I think you underestimate the fanaticism of some gamers;-)
I was at Fry's the day before the Warcraft III: Frozen Throne expansion was released, and people were lining up outside the store, while it was still open, playing their gameboys, waiting until the store re-opened at midnight for an hour specifically to sell the game. That crowd would definitely install Linux to get a game 3 days early. OTOH, maybe those are the guys who already have several Linux boxes at home:-)
Just imagine if Doom III was shipped as Linux-Only.
That would do way more to kill Doom III than it would to boost Linux (unless it came with something like Knoppix on the CD, but rebooting is still a pain, and then people wouldn't have to install Linux, which is the point right?)
Maybe if the Linux port was released like 3 days early, it might make some people try to install Linux just to get the game early, but I hardly think those people would get a good impression. I can hear them now: "KDE? GNOME? XFree86? Partitions? Ext3? ReiserFS? WTF? All I want is to play my Doom III dammit!"
Well I ran Renderman's benchmark on my Radeon 9100/Athlon XP 2800 system, and here are the results (edited for lameness filter):
*** ROUND 1 *** Test: Test Xrender doing non-scaled Over blends Time: 15.925 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing non-scaled Over blends Time: 15.927 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing non-scaled Over blends Time: 0.321 sec. *** ROUND 2 *** Test: Test Xrender doing 1/2 scaled Over blends Time: 7.125 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 1/2 scaled Over blends Time: 7.134 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing 1/2 scaled Over blends Time: 0.133 sec. *** ROUND 3 *** Test: Test Xrender doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 131.495 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 131.703 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing 2* smooth scaled Over blends Time: 2.487 sec. *** ROUND 4 *** Test: Test Xrender doing 2* nearest scaled Over blends Time: 113.890 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing 2* nearest scaled Over blends Time: 113.945 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing 2* nearest scaled Over blends Time: 1.778 sec. *** ROUND 6 *** Test: Test Xrender doing general nearest scaled Over blends Time: 197.817 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing general nearest scaled Over blends Time: 197.800 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing general nearest scaled Over blends Time: 5.171 sec. *** ROUND 7 *** Test: Test Xrender doing general smooth scaled Over blends Time: 268.509 sec. --- Test: Test Xrender (offscreen) doing general smooth scaled Over blends Time: 268.656 sec. --- Test: Test Imlib2 doing general smooth scaled Over blends Time: 7.507 sec.
Obviously XRender is getting crushed here by Imlib2. There are a million reasons this might be happening, it's definitely worth looking into. In the best Slashdot tradition, here's some wild speculation about what might be causing the slowdown:
Renderman's code might be giving an unfair advantage to Imlib2. The Imlib2 results are never shown on the screen. However, XRender is tested both with display and without, so it seems like it should be fair.
Renderman's code might be using XRender in an inefficient way. I'm no X programming expert so I have no idea if what he's doing is the best way to do it, but Rasterman is supposed to be some sort of expert in producing nice fast graphics on X so I'd say this is unlikely.
XRender might not be hardware accelerated for some reason, probably having to do with driver configuration or something. But geez, does the software rendering have to be that slow? Maybe they could learn something from Imlib2.
The hotly debated "X protocol overhead" might be causing this slowdown. But given the magnitude of the slowdown, I think this is unlikely.
Hopefully someone knowledgeable like Keith Packard himself will come and enlighten us with the true cause.
Is XRender really accelerated? I thought that most Render operations were still unaccelerated on most video cards, and how and if they could be accelerated was still an open question. Maybe the real problem here is Render's software rendering code?
Oh come on. MS releases a new security patch every other day, if not more often than that. It's a royal pain to keep a Windows system updated, and it's not something that can or should be expected of someone who just wants to check their email three times a week, and visit a website now and then. And heaven forbid you ever get behind, otherwise you could end up with 60+ MB of patches to download. We recently bought a new computer, and once we brought it home I found that to just download the security patches that had come out since Windows had been installed at the factory took over 5 hours over our dialup! Is it any wonder there are unpatched systems out there?
Well, DUH! If I give them a black box with only only black box applications Linux and Windows are largely the same.
This was not the case a short time (a few years) ago. Linux applications and desktops were mostly inferior to Windows applications and Explorer. This study is important because it is confirming with the scientific method what many people have already realized - Linux applications are ready for the desktop.
There's still TONS of room for improvement there (do we want to settle for something only about as good as Windows?), but we know that Linux has caught up with Windows in at least one area.
