if you are just drawing to an area of memory (whether on the video card or in main memory), how does the acceleration work?
Inside the rectangles, you could just use normal hardware acceleration like we have today. ALL graphics work is just drawing to an area of memory. Today that area of memory represents the screen directly. This system would have many areas of memory, each one representing a window, and the complete video image would be composited and displayed automatically by the video hardware, instead of having X manage the windows itself using precious CPU cycles.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
OK, I'm getting kinda tired of people claiming that electric cars and such simply "move the problem" to a different area, because the energy has to be produced somewhere.
Of course the energy has to be produced somewhere, but which would you rather: Millions of inefficient engines all over the place, with a large concentration in big cities where lots of people live, OR in centralized power plants with efficient, highly government regulated generators? If you think about it, you'll realize that centralizing energy production allows much tighter emissions control. Large power plants can afford to have giant scrubbers that clean their output, and can have the most efficient fuel->energy conversion equipment available. Cars, on the other hand, have many requirements (must be small, start fast, light, etc) that dictate that their engines can't run at the highest possible efficiency.
Centralized energy production also allows the source of energy to be placed far away from cities where people live, reducing pollution in cities. Also, it is easier for centralized power plants to use alternate energy sources (ever seen a hydroelectric or wind-powered car?).
In short, any technology that takes the pollution source out of the car and puts the burden of energy production on centralized electric plants is good for the environment.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Yes! I've often wondered why window systems didn't work like this.
What's more, it seems to me that there's TREMENDOUS potential here for hardware acceleration! Think about it: you could have special hardware that automatically refreshes all the rectangles from different areas in memory, without X or Win95 or whatever even thinking about it!
It could do ALL of the clipping and such in hardware, leaving your window system or graphics toolkit with nearly 100% of the CPU to draw on the seperate rectangles by itself.
File that one under "the things I need to invent after I get as rich as Bill Gates."
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
I'll tell you what Freenet needs to do politically, just to survive.
Wait, it has to do something to survive? I don't think so - that's the whole point of Freenet! It doesn't matter what anyone does, as long as there are people who want to use Freenet, Freenet will be there. There are no centralized anythings in Freenet, so there's no point of attack. There's nothing anyone can do to shut it down short of hunting down every single person running a Freenet node and shutting them down.
I don't see how becoming an MP3 swapping service would threaten Freenet in any way. Just the opposite in fact: Freenet needs users to survive, and what do users want? FREE MUSIC!!!
There are some problems with using Freenet as an MP3 swapping service, though. The way it works doesn't exactly lend itself to easy music swapping. However, that hasn't stopped people from trying! Check out Espra, a free music swapping service using Freenet, now in Beta. Not only does Espra let you download music, it also provides a method of letting you compensate the artists, with as much or as little money as you want. It looks pretty cool.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Python vs. Perl according to Yoda
Subject: Python versus Perl: A humorous look
From: funkster@midwinter.com
To: guido@cnri.reston.va.us
Date: 10 Jul 1999 01:45:07 -0700
This has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. It's
a scene from _The Empire Strikes Back_ reinterpreted to serve a
valuable moral lesson for aspiring programmers.
--
EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH -- DAY
With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the
many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the
Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his
exercises -- grepping, installing new packages, logging in as
root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts
in Python.
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability.
But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...
default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they.
Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once
you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
consume you it will.
LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?
YODA: No... no... no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?
YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from
now.
--
larry
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
While the single-atom transistor thing is cool, it seems to me that the interesting part of this discovery/invention is the super-tiny wires they have to connect them. Now THAT's cool, and a big problem down there at the nano(pico?)-scale level.
What I want to know is, how will they connect this with normal electronics? They'd probably need 5 or 6 buffers in between to step down the current so as not to fry the tiny wires. Also, wouldn't a chip made with this technology be super-sensitive to interference? If a random cosmic ray hit it, it would probably be fried.
