Sounds like the OS-9 operating system I used to use on 68k machines; graphics and widgets were implemented in the way you're describing as a kind of a terminal.
Displaying a stream of escape sequences to a window (each window had a device name) or within a window would create, modify or manipulate high-level widgets in quite an efficient manner. Creating a new window, giving it scrollbars and a couple of buttons was as simple as sending a few bytes of data to a window's device or standard output path.
It's like ANSI or VT100, only graphical... And when writing C apps for the GUI, you could either call high-level functions like CreateWindow() or you could string the sequence of 10-20 bytes together yourself and just STDOUT them with printf() quite easily; the result was the same. But of course, the main benefit was that you could write shell scripts that would take full advantage of windowing, subwindowing and widget capabilities just by using STDOUT and STDIN, without needing extra libraries or middleware.
It's not a release, and it's not a beta yet, and Mr. Volkerding was not rude. He is a giant int he Linux world. Anyway, the slackware-current tree is for development.
Or would you Slashdot guys rather have closed development over at Slackware?
I'm a starving writer and journalist. My salary is well under $20k. Yeah I do some tech and network work for my friends and local community causes but it's all in the name of helping out. Mostly I'm just here for the free drinks.
I just paid $300 for my own personal machine: a ThinkPad 760xd and now I can't eat or go to the john for a month. No way I can afford $1500 for an iBook.
After this holiday season (which saw $99 DVD players at Circuit City, among other places) nearly everyone I know now has a DVD player, and most of them already have a small stack of films as well. This is ~35 DVD players that I know of in the houses of middle-middle-class folks.
Nobody I know has an HDTV set. They're all perfectly happy to play their DVDs on their current sets -- the benefits of no rewind, no degradation, better sound, space savings and so on are enough to sell DVD players.
Your conclusion is correct: DVD is going to win, but not in spite of itself as you seem to suggest. It's going to win because it is already in a solid position to become the de-facto video standard of the next decade or so. D-VHS not only requires HDTV, but requires (if I read correctly) a special type of HDTV which is even more expensive than the already expensive standard HDTV set.
D-VHS is simply too late, whether technically better or not.
If I understand correctly, there will be complete shell access for things like shell scripting, perl, and so on... Basically, a fairly standard BSD operating system under the GUI. And now, there's an X server for OS X so that X apps can be run as well, fairly seamlessly.
Basically, it sounds like a full-fledged Unix-like OS with the added benefit of a full-fledged Mac-like OS on the same display.
God knows I'd switch if I could afford the @(#%&@)*#$& Mac hardware.
This was done once already, with the "PR" rating used by Cyrix with the 6x86 CPU for so long. It failed miserably, because uneducated consumers were incensed when they found out that their "PR-166" chip was really a "only" a 133 MHz chip. There were talks of class action suits and so on.
These people, too, didn't want to learn more about computer architecture than they had to. This doomed them to the narrow "MHz vs. MHz" vision.
Once the semi-techies (people who like computers but don't know shit about them anyway) got ahold of this information, Cyrix CPUs became a kind of pariah. There were so many little local shops in my area who wouldn't sell them because (they said) Cyrix was a dishonest company who lied about the speed of their chips and couldn't even "figure out" how to make a real 200MHz CPU anyway...
Basically, good luck getting anyone to agree to this, especially any companies who currently hold the "speed crown" in terms of MHz and can therefore market it that way to the undereducated masses...
Not knowing anything at all about this technology (chemistry?! biology?! latin?!) it reminds me of the "Mr. Fusion" device on the back of Doc's car in Back to the Future.
Though the underlying mechanism is different, if this type of thing were made more efficient, wouldn't it be possible to dump a bunch of potato peelings, fat trimmings from the roast, moldy bread and apple cores into the "Mr. Garbage Disposal" on the back of your electrically-powered moped?
I know there's a car that already runs on used fryer grease, but there are a lot of apple cores, potato peelings and bags of moldy bread out there, too...
There's more to this economic picture than just passenger travel. There's goods and (more importantly) natural resources exchange. There's a great deal of underexploited potential for trade of this kind between the US and regions of the former USSR simply because of geographic isolation; it isn't easy to transport every last thing by air or sea.
This could be a good deal for both nations, esp. with regard to petroleum.
Plus, don't underestimate the passenger thing... I doubt whether they'd even make it a passenger line, but I'd pay a decent penny just to be able to say I'd made the trip. I find the idea very cool.
What if the first few batches of silicon are utter, buggy crap? If Linux is the only native OS out there for Itanium, will Linux perhaps get blamed for or at least associated with all of the problems that can occur in a new platform?
