It usually gets less than 15 frames per second on tuxracer/ppracer, for example. Changing video modes or enabling any of a dozen or so GL features tends to cause unexpected behavior and crash GL programs. Tons of GL extensions aren't supported.
The GMA 9x0 is rasterization hardware. The pixel shaders are the only piece of actual computational hardware on the entire chip. The GMA (X)3000 is the first ever chip that does not do all of its 3D graphics work in software.
They supported technology like AIGLX before Nvidia.
They are quite fast enough for 3D desktop. The onboard GMA 950 can comfortably run either compiz or beryl 3d desktops with high efficiency.
My complaint is that that is done entirely in Mesa. The GMA 9x0 is rasterization hardware - that's all. I'm not surprised GMA 9x0 drivers work so well in Linux, and, in fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they work better than in Windows. I'm not surprised they're open source, either.
Consider, though, that they were able to open the source because all they had to do was rip out all of their 3D IP and let Mesa do all the legwork. Looking at it that way, it's not at all very interesting that they opened the source - after removing all the 3D code, all you've got is a really fast 2D driver - so what's there for them to hide?
NVIDIA has said on multiple occasions that the only thing keeping them from opening their source is all of the licensed 3D code they use in the driver. Until that can be stripped out, it stays closed.
ATi has only gone so far as to contract a developer and give him specs under NDA to develop an open source driver - for their outdated and obsolete hardware.
I won't be happy until an actual 3D chip has open source drivers - or perhaps until the GMA (X)3000 gets put in laptops. Until that happens, I couldn't give a rat's ass that Intel opened their drivers for their worthless hardware.
He's a Fundie. God wrote it all with His own unerring hand.
(Every other, more realistic, Christian is able to admit that the Bible was written by at least 70 different authors, all of whom are thought to have written everything down in more limited roles as God's messengers. This just proves Jack's off his nut in more ways than one.)
What I want in a "dream machine" laptop is modest, at best.
13" - 14.1" display. I really don't want anything larger, and anything smaller is a PDA.
80+ GB 1.8" or 2.5" hard drive. These days, anything smaller is unreasonable, but anything larger, and that's what USB storage is for.:P
802.11g, or n when it matures. What I'm describing is a mobile workstation, so I want to take it literally anywhere.
Extremely low-power CPU with a reasonably high clock (1GHz or more). I'm looking for 9-hour battery performance, under a modest load. ARM seems to fit the bill, but I'd like to see something a little more powerful. A low-end OpenSPARC maybe? x86 is out of the question.
Low-power 3D accelerator. 3D programming is a hobby of mine, so I want that capability. Low-power profile GPU, with modest 3D power: Equivalent to a GeForce Go 6600, but with an open architecture and Free specs, and easily able to handle a ported version of Folding@Home for GPUs when hooked up to AC power and put in a standby mode. (Read: I don't care how much power it burns in 3D mode, but 2D mode has to use a trickle of power.)
USB and Firewire - for everything else.
Why can't I get that kind of thing in a laptop computer? Why do I have to move up to 17" desktop replacements to get a usable 3D GPU? Why is the Core CPU always paired with the industry's biggest joke in 3D graphics (the GMA9x0)? Why is battery life still stuck at 3 to 4 hours? The mobile market has had more than enough time to develop beyond that, and it has thus far failed.
I'm hearing that the problem still remains in 2.6.20.3. This is disappointing.
For clarification, the problem appears to affect Intel and nVidia chipset SATA controllers mainly. It causes stalls in the kernel without any clear reason.
Mine didn't. In fact, it came with a note that said that I'd have to deal with the "upcoming DST changes" manually. It doesn't even have an obvious way to handle something simple like changing the time!
Incidentally, I worked on a project that used the same data to a very interesting end: (Fortunately, my NDA has expired by now.)
In our project, we needed to know exactly where and what coverage was needed on which FM channels where we could get away with putting in an FM translator station. We imported the census data in Access (which was surprisingly straight-forward), and used the Manifold System initially - and later MapInfo - to visualize the areas we could sneak in without interfering with existing (and future) stations.
We developed several Access apps that allowed us to build a list of new sites to set up translator stations: Over 17,000, if memory serves. In the March filing of 2003, a couple Perl scripts pushed 4,221 applications to the FCC, nearly all of which were automatically generated.
Over the course of the next 5 months, we went over each application by hand (again, using our custom software, combined with software originally designed for this purpose), while a couple of us developed our own series of scripts and programs to perform interference studies in MapInfo.
In the August filing, we withdrew several applications and improved nearly 2,000 others.
