Someone should reverse engineer 3D acceleration for graphics cards. Another great idea, but it's proven to be really hard so far.
Perhaps so, but it seems like the most likely solution to the problem at the moment. The r300 project has now
got working drivers, through reverse engineering, for relatively modern ATI cards (at least up to X800, don't know
about newer).
Thus speaks the voice of one who sees widespread adoption of Linux as a goal. Others see the creation of a
free operating system as the goal instead. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but nor do they go hand in hand.
I would rather see Linux remain a niche OS than sacrifice my principles to chase market share. Of course, I'd
like to see Linux gain widespread adoption as well. But if it came to a choice
between the two, I'll stick with what I believe to be right.
I think most people see stuff like what happened in London and the cartoon riots and realize the alternative is much worse.
Actually, no (and I say that as a Londoner, having personally
experienced multiple terrorist bombs). No amount of spying on
the general public will allow the government to wipe out
terrorism. Yes, perhaps it will reduce it. Slightly. But I
can assure you that the price for that reduction is too high.
google also allows you to download the file in several formats.
This is the killer feature for me. Youtube just doesn't have the bandwidth to be able to stream videos. I can't remember the
last time I was able to watch a video on youtube without it pausing to catch up every few seconds. Google has a similar
problem (albeit to a lesser extent). However, Google lets you download the video and watch it offline. That to me makes
Google Video usable, and Youtube unusable. How it's managed to get the bulk of the market share for online videos is
utterly beyond me.
It's not much of an article! OK, so it covers the very beginning, and is only a short column,
but there's an awful lot it
misses out. Sure, it mentions C&VG, and indeed, the whole industry read it at
the time, here in the UK. But Sinclair User came along
shortly afterwards and garnered a sizeable following. There's also no mention of the Newsfield publications.
Crash and Zzap!64
really were the defining magazines of the 1980s computer gaming scene.
For 100 million pixels, the graphics of those planes look pretty crap.
Despite the impressive sounding headline figures, it's not actually
that high resolution at all. 100 million pixels is approx 16.7 million per side
of the cube. Now I have some 4.2 million pixels sitting in front of me as I type this. So it's only about
4 times the pixels of my current desktop, covering a 10'x10' wall, which I can assure you is much
more than 4 times the display area that I have. In fact, the VR room is only around 33dpi, compared to
over 100dpi on my desktop. It's still pretty impressive, of course, and remember that your head will
typically be 5' away from the display in the VR room, so you don't need massively high resolutions to
get a good visual effect.
At this rate why not just use emacs with gnuclient (for fast access) and viper mode (for your basic vi keybindings)?
Because basic vi keybindings aren't enough. I use probably 95% of vi's features on a regular basis, and
I can't make do with less than that. The last time I tried vi emulation under emacs, I gave up in disgust
because I didn't support the features I use every day.
The car existed and was used to drag race in the UK.
Speaking of UK drag racing, Ronnie Picardo has a dual engined jet poweredBeetle
that has regularly been out and about at Santa Pod raceway over the last few years. It has a normal petrol engine
for low speed driving, and a rather large jet sticking out of the back. From memory, it's still road legal, as well.
Thus this story is nothing that hasn't already been done some time ago...
No, this is wrong. UK employment law gives 20 days + bank holidays
No, it's you that are wrong. There is no statutory entitlement to take the day off on a bank holiday. You are only entitled to 20 days
holiday per year. It is common for employers to allow bank holidays off in addition to those 20 days, but it's not universal, and some
employers insist that if you take a bank holiday off, it comes out of your annual holiday entitlement. There are plans to change that, but
they're not yet law in the UK.
John Lecarre, especially early on, was writing his espionage thrillers based on personal experience in British Intelligence; Ian Fleming was writing pop nonsense.
Maybe so, but it was based directly on his personal experience in British Intelligence. To claim le Carré's work is superior
because of his intelligence background is nonsense. It may be superior (although that's subjective), but given Fleming's background
in naval intelligence, personal experience is certainly not going to be the reason for one being better than the other.
This is par for the course regarding Fedora. I've had the misfortune of having to install it on testbed machines at work, and it is the ultimate example of beta software.
Just to provide an alternative perspective, I couldn't disagree more. I've used Fedora since FC1,
and have found it to be a useful, stable desktop. The reviewer's experiences in no way match mine,
which have essentially been "stick the CD in, install and start using it". I've never seen any of
the problems mentioned, and nor have I heard of anyone else having them. Sure, hardware detection
issues can be an occasional problem for any distribution, but from what I've seen, Fedora does
better than any other distribution I've used on that front. I guess he just got unlucky.
those interested in command line image processing, should check out netpbm too.
