I don't know if a "compatibility layer" will be needed. Look at the great number of filesystems that operating systems like Linux can support? My guess is that it probably supports more than 80.
Hell. The kernel will still probably be able to mount iso9660 filesystems in an ISO file format in 50 years.
I find that FLAC is a better solution than WAV for most circumstances, since it is lossless to convert back and forth and takes up only about 50% of the space. I've been buying all of my music from Magnatune for that very reason; they offer stuff in FLAC format. I also killed my (legitimate) MP3 music collection in favor of FLAC as well, and am slowly re-ripping all of my stuff to FLAC for archival. Encoding is faster than MP3 as well.
Actually, I've heard of people that have daily CVS backup scripting to keep a copy of their home directory on a remote server. That could be a good idea, assuming that you could afford all of the storage space.
Hmm... Maybe something that Google could get into after experimenting with GMail. Such a service could even be usable by novice computer users, by providing a graphical tool that leaves a daemon running in your system tray or something. Schedule backups for 2:00 am every morning, and that's it.
Of course, backups over a network have been a pretty normal thing for a long time. It's just a matter of making it affordable and easy for most people.
Actually, on most hardware, the OSS emulation should be able to support as many PCM streams as the device supports for the native ALSA streams. For instance, I can have several OSS applications playing at the same time on my Vortex 2, without a problem. I can also blend multiple ALSA or OSS apps at one time.
ALSA can use a plugin, called DMIX, to do mixing in software. I believe that there is an ALSA plugin through JACK to do it as well. I've never had to use these things, so I cannot offer any information on them. The DMIX site has a bit of information on how to handle this though.
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlugi n
To my knowledge, the Ensoniq documentation never stated wheather or not hardware mixing was possible. I'm almost certain, that at one time, my AudioPCI was doing hardware or software mixing until Creative purchased the company and then crippled future drivers. I know that the PCI128 does at least software mixing, at minium. Bear in mind though that the drivers can fake (tell other software) that hardware mixing is functional, when in reality, it is DirectX. I think that this Windows program can give you more information about your sound device.
http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/auwinbench/au ho me.asp?visitor=
Software mixing isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, on Windows, some driver sets do it very well. However, it means that the card will likely be crippled when it is moved to another platform (Unix or Linux) and doesn't have DirectX, for which it was designed.
ALSA does allow a device to write to more than one "node" if it is a hardware mixing capable card. For example, my Aureal Vortex has 32 available hardware subdevies in the current driver set. The "/dev/dsp" system is unique to the old OSS driver system. ALSA drivers are listed much like the way Windows does.
As you see, device "AU88x0 ADB" is the normal playback device, and has 32 playback channels listed. If I run my music program (XMMS, for instance) and play a file, one of the 32 will be in use. The ALSA subsystem is pretty smart in determining these things, given properly coded drivers.
As you can see, only one of the 32 playback channels is in use, if I glance at the process above. The ALSA drivers manage this by itself. There aren't multiple "nodes", perse, as the OSS drivers often had.
It's likely that your programs that were talking about/dev/dsp or something similar were written to use OSS. ALSA has OSS emulation, which works pretty well, but it is optimal to use a program's output plugin that has ALSA support.
RedHat 9 didn't have a version of ALSA that had proper Aureal drivers at the time of its release. Almost within weeks afterwards, the ALSA project released a driver with the Aureal chipset support. It wasn't until 2003 that the card had been reverse engineered to a point of where it was actually usable (since Aureal went out of business a few years ago).
Now, the Vortex is one of the best supported chips on Linux (if you use a recent ALSA driver). I've got at least 6 Vortex cards to last me until the PCI bus gets depreciated.;)
The only software mixer that I ever actually liked was the one from 4-Front, for their OSS Commericial drivers. This mixer was called the "Virtual Mixer", and for the most part- it worked well, and didn't require any special code, like ALSA and ESD do. Apps could write directly to a/dev/dsp device and it would get mixed, much like DirectX does.
I used these drivers for some time, until the Santa Cruz got better ALSA drivers. The only problem I had with OSS-Commercial was that it didn't play nicely with mmap audio in games like Quake. 4-Front's drivers also lacked some advanced features for my card at the time. On the other hand, they have a worthwhile product for people that want minimal hassles with cards that don't do hardware mixing. I don't know how viable they will be as OSS depreciates to ALSA though.