Even the most perfect theoretical system will only be as good as people who run it.
That's a nice saying, but it's not necessarily true. The US system of government was carefully designed to be better than the people who run it. The system of checks and balances works to make sure that even if some people are bad and corrupt, other people with conflicting interests can balance it out and set things right. The key is not to let any one person or group amass too much power. How well it worked is debatable, but it is possible to devise systems where people's conflicting interests balance out to produce a reasonable simulation of an impartial government.
The Soviet Union apparently didn't have any checks and/or balances that worked. Corruption was rampant. That may have been the cause of its downfall. OTOH, maybe communism in that form is actually unworkable. It's hard to say. Since it's hard to prove a negative, we will never really know unless a government of that type succeeds.
Actually, that's a different worm. I should know, I've been infected by both of these in the last week:-) I've been running an unpatched XP install on my desktop. I don't have any antivirus software installed (the only really successful worms are the ones that aren't stopped by antivirus software, what's the point?) so I have to defeat viruses myself in open combat;-)
Anyway, the one thing I found that killed them both is Notepad. Just open up the executable in Notepad, type a few random characters here and there, erase some things, mess up the file header, and then save right over the virus! They're never expecting that. Make sure to kill the virus processes first, of course, or else you'll get the infamous "access violation". (In the case of msconfig32.exe, you must use the command-line tools 'tasklist' and 'taskkill') The viruses might restore themselves if you remove them from the registry, or delete the file, but they're not expecting you to corrupt the executable. If Windows, in its infinite stupidity, tries to run the virus again, it will fail harmlessly.
P.S. I know, I know, you're wondering why I'm running an unpatched XP install on my desktop. Well, I just reinstalled, and only have dialup, and I'm going back to college in a month where there's super-broadband. Downloading 30+ MB (conservative estimate) of service packs, patches, hotfixes, and updates over dialup (not even 56k, more like 28.8) seems pointless. Besides, it's interesting seeing actual virus infections happen and fixing them myself. If anything goes horribly wrong, I have my XP cd right here to reinstall again. I'll be reinstalling and patching when I get back to a real internet connection.
The fuss is the multiplayer. The single player was fun (despite the cut-and-paste levels in the middle, the gameplay is very well done), and I've played it a lot (recently beat every level on Legendary), but the multiplayer is IMHO still the most fun you can have with four people and a single XBox. It has a *lot* of replayability, with the balanced weapons, the customizable game modes, and the great vehicles, and then there are System Link games with 8-16 people, which can be great. We've stopped referring to my system as an XBox because it hardly ever has any other games in it, we just call it a "Halo box." It stands out among XBox games.
Ford CD players used to have a "compression" button (they may still but I haven't seen the newer ones). I had no idea what it did until I learned about compression at school. I don't think anyone else in my family ever knew or cared what it did. It did help when listening to classical music though, after I learned what it did and when to use it.
Also, most PC DVD players (WinDVD I think, and others) have a compression feature, and it actually is on by default. They usually name the option "enhance dialogue" or something like that, so I guess they realize the problem with DVDs. It's implemented extremely poorly in WinDVD, though: half the time it still fails to make dialogue audible, and whenever a loud part comes on the first second is too loud, followed by a jarring instant volume reduction that really takes the punch out of whatever is happening (WinDVD users out there may have noticed this before).
I wouldn't want to try running that on my PDA. It's an older iPAQ, and that thing would take up over half the Flash RAM by itself! And 32 MB of runtime memory consumption wouldn't leave room for anything else to run, like the OS. I'll stick with Konqueror/Embedded, thanks.
So where can I get safari for AIX or konqueror for Solaris? Part of the reason Mozilla is so big is because of it's cross platform design.
LOL! Just in case this wasn't a troll, you can get Konqueror for AIX here , and it comes with Solaris on an extras CD, at least in Solaris 8. Also, you can run Konqueror on your PDA. Try that with Mozilla.
I'm not sure what to say about ReiserFS's reliability. I've been using it at home for a year or so now. Soon after I started using it, I had a system crash (bad video drivers). When I shut off the power and turned it back on, ReiserFS did its journal replay thing, but I was left with a corrupt directory full of files that I couldn't open or delete. At the time, I couldn't find any ReiserFS filesystem fixer tool that didn't have huge disclaimers all over it about how it would probably destroy all your data, so I couldn't really fix it. But since then, I haven't had a single problem. The corrupt directory is still there with its phantom files. I keep meaning to do something about it, but since I'm not having any problems I really don't have any motivation to fix it. I use the system as my main desktop and I have filled up the ReiserFS partition with stuff and cleaned it out several times since then. So on the one hand, I have a slightly corrupted ReiserFS filesystem; on the other hand, ReiserFS has dealt with it perfectly for a year now.
The problem with xset is it doesn't provide a way to set the base mouse speed. In fact I don't think there is a way to set the base mouse speed for XFree at all, which really sucks. The only thing you can do is set the acceleration (the multiplier that XFree applies when you move the mouse fast, which makes it easier to jump across the screen while still giving you precise slow-speed control). What really happened in the 2.4.x -> 2.5.x jump (for me at least) was that the kernel got some sort of new mouse driver that reports that the mouse moved a larger distance for the same actual movement than the old driver. This increases the base speed that XFree multiplies. This can't really be compensated for with xset. If the base speed is too fast and you just set your multiplier low, then it becomes harder to control the mouse precisely over short distances.
If somebody knows the way to control XFree's base mouse speed (the speed that you get without any multiplier at all), I'd love to be proven wrong about this. Don't tell me that xset can do it though, because it can't.
Now, you can boot linux with the 007 hack (involving a memory card), add some files to the hard drive, and have an XBox that boots linux all the time, without having to go through a procedure involving loading a saved game every time. Before if you wanted a permanent Linux XBox, you had to flash the bios, which required opening the case and soldering a physical connection together to enable the write feature of the flash ROM.
That was an awesome help system. Microsoft should dump MSDN and go back to an ASCII menu system, or something. QBASIC help taught me a lot about programming. After that I moved on to TI-BASIC for the TI-82, then the 89, then C, and on to the world of real programming languages. But without QBASIC help, I might never have gotten into it.
This could be misleading though. The game in question shows you a number between 1 and 12, say 10, and asks you whether the next random number will be lower or higher. You would expect that if the number is 10 then you could chose the "lower" option to get a higher chance of winning, but if the outcome is predetermined then this step really has no effect on the outcome. It is this deception that they are all upset about, because it makes the game seem like it gives you a better chance than it does.
Personally I think gambling is stupid, and these guys are taking it way too seriously. If they're playing slots to make money, they're stupid, but if they're playing to have fun, then what does it matter how the machine decides whether you win or lose? What you don't know can't make it less fun.
LUFS is pretty neat, but I think IOSlaves are nicer. LUFS is still tied to the Unix filesystem, which is great for managing local files, but was never designed for anything else. Creating magic directories that cause gnutella searches to be performed is not my idea of a nice interface. IMHO, automount has always been an ugly kludge, and mapping URLs onto the Unix filesystem is not a great solution. How would you handle a URL like: http://user:password@host.com/search.pl?param=va lue¶m2=value2
And how would you handle HTTP caching? How would you send POSTs and other types of HTTP requests? Even if you could add all these features to LUFS, it would start getting more and more unweildy to use. And that's just for HTTP.
I would say you're right, except the kernel does a lousy job of implementing filesystems in a user-friendly way. KDE IOSlaves are so much cooler for several reasons:
They use URLs everywhere, which makes it easy to access local and remote files anywhere using any protocol from any application.
New filesystems can be installed and activated by the user, you don't need a kernel module.
You don't have to mount anything anywhere.
Non-filesystem like protocols such as HTTP and POP3 can be easily implemented as IOSlaves and then used from any application.
These features make IOSlaves much cooler than kernel filesystems IMHO.
This doesn't break anything. They will continue to sell non-crippled DVDs for the same price, and they will sell these crippled ones for the price of a rental. People will buy them because of the convenience of never having to return them and never having to pay late fees. There might be some lost business overall because people don't have to come back to the store to return them, but the studios won't care because right now rental stores get the profits from repeat business like that, not the studios.
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I was at Fry's the day before the Warcraft III: Frozen Throne expansion was released, and people were lining up outside the store, while it was still open, playing their gameboys, waiting until the store re-opened at midnight for an hour specifically to sell the game. That crowd would definitely install Linux to get a game 3 days early. OTOH, maybe those are the guys who already have several Linux boxes at home :-)
That would do way more to kill Doom III than it would to boost Linux (unless it came with something like Knoppix on the CD, but rebooting is still a pain, and then people wouldn't have to install Linux, which is the point right?)