Hope they can solve all the problems. This sounds like really cool technology.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Perhaps it isn't the anti-aliasing as much as the fonts. All the fonts I've seen used in screenshots of AA QT looked pretty ugly. In general, Windows has higher-quality fonts than
Linux.
In fact, as I look over this page in Internet Explorer 5.5 on Win98, I notice that while there are fonts drawn all over the screen (menus, address bar, window title bar, text on webpage, status bar, Start menu, etc) there are only two places on the entire screen using AA fonts: The two large bold headers on the comment I'm replying to. Every other font on the screen is NOT AA! When you use a windows machine, you're only looking at AA fonts perhaps 10% of the time. No system fonts are anti-aliased. They just have better quality fonts.
Someone needs to start a Open Fonts project. Well, probably someone has already. Someone needs to promote existing Open Fonts projects, then, becuase X is in need of some better fonts (that look good and are readable at ALL sizes).
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
I... I can't believe it! A Slashdot story taking AOL's side! michael must have gone temporarily out of his mind. Expect a retraction soon:
"Update: We're sorry, we just realized that we took the side of a major corporation. We hereby retract this article and all statements made within it. May God forgive us."
I realize this has applications in beowulf clusters and the like. What I was asking, way up at the top of this thread (and in the subject of these posts), is whether this has any applications that would be useful for regular home linux users on home PCs. In that situation, this won't provide a significant speedup.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Well, if you were booting Linux anyway, I suppose you wouldn't need the bootloader step. However, if you weren't, you would still need the bootloader. And it STILL doesn't provide a gigantic speedup unless you have a slow BIOS to start with. Why? Because the bootloader step is fast anyway! 1-2 seconds! This doesn't get around the fact that you still need to mount your filesystems, load drivers, start cron, apache, X, etc. THAT's the time-consuming part of booting your computer.
Also, there are good reasons to boot a seperate kernel from the hard drive even if you're going into Linux anyway. If you plan to upgrade your kernel sometimes, it might not be a good idea to keep flashing your BIOS all the time. Flash memory has a limited number of writes before it wears out. Keeping the kernel on the hard drive and using a bootloader would probably be a good idea in this case.
I don't know how much room there is in BIOS memory, either. The kernel booted from the BIOS might not have all the options compiled in that you'd want in order to keep size down. Then you'd have to boot a seperate kernel as well.
Once again, I don't see how this would provide a really significant speedup. 5-8 seconds shaved off, maybe, but this is NOT instant booting.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
I DID read the article. Yes, the BIOS boots in 3 seconds. However, that doesn't mean that the computer is up and running in 3 seconds! You must still load up your bootloader and boot your regular OS, just like you usually do. I'll admit that's a pretty fast BIOS, however, that's all it is. It won't make the Windows or Linux boot process go faster. If you have a good fast BIOS already, it won't even provide much benefit in terms of startup time. These guys are doing it because of the flexibility it offers in terms of boot-time configuration, although they do like the increased speed.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the point of replacing your BIOS with Linux? My BIOS already works fine. That is to say, it boots. What more do you need from a BIOS?
There might be specialized applications where this is useful, but is there any reason why us normal Linux users should care?
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
This sounds a lot like QT2's method of themeing, used in KDE. For example, certain widgets have their behaviors changed when switching from theme to theme. In the Windows-like theme, scrollbars are just like the scrollbars we all know and love, but in some other themes, the scrollbars have both buttons (up and down) at the bottom of the scrollbar. I believe it would also be possible, using QT's theme engine, to create an entirely new method of operating a scrollbar (or any other widget) by replacing the actual code in QT that draws and operates the widget, on the fly. QT's theme engine does just what this patent describes:
> providing a plurality of themes, each theme controlling an appearance and behavior of objects rendered on said graphical user interface, wherein at least one of said appearance and said behavior is controlled differently for an object when said graphical user interface is operated in accordance with one theme than when said graphical user interface is operated in accordance with another theme;
<QT2 does this.
> providing a plurality of theme engines, each theme engine associated with a different theme type, wherein at least one of said theme engines is hard-coded and at least one of said theme engines is a data-driven, parametric engine;
<This sounds exactly like KWin's theme management, and it probably applies to QT2 as well.
> selecting a theme from among said plurality of themes;
<The new Theme manager in KDE 2.1 does this.
> identifying one of said plurality of theme engines associated with said selected theme;
<KDE Theme manager again.
> loading, by said identified theme engine, theme data for operating said graphical user interface in accordance with said selected theme.
<Yeah, that's sort of necessary for themeing, now, isn't it!
This is disturbing. If Apple actually enforces this patent, KDE would be the first to go (And they're just finally starting to get some good themes on kde.themes.org)! Hopefully QT2 came out soon enough that it was before this patent took effect. I'd hate to see TrollTech sued over this dumb patent!
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
No, not at all. The exceptions you are disabling are for QT itself, which doesn't use exceptions. KDE programs could still use exceptions if they wanted (usually they don't though). Enabling exceptions does nothing but make the QT dynamic library bigger.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
This isn't a question of having the ISP monitor its newsgroups continuously to make sure that nothing illegal is happening, this is a question of the ISP not taking any action when NOTIFIED of said illegal actions. In the story, you can read that the ISP was notified by a customer AND law enforcement that these illegal pictures were being posted, and they did nothing.
I think that if an ISP is notified of something like this, they should check it out, and if there really is something illegal going on, they should remove it. That's different than requiring ISPs to constantly scan their own newsgroups for illegal content.
Basically, if the ISP doesn't know about it, they can't be responsible for it, but if they are informed, they must do something about it. Seems pretty fair to me. ----
Slashdot Mirror
if you are just drawing to an area of memory (whether on the video card or in main memory), how does the acceleration work?
Inside the rectangles, you could just use normal hardware acceleration like we have today. ALL graphics work is just drawing to an area of memory. Today that area of memory represents the screen directly. This system would have many areas of memory, each one representing a window, and the complete video image would be composited and displayed automatically by the video hardware, instead of having X manage the windows itself using precious CPU cycles.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
OK, I'm getting kinda tired of people claiming that electric cars and such simply "move the problem" to a different area, because the energy has to be produced somewhere.
Of course the energy has to be produced somewhere, but which would you rather: Millions of inefficient engines all over the place, with a large concentration in big cities where lots of people live, OR in centralized power plants with efficient, highly government regulated generators? If you think about it, you'll realize that centralizing energy production allows much tighter emissions control. Large power plants can afford to have giant scrubbers that clean their output, and can have the most efficient fuel->energy conversion equipment available. Cars, on the other hand, have many requirements (must be small, start fast, light, etc) that dictate that their engines can't run at the highest possible efficiency.
Centralized energy production also allows the source of energy to be placed far away from cities where people live, reducing pollution in cities. Also, it is easier for centralized power plants to use alternate energy sources (ever seen a hydroelectric or wind-powered car?).
In short, any technology that takes the pollution source out of the car and puts the burden of energy production on centralized electric plants is good for the environment.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Yes! I've often wondered why window systems didn't work like this.
What's more, it seems to me that there's TREMENDOUS potential here for hardware acceleration! Think about it: you could have special hardware that automatically refreshes all the rectangles from different areas in memory, without X or Win95 or whatever even thinking about it!
It could do ALL of the clipping and such in hardware, leaving your window system or graphics toolkit with nearly 100% of the CPU to draw on the seperate rectangles by itself.
File that one under "the things I need to invent after I get as rich as Bill Gates."
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
I'll tell you what Freenet needs to do politically, just to survive.
Wait, it has to do something to survive? I don't think so - that's the whole point of Freenet! It doesn't matter what anyone does, as long as there are people who want to use Freenet, Freenet will be there. There are no centralized anythings in Freenet, so there's no point of attack. There's nothing anyone can do to shut it down short of hunting down every single person running a Freenet node and shutting them down.