The Live does mixing in hardware. It wasn't until the era of the Live, Aureal Vortex, Yamaha PCI, and a few others, that cards were doing hardware mixing. Thus, cards like the SB16 and the Ensoniq/Creative AudioPCI don't. Windows 2000 introduced software mixing through DirectX. Afterwards, cheapie chips went back into not having hardware mixing again. This is why some people have problems with sound in Linux. They have a cheapie, integrated POS sound chip, like the C-Media, i810, nVidia nForce APU, Realtek, etc, and they cannot do hardware mixing. Creative Labs is fortunately one manufacturer that is still making chips with hardware mixing. Audigy series seems to do this. The CS46xx cards (like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) are great alternatives as well.
I'm betting that this was the real problem with the author of the article. If anyone wants a high-quality and CHEAP soundcard that works great with the Linux ALSA drivers, they should buy a $5 Aureal Vortex or Yamaha PCI card from Ebay. The Aureal cards do hardware mixing and also have a hardware graphic equalizer. The Soundblaster Live Value cards are also good choices, and can be purchased for $10-$15.
No. You're not unwelcome. I would *love* to get into the Amiga OS again, simply because I liked some aspects of the OS that I used 10 years ago. But seriously. It's not realistic today. It might be if I could run the OS on hardware that I already have in my home, but otherwise - it's not realistic.
God. At least they could do something halfway worthwhile, like port it to run on the Athlon 64 or something. You could buy a 64 bit Athlon CPU and a micro ATX board for just a few hundred dollars and have a usable system for a dated operating system.
Sure, I see some nostalgic value in it, but I just don't get it. Let me add that I loved the Commodore 64 and the Amiga systems of old. We've still got a few Amigas hanging around my workplace, but the last time that we used them was for Toaster and Lightwave 5 work and that was nearly 8-10 years ago. Even then, while useful, they were showing their age.
I see no significant changes to the GUI mechanics here. I guess it's simply for the purists out there.
I see no indication that this will ever run on hardware that is actually *available* to people. Again, it's another instance of this software being built simply for purists whoe want something "different" than what the Microsoft crowd uses.
Amigas were amazing for their time, but if you fastforward nearly 20 years, things have changed a lot. Sure, I love the PPC hardware that they are trying to use today, but is it really viable for this?
To be fair, all of the really high benchmarks that I saw were simply synthetic benchmarks. In actualy game performance, the new nV40 seemed to be seldom higher than an FPS or two, and in many cases it was even lower than the ATI card it was paried against.
There is a difference. It actually works on UNIX and Linux. WINNT's methods of operating as a standard user are a pain in the ass, and you often have to log out and log back in to perform the most simple of tasks.
You almost HAVE to run as Admin on Windows to operate without a snag in the even of a simple system tweak. Shoot - you can even adjust power management as a standard user.
Sure, but if Microsoft's adoption of PNG is in any way indicative of how this skinning system will work, you can count out any PNG alpha transparency capability, ala Internet Explorer. Well, at least until a hotfix that will arrive some time in 2010.
What functions are you talking about for "advanced document formatting"?
As for modifying the document code, OpenOffice's is the same way. It's a gzipped file that has the document source inside. Simply open it and hack away at your content.xml file. But really... Who normally needs to do that?
Maybe they should have considered this a few years ago before all of the free and multiplatform office suites got to be as good as they are.
I would have paid Corel a few years ago for a *good* release of their software, but what they created with WINElib was just total crap. Now, we have OpenOffice, Star Office (free for education and research), KDE's Office suite, Gnome's Office software, and several other alternatives that really negate the need for Corel's software.
I could potentially see Corel's software as an alternative to Sun's supported software for business use. Howver, it is very doubtful that Corel will be able to persuade people to use this unless they convince OEMs to pack it in as an inexpensive alternative like they did two years ago on low end HP Pavillion PCs.
Maybe they'll be smart and support SXW and other open source office suite formats.
More proof that people will pay to sustain the things that they believe in. They will pay to keep it alive, even if they can have it for free. Any daily user of a good Linux distribution can see the value in sustaining its maintainers.
