Free games is a great idea, and I play Day of Defeat (free half-life mod) all the time. However, most of the decent free games are reasonably simple. A Half Life mod, although a major piece of work, is a tiny amount of work compared to (say) Zelda:WW. The CS people don't need to bother with story or cut scenes, the levels are all pretty small and simple. I don't think open source games are the way to get gamers to use Linux. The only way that will happen is if a majority of new titles have a linux version released at the same time as the Windows version.
A bad name - it's longer, ambiguous (is that Palmone as in Danone?) and loses much of the recognition factor. Just call the hardware company Palm and who cares what the OS company is called?
A truly nasty colour scheme This is not a pretty site (or sight).
Isn't pulse dialling much slower? You have to wait for the pulses, especially annoying if you're redialling someone. I'm pretty sure I've used customer service lines that assume you have a touch tone phone
Free software programmers are mostly coding out of some desire to help the community, to give something back, because they enjoy it and because it gives them a little 'fame' online. Yes, you have the right to bitch about their work all you want, but why would you want to?
I run a small free software project. Nothing makes me feel better about working on it than emails from happy users. They increase my productivity indirectly by giving me a sense of achievment. I also welcome *polite* bug reports, feature requests etc as they help make the project better. But flame mails? What possible purpose could they serve other than to make me angry and reduce my motivation to spend my free time coding?
You're joking right? Does anybody even own a pulse-dial phone? What is it with the US telco industry - it seems to lag behind the rest of the world so much.
Mario sunshine (excellent fun, although it was my first mario game) Zelda Pikmin Luigi's mansion Smash Brother's is incredible fun even single player
Then of course, there are the pieces of crap
Resident Evil (please, someone take the development team out back and shoot them) Sonic Adventure Battle 2 (I thought this was a sonic game? Where is he then?)
I don't get why everyone plays first person games like Halo on a console. No mouse==no control.
You're confusing usability and familiarity. Microsoft have beaten people over the head for so long with their brain-dead interface that people accept it as "the only way to do things" without thinking. I find it painful to use Windows now after using KDE for so long. Right click menus don't appear when I hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse - I have to release the button first. The window decorations are just stupidly laid out. Menubars are at the top of each app rather than at the top of the screen where they are easier to use. The start menu is horrible - why is the Programs folder at the top, furthest from the mouse cursor? The WindowsXP start menu is even worse.
I'm not sure why they say KDE is very similar to Windows.
Yes, it can be configured to look like Windows. It can also be configured as a traditional Unix desktop (activation-follows-mouse, no taskbar, CDE style alt-tabbing) or MacOS (menubar at top of screen, macos[9|X] style window decorations) or any bizzare combination you can come up with.
OK, replying to my own post, but it's seemingly not caching that speeds up the imlib test- calling imlib_set_cache_size(0) has no effect on the speed of the imlib test.
Somebody mentioned below that imlib is probably caching the image, whereas Xrender is doing the transformation everytime. So I thought I'd try the same caching approach with Xrender.
The first time the scale test is called, I rendered the image to an offscreen buffer with the correct transformations set. Then after that I just XRenderComposite to the screen from the offscreen buffer. The results (NVidia 4496, RenderAccel=true, geforce2 MX,athlon XP 1800+) for one test are:
*** ROUND 2 ***
Test: Test Xrender doing 1/2 scaled Over blends - caching implementation Time: 0.126 sec.
Test: Test Xrender doing 1/2 scaled Over blends - original implementation Time: 6.993 sec.
Test: Test Imlib2 doing 1/2 scaled Over blends Time: 0.191 sec.
Which shows Xrender taking two-thirds the time of imlib.
My guess is that imlib is probably caching something. This is supported by the fact that Xrender is faster for the non-scaled composition in the original code.
The compiler can make some use of multimedia extensions, but it can't exploit them fully. To get the best performance often requires a non-trivial modification of the loop you're optimising, which you can really only get (at the moment) by writing hand optimised assembly.
I've written MMX versions of algorithms (blending, intensity etc) that are 5 times faster than their C equivalent - I've yet to see that kind of improvement from GCC.
$350k is a hell of a lot of money for something that's mostly GPLed. I don't know how many servers we're talking about, but at (pulls number out of hat) $3000 per server, you could buy an extra 100 servers to use as redundant failover machines, leaving $50k to pay for installation. Surely that would give you more reliable service than a support contract could?
It appears to be fixed in 4496, the latest version of the drivers. 4363 would crash every few minutes or so, but 4496 is very stable. Still slower than 3123 for 2D stuff though.
