This is simply a technology preview. In order to allow for usable and intuitive visual effects, the engine needs to be ready for it. This simply shows that the engine is getting there.
There is very unlikely that the effects in the video will show up in their current state in a release.
"I really hope they've got the xcompmgr debugged so it works without freezing on my Inspiron8000. Factoring all display rendering operations out of the CPU onto the GPU in OpenGL will really squeeze a lot more performance out of GNOME, across the board."
xcompmgr was a hack that was never intended for a production environment. It was AFAIK never meant to go very far other than a proof of concept. Metacity has on the other hand now a built in compositor, if you had bothered to RTFA.
"MP3's limited support of DRM has ensured that it's a popular 'standard' for pirated music."
It is not "support" that matters but whether it is enforced or not. I don't know if WMA enforces DRM, but AAC certainly does not. Both AAC and WMA supports DRM, but that is entirely different.
MP3 is popular because you know it will play everywhere, while you are not so lucky with WMA, AAC or OGG due to lack of support in music players or operating systems.
Are you for real? Have you existed in a vacuum over the last 10 years of the mobile phone industry?
Text messages are: 1.Asyncronous by nature. Your target does not have to be available for receiving calls for you to send them text messages. They'll read them the next time they check their phones. Listening to voice mail is a much slower and more annoying form of asyncrynous communication. 2. Easier and less ambigious way of sending information to someone. Need an address? Send it by text rather than try to spell it to someone over the phone. 3. You can text people even in areas where you don't want to talk out loud.
And the big one: 3. It is less personal and easier to say what you want to say.
Instant messaging for phones sounds exactly like SMS, so I simply don't see the point of this unless they allow you to communicate easily and for free (at least one way) with a PC Instant Messenger such as AIM, MSN Messenger or ICQ.
Carrying conversations with text messages can be a little annoying, but that is not what they were really made for.
"If the code were optimized for SSE3, it would only run on recent Intel chips to begin with. "
This is not true. Recent AMD Athlon 64 processors have SSE3 support.
Re:Cultural differences?
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I assure you, it has very little to do with that. All KDE or GNOME discussions on Slashdot get completely swamped with trolls from the "other side".
The loaded comment at the end of the news snippet is literally engineered to create this controversy. The more people that come on here to troll, the more money Slashdot gets.
"I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to, but KDE is starting to look seriously cool."
I agree with your overall comment, however there is something I wish to add.
"In real life, you would have the social tact to start out with statements and leave room for yourself to retract what you've said or to give a little ground and end up mutually agreeing on something."
Email is often used precicely for having to avoid this kind of social tact. In my experience it is often used for giving unpopular orders or news to employees. It is often used to tell people things they don't want to hear.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that an argument may escalate when you deliberately avoid social tact. Just because they are not there to argue with you does not mean there won't be a reaction.
There are many things this can do. Functionally, the fastest way of minimising a window is to simply make it disappear. This, however, can be confusing because it is not obvious where the window went. A fancy window shrinking effect like on OS X thus improves usability. If done correctly you will not lose time on it either.
Functionally, the fastest way of switching virtual desktop is to simply make the old one disappear and the new one show up. This, however, makes most users think all their applications crashed. Using virtual desktops is something only geeks have used before. Maybe this fancy cube effect makes the virtual desktops obvious to the average user and thus makes them start using them as well.
These fancy effects thus show transition between states something which makes the connection between the states more obvious to the user.
The wobbling windows I don't know. They might be just a proof of concept. Although some of the developers have stated that it gave each window a real and tangible quality, like a sheet of paper being moved. It certainly shouldn't be excaggerated, but maybe it does help?
"The biggest challenge though, is probably insurmountable, and that's product line integration. Sun may be gasping, but Solaris still has a strong presence out there. I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers. Which server hardware and OS would "Snapple" sell? Would SPARC and Solaris be end-of-life'd in such a scenario?"
Apple's offerings are very user-friendly although OS X Server does not have many of the strong enterprise features of Solaris. I could see Apple putting an OS X type GUI on Solaris and making it into their enterprise offering, running on Apple SPARC-systems.