Open source is a still a pretty new concept to many. I think that it was just a matter of time before traditional "brick and mortar" rules stopped applying. It took some time, but the system is starting to catch on. You don't need to go to the store to support your favorite Linux distro. Mandrake club and online payment systems have proven that.
I believe that the biggest issue is that it is a tool that they *don't control*. They're losing their power over distribution, very rapidly. Even if people are still buying CDs, what does the future hold when traditional music companies are replaced by alternative means of music distribution?
They traditional record label and its goons aren't needed anymore. They're becoming extinct.
It's just my opinion, but like most Team Ninja games over the last few years, it is simply a repetitive and unoriginal game with very pretty graphics. Essentially, it's a tech demo, like the last few Dead or Alive games. At least this time it was more of an attempt at making a lasting game.
It's not bad by any means, but I think that other adventure games like Prince of Persia do a better job of telling a story and merging fun gameplay. Ninja Gaiden is hardly any reason to buy the system right now. The difficulty issue mostly comes down to using the right weapons at the right time. Mastering, and you'll get through the game pretty quickly. After some time, it's easy to lose interest as there really is no meat and potatoes to the game. The story and repetitive gameplay doesn't really do the game justice, in spite of its lovely graphics.
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I don't know if a "compatibility layer" will be needed. Look at the great number of filesystems that operating systems like Linux can support? My guess is that it probably supports more than 80.
Hell. The kernel will still probably be able to mount iso9660 filesystems in an ISO file format in 50 years.
I find that FLAC is a better solution than WAV for most circumstances, since it is lossless to convert back and forth and takes up only about 50% of the space. I've been buying all of my music from Magnatune for that very reason; they offer stuff in FLAC format. I also killed my (legitimate) MP3 music collection in favor of FLAC as well, and am slowly re-ripping all of my stuff to FLAC for archival. Encoding is faster than MP3 as well.
;)
By the way. Nice reference to "Harvey".
Actually, I've heard of people that have daily CVS backup scripting to keep a copy of their home directory on a remote server. That could be a good idea, assuming that you could afford all of the storage space.
Hmm... Maybe something that Google could get into after experimenting with GMail. Such a service could even be usable by novice computer users, by providing a graphical tool that leaves a daemon running in your system tray or something. Schedule backups for 2:00 am every morning, and that's it.
Of course, backups over a network have been a pretty normal thing for a long time. It's just a matter of making it affordable and easy for most people.
Actually, on most hardware, the OSS emulation should be able to support as many PCM streams as the device supports for the native ALSA streams. For instance, I can have several OSS applications playing at the same time on my Vortex 2, without a problem. I can also blend multiple ALSA or OSS apps at one time.
ALSA can use a plugin, called DMIX, to do mixing in software. I believe that there is an ALSA plugin through JACK to do it as well. I've never had to use these things, so I cannot offer any information on them. The DMIX site has a bit of information on how to handle this though.
i n
u ho me.asp?visitor=
/proc/asound/pcm
/proc/asound/au8830/pcm0p/info
/dev/dsp or something similar were written to use OSS. ALSA has OSS emulation, which works pretty well, but it is optimal to use a program's output plugin that has ALSA support.
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DmixPlug
To my knowledge, the Ensoniq documentation never stated wheather or not hardware mixing was possible. I'm almost certain, that at one time, my AudioPCI was doing hardware or software mixing until Creative purchased the company and then crippled future drivers. I know that the PCI128 does at least software mixing, at minium. Bear in mind though that the drivers can fake (tell other software) that hardware mixing is functional, when in reality, it is DirectX. I think that this Windows program can give you more information about your sound device.
http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/auwinbench/a
Software mixing isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, on Windows, some driver sets do it very well. However, it means that the card will likely be crippled when it is moved to another platform (Unix or Linux) and doesn't have DirectX, for which it was designed.