Maybe if the Linux port was released like 3 days early, it might make some people try to install Linux just to get the game early, but I hardly think those people would get a good impression. I can hear them now: "KDE? GNOME? XFree86? Partitions? Ext3? ReiserFS? WTF? All I want is to play my Doom III dammit!"
Argh! I even used the preview button, and I still spelled Rasterman Renderman? Must have had Pixar on the brain...
Obviously XRender is getting crushed here by Imlib2. There are a million reasons this might be happening, it's definitely worth looking into. In the best Slashdot tradition, here's some wild speculation about what might be causing the slowdown:
- Renderman's code might be giving an unfair advantage to Imlib2. The Imlib2 results are never shown on the screen. However, XRender is tested both with display and without, so it seems like it should be fair.
- Renderman's code might be using XRender in an inefficient way. I'm no X programming expert so I have no idea if what he's doing is the best way to do it, but Rasterman is supposed to be some sort of expert in producing nice fast graphics on X so I'd say this is unlikely.
- XRender might not be hardware accelerated for some reason, probably having to do with driver configuration or something. But geez, does the software rendering have to be that slow? Maybe they could learn something from Imlib2.
- The hotly debated "X protocol overhead" might be causing this slowdown. But given the magnitude of the slowdown, I think this is unlikely.
Hopefully someone knowledgeable like Keith Packard himself will come and enlighten us with the true cause.Is XRender really accelerated? I thought that most Render operations were still unaccelerated on most video cards, and how and if they could be accelerated was still an open question. Maybe the real problem here is Render's software rendering code?
Oh come on. MS releases a new security patch every other day, if not more often than that. It's a royal pain to keep a Windows system updated, and it's not something that can or should be expected of someone who just wants to check their email three times a week, and visit a website now and then. And heaven forbid you ever get behind, otherwise you could end up with 60+ MB of patches to download. We recently bought a new computer, and once we brought it home I found that to just download the security patches that had come out since Windows had been installed at the factory took over 5 hours over our dialup! Is it any wonder there are unpatched systems out there?
This was not the case a short time (a few years) ago. Linux applications and desktops were mostly inferior to Windows applications and Explorer. This study is important because it is confirming with the scientific method what many people have already realized - Linux applications are ready for the desktop.
There's still TONS of room for improvement there (do we want to settle for something only about as good as Windows?), but we know that Linux has caught up with Windows in at least one area.
That's a nice saying, but it's not necessarily true. The US system of government was carefully designed to be better than the people who run it. The system of checks and balances works to make sure that even if some people are bad and corrupt, other people with conflicting interests can balance it out and set things right. The key is not to let any one person or group amass too much power. How well it worked is debatable, but it is possible to devise systems where people's conflicting interests balance out to produce a reasonable simulation of an impartial government.
The Soviet Union apparently didn't have any checks and/or balances that worked. Corruption was rampant. That may have been the cause of its downfall. OTOH, maybe communism in that form is actually unworkable. It's hard to say. Since it's hard to prove a negative, we will never really know unless a government of that type succeeds.
Anyway, the one thing I found that killed them both is Notepad. Just open up the executable in Notepad, type a few random characters here and there, erase some things, mess up the file header, and then save right over the virus! They're never expecting that. Make sure to kill the virus processes first, of course, or else you'll get the infamous "access violation". (In the case of msconfig32.exe, you must use the command-line tools 'tasklist' and 'taskkill') The viruses might restore themselves if you remove them from the registry, or delete the file, but they're not expecting you to corrupt the executable. If Windows, in its infinite stupidity, tries to run the virus again, it will fail harmlessly.
P.S. I know, I know, you're wondering why I'm running an unpatched XP install on my desktop. Well, I just reinstalled, and only have dialup, and I'm going back to college in a month where there's super-broadband. Downloading 30+ MB (conservative estimate) of service packs, patches, hotfixes, and updates over dialup (not even 56k, more like 28.8) seems pointless. Besides, it's interesting seeing actual virus infections happen and fixing them myself. If anything goes horribly wrong, I have my XP cd right here to reinstall again. I'll be reinstalling and patching when I get back to a real internet connection.
On that note...
The fuss is the multiplayer. The single player was fun (despite the cut-and-paste levels in the middle, the gameplay is very well done), and I've played it a lot (recently beat every level on Legendary), but the multiplayer is IMHO still the most fun you can have with four people and a single XBox. It has a *lot* of replayability, with the balanced weapons, the customizable game modes, and the great vehicles, and then there are System Link games with 8-16 people, which can be great. We've stopped referring to my system as an XBox because it hardly ever has any other games in it, we just call it a "Halo box." It stands out among XBox games.