I will even give Apple a marketing idea for free. The logo of the enterprise systems could be a burning apple.
The inclusion of Mono in Fedora is the first step towards healing a rather serious potential rift in the GNOME world. Up until now, you could not develop a Mono-app with GTK# and expect it to work on all major updated distributions without added software.
Don't worry about Windows compatibility, Mono is cool enough on it's own, especially because Novell/Ximian has done such a good job with the Mono-wrappers for GNOME-technologies. Hopefully this will see more GNOME-development.
Only the PowerMac and iMac G5 are currently 64 bit. The other Macs (laptops, Mac mini) are still 32 bit, which is probably one of the reasons why these lines will see the transition before the PowerMac and iMac.
Apple wouldn't release a system that can only replace the Tivo. They would release a system that can do more.
A home entertainment system that can do video recording, DVD and music playing is something that has been done pretty shittily so far. If Apple can pull off a system that is as easy and usable as the iPod, then they will sell.
.. as substantial privatisation has happened over the last few years. They are still oppressive though.
It does not seem like being oppressive is the problem the US or the EU has with communist states though, as they are conducting extensive business with China these days.
An oppressive facist police state is perfectly ok, as long as there are possibilities for making money from them. This makes a mockery of the argument that the US invaded Iraq to free the people from oppression.
You are pretty much doing the same thing. You are extrapolating the Slashdot community's and your own friends way of gaming to the rest of the population.
WoW is THE most popular multiplayer roleplaying game online afaik. How many users do WoW have compared to the full gaming market? Probably extremely few.
Five million users sounds massive, but the world gaming market is probably several hundred million people.
I disagree with the analyst, I think online gaming is already quite big and will grow further, but I doubt WoW is the best example. Online RPGs are a geeky activity that will probably never be big enough to fund something like XBox live. Sport games, racing games, fighting games, etc. probably will.
"They meant that it will play NES, SNES and N64 games. Well, it doesn't have 3 cartridge slots on it, so where will the game ROM images come from? Answer, they'll sell them to you again over the internet."
They aren't really backwards compatible if you can't use the games you have already bought without buying them again, are they?
They could easily sell external USB (or another interface) cartridge-readers for the Revolution though.
"Seriously, am I the only person who thinks this advice completely insane? 60% converted on an arbitrary scale, converted to sound pressure with a device-dependent conversion that varies wildly? I hope that comment was misquoted or taken out of context."
Insane? No. Inaccurate? Yes. A "rule of thumb" is by definition an inaccurate rule that will work in most cases, but fail in some. That is what the expression means.
"With portable and headphone I'm currently using, 60% full scale would blow out my ears in seconds, if the headphones didn't first destroy themselves in a valiant attempt to save my ears"
Well, I don't think your equipment necessarily is that representative. Besides, you seem to be aware that your equipment means that you should be careful about using the rule of thumb.
Note that the European versions of the iPod have their maximum level reduced heavily from the american one due to EU regulations. I find I can listen to it at maximum level without real discomfort, but still opt for around 60% of the maximum.
If people have such huge problems finding the right volume for their earbuds maybe the US should impose such regulations as well.
"Unfortunately, the focus will of course be on KDE and Gnome, the Heckyl and Jeckyl whose sole point of contention is "I'M a perfect clone of the Windows environment!" "No, I am!" "No, me!" "NO, ME!" So in fact, you're not the least bit interested in considering even KDE or Gnome on it's own right - this will be a Windows-impersonator contest."
You have apparently not used GNOME in a while. GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines are probably much more influenced by MacOS than windows. GNOME and KDE have very different goals as well with different target markets.
You also go out of your way to diminish the importance of Windows. I am certainly no fan myself, but it is used by over 90% of all users today and the Windows interfaces are by far the interfaces someone is the most likely to know about.
You also quote some completely meaningless and irrelevant facts. What does it matter that Windows have only existed for 20 years? We're talking about general purpose desktop computers here and they have certainly NOT existed for 182 years. In fact, Windows and it's predecessor DOS have been the dominant desktop operating systems (not the same as the best) for almost the entire time most people have had access to desktop computers.