>Hint: update the FAQ, documentation and forums (sticky's work > wonders)
No, you always get idiots posting questions that are clearly in the FAQ, even in sticky questions at the top of the forum (check out the NVIDIA linux forum for an example of this. In fact, every forum I've ever posted to had the same problem - even those with a big link to the FAQ on the "post new message" page).
Yes, the free software community could do much much more to welcome new users. But never underestimate the stupidity of users. I use a piece of logic solver software in my research. All the users are academics - PhD students upwards. Yet the mailing list is frequently bombarded with the most simplistic questions about C syntax that could be solved with 30 seconds on google, or questions like "Why doesn't this code work?" followed by a page long code listing.
I meant switch it from "USB keyboard support=OS" to "USB keyboard support=BIOS". I said it because I installed SuSE recently with a USB keyboard and it worked fine during the install IIRC.
>Do you think we need dozen KWrite-alike programs which all >have very little features?
Of course not. But each desktop environment does need its own integrated version (in order to have it honour user preferences etc). And if someone doesn't like the current choice and spends their free time to write their own and happens to release it for free, what's wrong with that?
I don't understand the whole "why are we wasting our time writing two desktop environments?" argument. It's not like there is "we" to start with - open-source devlopment time is not some fixed utility like it is in the closed source world. It's mostly made up of what free time people will give. The more interesting they find the project, the more time they will give. With two projects, you get two teams looking at the same problem from different angles and there is cross-pollination. Even if you could force developers to only work on one, their motivation would drop and you'd end up losing more development time than you save by only having one environment.
Oh yeah, US private prisons worked so well. Privatising the British railway system was a wonderful idea that didn't lead to huge accidents due to poor track maintenance. The UK state schools that were left stranded when the private companies signed up to run them broke their contracts were far more efficient. Public services are best run for the public good, not private profit.
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How does card counting at Blackjack affect other players? You're playing against the bank, not each other.
Free games is a great idea, and I play Day of Defeat (free half-life mod) all the time. However, most of the decent free games are reasonably simple. A Half Life mod, although a major piece of work, is a tiny amount of work compared to (say) Zelda:WW. The CS people don't need to bother with story or cut scenes, the levels are all pretty small and simple.
I don't think open source games are the way to get gamers to use Linux. The only way that will happen is if a majority of new titles have a linux version released at the same time as the Windows version.
So all this planning has resulted in:
Way to go Palm*.
Isn't pulse dialling much slower? You have to wait for the pulses, especially annoying if you're redialling someone. I'm pretty sure I've used customer service lines that assume you have a touch tone phone
I didn't know the PS2 let you do that. Next you'll be telling me there's Day of Defeat on the PS2 too.
Free software programmers are mostly coding out of some desire to help the community, to give something back, because they enjoy it and because it gives them a little 'fame' online. Yes, you have the right to bitch about their work all you want, but why would you want to?
I run a small free software project. Nothing makes me feel better about working on it than emails from happy users. They increase my productivity indirectly by giving me a sense of achievment. I also welcome *polite* bug reports, feature requests etc as they help make the project better. But flame mails? What possible purpose could they serve other than to make me angry and reduce my motivation to spend my free time coding?
You're joking right? Does anybody even own a pulse-dial phone? What is it with the US telco industry - it seems to lag behind the rest of the world so much.
My list of games I own and like:
Mario sunshine (excellent fun, although it was my first mario game)
Zelda
Pikmin
Luigi's mansion
Smash Brother's is incredible fun even single player
Then of course, there are the pieces of crap
Resident Evil (please, someone take the development team out back and shoot them)
Sonic Adventure Battle 2 (I thought this was a sonic game? Where is he then?)
I don't get why everyone plays first person games like Halo on a console. No mouse==no control.
You're confusing usability and familiarity. Microsoft have beaten people over the head for so long with their brain-dead interface that people accept it as "the only way to do things" without thinking.
I find it painful to use Windows now after using KDE for so long. Right click menus don't appear when I hold down the right mouse button and move the mouse - I have to release the button first. The window decorations are just stupidly laid out. Menubars are at the top of each app rather than at the top of the screen where they are easier to use. The start menu is horrible - why is the Programs folder at the top, furthest from the mouse cursor? The WindowsXP start menu is even worse.
I'm not sure why they say KDE is very similar to Windows.
Yes, it can be configured to look like Windows. It can also be configured as a traditional Unix desktop (activation-follows-mouse, no taskbar, CDE style alt-tabbing) or MacOS (menubar at top of screen, macos[9|X] style window decorations) or any bizzare combination you can come up with.
>Unless you are in the Fargo area. In that case, I'll work for cheap. :
;-)
Can't you just go find that suitcase full of ransom money that guy buried in the snow?