I left in March 2004, but last I heard, they had nearly 2,000 construction permits, and had actually built 5 or 6 of them. A few of the other permits have been sold for upwards of $500,000.
All in all, I can't say I really approve of their methods, but I can't really say I'm not proud of what we achieved, either.
And, actually, I've been looking for a new portable computer on which I can do programming, remote administration, and other basic work tasks without being tied to a desktop or tied to a wall after 5 hours. Like a 13" ARM notebook with a 9-hour battery life. Wouldn't that be just the thing?
WoW has been running exceptionally well in vanilla Wine for quite some time now. Recent versions (0.9.18 to current - 0.9.31 is particularly nice, and I see 0.9.32 is out already) are very nearly glitch-free. I play quite regularly on Linux, actually.
As for other games, you'll just have to petition the publishers to add Linux to their regular cross-platform plans - perhaps point out that porting to Linux is little different from Mac OS X.
Well, the difference here is that Vista completely changes the driver API.
Going from Win98 to Win2k, yeah, there are going to be missing drivers because, guess what? Different kernel, different API! But not so going from NT4 to Win2k - NT4 drivers still worked in Win2k.
Going from Win2k to WinXP? Well, it's still the same API - you can even still use your old NT4 drivers if you need them. (Excepting, of course, things like video drivers, because, you know, those thigns are fragile.)
Going from WinXP to Vista? One or two drivers might work. Maybe. Sound drivers? The architecture changed. Completely. Video drivers? They're supposed to be in user space, so... New API!
On the other hand, Linux has a similar problem: the driver API changes every couple releases - often! On the upshot, though, 95% of the drivers you will ever need are already part of the kernel source, so they just come along for the ride. That goes for sound and video drivers, too. But, anything that isn't strictly GPLed or that hasn't been stabilised for inclusion in mainline must be compiled separately. But given that you'll probably only ever need to install NVIDIA or ATi drivers, that doesn't seem like too big a loss....
I'd hope so. I've not used 2.6.19 much because that's when the stalling started. I'm still hearing of other people having problems with 2.6.20 (myself included), so I'm afraid I'll have to wait until 2.6.21. I've been really disappointed lately with the quality of the odd-numbered releases, but.20 is the worst yet.
It's bugging me because a more minor bug in 2.6.18 occasionally rears it head. It's not bad enough to go back to 2.6.16, but i need some of the features.18 came with. I'm sad.:(
Why can't Dell just test and certify that all of the hardware they use in building new systems has working drivers that are either free (as in NVIDIA or ATi) or Free (as in already in the kernel), so that when you buy a computer from Dell, you are assured 100% that this hardware will work in Linux and that drivers are easy to acquire and maintain?
I don't really see how this is an "exploit," since it seems to require user intervention. But in any case, I've been doing this using VBA with IE to automatically fill out file upload fields - for years.
I know, I should have used Curl or something back then, but it was Access VBA. Don't blame me!
The real "fix," though, would be to remove the text box entirely and just have a browse button.
I hope this doesn't put people off using gnome. It's still more stable than KDE from my experience, and has many good applications on GTK (which I rate more stable than the kde counterparts - regardless of configurability or not, reliability is quite important to me). If you want more configurability, , and your skills have developed from entry level to enthusiast, move out of KDE & Gnome.
I've found exactly the opposite to be true. Gnome is a pit of insanity, while KDE is a bit of a breath of fresh air - as far as its stability goes.
I have run into only one problem, though: the kio plugins have a tendency to not die. I have to periodically `killall kio_file kio_pop3 kio_imap4 kio_http` or I can't run their parent processes again (like Kmail or amaroK or Konqueror, which I rarely have running more than a few hours at a time).
Gnome, on the other hand, is a far cry from what I've come to expect from it. Metacity is unreliable for me, Evolution crashes damn near every 10 minutes, Nautilus has trouble even opening $HOME without exploding into a hail of fragmented shards of un-free()d memory (and inexplicably getting stuck in Z).... Not to mention how ugly they all are if the bonobo daemon isn't running - or how prone they are to sudden failure.
I have to wonder, then, why bother to support Vista at all until next year?
OK, I'm bitter. Game execs seem to be willing to care more about the young and unproven DirectX 10 than all the people on (the mature platforms) Mac OS X and Linux who are probably more than willing to pay a little extra for a good game.
It' slike that episode of DS9 I watched last night: clothing Ferengi females simultaneously doubles both the consumer base and workforce. Like the FCA, execs of game publishers and developers are more concerned about exploiting their current market (and a too-immature and almost non-existent market) than about expanding it into a larger base.
I see it quite the other way around. All humans are a member of a single Human Race - a single species. Why should there be any differentiation of sub-species?