Making sure your interface system looks and feels totally unlike what 90% of people are used to is not going to ease people into using your system.
I do agree on the pointlessness of a study like this. It is a good marketing tool and good for flamewars and pissing contests, but individual studies with constructive criticism is far more likely to achieve something.
"Or how about the banks making websites that enforce strong password standards?"
This does not work. If the security is too awkward, people will just write down their passwords. Sure this will help against online fraud, but good old fashioned thiefs will have a field day.
"Encrypt everything. Encrypt email, surf through anonymizing proxies, don't use loyalty cards, pay cash, and live "off the grid" if you're really hardcore. Sure, that might work, depending on how much inconvenience you're willing to put up with. Unless you live completely off the grid, you still need to pay your bills, and your bills are traceable."
Me, like most non-slashdot people, are still not that paranoid. While the government and others COULD track my every movement, I still don't think they are.
Living "off the grid", however, is a sure way of getting lost in modern society. Which bank these days is going to give a mortgage to anyone who they have no records of? The sad truth is that having a record of having been a good conformist is becoming increasingly important.
Banks and other organisations are increasingly operating on a white-listing system. If they can't track enough information about you, they will not white-list you.
Thus for any regular person with a standard salary based job, a car, a house, etc.. you can't live "off the grid".
The only real option is to vote or get better, get involved with political parties promoting personal freedom.
"In addition, the government and the media companies can simply make encryption illegal -- they have basically already done so in the USA and EU... So, you're a terrorist now."
This is way over the top though. Almost every person using the Internet is using encryption every day, most even without realising. Encryption is not illegal in Europe and it is not possible to make it illegal, because of all the malicious attackers on the Internet. Without encryption, each company and person is a sitting duck to script kiddies, fraudsters and corporate spies.
Thus currently, some level of privacy can be had, because lots of communication can be had through these necessary encrypted channels. In a weird way we can probably thank all these black-hats for making sure we are still allowed encryption.
The problem is that our current way of encryption will probably become obsolete within the next 20 years due to quantum computing. What will happen then?
.. never less. This is because there is an ever growing number of patents to search through every time someome is applying for a patent. Searching for patents is not enough, you actually have to read them as well to figure out whether it constitutes prior art.
Even if you reduced the number of years a patent is valid, you still need to record them forever, in case someone tries to patent them again.
The only thing that could stop the patent system from becoming more and more expensive, is that the techniques for searching through and reading the patents improve at a faster rate than the number of patents.
Otherwise, one of three things will happen: 1. The patent system will eventually become so expensive that only the extremely wealthy companies can patent things. This will typically mean the end of competition. 2. The patent office will just let more and more bogus patents through to be sorted out by the legal system. This will also mean the end of competition as the most wealthy companies can sue any competitor to the ground. 3. Someone in power sees the madness and dismantles the patent system.
Someone might say that 1. and 2. have both already happened.
.. to the iPod and most other mp3-players not having any radio tuner or internet access when you are on the road.
When iPods and other mp3-players have constant Internet access, "podcasting" will be about as common as people taping radio feeds on their cassette deck to play later. Hardly something requiring a new word.
Two hours of talk show for $9.99 is a ridiculous price. Are they of particularly fantastic quality?
Scripted TV shows and movies are stuff you watch several times and your favourites are stuff you want to collect. Companies can thus get away with charging a premium on it. Are there really that many that will want to watch a particular episode of Late Night Show over and over again unless a relative happened to be on it?
I'll find it surprising if these work out as anything but a free teaser for other material.
Given the reports recently and the extreme eagerness to sue, It is possible the guy might have known about the defect and bought the console just to sue. If I was a Microsoft lawyer I would certainly look into this possibility.
It is really incredible to see how fast Apple's Preview application is at loading PDFs. I have also yet to find a PDF that doesn't load perfectly. I don't think I ever bothered installing the Adobe Reader since the Panther came out.
Slashdot Mirror
This is simply a technology preview. In order to allow for usable and intuitive visual effects, the engine needs to be ready for it. This simply shows that the engine is getting there.
There is very unlikely that the effects in the video will show up in their current state in a release.