OK, replying to my own post, but it's seemingly not caching that speeds up the imlib test- calling imlib_set_cache_size(0) has no effect on the speed of the imlib test.
Somebody mentioned below that imlib is probably caching the image, whereas Xrender is doing the transformation everytime. So I thought I'd try the same caching approach with Xrender.
The first time the scale test is called, I rendered the image to an offscreen buffer with the correct transformations set. Then after that I just XRenderComposite to the screen from the offscreen buffer. The results (NVidia 4496, RenderAccel=true, geforce2 MX,athlon XP 1800+) for one test are:
*** ROUND 2 ***
Test: Test Xrender doing 1/2 scaled Over blends - caching implementation
Time: 0.126 sec.
Test: Test Xrender doing 1/2 scaled Over blends - original implementation
Time: 6.993 sec.
Test: Test Imlib2 doing 1/2 scaled Over blends
Time: 0.191 sec.
Which shows Xrender taking two-thirds the time of imlib.
My guess is that imlib is probably caching something. This is supported by the fact that Xrender is faster for the non-scaled composition in the original code.
The compiler can make some use of multimedia extensions, but it can't exploit them fully. To get the best performance often requires a non-trivial modification of the loop you're optimising, which you can really only get (at the moment) by writing hand optimised assembly.
I've written MMX versions of algorithms (blending, intensity etc) that are 5 times faster than their C equivalent - I've yet to see that kind of improvement from GCC.
$350k is a hell of a lot of money for something that's mostly GPLed.
I don't know how many servers we're talking about, but at (pulls number out of hat) $3000 per server, you could buy an extra 100 servers to use as redundant failover machines, leaving $50k to pay for installation. Surely that would give you more reliable service than a support contract could?
It appears to be fixed in 4496, the latest version of the drivers. 4363 would crash every few minutes or so, but 4496 is very stable. Still slower than 3123 for 2D stuff though.
>Hint: update the FAQ, documentation and forums (sticky's work
> wonders)
No, you always get idiots posting questions that are clearly in the FAQ, even in sticky questions at the top of the forum (check out the NVIDIA linux forum for an example of this. In fact, every forum I've ever posted to had the same problem - even those with a big link to the FAQ on the "post new message" page).
Yes, the free software community could do much much more to welcome new users. But never underestimate the stupidity of users. I use a piece of logic solver software in my research. All the users are academics - PhD students upwards. Yet the mailing list is frequently bombarded with the most simplistic questions about C syntax that could be solved with 30 seconds on google, or questions like "Why doesn't this code work?" followed by a page long code listing.
I meant switch it from "USB keyboard support=OS" to "USB keyboard support=BIOS". I said it because I installed SuSE recently with a USB keyboard and it worked fine during the install IIRC.
Why not just switch USB keyboard support to BIOS in your BIOS settings? That way you can use your keyboard during the install.
>"...Microsoft has made extensive use of Eolas'
>technology to make its Internet Explorer the
>best-of-breed browser"
Best of breed? I thought perjury was a serious crime in US courts.
>Do you think we need dozen KWrite-alike programs which all
>have very little features?
Of course not. But each desktop environment does need its own integrated version (in order to have it honour user preferences etc). And if someone doesn't like the current choice and spends their free time to write their own and happens to release it for free, what's wrong with that?
I don't understand the whole "why are we wasting our time writing two desktop environments?" argument. It's not like there is "we" to start with - open-source devlopment time is not some fixed utility like it is in the closed source world. It's mostly made up of what free time people will give. The more interesting they find the project, the more time they will give.
With two projects, you get two teams looking at the same problem from different angles and there is cross-pollination. Even if you could force developers to only work on one, their motivation would drop and you'd end up losing more development time than you save by only having one environment.
Probably more effort than writing from scratch, given the differences in the two projects (Qt vs GTK, C vs C++).
Why should there only be one of every app? Is there only one type of car. Writing portably where possible is great, yes, but not in every case.
>And why do so many British English speakers smuggly act like
;-)
>their spelling or phrasing is clearly more intelligent
Probably because the caricature of Americans the world over is as uncultured, brash, boorish people.
And the British are still wondering why part of their empire is refusing to obey orders on spelling
(The preceding statements are intended purely as humour and are in no way intended to malign or cause offence to the people of the USA)
Oh yeah, US private prisons worked so well. Privatising the British railway system was a wonderful idea that didn't lead to huge accidents due to poor track maintenance. The UK state schools that were left stranded when the private companies signed up to run them broke their contracts were far more efficient.
Public services are best run for the public good, not private profit.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: