No, it doesn't work on Firefox, as an update to the blog post points out. Youtube won't supply video in a format Firefox supports (and it only supports one - Theora). I believe there is work being done to allow Firefox to use other codecs if you have them installed (as Webkit does - it works for me using Epiphany), at which point this could potentially work on Firefox.
The crazy people in Berkeley wander around pushing shopping carts; the crazy people in Glastonbury sit in fields smoking pot. What is distinctive about Santa Cruz is its peculiarly high-functioning crazy people, like this guy, who are entirely divorced from reality, yet somehow manage to, for instance, run a record label.
our software repository is on a NFS share, you compile to an architecture-specific directory on each of your platforms to create individual binaries that are to be turned into fat binaries and libraries, then on the platform with the fat binary tools you run them to assemble the architecture-specific stuff into actual binaries
Or, you could do the same thing, and then not combine the architecture-specific binaries into one fat binary, but use standardized install locations and an automatically generated shell script, instead. I don't see what the big win for fat binaries is.
With a fat binary, the operating system chooses which one is appropriate.... A shell script that is part of the application cannot do that unless you or someone else rewrites it.
Of course it can, if the operating system provides the necessary functionality. And it's much easier for distributions to provide a "run the appropriate binary" program, than it is to add fat binary support to the kernel and libc.
As soon as you link in a library that needs to be able to load with more than one architecture, your "simpler" scheme blows up to an unholy mess with multiple trees of libraries, multiple library paths, having to compile each slice of the binary completely separately because they end up with different sets of LDFLAGS for each link line, etc.
That makes no sense. Compiling a separate binary for each architecture is going to be no more or less messy than compiling a separate binary for each architecture and then stuffing them in one fat binary. If different architectures need different LDFLAGS, they'll need different LDFLAGS whether or not you use separate binaries of fat binaries.
Heavily improved version of the (GPLed) Id Tech 3 engine.
Right - it's not an example of id's technology equivalent to UE3 that id have GPLed. It's an example of a much earlier id technology that has been improved by someone else.
I assume they have added FreeNX or commercial NX to the mix to get the network performance.
No, they haven't, except for a small number of offsite users working over low-bandwidth connections.
speaking of one packet per character sent instead of hundreds defining every pixel and its shadow
Xft already stores glyphs on the server. The image information is transferred once for each character in each font at a given size, not for every text drawing operation.
I had to use the broken apt-get programs, and then had to resort to the console.
No, you didn't. You could have used "Add/Remove Programs" (now the "Ubuntu Software Center"), or clicked on the "Driver Manager" that pops up automatically when Ubuntu notices there are drivers available for your hardware that are not installed. But you probably don't have to do either, because Ubuntu comes with most drivers already installed.
You're right that it's a weakness of Linux that it doesn't support as much hardware as Windows does; but the problem isn't the difficulty of installing drivers, because installing drivers on Linux is incredibly easy. The problem is that (and this is perhaps more serious) sometimes there are no drivers at all.
What I don't see a whole lot of is major distro companies (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical) paying for major upstream development with X.
Really? David Airlie (one of the main developers of the open-source ATI drivers) works for Red Hat. Keith Packard, one of the major forces behind x.org (and important recent-ish developments like the composite extension) was employed by SuSE. A lot of the DRI2 work is, I believe, being done by employees of Red Hat, and Novell are also credited for work done on x.org. I don't think the situation is any different for X than it is for the other components of the Linux desktop.
The issue is that the network transparency is utterly useless on modern UIs everything beyound Athena Widgets, or a plain xtern simply clogs your network in no time if you use it from more than one client server connection. The protocol simply is too low level to scale
Bollocks. Largo, Florida runs about 300 users on thin clients over X, with all the latest Linux UI stuff, like GTK and Compiz. Yes, the fancy 3D desktop cube works just fine over networked X11.
And yet this layer of indirection makes it harder for everyone
No, this layer of indirection is necessary whether or not you want network transparency. All modern OSs, including Windows and OS X, use an IPC mechanism in their graphics subsystem.
Which is very specifically what they seem to be doing with the Droid. A list of more-or-less random things that the iPhone doesn't do, with no real attempt to explain why you might want to do these things, or concrete vision of how the Droid might enhance your life in a way the iPhone doesn't.
Admittedly, it's not as bad as T-Mobile's ad for the MyTouch 3G (aka the HTC Magic), with its meaningless "100% you" slogan, which appears to add up to, erm, being able to change the wallpaper.
Why does Apple seem to be the only company that has any idea how to market a smartphone?
If MS released WinFS in a situation where one user is reporting file corruption that doesn't appear to occur for anyone else? We'd be shocked at the improvement.
The massive increase in prison spending which makes a negligible difference in crime rates compared to other states is pretty good evidence that three-strikes laws don't work, yes.
Just noticed you specified a "workstation," and perhaps it's not bollocks that you would want 2 gigs for a workstation, if by that you mean a development machine. I've just run Eclipse in addition to Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice (and the desktop environment and a few other background things like pidgin), and my memory usage is now touching 1 gig; compiling anything sizeable at the same time as running these apps might well lead to enough swapping to be annoying.
However, with Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice, my memory usage is around 700 megs, so there's no way you need at least 2 gigs for non-development desktop usage.
Linux can be rather expensive if you're trying to run a CAD program and it refuses to operate properly in either Ubuntu Linux or the Wine windoze emulator.
I'm not sure how Linux ($0) and a Windows license for when you discover Linux doesn't work for you, is more expensive than not using Linux.
If you want decent performance, for a workstation, you want at least 2GB of RAM
Bollocks. Contemporary Linux distros run OK in 512 Mb, absolutely fine, with multiple apps running, in 1GB. Ubuntu's 256 Mb requirement is, well, optimistic, but you don't need 2Gb of RAM for normal desktop use (Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice being used at the same time, say) under Linux.
It's easy to defend the rights to freedom of speech or of assembly. Those can be rationally derived from the fact of one's existence.
You might want to talk to some philosophers about that. Defining just what a right is is pretty difficult, let alone deriving specific rights from reason alone.
So this new right is just yet another form of redistribution of the fruits of productive labor...
Boost has pretty strong threading support, which is the basis for the threading capabilities in the forthcoming revision of the C++ standard. Boost also has cross-platform IPC and socket libraries. It would be a good choice for the OP, I think.
I don't know, that doesn't make it obvious to me. "Was" would be OK if we were talking about a bulk noun - "50% of the water was left in the glass" is right, but *"50% of the apples was left in the basket" sounds obviously wrong to me. I'm now trying to figure out if "warez" is a bulk noun or not, and actually it may well be. *"I downloaded 10 warez yesterday" does sound wrong, which it shouldn't if "warez" is a plural; but the "z" in "warez" suggests that it derives from a plural form.
In the end someone has to pay for the health care. If it is the government then you are going to pay more taxes rather than paying a high insurance premium.
Not necessarily. US government health spending per capita is higher than government healthcare spending per capita in some countries with universal government-funded healthcare, like the UK. So British people don't pay anything for insurance, and they pay less tax to fund healthcare.
The US health system is so massively inefficient that it's possible that a government health system would mean you would pay less in tax than you do now, and not have to pay for health insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't work on Firefox, as an update to the blog post points out. Youtube won't supply video in a format Firefox supports (and it only supports one - Theora). I believe there is work being done to allow Firefox to use other codecs if you have them installed (as Webkit does - it works for me using Epiphany), at which point this could potentially work on Firefox.
Well, I live in Berkeley, so maybe I've just got inured to its particular band of crazy.
I have heard that track years ago, but I'd forgotten about it, so thanks for the reminder.
Ha, true. But sticking with the idea through a few flames on Slashdot isn't quite the same as sticking with it through the court system.
The crazy people in Berkeley wander around pushing shopping carts; the crazy people in Glastonbury sit in fields smoking pot. What is distinctive about Santa Cruz is its peculiarly high-functioning crazy people, like this guy, who are entirely divorced from reality, yet somehow manage to, for instance, run a record label.
our software repository is on a NFS share, you compile to an architecture-specific directory on each of your platforms to create individual binaries that are to be turned into fat binaries and libraries, then on the platform with the fat binary tools you run them to assemble the architecture-specific stuff into actual binaries
Or, you could do the same thing, and then not combine the architecture-specific binaries into one fat binary, but use standardized install locations and an automatically generated shell script, instead. I don't see what the big win for fat binaries is.
With a fat binary, the operating system chooses which one is appropriate.... A shell script that is part of the application cannot do that unless you or someone else rewrites it.
Of course it can, if the operating system provides the necessary functionality. And it's much easier for distributions to provide a "run the appropriate binary" program, than it is to add fat binary support to the kernel and libc.
As soon as you link in a library that needs to be able to load with more than one architecture, your "simpler" scheme blows up to an unholy mess with multiple trees of libraries, multiple library paths, having to compile each slice of the binary completely separately because they end up with different sets of LDFLAGS for each link line, etc.
That makes no sense. Compiling a separate binary for each architecture is going to be no more or less messy than compiling a separate binary for each architecture and then stuffing them in one fat binary. If different architectures need different LDFLAGS, they'll need different LDFLAGS whether or not you use separate binaries of fat binaries.
Heavily improved version of the (GPLed) Id Tech 3 engine.
Right - it's not an example of id's technology equivalent to UE3 that id have GPLed. It's an example of a much earlier id technology that has been improved by someone else.
I assume they have added FreeNX or commercial NX to the mix to get the network performance.
No, they haven't, except for a small number of offsite users working over low-bandwidth connections.
speaking of one packet per character sent instead of hundreds defining every pixel and its shadow
Xft already stores glyphs on the server. The image information is transferred once for each character in each font at a given size, not for every text drawing operation.
I had to use the broken apt-get programs, and then had to resort to the console.
No, you didn't. You could have used "Add/Remove Programs" (now the "Ubuntu Software Center"), or clicked on the
"Driver Manager" that pops up automatically when Ubuntu notices there are drivers available for your hardware that are not installed. But you probably don't have to do either, because Ubuntu comes with most drivers already installed.
You're right that it's a weakness of Linux that it doesn't support as much hardware as Windows does; but the problem isn't the difficulty of installing drivers, because installing drivers on Linux is incredibly easy. The problem is that (and this is perhaps more serious) sometimes there are no drivers at all.
What I don't see a whole lot of is major distro companies (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical) paying for major upstream development with X.
Really? David Airlie (one of the main developers of the open-source ATI drivers) works for Red Hat. Keith Packard, one of the major forces behind x.org (and important recent-ish developments like the composite extension) was employed by SuSE. A lot of the DRI2 work is, I believe, being done by employees of Red Hat, and Novell are also credited for work done on x.org. I don't think the situation is any different for X than it is for the other components of the Linux desktop.
The issue is that the network transparency is utterly useless on modern UIs everything beyound Athena Widgets, or a plain xtern simply clogs your network in no time if you use it from more than one client server connection.
The protocol simply is too low level to scale
Bollocks. Largo, Florida runs about 300 users on thin clients over X, with all the latest Linux UI stuff, like GTK and Compiz. Yes, the fancy 3D desktop cube works just fine over networked X11.
And yet this layer of indirection makes it harder for everyone
No, this layer of indirection is necessary whether or not you want network transparency. All modern OSs, including Windows and OS X, use an IPC mechanism in their graphics subsystem.
is to market yourself as a 'iPhone killer'
Which is very specifically what they seem to be doing with the Droid. A list of more-or-less random things that the iPhone doesn't do, with no real attempt to explain why you might want to do these things, or concrete vision of how the Droid might enhance your life in a way the iPhone doesn't.
Admittedly, it's not as bad as T-Mobile's ad for the MyTouch 3G (aka the HTC Magic), with its meaningless "100% you" slogan, which appears to add up to, erm, being able to change the wallpaper.
Why does Apple seem to be the only company that has any idea how to market a smartphone?
If MS released WinFS in a situation where one user is reporting file corruption that doesn't appear to occur for anyone else? We'd be shocked at the improvement.
The massive increase in prison spending which makes a negligible difference in crime rates compared to other states is pretty good evidence that three-strikes laws don't work, yes.
If by "never" you mean "since the 13th century."
Lock him up for his own as well as everyone else's good.
Yeah, three strikes laws are really working out for everyone's good in California.
Just noticed you specified a "workstation," and perhaps it's not bollocks that you would want 2 gigs for a workstation, if by that you mean a development machine. I've just run Eclipse in addition to Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice (and the desktop environment and a few other background things like pidgin), and my memory usage is now touching 1 gig; compiling anything sizeable at the same time as running these apps might well lead to enough swapping to be annoying.
However, with Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice, my memory usage is around 700 megs, so there's no way you need at least 2 gigs for non-development desktop usage.
Linux can be rather expensive if you're trying to run a CAD program and it refuses to operate properly in either Ubuntu Linux or the Wine windoze emulator.
I'm not sure how Linux ($0) and a Windows license for when you discover Linux doesn't work for you, is more expensive than not using Linux.
If you want decent performance, for a workstation, you want at least 2GB of RAM
Bollocks. Contemporary Linux distros run OK in 512 Mb, absolutely fine, with multiple apps running, in 1GB. Ubuntu's 256 Mb requirement is, well, optimistic, but you don't need 2Gb of RAM for normal desktop use (Firefox, Evolution, and Openoffice being used at the same time, say) under Linux.
Don't ever expect a reasonable discussion with anybody who thinks that's a clever way to argue.
Glenn Beck isn't interested in reasonable discussion. Hurling abuse at him is a perfectly reasonable way to respond to this.
It's easy to defend the rights to freedom of speech or of assembly. Those can be rationally derived from the fact of one's existence.
You might want to talk to some philosophers about that. Defining just what a right is is pretty difficult, let alone deriving specific rights from reason alone.
So this new right is just yet another form of redistribution of the fruits of productive labor...
It is indeed. So what's your point?
Boost has pretty strong threading support, which is the basis for the threading capabilities in the forthcoming revision of the C++ standard. Boost also has cross-platform IPC and socket libraries. It would be a good choice for the OP, I think.
I don't know, that doesn't make it obvious to me. "Was" would be OK if we were talking about a bulk noun - "50% of the water was left in the glass" is right, but *"50% of the apples was left in the basket" sounds obviously wrong to me. I'm now trying to figure out if "warez" is a bulk noun or not, and actually it may well be. *"I downloaded 10 warez yesterday" does sound wrong, which it shouldn't if "warez" is a plural; but the "z" in "warez" suggests that it derives from a plural form.
"Were" is the past plural form of "to be." As "100% of the warez" names more than one ware, "were" is the right form of the verb to use here.
In the end someone has to pay for the health care. If it is the government then you are going to pay more taxes rather than paying a high insurance premium.
Not necessarily. US government health spending per capita is higher than government healthcare spending per capita in some countries with universal government-funded healthcare, like the UK. So British people don't pay anything for insurance, and they pay less tax to fund healthcare.
The US health system is so massively inefficient that it's possible that a government health system would mean you would pay less in tax than you do now, and not have to pay for health insurance.