"I really hope they've got the xcompmgr debugged so it works without freezing on my Inspiron8000. Factoring all display rendering operations out of the CPU onto the GPU in OpenGL will really squeeze a lot more performance out of GNOME, across the board."
xcompmgr was a hack that was never intended for a production environment. It was AFAIK never meant to go very far other than a proof of concept. Metacity has on the other hand now a built in compositor, if you had bothered to RTFA.
"MP3's limited support of DRM has ensured that it's a popular 'standard' for pirated music."
It is not "support" that matters but whether it is enforced or not. I don't know if WMA enforces DRM, but AAC certainly does not. Both AAC and WMA supports DRM, but that is entirely different.
MP3 is popular because you know it will play everywhere, while you are not so lucky with WMA, AAC or OGG due to lack of support in music players or operating systems.
"Pricing is very inexpensive and very fair,"
To whom is it fair? It offers almost nothing in royalties to the copyright owners due to a loophole in Russian copyright law.
Just because the prices are attractive to the customer does not make it fair.
On the other hand the record companies are asking for too much money for music. £0.79 for ONE song is ludicrous.
Are you for real? Have you existed in a vacuum over the last 10 years of the mobile phone industry?
Text messages are:
1.Asyncronous by nature. Your target does not have to be available for receiving calls for you to send them text messages. They'll read them the next time they check their phones. Listening to voice mail is a much slower and more annoying form of asyncrynous communication.
2. Easier and less ambigious way of sending information to someone. Need an address? Send it by text rather than try to spell it to someone over the phone.
3. You can text people even in areas where you don't want to talk out loud.
And the big one:
3. It is less personal and easier to say what you want to say.
Instant messaging for phones sounds exactly like SMS, so I simply don't see the point of this unless they allow you to communicate easily and for free (at least one way) with a PC Instant Messenger such as AIM, MSN Messenger or ICQ.
Carrying conversations with text messages can be a little annoying, but that is not what they were really made for.
"If the code were optimized for SSE3, it would only run on recent Intel chips to begin with. "
This is not true. Recent AMD Athlon 64 processors have SSE3 support.
I assure you, it has very little to do with that. All KDE or GNOME discussions on Slashdot get completely swamped with trolls from the "other side".
The loaded comment at the end of the news snippet is literally engineered to create this controversy. The more people that come on here to troll, the more money Slashdot gets.
"I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to, but KDE is starting to look seriously cool."
Puh-leeeeease. Could it get more obvious?
I agree with your overall comment, however there is something I wish to add.
"In real life, you would have the social tact to start out with statements and leave room for yourself to retract what you've said or to give a little ground and end up mutually agreeing on something."
Email is often used precicely for having to avoid this kind of social tact. In my experience it is often used for giving unpopular orders or news to employees. It is often used to tell people things they don't want to hear.
It should come as absolutely no surprise that an argument may escalate when you deliberately avoid social tact. Just because they are not there to argue with you does not mean there won't be a reaction.
There are many things this can do. Functionally, the fastest way of minimising a window is to simply make it disappear. This, however, can be confusing because it is not obvious where the window went. A fancy window shrinking effect like on OS X thus improves usability. If done correctly you will not lose time on it either.
Functionally, the fastest way of switching virtual desktop is to simply make the old one disappear and the new one show up. This, however, makes most users think all their applications crashed. Using virtual desktops is something only geeks have used before. Maybe this fancy cube effect makes the virtual desktops obvious to the average user and thus makes them start using them as well.
These fancy effects thus show transition between states something which makes the connection between the states more obvious to the user.
The wobbling windows I don't know. They might be just a proof of concept. Although some of the developers have stated that it gave each window a real and tangible quality, like a sheet of paper being moved. It certainly shouldn't be excaggerated, but maybe it does help?
"The biggest challenge though, is probably insurmountable, and that's product line integration. Sun may be gasping, but Solaris still has a strong presence out there. I can't imagine a forced migration to OS X Server would please sysadmins, even if they get to keep their SPARC-based servers. Which server hardware and OS would "Snapple" sell? Would SPARC and Solaris be end-of-life'd in such a scenario?"