I don't see how becoming an MP3 swapping service would threaten Freenet in any way. Just the opposite in fact: Freenet needs users to survive, and what do users want? FREE MUSIC!!!
There are some problems with using Freenet as an MP3 swapping service, though. The way it works doesn't exactly lend itself to easy music swapping. However, that hasn't stopped people from trying! Check out Espra, a free music swapping service using Freenet, now in Beta. Not only does Espra let you download music, it also provides a method of letting you compensate the artists, with as much or as little money as you want. It looks pretty cool.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
From Python Humor:
Python vs. Perl according to Yoda
Subject: Python versus Perl: A humorous look
From: funkster@midwinter.com
To: guido@cnri.reston.va.us
Date: 10 Jul 1999 01:45:07 -0700
This has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. It's
a scene from _The Empire Strikes Back_ reinterpreted to serve a
valuable moral lesson for aspiring programmers.
--
EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH -- DAY
With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the
many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the
Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his
exercises -- grepping, installing new packages, logging in as
root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts
in Python.
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability.
But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...
default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they.
Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once
you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
consume you it will.
LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?
YODA: No... no... no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?
YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from
now.
--
larry
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
While the single-atom transistor thing is cool, it seems to me that the interesting part of this discovery/invention is the super-tiny wires they have to connect them. Now THAT's cool, and a big problem down there at the nano(pico?)-scale level.
What I want to know is, how will they connect this with normal electronics? They'd probably need 5 or 6 buffers in between to step down the current so as not to fry the tiny wires. Also, wouldn't a chip made with this technology be super-sensitive to interference? If a random cosmic ray hit it, it would probably be fried.
Hope they can solve all the problems. This sounds like really cool technology.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Perhaps it isn't the anti-aliasing as much as the fonts. All the fonts I've seen used in screenshots of AA QT looked pretty ugly. In general, Windows has higher-quality fonts than Linux.
In fact, as I look over this page in Internet Explorer 5.5 on Win98, I notice that while there are fonts drawn all over the screen (menus, address bar, window title bar, text on webpage, status bar, Start menu, etc) there are only two places on the entire screen using AA fonts: The two large bold headers on the comment I'm replying to. Every other font on the screen is NOT AA! When you use a windows machine, you're only looking at AA fonts perhaps 10% of the time. No system fonts are anti-aliased. They just have better quality fonts.
Someone needs to start a Open Fonts project. Well, probably someone has already. Someone needs to promote existing Open Fonts projects, then, becuase X is in need of some better fonts (that look good and are readable at ALL sizes).
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Huh??
AOL guys are the good guys this time?
I... I can't believe it! A Slashdot story taking AOL's side! michael must have gone temporarily out of his mind. Expect a retraction soon:
"Update: We're sorry, we just realized that we took the side of a major corporation. We hereby retract this article and all statements made within it. May God forgive us."
----
I realize this has applications in beowulf clusters and the like. What I was asking, way up at the top of this thread (and in the subject of these posts), is whether this has any applications that would be useful for regular home linux users on home PCs. In that situation, this won't provide a significant speedup.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Well, if you were booting Linux anyway, I suppose you wouldn't need the bootloader step. However, if you weren't, you would still need the bootloader. And it STILL doesn't provide a gigantic speedup unless you have a slow BIOS to start with. Why? Because the bootloader step is fast anyway! 1-2 seconds! This doesn't get around the fact that you still need to mount your filesystems, load drivers, start cron, apache, X, etc. THAT's the time-consuming part of booting your computer.
Also, there are good reasons to boot a seperate kernel from the hard drive even if you're going into Linux anyway. If you plan to upgrade your kernel sometimes, it might not be a good idea to keep flashing your BIOS all the time. Flash memory has a limited number of writes before it wears out. Keeping the kernel on the hard drive and using a bootloader would probably be a good idea in this case.