Conversely, all species are distinct races - dwarves, elves, orcs, whathaveyou, are all distinct species, though they seem to be biologically compatible.
That's why I don't get the whole racism thing - the white supremacist and "oppressed minority" bullshit.
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The GMA 9x0 is rasterization hardware. The pixel shaders are the only piece of actual computational hardware on the entire chip. The GMA (X)3000 is the first ever chip that does not do all of its 3D graphics work in software.
My complaint is that that is done entirely in Mesa. The GMA 9x0 is rasterization hardware - that's all. I'm not surprised GMA 9x0 drivers work so well in Linux, and, in fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they work better than in Windows. I'm not surprised they're open source, either.
Consider, though, that they were able to open the source because all they had to do was rip out all of their 3D IP and let Mesa do all the legwork. Looking at it that way, it's not at all very interesting that they opened the source - after removing all the 3D code, all you've got is a really fast 2D driver - so what's there for them to hide?
NVIDIA has said on multiple occasions that the only thing keeping them from opening their source is all of the licensed 3D code they use in the driver. Until that can be stripped out, it stays closed.
ATi has only gone so far as to contract a developer and give him specs under NDA to develop an open source driver - for their outdated and obsolete hardware.
I won't be happy until an actual 3D chip has open source drivers - or perhaps until the GMA (X)3000 gets put in laptops. Until that happens, I couldn't give a rat's ass that Intel opened their drivers for their worthless hardware.
He's a Fundie. God wrote it all with His own unerring hand.
(Every other, more realistic, Christian is able to admit that the Bible was written by at least 70 different authors, all of whom are thought to have written everything down in more limited roles as God's messengers. This just proves Jack's off his nut in more ways than one.)
What I want in a "dream machine" laptop is modest, at best.
Why can't I get that kind of thing in a laptop computer? Why do I have to move up to 17" desktop replacements to get a usable 3D GPU? Why is the Core CPU always paired with the industry's biggest joke in 3D graphics (the GMA9x0)? Why is battery life still stuck at 3 to 4 hours? The mobile market has had more than enough time to develop beyond that, and it has thus far failed.
I'm hearing that the problem still remains in 2.6.20.3. This is disappointing.
For clarification, the problem appears to affect Intel and nVidia chipset SATA controllers mainly. It causes stalls in the kernel without any clear reason.
Mine didn't. In fact, it came with a note that said that I'd have to deal with the "upcoming DST changes" manually. It doesn't even have an obvious way to handle something simple like changing the time!
That's not all we do in Idaho.
... Then again, now that I've left, there probably aren't enough smart people to do anything else. The smart people all work for Micron.
Call me paranoid, but it's probably to keep us from doing it again.
Incidentally, I worked on a project that used the same data to a very interesting end: (Fortunately, my NDA has expired by now.)
In our project, we needed to know exactly where and what coverage was needed on which FM channels where we could get away with putting in an FM translator station. We imported the census data in Access (which was surprisingly straight-forward), and used the Manifold System initially - and later MapInfo - to visualize the areas we could sneak in without interfering with existing (and future) stations.
We developed several Access apps that allowed us to build a list of new sites to set up translator stations: Over 17,000, if memory serves. In the March filing of 2003, a couple Perl scripts pushed 4,221 applications to the FCC, nearly all of which were automatically generated.
Over the course of the next 5 months, we went over each application by hand (again, using our custom software, combined with software originally designed for this purpose), while a couple of us developed our own series of scripts and programs to perform interference studies in MapInfo.
In the August filing, we withdrew several applications and improved nearly 2,000 others.
I left in March 2004, but last I heard, they had nearly 2,000 construction permits, and had actually built 5 or 6 of them. A few of the other permits have been sold for upwards of $500,000.
All in all, I can't say I really approve of their methods, but I can't really say I'm not proud of what we achieved, either.
I feel exactly the same way you do.
And, actually, I've been looking for a new portable computer on which I can do programming, remote administration, and other basic work tasks without being tied to a desktop or tied to a wall after 5 hours. Like a 13" ARM notebook with a 9-hour battery life. Wouldn't that be just the thing?
That's a good idea. A better one would be an ARM9 notebook with 802.11b (or g or n) functionality and a 9-hour battery life.
Then, at least, I'd be able to get a reasonable notebook computer.
Did I miss the press release or isn't Defcon still Windows-only?
WoW has been running exceptionally well in vanilla Wine for quite some time now. Recent versions (0.9.18 to current - 0.9.31 is particularly nice, and I see 0.9.32 is out already) are very nearly glitch-free. I play quite regularly on Linux, actually.