Apple's offerings are very user-friendly although OS X Server does not have many of the strong enterprise features of Solaris. I could see Apple putting an OS X type GUI on Solaris and making it into their enterprise offering, running on Apple SPARC-systems.
I will even give Apple a marketing idea for free. The logo of the enterprise systems could be a burning apple.
The inclusion of Mono in Fedora is the first step towards healing a rather serious potential rift in the GNOME world. Up until now, you could not develop a Mono-app with GTK# and expect it to work on all major updated distributions without added software.
Don't worry about Windows compatibility, Mono is cool enough on it's own, especially because Novell/Ximian has done such a good job with the Mono-wrappers for GNOME-technologies. Hopefully this will see more GNOME-development.
Only the PowerMac and iMac G5 are currently 64 bit. The other Macs (laptops, Mac mini) are still 32 bit, which is probably one of the reasons why these lines will see the transition before the PowerMac and iMac.
Apple wouldn't release a system that can only replace the Tivo. They would release a system that can do more.
A home entertainment system that can do video recording, DVD and music playing is something that has been done pretty shittily so far. If Apple can pull off a system that is as easy and usable as the iPod, then they will sell.
.. as substantial privatisation has happened over the last few years. They are still oppressive though.
It does not seem like being oppressive is the problem the US or the EU has with communist states though, as they are conducting extensive business with China these days.
An oppressive facist police state is perfectly ok, as long as there are possibilities for making money from them. This makes a mockery of the argument that the US invaded Iraq to free the people from oppression.
You are pretty much doing the same thing. You are extrapolating the Slashdot community's and your own friends way of gaming to the rest of the population.
WoW is THE most popular multiplayer roleplaying game online afaik. How many users do WoW have compared to the full gaming market? Probably extremely few.
Five million users sounds massive, but the world gaming market is probably several hundred million people.
I disagree with the analyst, I think online gaming is already quite big and will grow further, but I doubt WoW is the best example. Online RPGs are a geeky activity that will probably never be big enough to fund something like XBox live. Sport games, racing games, fighting games, etc. probably will.
"They meant that it will play NES, SNES and N64 games. Well, it doesn't have 3 cartridge slots on it, so where will the game ROM images come from? Answer, they'll sell them to you again over the internet."
They aren't really backwards compatible if you can't use the games you have already bought without buying them again, are they?
They could easily sell external USB (or another interface) cartridge-readers for the Revolution though.
"Seriously, am I the only person who thinks this advice completely insane? 60% converted on an arbitrary scale, converted to sound pressure with a device-dependent conversion that varies wildly? I hope that comment was misquoted or taken out of context."
Insane? No. Inaccurate? Yes. A "rule of thumb" is by definition an inaccurate rule that will work in most cases, but fail in some. That is what the expression means.
"With portable and headphone I'm currently using, 60% full scale would blow out my ears in seconds, if the headphones didn't first destroy themselves in a valiant attempt to save my ears"
Well, I don't think your equipment necessarily is that representative. Besides, you seem to be aware that your equipment means that you should be careful about using the rule of thumb.
Note that the European versions of the iPod have their maximum level reduced heavily from the american one due to EU regulations. I find I can listen to it at maximum level without real discomfort, but still opt for around 60% of the maximum.
If people have such huge problems finding the right volume for their earbuds maybe the US should impose such regulations as well.
"Unfortunately, the focus will of course be on KDE and Gnome, the Heckyl and Jeckyl whose sole point of contention is "I'M a perfect clone of the Windows environment!" "No, I am!" "No, me!" "NO, ME!" So in fact, you're not the least bit interested in considering even KDE or Gnome on it's own right - this will be a Windows-impersonator contest."
You have apparently not used GNOME in a while. GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines are probably much more influenced by MacOS than windows. GNOME and KDE have very different goals as well with different target markets.
You also go out of your way to diminish the importance of Windows. I am certainly no fan myself, but it is used by over 90% of all users today and the Windows interfaces are by far the interfaces someone is the most likely to know about.