I couldn't agree more. For a start, a single monolithic app like ImageMagick is just not the Unix way. It means
that to add functionality, you need to recompile the application. With netpbm, if you want a new feature, you just write
a filter and stick it in the pipeline. Much easier, and much more flexible. In the past, my only gripe
was that netpbm (and pbmplus
before it) was unable to handle transparency in image. Fortunately, that's no longer the case, and recent
versions are able to do so.
Plus, with my (admittedly not very scientific) tests, netpbm comes out
slightly faster for the tasks I perform anyway (mostly cropping and scaling).
I can highly recommend netpbm.
I ask this because what my American viewpoint sees of the middle east is the seeming lack of mass-transportation systems like we have in American (highways, railroads, and the like.)
That's odd... from what I've seen, America lacks mass transportation systems, forcing the public
onto the roads in private cars due to lack of suitable alternatives (underground railways, trams,
etc), particularly in the cities.
if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money
Now, I know this is Slashdot, but even here I'd expect a better effort than this FUD.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway, you can both read and create PDFs using
free (speech and beer) software, the very existence of which is possible because Adobe
has kindly released the specs for PDF that are available to all without charge. Nor does
Adobe charge for their own reader, although they do keep the source to themselves.
But Unipages are superior to PDF in their ability to hold
functionality (Javascript), Flash animations and practically anything
normally possible in a web page.
Of course, had you bothered to research the subject, you'd know that
PDF has supported animations and scripting with JavaScript within
a document for many years now. I'm not saying
the Unipage won't be useful thing. But to claim it's superior to PDF
in areas where it's clearly not isn't going to help its cause. Not
only that, but the two products have different goals anyway. PDF is,
and I suspect will remain, the best way to send a document where the
design and layout is important. It should render the same on all PDF
viewers, and can contain richer formatting than can be expressed in
HTML/CSS. A Unipage will probably be easier to author[1] than a complex
PDF, but will only accurately preserve content, not formatting. Use
whichever one is right for the task at hand. If anything, I'd say
it's more of a rival to Word documents than PDFs.
[1] In fact, I suspect that will be its major selling point. Although
you can do wonderful things with PDF, most people don't because a) they
don't know about them, and b) the Adobe authoring tools are expensive,
and hence not widespread.
It doesn't even mean they miss-interpret meaning. What it does do is demand the reader establish the context from which the meaning can be established.
But thats a dangerous path, since one cannot always expect to be able to generate a sufficient context.
But that's the point. Most of the time, there isn't sufficient context to be able to
correctly guess the intended meaning.
I couldn't agree more. However, it's not just a case of me getting
frustrated at the apparent lack of schooling of the people with whom
I'm interacting. Nor is it just a case of language evolving. No, it's
reaching the point where I'm genuinely struggling to understand what
people are saying. As an example, I see an increasing number of people
writing "no" when they mean "know". Since my brain is conditioned to
associate a completely different meaning to the word "no", I have to
do a double take before I can work out what they meant. When combined
with a total absence of punctuation, I'm left wondering how the
generation of today manage to communicate with each other at all,
let alone with others.
Computers are not something you can have an opinion about: you pick what is on the market at the time you buy them.
No, you're missing the point. Both the PC and the 8-bit micros were on the market at
the same time. You had a choice. PCs were insanely expensive at the time, way out of the reach
of the general public. Hence the home micros took off, as they were at least affordable. What's
depressing is that in the USA, people bought the PC anyway, which was (and indeed still is) a
very dull machine in comparison.
I was depressed by how many of the people in the article listed an IBM PC as their first computer.
There was a magic about the early 8-bit micros that captured the imagination, and that was just
completely missing on the PC. I, too, was brought up with the joys of wobbly RAM packs, dead flesh
keyboards, and progressed up through the C64 and onto the Amiga before finally migrating to a PC
compatible in the mid '90s. People that only had access to a PC have no idea about what they were
missing.
This is not a "braindead" design. It is, in fact, the only possible design.
Wrong. It is one possible design. The window manager and the compositor have to interact, that I'll grant you.
But they don't necessarily have to be in the same process. There are many ways they could be communicating
with each other -- using sockets, or shared memory, for example. Now for performance reasons, that might be
impractical. As you say, I haven't worked on or with the code, so I don't know. But if that proved to be the
case, then anyone with half a brain would have realised from the very start that people would want to do this
with a variety of window managers, not just the one chosen by the inital developer. Given that, the current
solution to the problem (just take a fork of the code for each wm) is a braindead design, and it
makes me question the other design choices that may have been made here. If they can't get something that
simple right, then they obviously haven't thought about the bigger picture, and have just concentrated on
their one implementation. It makes me wonder how many other similar mistakes they have made.
Wow! With a design that braindead, I sincerely hope that this project disappears into oblivion. Linux needs
sanity far more than it needs eye candy, and this is without doubt the wrong path to be heading down.
Metacity will also be incorporating composite code directly rather than have a separate userspace process.