What I'm saying is, what if Itanium+Linux=crap just gets shortened to Linux=crap in the minds of some folks, even though the shaky new Itanium platform was really at fault?
Maybe it would be "fscked" up for somebody to worry about 3dfx customers, but it would be a hell of a lot more ethical.
Why some nVidia fans such assholes about this? Even forgetting about shareholders and gaming hardcores, a lot of people who bought retail for the holidays without any knowledge of this are getting screwed over in a big way.
Comments blaming this on the "stupidity" of people who buy 3dfx or saying that nVidia can and should screw everyone over really piss me off. I think that a good conscience at least requires that nVidia make a good faith effort to support VSA-100 with drivers, since they've just bought it.
But you're right, that's only the ethical, good conscience thing to do. I guess that's not the American [fuck your neighbors and suck money for the rich out of the middle class] way.
Um, the point is that I own a whole bunch of games which support Glide and DirectX or OpenGL, and all of them look and play much better in Glide on Voodoo than under OpenGL or DirectX and other hardware.
Are they old games? Some of them. So what? I don't care about your politics. I care about my games.
When I upgraded from my old 2D card a few years ago, I bought a Riva 128ZX and a Banshee. The Banshee had better image quality, especially at higher resolutions, and the drivers were more solid. I kept the Banshee and returned the 128ZX.
Later on, ready to upgrade again, I bought a TNT2 and a Voodoo3 3000. After toying with them both for about a week, I returned the TNT2 and kept the Voodoo3. 2D image quality, board quality, and driver quality was just better, and framerates in many games were better, too.
Finally, this year, I bought a GeForce, a Radeon, and a Voodoo5, fully expecting the 3dfx card to lose after reading reviews. The Radeon was a crap product with useless drivers and I sold it off right away. The GeForce and Voodoo5 battled it out, but in the end, the GeForce 2D was just too lousy at 1600x1200 and all of my Glide games (some of them among my favorites) looked and played so much better with the Voodoo5...
So now I own just a Voodoo5, which I've been happy with. In essence, I've always found that 3dfx quality just put it head and shoulders above the rest, at least for my tastes.
I hope that Nvidia will start getting 2D right, or I may have this Voodoo5 for a long time...
Loki's games work, they work on multiple distributions, and they're for sale online. I wouldn't ever try to drop in at CompUSA and buy Descent 3 for Linux... It wouldn't occur to me.
Instead, just pop over to Loki and order it.
I can easily see how it might be a losing proposition to try and get a Linux game shrink-wrap onto a retail shelf... I'm not sure that kind of volume exists in Linux gaming right now -- sounds like a money-losing proposition. Better to sell online.
I ran a Voodoo3 for over a year and was very satisfied. I played Q3A at 1024x768 and never felt deprived. Then, I "upgraded" to a GeForce 256 not too long ago.
Well, Voodoo5 prices have come down (as everyone knew they would) and I just picked up a retail Voodoo5 online for $170.00 flat to replace my Geforce 256. I tried a Radeon 32MB first, but returned it and went Voodoo5 instead.
Why did I do this? What does this get me? A reasonably fast card at a similar price point to nVidia and ATI offerings with two important benefits:
It will run all of my glide-only games. Yes, I still have some and I like them a lot. I want to run glide on all games that offer a choice too because glide image quality just kicks the sh*t out of DirectX, at least in most of the games I've got.
Better FSAA. Most of the reviews say that the VSA-100 FSAA implementation is better than the FSAA on Radeon or Geforce cards. And now that I've seen the FSAA 2x running at 1024x768 on my Voodoo5, I can definitely agree. It's better than the Geforce FSAA and light years ahead of the (almost useless) Radeon FSAA.
So, I went from Voodoo3 -> GeForce -> Radeon -> Voodoo5 in the space of a couple of months and now I'm satisfied again.
Here's hoping 3dfx is around for my next upgrade, too.
It's not just e-mail -- they're dropping free dialup services altogether. This makes a hell of a lot of work for me... I've sent every member of my family and half of the people over 50 that I know a disk with the AV stuff on it and they're all using it.
Next week, I'm suddenly going to be the AltaVista help desk while everyone I know calls me to ask why their 'net is down. Dammit.
I've been neutral politically because I didn't feel like either party suited my needs. I'm a fiscal conservative (lower taxes!) but a social liberal (pro-choice!) and have always felt as though both parties were fairly amoral.
This election and the comments here at Slashdot have changed my mind, though.
The behavior of the Democratic party has been incredibly self-righteous and offensive to me.
They continue to talk about the "will of the people" even though the vote (including in Florida) was split soundly down the middle. They therefore effectively call all non-Gore voters inhuman and not worthy of being counted.
They fly in the face of both tradition and law by contesting an election (make no mistake) from election night over and over and over, even though they continue to loose. When they can't win, they ratchet up the hate speech toward all non-Gore supporters, who are now non-American, fascist, and wanting to stage a Coup D'etat.
Through it all, they insult a man who graduated from Harvard and Yale, calling him a rich Daddy's boy, an idiot and a lettucehead, even though their own man is an equally wealthy senator's son who flunked out of college and is every bit the "good ol' boy" insider that his opponent is.
As if that wasn't enough, they hang around Slashdot calling the voters who voted for Bush "stupid" and saying things about hoping that "fucking republicans" all die. Brilliant.
They make derogatory comments about states in the middle of the U.S. who voted for Bush. Much of my family lives in San Francisco and much of my family lives in Utah and Idaho. To me, they're all intelligent, loving people who are worth their weight in gold. That democrats would insult half of my family simply because they live in the middle of the U.S. rather than in a major urban center is incindiary and hurtful.
They make anti-white comments on every television channel I watch, equating white people with slavery and hate, trying to marginalize every last one of them. My mother is white. My father is not. To me, they have an equal right to vote and an equal right to live. The fact that democratic supporters would apparently wish my mother ill just because she's white and middle-class makes me puke.
I have been honestly shocked by the behavior of the democratic party during this post-election mess. I went into it slightly untrusting of republican money and thinking that Al Gore was at least a "boy scout" by comparison. Boy was I wrong. I'm going to vote Republican next time around.
Now I'll sit around and watch the replies to this post: "you're a republican anyway asshole" and "fuck off and die republican" and "I hate you white boy" and "you're an idiot" and so on. Beautiful.
Ummm... Let the stupid people run your life. I'd rather have them excluded from making laws about mine. If you can't pass a basic IQ test, you shouldn't be voting, driving, making babies or making food in a restauraunt, period.
Guess this makes me a bigoted, fascist, hateful, satanic republican?
I was under the impression that the need for new case designs was due to the weight of the heat sink, not the height.
From what I understand, there are four holes in the P4 motherboard through which mounting posts (part of the case) rise; the heat sink is then bolted to these posts? Simply clipping the heat sink onto the motherboard as has been done with past architectures won't work because the unit is too heavy and causes significant bowing of the board.
Mind you, this is all second-hand and several months old from a friend inside Intel, but a heat-sink that is too high to fit into an ATX case would be a monster indeed...
This can work with old IDE cables or SCSI-1, but don't try this with the higher bus speeds of SCSI-2 or anything faster or with UDMA IDA drives.
These lines are parallel for a reason (every other one of them is ground) and you will get interference (read: data loss) if you're not extremely lucky. If you want round cables, buy them pre-made, where each data line is twisted with its matching ground line to halt interference.
Love 'em. I still have my whole stack of old Infocom game originals (360k floppies). I lost half of my eyesight playing those things on an old "green screen" display that was only 8" across to begin with (I couldn't afford anything else at the time -- even the 8" green screen cost me $190).
I also loved all of the Sierra text/graphic adventures -- King's quest I-IV and similar games that were around at the time... I thought they were incredibly fun and were good for weeks of spare-time gameplay.
I actually think today's games (i.e. Quake III, Unreal Tournament) are the ultimate triumph of graphics of substance that so many people are accusing Myst and Riven of. I own a huge number of first-person shooters (because that's what's being sold today) and they're okay, but I play them more for "cool graphics" value than for anything else -- really, they're all just the same:
Stick one, two, or fifty low-detail humanoid figures in a room and then frantically blast, blast, blast away while saying to the other users online: "shit, boog, gonna get blown away!"
I still play King's Quest I sometimes. I almost never play Quake or Quake II anymore.
I get really tired of hearing that Myst and Riven sucked and that the millions in sales are thanks only to clueless newbies who like art, unlike "real" gamers who can see the games for the lousy pieces of work they are. This is total bullshit.
Myst and Riven didn't suck by a long shot. They were the first two PC games I ever actually finished or whose plot ever made any difference to me as I played. I played both from beginning to end without spoilers and I still have all of the notes I kept during Riven as a part of gameplay.