I don't know how much room there is in BIOS memory, either. The kernel booted from the BIOS might not have all the options compiled in that you'd want in order to keep size down. Then you'd have to boot a seperate kernel as well.
Once again, I don't see how this would provide a really significant speedup. 5-8 seconds shaved off, maybe, but this is NOT instant booting.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
I DID read the article. Yes, the BIOS boots in 3 seconds. However, that doesn't mean that the computer is up and running in 3 seconds! You must still load up your bootloader and boot your regular OS, just like you usually do. I'll admit that's a pretty fast BIOS, however, that's all it is. It won't make the Windows or Linux boot process go faster. If you have a good fast BIOS already, it won't even provide much benefit in terms of startup time. These guys are doing it because of the flexibility it offers in terms of boot-time configuration, although they do like the increased speed.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the point of replacing your BIOS with Linux? My BIOS already works fine. That is to say, it boots. What more do you need from a BIOS?
There might be specialized applications where this is useful, but is there any reason why us normal Linux users should care?
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
All they have so far are dolphins mimicking sounds- no evidence that the dolphins can understand it at all. Like parrots.
I guess you haven't seen this article about parrots. Check it out! It's about a parrot that can understand English and answer simple questions!
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
Just because Windoze, KDE, GNOME, and Winamp themes are only skins
Hey! KDE2 themes aren't only skins! They can change the behavior, placement, and size of widgets both on windows and inside KDE applications.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
This sounds a lot like QT2's method of themeing, used in KDE. For example, certain widgets have their behaviors changed when switching from theme to theme. In the Windows-like theme, scrollbars are just like the scrollbars we all know and love, but in some other themes, the scrollbars have both buttons (up and down) at the bottom of the scrollbar. I believe it would also be possible, using QT's theme engine, to create an entirely new method of operating a scrollbar (or any other widget) by replacing the actual code in QT that draws and operates the widget, on the fly. QT's theme engine does just what this patent describes:
> providing a plurality of themes, each theme controlling an appearance and behavior of objects rendered on said graphical user interface, wherein at least one of said appearance and said behavior is controlled differently for an object when said graphical user interface is operated in accordance with one theme than when said graphical user interface is operated in accordance with another theme;
<QT2 does this.
> providing a plurality of theme engines, each theme engine associated with a different theme type, wherein at least one of said theme engines is hard-coded and at least one of said theme engines is a data-driven, parametric engine;
<This sounds exactly like KWin's theme management, and it probably applies to QT2 as well.
> selecting a theme from among said plurality of themes;
<The new Theme manager in KDE 2.1 does this.
> identifying one of said plurality of theme engines associated with said selected theme;
<KDE Theme manager again.
> loading, by said identified theme engine, theme data for operating said graphical user interface in accordance with said selected theme.
<Yeah, that's sort of necessary for themeing, now, isn't it!
This is disturbing. If Apple actually enforces this patent, KDE would be the first to go (And they're just finally starting to get some good themes on kde.themes.org)! Hopefully QT2 came out soon enough that it was before this patent took effect. I'd hate to see TrollTech sued over this dumb patent!
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
No, not at all. The exceptions you are disabling are for QT itself, which doesn't use exceptions. KDE programs could still use exceptions if they wanted (usually they don't though). Enabling exceptions does nothing but make the QT dynamic library bigger.
[me@localhost]$ prolog
| ?- god.
! Existence error in god/0
This isn't a question of having the ISP monitor its newsgroups continuously to make sure that nothing illegal is happening, this is a question of the ISP not taking any action when NOTIFIED of said illegal actions. In the story, you can read that the ISP was notified by a customer AND law enforcement that these illegal pictures were being posted, and they did nothing.
I think that if an ISP is notified of something like this, they should check it out, and if there really is something illegal going on, they should remove it. That's different than requiring ISPs to constantly scan their own newsgroups for illegal content.
Basically, if the ISP doesn't know about it, they can't be responsible for it, but if they are informed, they must do something about it. Seems pretty fair to me.
----