Which doesn't quite answer the question. Can *any* window manager be used, or only those that have incorporated
the compositing code? Is it possible to use a standalone compositor (say, at the expense of some performance),
or does it have to be part of the window manager? If it's the latter, than the obvious route is to make it a
shared library, which the wm can dlopen() as appropriate. That way, you avoid having a fork of the compositing
code in each wm.
OTOH, this is the same people that think that CTRL-K is much more logical for deleteing stuff than say, oh, I don't know... delete, maybe?
Given that ctrl-k is used for similar functions in other applications, it's fair to reuse it for that in Gimp.
ISTR that even MS Excel uses ctrl-k to clear a cell, for example. Note that it's trivial to remap the delete
key to either cut (normally ctrl-x) or clear (normally ctrl-k) in Gimp, should you wish to do so. You could
argue that it should perhaps be the default setting.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps so, but it seems like the most likely solution to the problem at the moment. The r300 project has now got working drivers, through reverse engineering, for relatively modern ATI cards (at least up to X800, don't know about newer).
Thus speaks the voice of one who sees widespread adoption of Linux as a goal. Others see the creation of a free operating system as the goal instead. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but nor do they go hand in hand. I would rather see Linux remain a niche OS than sacrifice my principles to chase market share. Of course, I'd like to see Linux gain widespread adoption as well. But if it came to a choice between the two, I'll stick with what I believe to be right.
Actually, no (and I say that as a Londoner, having personally experienced multiple terrorist bombs). No amount of spying on the general public will allow the government to wipe out terrorism. Yes, perhaps it will reduce it. Slightly. But I can assure you that the price for that reduction is too high.
This is the killer feature for me. Youtube just doesn't have the bandwidth to be able to stream videos. I can't remember the last time I was able to watch a video on youtube without it pausing to catch up every few seconds. Google has a similar problem (albeit to a lesser extent). However, Google lets you download the video and watch it offline. That to me makes Google Video usable, and Youtube unusable. How it's managed to get the bulk of the market share for online videos is utterly beyond me.
It's not much of an article! OK, so it covers the very beginning, and is only a short column, but there's an awful lot it misses out. Sure, it mentions C&VG, and indeed, the whole industry read it at the time, here in the UK. But Sinclair User came along shortly afterwards and garnered a sizeable following. There's also no mention of the Newsfield publications. Crash and Zzap!64 really were the defining magazines of the 1980s computer gaming scene.
Despite the impressive sounding headline figures, it's not actually that high resolution at all. 100 million pixels is approx 16.7 million per side of the cube. Now I have some 4.2 million pixels sitting in front of me as I type this. So it's only about 4 times the pixels of my current desktop, covering a 10'x10' wall, which I can assure you is much more than 4 times the display area that I have. In fact, the VR room is only around 33dpi, compared to over 100dpi on my desktop. It's still pretty impressive, of course, and remember that your head will typically be 5' away from the display in the VR room, so you don't need massively high resolutions to get a good visual effect.
Because basic vi keybindings aren't enough. I use probably 95% of vi's features on a regular basis, and I can't make do with less than that. The last time I tried vi emulation under emacs, I gave up in disgust because I didn't support the features I use every day.
Speaking of UK drag racing, Ronnie Picardo has a dual engined jet powered Beetle that has regularly been out and about at Santa Pod raceway over the last few years. It has a normal petrol engine for low speed driving, and a rather large jet sticking out of the back. From memory, it's still road legal, as well. Thus this story is nothing that hasn't already been done some time ago...
No, it's you that are wrong. There is no statutory entitlement to take the day off on a bank holiday. You are only entitled to 20 days holiday per year. It is common for employers to allow bank holidays off in addition to those 20 days, but it's not universal, and some employers insist that if you take a bank holiday off, it comes out of your annual holiday entitlement. There are plans to change that, but they're not yet law in the UK.
Maybe so, but it was based directly on his personal experience in British Intelligence. To claim le Carré's work is superior because of his intelligence background is nonsense. It may be superior (although that's subjective), but given Fleming's background in naval intelligence, personal experience is certainly not going to be the reason for one being better than the other.
Just to provide an alternative perspective, I couldn't disagree more. I've used Fedora since FC1, and have found it to be a useful, stable desktop. The reviewer's experiences in no way match mine, which have essentially been "stick the CD in, install and start using it". I've never seen any of the problems mentioned, and nor have I heard of anyone else having them. Sure, hardware detection issues can be an occasional problem for any distribution, but from what I've seen, Fedora does better than any other distribution I've used on that front. I guess he just got unlucky.