I now own about $5,000 worth of computer games, including Quake II, Quake III, Descent III, Half Life, Deus Ex, Soldier of Fortune, Myth II: Soulblighter, Ultima IX, Ultima Online, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Unreal, Unreal Tournament and tons of other "big smash" games. My gaming rig is an Athlon 1GHz with 450MB RAM, 3D sound, 64MB ATI Radeon DDR, 21" monitor and U2W SCSI all around. I'm not a clueless newbie.
And somehow still, my two favorites games of all time are -- you guessed it -- Myst and Riven. I continue to search in vain for games which will match the immersive experience I had with these two. Riven especially is a truly incredible piece of entertainment. I check Cyan's page often and can only hope that "mudpie" lives up to the lineage.
Some people do like to be made to think and to explore when trying to play a game, contraty to popular wisdom that all gamers only want a mindless violence experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Displaying a stream of escape sequences to a window (each window had a device name) or within a window would create, modify or manipulate high-level widgets in quite an efficient manner. Creating a new window, giving it scrollbars and a couple of buttons was as simple as sending a few bytes of data to a window's device or standard output path.
It's like ANSI or VT100, only graphical... And when writing C apps for the GUI, you could either call high-level functions like CreateWindow() or you could string the sequence of 10-20 bytes together yourself and just STDOUT them with printf() quite easily; the result was the same. But of course, the main benefit was that you could write shell scripts that would take full advantage of windowing, subwindowing and widget capabilities just by using STDOUT and STDIN, without needing extra libraries or middleware.
Mobile Duron + Geeks = Instant Unix!
Shut up... Some of us can't even afford boxen yet. We're still stuck with Vaxen.
Or would you Slashdot guys rather have closed development over at Slackware?
I just paid $300 for my own personal machine: a ThinkPad 760xd and now I can't eat or go to the john for a month. No way I can afford $1500 for an iBook.
Nobody I know has an HDTV set. They're all perfectly happy to play their DVDs on their current sets -- the benefits of no rewind, no degradation, better sound, space savings and so on are enough to sell DVD players.
Your conclusion is correct: DVD is going to win, but not in spite of itself as you seem to suggest. It's going to win because it is already in a solid position to become the de-facto video standard of the next decade or so. D-VHS not only requires HDTV, but requires (if I read correctly) a special type of HDTV which is even more expensive than the already expensive standard HDTV set.
D-VHS is simply too late, whether technically better or not.
Basically, it sounds like a full-fledged Unix-like OS with the added benefit of a full-fledged Mac-like OS on the same display.
God knows I'd switch if I could afford the @(#%&@)*#$& Mac hardware.
These people, too, didn't want to learn more about computer architecture than they had to. This doomed them to the narrow "MHz vs. MHz" vision.
Once the semi-techies (people who like computers but don't know shit about them anyway) got ahold of this information, Cyrix CPUs became a kind of pariah. There were so many little local shops in my area who wouldn't sell them because (they said) Cyrix was a dishonest company who lied about the speed of their chips and couldn't even "figure out" how to make a real 200MHz CPU anyway...
Basically, good luck getting anyone to agree to this, especially any companies who currently hold the "speed crown" in terms of MHz and can therefore market it that way to the undereducated masses...
Though the underlying mechanism is different, if this type of thing were made more efficient, wouldn't it be possible to dump a bunch of potato peelings, fat trimmings from the roast, moldy bread and apple cores into the "Mr. Garbage Disposal" on the back of your electrically-powered moped?
I know there's a car that already runs on used fryer grease, but there are a lot of apple cores, potato peelings and bags of moldy bread out there, too...
This could be a good deal for both nations, esp. with regard to petroleum.
Plus, don't underestimate the passenger thing... I doubt whether they'd even make it a passenger line, but I'd pay a decent penny just to be able to say I'd made the trip. I find the idea very cool.
What I'm saying is, what if Itanium+Linux=crap just gets shortened to Linux=crap in the minds of some folks, even though the shaky new Itanium platform was really at fault?
Why some nVidia fans such assholes about this? Even forgetting about shareholders and gaming hardcores, a lot of people who bought retail for the holidays without any knowledge of this are getting screwed over in a big way.
Comments blaming this on the "stupidity" of people who buy 3dfx or saying that nVidia can and should screw everyone over really piss me off. I think that a good conscience at least requires that nVidia make a good faith effort to support VSA-100 with drivers, since they've just bought it.
But you're right, that's only the ethical, good conscience thing to do. I guess that's not the American [fuck your neighbors and suck money for the rich out of the middle class] way.
Are they old games? Some of them. So what? I don't care about your politics. I care about my games.