Also, most PC DVD players (WinDVD I think, and others) have a compression feature, and it actually is on by default. They usually name the option "enhance dialogue" or something like that, so I guess they realize the problem with DVDs. It's implemented extremely poorly in WinDVD, though: half the time it still fails to make dialogue audible, and whenever a loud part comes on the first second is too loud, followed by a jarring instant volume reduction that really takes the punch out of whatever is happening (WinDVD users out there may have noticed this before).
I wouldn't want to try running that on my PDA. It's an older iPAQ, and that thing would take up over half the Flash RAM by itself! And 32 MB of runtime memory consumption wouldn't leave room for anything else to run, like the OS. I'll stick with Konqueror/Embedded, thanks.
LOL! Just in case this wasn't a troll, you can get Konqueror for AIX here , and it comes with Solaris on an extras CD, at least in Solaris 8. Also, you can run Konqueror on your PDA. Try that with Mozilla.
I'm not sure what to say about ReiserFS's reliability. I've been using it at home for a year or so now. Soon after I started using it, I had a system crash (bad video drivers). When I shut off the power and turned it back on, ReiserFS did its journal replay thing, but I was left with a corrupt directory full of files that I couldn't open or delete. At the time, I couldn't find any ReiserFS filesystem fixer tool that didn't have huge disclaimers all over it about how it would probably destroy all your data, so I couldn't really fix it. But since then, I haven't had a single problem. The corrupt directory is still there with its phantom files. I keep meaning to do something about it, but since I'm not having any problems I really don't have any motivation to fix it. I use the system as my main desktop and I have filled up the ReiserFS partition with stuff and cleaned it out several times since then. So on the one hand, I have a slightly corrupted ReiserFS filesystem; on the other hand, ReiserFS has dealt with it perfectly for a year now.
Hey, that's a good idea. If there was some way to have more than one acceleration value, that would be perfect.
If somebody knows the way to control XFree's base mouse speed (the speed that you get without any multiplier at all), I'd love to be proven wrong about this. Don't tell me that xset can do it though, because it can't.
Now, you can boot linux with the 007 hack (involving a memory card), add some files to the hard drive, and have an XBox that boots linux all the time, without having to go through a procedure involving loading a saved game every time. Before if you wanted a permanent Linux XBox, you had to flash the bios, which required opening the case and soldering a physical connection together to enable the write feature of the flash ROM.
That was an awesome help system. Microsoft should dump MSDN and go back to an ASCII menu system, or something. QBASIC help taught me a lot about programming. After that I moved on to TI-BASIC for the TI-82, then the 89, then C, and on to the world of real programming languages. But without QBASIC help, I might never have gotten into it.
Personally I think gambling is stupid, and these guys are taking it way too seriously. If they're playing slots to make money, they're stupid, but if they're playing to have fun, then what does it matter how the machine decides whether you win or lose? What you don't know can't make it less fun.
You use the IOSlave's methods for getting directory listings and changing permissions, of course.
Consider FTP: do you make a new connection for each URL, or do you keep the connection open for a while in hopes of getting another?
The second way. Also I think that the way IOSlaves work, the application can decide for itself when to open and close connections if it wants.
LUFS is pretty neat, but I think IOSlaves are nicer. LUFS is still tied to the Unix filesystem, which is great for managing local files, but was never designed for anything else. Creating magic directories that cause gnutella searches to be performed is not my idea of a nice interface. IMHO, automount has always been an ugly kludge, and mapping URLs onto the Unix filesystem is not a great solution. How would you handle a URL like:a lue¶m2=value2
http://user:password@host.com/search.pl?param=v
And how would you handle HTTP caching? How would you send POSTs and other types of HTTP requests? Even if you could add all these features to LUFS, it would start getting more and more unweildy to use. And that's just for HTTP.
These features make IOSlaves much cooler than kernel filesystems IMHO.
He didn't mess with the real world. He messed with the machines. That's a very different thing.
This doesn't break anything. They will continue to sell non-crippled DVDs for the same price, and they will sell these crippled ones for the price of a rental. People will buy them because of the convenience of never having to return them and never having to pay late fees. There might be some lost business overall because people don't have to come back to the store to return them, but the studios won't care because right now rental stores get the profits from repeat business like that, not the studios.