As for other games, you'll just have to petition the publishers to add Linux to their regular cross-platform plans - perhaps point out that porting to Linux is little different from Mac OS X.
Well, the difference here is that Vista completely changes the driver API.
Going from Win98 to Win2k, yeah, there are going to be missing drivers because, guess what? Different kernel, different API! But not so going from NT4 to Win2k - NT4 drivers still worked in Win2k.
Going from Win2k to WinXP? Well, it's still the same API - you can even still use your old NT4 drivers if you need them. (Excepting, of course, things like video drivers, because, you know, those thigns are fragile.)
Going from WinXP to Vista? One or two drivers might work. Maybe. Sound drivers? The architecture changed. Completely. Video drivers? They're supposed to be in user space, so... New API!
On the other hand, Linux has a similar problem: the driver API changes every couple releases - often! On the upshot, though, 95% of the drivers you will ever need are already part of the kernel source, so they just come along for the ride. That goes for sound and video drivers, too. But, anything that isn't strictly GPLed or that hasn't been stabilised for inclusion in mainline must be compiled separately. But given that you'll probably only ever need to install NVIDIA or ATi drivers, that doesn't seem like too big a loss....
I'd hope so. I've not used 2.6.19 much because that's when the stalling started. I'm still hearing of other people having problems with 2.6.20 (myself included), so I'm afraid I'll have to wait until 2.6.21. I've been really disappointed lately with the quality of the odd-numbered releases, but .20 is the worst yet.
It's bugging me because a more minor bug in 2.6.18 occasionally rears it head. It's not bad enough to go back to 2.6.16, but i need some of the features .18 came with. I'm sad. :(
... fucked up the libata SATA drivers. There's a deadlock that some of us have been hitting, but I have no idea what it is.
Why can't Dell just test and certify that all of the hardware they use in building new systems has working drivers that are either free (as in NVIDIA or ATi) or Free (as in already in the kernel), so that when you buy a computer from Dell, you are assured 100% that this hardware will work in Linux and that drivers are easy to acquire and maintain?
THEN worry about OEM Linux.
Samsung's Yepp (I have a YP-F1XB) plays Vorbis and WMA just fine, TYVM.
I don't really see how this is an "exploit," since it seems to require user intervention. But in any case, I've been doing this using VBA with IE to automatically fill out file upload fields - for years.
I know, I should have used Curl or something back then, but it was Access VBA. Don't blame me!
The real "fix," though, would be to remove the text box entirely and just have a browse button.
... Oh, you mean Windows Vista, not Vista?
That must be why I was so confused about this new GUI stuff - our backend GUI hasn't changed in 4 years!
I've found exactly the opposite to be true. Gnome is a pit of insanity, while KDE is a bit of a breath of fresh air - as far as its stability goes.
I have run into only one problem, though: the kio plugins have a tendency to not die. I have to periodically `killall kio_file kio_pop3 kio_imap4 kio_http` or I can't run their parent processes again (like Kmail or amaroK or Konqueror, which I rarely have running more than a few hours at a time).
Gnome, on the other hand, is a far cry from what I've come to expect from it. Metacity is unreliable for me, Evolution crashes damn near every 10 minutes, Nautilus has trouble even opening $HOME without exploding into a hail of fragmented shards of un-free()d memory (and inexplicably getting stuck in Z).... Not to mention how ugly they all are if the bonobo daemon isn't running - or how prone they are to sudden failure.
Goddamn, I wish I had mod points today. Parent is the most insightful and true thing I've ever seen said about the PS3 since its release.
I have to wonder, then, why bother to support Vista at all until next year?
OK, I'm bitter. Game execs seem to be willing to care more about the young and unproven DirectX 10 than all the people on (the mature platforms) Mac OS X and Linux who are probably more than willing to pay a little extra for a good game.
It' slike that episode of DS9 I watched last night: clothing Ferengi females simultaneously doubles both the consumer base and workforce. Like the FCA, execs of game publishers and developers are more concerned about exploiting their current market (and a too-immature and almost non-existent market) than about expanding it into a larger base.
Economically, it doesn't make sense.
It makes me want to throw chairs at people.
I see it quite the other way around. All humans are a member of a single Human Race - a single species. Why should there be any differentiation of sub-species?
Conversely, all species are distinct races - dwarves, elves, orcs, whathaveyou, are all distinct species, though they seem to be biologically compatible.
That's why I don't get the whole racism thing - the white supremacist and "oppressed minority" bullshit.
Don't unless you have source audio. A decoded MP3 has such horrible quality that when transcoded to Vorbis, the quality suffers immensely.