So now I own just a Voodoo5, which I've been happy with. In essence, I've always found that 3dfx quality just put it head and shoulders above the rest, at least for my tastes.
I hope that Nvidia will start getting 2D right, or I may have this Voodoo5 for a long time...
Instead, just pop over to Loki and order it.
I can easily see how it might be a losing proposition to try and get a Linux game shrink-wrap onto a retail shelf... I'm not sure that kind of volume exists in Linux gaming right now -- sounds like a money-losing proposition. Better to sell online.
Well, Voodoo5 prices have come down (as everyone knew they would) and I just picked up a retail Voodoo5 online for $170.00 flat to replace my Geforce 256. I tried a Radeon 32MB first, but returned it and went Voodoo5 instead.
Why did I do this? What does this get me? A reasonably fast card at a similar price point to nVidia and ATI offerings with two important benefits:
So, I went from Voodoo3 -> GeForce -> Radeon -> Voodoo5 in the space of a couple of months and now I'm satisfied again.
Here's hoping 3dfx is around for my next upgrade, too.
Next week, I'm suddenly going to be the AltaVista help desk while everyone I know calls me to ask why their 'net is down. Dammit.
This election and the comments here at Slashdot have changed my mind, though.
The behavior of the Democratic party has been incredibly self-righteous and offensive to me.
I have been honestly shocked by the behavior of the democratic party during this post-election mess. I went into it slightly untrusting of republican money and thinking that Al Gore was at least a "boy scout" by comparison. Boy was I wrong. I'm going to vote Republican next time around.
Now I'll sit around and watch the replies to this post: "you're a republican anyway asshole" and "fuck off and die republican" and "I hate you white boy" and "you're an idiot" and so on. Beautiful.
Makes me proud to be an American.
Guess this makes me a bigoted, fascist, hateful, satanic republican?
From what I understand, there are four holes in the P4 motherboard through which mounting posts (part of the case) rise; the heat sink is then bolted to these posts? Simply clipping the heat sink onto the motherboard as has been done with past architectures won't work because the unit is too heavy and causes significant bowing of the board.
Mind you, this is all second-hand and several months old from a friend inside Intel, but a heat-sink that is too high to fit into an ATX case would be a monster indeed...
I meant Fast SCSI-2 or faster...
These lines are parallel for a reason (every other one of them is ground) and you will get interference (read: data loss) if you're not extremely lucky. If you want round cables, buy them pre-made, where each data line is twisted with its matching ground line to halt interference.
I think you mean "subliminable" don't you?
Love 'em. I still have my whole stack of old Infocom game originals (360k floppies). I lost half of my eyesight playing those things on an old "green screen" display that was only 8" across to begin with (I couldn't afford anything else at the time -- even the 8" green screen cost me $190).
I also loved all of the Sierra text/graphic adventures -- King's quest I-IV and similar games that were around at the time... I thought they were incredibly fun and were good for weeks of spare-time gameplay.
I actually think today's games (i.e. Quake III, Unreal Tournament) are the ultimate triumph of graphics of substance that so many people are accusing Myst and Riven of. I own a huge number of first-person shooters (because that's what's being sold today) and they're okay, but I play them more for "cool graphics" value than for anything else -- really, they're all just the same:
Stick one, two, or fifty low-detail humanoid figures in a room and then frantically blast, blast, blast away while saying to the other users online: "shit, boog, gonna get blown away!"
I still play King's Quest I sometimes. I almost never play Quake or Quake II anymore.
Myst and Riven didn't suck by a long shot. They were the first two PC games I ever actually finished or whose plot ever made any difference to me as I played. I played both from beginning to end without spoilers and I still have all of the notes I kept during Riven as a part of gameplay.
I now own about $5,000 worth of computer games, including Quake II, Quake III, Descent III, Half Life, Deus Ex, Soldier of Fortune, Myth II: Soulblighter, Ultima IX, Ultima Online, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Unreal, Unreal Tournament and tons of other "big smash" games. My gaming rig is an Athlon 1GHz with 450MB RAM, 3D sound, 64MB ATI Radeon DDR, 21" monitor and U2W SCSI all around. I'm not a clueless newbie.
And somehow still, my two favorites games of all time are -- you guessed it -- Myst and Riven. I continue to search in vain for games which will match the immersive experience I had with these two. Riven especially is a truly incredible piece of entertainment. I check Cyan's page often and can only hope that "mudpie" lives up to the lineage.
Some people do like to be made to think and to explore when trying to play a game, contraty to popular wisdom that all gamers only want a mindless violence experience.