ALSA does allow a device to write to more than one "node" if it is a hardware mixing capable card. For example, my Aureal Vortex has 32 available hardware subdevies in the current driver set. The "/dev/dsp" system is unique to the old OSS driver system. ALSA drivers are listed much like the way Windows does.
cat
00-00: AU88x0 ADB : adb : playback 32 : capture 32
00-01: AU88x0 SPDIF : spdif : playback 1
00-02: AU88x0 A3D : a3d : playback 16
00-03: AU88x0 WT : wt : playback 64
As you see, device "AU88x0 ADB" is the normal playback device, and has 32 playback channels listed. If I run my music program (XMMS, for instance) and play a file, one of the 32 will be in use. The ALSA subsystem is pretty smart in determining these things, given properly coded drivers.
cat
card: 0
device: 0
subdevice: 0
stream: PLAYBACK
id: AU88x0 ADB
name: adb
subname: subdevice #0
class: 0
subclass: 0
subdevices_count: 32
subdevices_avail: 31
As you can see, only one of the 32 playback channels is in use, if I glance at the process above. The ALSA drivers manage this by itself. There aren't multiple "nodes", perse, as the OSS drivers often had.
It's likely that your programs that were talking about
RedHat 9 didn't have a version of ALSA that had proper Aureal drivers at the time of its release. Almost within weeks afterwards, the ALSA project released a driver with the Aureal chipset support. It wasn't until 2003 that the card had been reverse engineered to a point of where it was actually usable (since Aureal went out of business a few years ago).
;)
Now, the Vortex is one of the best supported chips on Linux (if you use a recent ALSA driver). I've got at least 6 Vortex cards to last me until the PCI bus gets depreciated.
The only software mixer that I ever actually liked was the one from 4-Front, for their OSS Commericial drivers. This mixer was called the "Virtual Mixer", and for the most part- it worked well, and didn't require any special code, like ALSA and ESD do. Apps could write directly to a /dev/dsp device and it would get mixed, much like DirectX does.
I used these drivers for some time, until the Santa Cruz got better ALSA drivers. The only problem I had with OSS-Commercial was that it didn't play nicely with mmap audio in games like Quake. 4-Front's drivers also lacked some advanced features for my card at the time. On the other hand, they have a worthwhile product for people that want minimal hassles with cards that don't do hardware mixing. I don't know how viable they will be as OSS depreciates to ALSA though.
He's not on crack.
The Live does mixing in hardware. It wasn't until the era of the Live, Aureal Vortex, Yamaha PCI, and a few others, that cards were doing hardware mixing. Thus, cards like the SB16 and the Ensoniq/Creative AudioPCI don't. Windows 2000 introduced software mixing through DirectX. Afterwards, cheapie chips went back into not having hardware mixing again. This is why some people have problems with sound in Linux. They have a cheapie, integrated POS sound chip, like the C-Media, i810, nVidia nForce APU, Realtek, etc, and they cannot do hardware mixing. Creative Labs is fortunately one manufacturer that is still making chips with hardware mixing. Audigy series seems to do this. The CS46xx cards (like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) are great alternatives as well.
I'm betting that this was the real problem with the author of the article. If anyone wants a high-quality and CHEAP soundcard that works great with the Linux ALSA drivers, they should buy a $5 Aureal Vortex or Yamaha PCI card from Ebay. The Aureal cards do hardware mixing and also have a hardware graphic equalizer. The Soundblaster Live Value cards are also good choices, and can be purchased for $10-$15.
Could you tell me what brand and model your USB device is? Also, does it support hardware mixing?
No. You're not unwelcome. I would *love* to get into the Amiga OS again, simply because I liked some aspects of the OS that I used 10 years ago. But seriously. It's not realistic today. It might be if I could run the OS on hardware that I already have in my home, but otherwise - it's not realistic.
No. It's an SUV that was made by Isuzu. Oh wait. That's "Amigo".
God. At least they could do something halfway worthwhile, like port it to run on the Athlon 64 or something. You could buy a 64 bit Athlon CPU and a micro ATX board for just a few hundred dollars and have a usable system for a dated operating system.
Sure, I see some nostalgic value in it, but I just don't get it. Let me add that I loved the Commodore 64 and the Amiga systems of old. We've still got a few Amigas hanging around my workplace, but the last time that we used them was for Toaster and Lightwave 5 work and that was nearly 8-10 years ago. Even then, while useful, they were showing their age.
I see no significant changes to the GUI mechanics here. I guess it's simply for the purists out there.
