWT if you are Java bound( which has no free gui builder...yet ). wxWindows is also not bad. QT is probably the most complete solution, but for commercial stuff its pricey.
Hm, I bet you had a nice time with your BSD and Apache system without ever using the GNU toolchain.
Was it fun paying through the nose for a compiler? Or are you lying through your teeth?
Your argument is absolutely amazing. And absolutely clueless. Do you not understand that the GPL is a grant of rights? How, in any possible system that allowed sublicencing, could the GPL be invalid?
Do you understand that people have the right to choose the licence for their work? And you can choose not to use it, rather than campaign for your right to steal?
In what way is that strange? Most of eastern europe is populated by amazing looking women. The Czech Republic, Croatia and Bulgaria are my top picks ;-)
Yes, I agree, if a programmer or company is idiotic enough to buy into the nightmare that is MSC++/COM/ATL/MFC crap, they will probably kill themselves about a week earlier than the same programmer working with VB.
.Net, but that offers no advantage to me over Java / SWT....
Its just sad that people think Microsoft make a good developement platform. Well, maybe they have one now with
except maybe for legacy COM stuff. JIntegra is fucking expensive.
TBH, I do windows gui stuff in Python/QT if I possibly can. Non-gui COM is a doddle from there, and its just quick... unfortunately a lot of companys mandate stuff like Java, etc.
Not to support a right wing looney, but the Great Leap Forward in China did kill from 30 to 60 million Chinese. Thats got to be the largest death toll for a purely economic policy.
However, this was the result of a command economy/ state capitalism, where the state acts a giant corporation, not a Communist one. The only vaguely large scale implementation of a Communist economy was in Spain during the Civil War. Didn't do too badly, till they lost. Its hard to tell how stable that would be long term.