You also quote some completely meaningless and irrelevant facts. What does it matter that Windows have only existed for 20 years? We're talking about general purpose desktop computers here and they have certainly NOT existed for 182 years. In fact, Windows and it's predecessor DOS have been the dominant desktop operating systems (not the same as the best) for almost the entire time most people have had access to desktop computers.
Making sure your interface system looks and feels totally unlike what 90% of people are used to is not going to ease people into using your system.
I do agree on the pointlessness of a study like this. It is a good marketing tool and good for flamewars and pissing contests, but individual studies with constructive criticism is far more likely to achieve something.
"Or how about the banks making websites that enforce strong password standards?"
This does not work. If the security is too awkward, people will just write down their passwords. Sure this will help against online fraud, but good old fashioned thiefs will have a field day.
"Encrypt everything. Encrypt email, surf through anonymizing proxies, don't use loyalty cards, pay cash, and live "off the grid" if you're really hardcore. Sure, that might work, depending on how much inconvenience you're willing to put up with. Unless you live completely off the grid, you still need to pay your bills, and your bills are traceable."
Me, like most non-slashdot people, are still not that paranoid. While the government and others COULD track my every movement, I still don't think they are.
Living "off the grid", however, is a sure way of getting lost in modern society. Which bank these days is going to give a mortgage to anyone who they have no records of? The sad truth is that having a record of having been a good conformist is becoming increasingly important.
Banks and other organisations are increasingly operating on a white-listing system. If they can't track enough information about you, they will not white-list you.
Thus for any regular person with a standard salary based job, a car, a house, etc.. you can't live "off the grid".
The only real option is to vote or get better, get involved with political parties promoting personal freedom.
"In addition, the government and the media companies can simply make encryption illegal -- they have basically already done so in the USA and EU... So, you're a terrorist now."
This is way over the top though. Almost every person using the Internet is using encryption every day, most even without realising. Encryption is not illegal in Europe and it is not possible to make it illegal, because of all the malicious attackers on the Internet. Without encryption, each company and person is a sitting duck to script kiddies, fraudsters and corporate spies.
Thus currently, some level of privacy can be had, because lots of communication can be had through these necessary encrypted channels. In a weird way we can probably thank all these black-hats for making sure we are still allowed encryption.
The problem is that our current way of encryption will probably become obsolete within the next 20 years due to quantum computing. What will happen then?
.. never less. This is because there is an ever growing number of patents to search through every time someome is applying for a patent. Searching for patents is not enough, you actually have to read them as well to figure out whether it constitutes prior art.
Even if you reduced the number of years a patent is valid, you still need to record them forever, in case someone tries to patent them again.
The only thing that could stop the patent system from becoming more and more expensive, is that the techniques for searching through and reading the patents improve at a faster rate than the number of patents.
Otherwise, one of three things will happen:
1. The patent system will eventually become so expensive that only the extremely wealthy companies can patent things. This will typically mean the end of competition.
2. The patent office will just let more and more bogus patents through to be sorted out by the legal system. This will also mean the end of competition as the most wealthy companies can sue any competitor to the ground.
3. Someone in power sees the madness and dismantles the patent system.
Someone might say that 1. and 2. have both already happened.
.. to the iPod and most other mp3-players not having any radio tuner or internet access when you are on the road.
When iPods and other mp3-players have constant Internet access, "podcasting" will be about as common as people taping radio feeds on their cassette deck to play later. Hardly something requiring a new word.
Two hours of talk show for $9.99 is a ridiculous price. Are they of particularly fantastic quality?
Scripted TV shows and movies are stuff you watch several times and your favourites are stuff you want to collect. Companies can thus get away with charging a premium on it. Are there really that many that will want to watch a particular episode of Late Night Show over and over again unless a relative happened to be on it?
I'll find it surprising if these work out as anything but a free teaser for other material.
Given the reports recently and the extreme eagerness to sue, It is possible the guy might have known about the defect and bought the console just to sue. If I was a Microsoft lawyer I would certainly look into this possibility.
It is really incredible to see how fast Apple's Preview application is at loading PDFs. I have also yet to find a PDF that doesn't load perfectly. I don't think I ever bothered installing the Adobe Reader since the Panther came out.