I see no indication that this will ever run on hardware that is actually *available* to people. Again, it's another instance of this software being built simply for purists whoe want something "different" than what the Microsoft crowd uses.
Amigas were amazing for their time, but if you fastforward nearly 20 years, things have changed a lot. Sure, I love the PPC hardware that they are trying to use today, but is it really viable for this?
To be fair, all of the really high benchmarks that I saw were simply synthetic benchmarks. In actualy game performance, the new nV40 seemed to be seldom higher than an FPS or two, and in many cases it was even lower than the ATI card it was paried against.
Very well, actually.
If you check out http://www.garagegames.com you will see that almost all of the Torque-based software products have native Linux and Mac versions.
Try ThinkTanks. It's a pretty cool example.
I wonder how long it will be before you can emulate the emulator that is emulating the XBox, via WINE.
;)
It would be quite funny to see the XBox games running on a Linux box, faster even than with Windows.
There is a difference. It actually works on UNIX and Linux. WINNT's methods of operating as a standard user are a pain in the ass, and you often have to log out and log back in to perform the most simple of tasks.
You almost HAVE to run as Admin on Windows to operate without a snag in the even of a simple system tweak. Shoot - you can even adjust power management as a standard user.
Sure, but if Microsoft's adoption of PNG is in any way indicative of how this skinning system will work, you can count out any PNG alpha transparency capability, ala Internet Explorer. Well, at least until a hotfix that will arrive some time in 2010.
You beat me to my Magnatune plug. In addition, you can buy delicious FLAC, OGG, or even WAV files of all of their music.
They don't have any "popular" music, but most of it is quite good.
What functions are you talking about for "advanced document formatting"?
As for modifying the document code, OpenOffice's is the same way. It's a gzipped file that has the document source inside. Simply open it and hack away at your content.xml file. But really... Who normally needs to do that?
Maybe they should have considered this a few years ago before all of the free and multiplatform office suites got to be as good as they are.
I would have paid Corel a few years ago for a *good* release of their software, but what they created with WINElib was just total crap. Now, we have OpenOffice, Star Office (free for education and research), KDE's Office suite, Gnome's Office software, and several other alternatives that really negate the need for Corel's software.
I could potentially see Corel's software as an alternative to Sun's supported software for business use. Howver, it is very doubtful that Corel will be able to persuade people to use this unless they convince OEMs to pack it in as an inexpensive alternative like they did two years ago on low end HP Pavillion PCs.
Maybe they'll be smart and support SXW and other open source office suite formats.
More proof that people will pay to sustain the things that they believe in. They will pay to keep it alive, even if they can have it for free. Any daily user of a good Linux distribution can see the value in sustaining its maintainers.
Open source is a still a pretty new concept to many. I think that it was just a matter of time before traditional "brick and mortar" rules stopped applying. It took some time, but the system is starting to catch on. You don't need to go to the store to support your favorite Linux distro. Mandrake club and online payment systems have proven that.
I believe that the biggest issue is that it is a tool that they *don't control*. They're losing their power over distribution, very rapidly. Even if people are still buying CDs, what does the future hold when traditional music companies are replaced by alternative means of music distribution?
They traditional record label and its goons aren't needed anymore. They're becoming extinct.
The answer is in my sig.
It's just my opinion, but like most Team Ninja games over the last few years, it is simply a repetitive and unoriginal game with very pretty graphics. Essentially, it's a tech demo, like the last few Dead or Alive games. At least this time it was more of an attempt at making a lasting game.
It's not bad by any means, but I think that other adventure games like Prince of Persia do a better job of telling a story and merging fun gameplay. Ninja Gaiden is hardly any reason to buy the system right now. The difficulty issue mostly comes down to using the right weapons at the right time. Mastering, and you'll get through the game pretty quickly. After some time, it's easy to lose interest as there really is no meat and potatoes to the game. The story and repetitive gameplay doesn't really do the game justice, in spite of its lovely graphics.
Speaking of Macs. Did anyone else notice that the PDF was made with:
Creator: QuarkXPress(tm) 4.11
Producer: Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Macintosh
Yay for MS Office!
Fark!
Photoshop this stupid EV1 ripoff of the CHICK-FIL-A cows.
http://ev1servers.net/images/chik_sm2.jpg