I couldn't agree more. For a start, a single monolithic app like ImageMagick is just not the Unix way. It means that to add functionality, you need to recompile the application. With netpbm, if you want a new feature, you just write a filter and stick it in the pipeline. Much easier, and much more flexible. In the past, my only gripe was that netpbm (and pbmplus before it) was unable to handle transparency in image. Fortunately, that's no longer the case, and recent versions are able to do so. Plus, with my (admittedly not very scientific) tests, netpbm comes out slightly faster for the tasks I perform anyway (mostly cropping and scaling). I can highly recommend netpbm.
That's odd... from what I've seen, America lacks mass transportation systems, forcing the public onto the roads in private cars due to lack of suitable alternatives (underground railways, trams, etc), particularly in the cities.
Now, I know this is Slashdot, but even here I'd expect a better effort than this FUD. I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway, you can both read and create PDFs using free (speech and beer) software, the very existence of which is possible because Adobe has kindly released the specs for PDF that are available to all without charge. Nor does Adobe charge for their own reader, although they do keep the source to themselves.
Of course, had you bothered to research the subject, you'd know that PDF has supported animations and scripting with JavaScript within a document for many years now. I'm not saying the Unipage won't be useful thing. But to claim it's superior to PDF in areas where it's clearly not isn't going to help its cause. Not only that, but the two products have different goals anyway. PDF is, and I suspect will remain, the best way to send a document where the design and layout is important. It should render the same on all PDF viewers, and can contain richer formatting than can be expressed in HTML/CSS. A Unipage will probably be easier to author[1] than a complex PDF, but will only accurately preserve content, not formatting. Use whichever one is right for the task at hand. If anything, I'd say it's more of a rival to Word documents than PDFs.
[1] In fact, I suspect that will be its major selling point. Although you can do wonderful things with PDF, most people don't because a) they don't know about them, and b) the Adobe authoring tools are expensive, and hence not widespread.
But that's the point. Most of the time, there isn't sufficient context to be able to correctly guess the intended meaning.
I couldn't agree more. However, it's not just a case of me getting frustrated at the apparent lack of schooling of the people with whom I'm interacting. Nor is it just a case of language evolving. No, it's reaching the point where I'm genuinely struggling to understand what people are saying. As an example, I see an increasing number of people writing "no" when they mean "know". Since my brain is conditioned to associate a completely different meaning to the word "no", I have to do a double take before I can work out what they meant. When combined with a total absence of punctuation, I'm left wondering how the generation of today manage to communicate with each other at all, let alone with others.
No, you're missing the point. Both the PC and the 8-bit micros were on the market at the same time. You had a choice. PCs were insanely expensive at the time, way out of the reach of the general public. Hence the home micros took off, as they were at least affordable. What's depressing is that in the USA, people bought the PC anyway, which was (and indeed still is) a very dull machine in comparison.
Holy crap! I didn't think anyone else would have heard of those. I still have one in my loft!
I was depressed by how many of the people in the article listed an IBM PC as their first computer. There was a magic about the early 8-bit micros that captured the imagination, and that was just completely missing on the PC. I, too, was brought up with the joys of wobbly RAM packs, dead flesh keyboards, and progressed up through the C64 and onto the Amiga before finally migrating to a PC compatible in the mid '90s. People that only had access to a PC have no idea about what they were missing.
Wrong. It is one possible design. The window manager and the compositor have to interact, that I'll grant you. But they don't necessarily have to be in the same process. There are many ways they could be communicating with each other -- using sockets, or shared memory, for example. Now for performance reasons, that might be impractical. As you say, I haven't worked on or with the code, so I don't know. But if that proved to be the case, then anyone with half a brain would have realised from the very start that people would want to do this with a variety of window managers, not just the one chosen by the inital developer. Given that, the current solution to the problem (just take a fork of the code for each wm) is a braindead design, and it makes me question the other design choices that may have been made here. If they can't get something that simple right, then they obviously haven't thought about the bigger picture, and have just concentrated on their one implementation. It makes me wonder how many other similar mistakes they have made.
Wow! With a design that braindead, I sincerely hope that this project disappears into oblivion. Linux needs sanity far more than it needs eye candy, and this is without doubt the wrong path to be heading down.
Which doesn't quite answer the question. Can *any* window manager be used, or only those that have incorporated the compositing code? Is it possible to use a standalone compositor (say, at the expense of some performance), or does it have to be part of the window manager? If it's the latter, than the obvious route is to make it a shared library, which the wm can dlopen() as appropriate. That way, you avoid having a fork of the compositing code in each wm.
That's all a matter of perspective, though. By that definition, Photoshop sucks because it uses unintuitive (to me) key mappings.
Given that ctrl-k is used for similar functions in other applications, it's fair to reuse it for that in Gimp. ISTR that even MS Excel uses ctrl-k to clear a cell, for example. Note that it's trivial to remap the delete key to either cut (normally ctrl-x) or clear (normally ctrl-k) in Gimp, should you wish to do so. You could argue that it should perhaps be the default setting.