While the intra-congressional letters are technically correct, they mislead by omission.
In particular, this sentence
The terms of restrictive license's - such as those in the GNU or GPL - prevent companies from adopting
unfairly singles out the GPL and ignores all of the other restrictive licenses- such as anything of the form Copyright 2002 XYZZY Corporation!!
These Congressmen+lobbyists are deliberately mistating the position of the "Open Source Government" initiative (or cherry-picking some more extremist proponents to serve as strawmen).
And they're leaving out an important intellectual-property fact about the standard procedures of software contracting: when you contract for code, unless you explicitly specify something different, both the customer AND the contractor get rights to the code. If the contract was for a compiler program, then the customer gets rights to some binaries, and the contractor still keeps code rights. (This many "consultancy" houses work- they resell the same source code over and over, with small customer-specific modifications each time)
What the public should desire is for us to get some benefit from software development paid for by the government. Today, a federal agency will fund a project, get it installed & maybe working, and then forget about it. The contractor typically searches around for other agencies needing the same functionalities and sells it to them, again. (Taking advantage of the government's poor inventory management to rack up more sales- but that's the customer's fault for not being more organized).
The change I'd like to see is, when the government enters into new software contracts, they ask for a GPL (or at least PD) source code package amoung the deliverables. That way all of the researchers and developers in the government, academia, and the private sector can examine and build on the taxpayer funded work. This doesn't have to be a law, just an executive directive, or mere recommendation. Not only will it encourage "the progress of science and the useful arts", but it will increase bueraucratic transparency and reduce dangerous security flaws.
This says NOTHING about taking away the separate right that every contractor has to reuse their own code. The developing company can maintain their own copyrighted version to use as they wish. But that shouldn't be the ONLY copy of the source code- we paid for it, we'd like to look it over too.
Most of the music and films (by total sales) do come from the US, but more importantly, even countries that create their own recordings will be willing to duplicate the US's laws in order to continue getting the US's products. And then the local works will be restricted in the same way.
- - - - -
I don't have to remind anyone that the Chinese government isn't exactly freedom loving. They don't want to be restricted by Microsoft (enemy of my enemy), but they're happy to restrict anyone else they can. Turning to the biggest bastion of fascism to protect your own freedoms isn't just ironic, its dangerous.
They aim to control the speech & thought of their own citizens. The free internet is an irritant to them- so far they've been unable to effectively block it. The only way they could make that work is to have code on the client side to scan your browser cache and send reports back to the police. And the only way to stop people from tampering with the monitoring software will be- dahdahdum- hardware recognition of signed binaries!
Something very similar to Palladium, or possibly even worse. China will either copy the Palladium technology directly (and become their own signing authority) or roll out a cheap clone (fixing any holes left in the Microsoft version).
Of course they weren't illiterates- the authors of an artifical word (company or product name) usually get to tell people how they wish it to be pronounced. It's a marketing thing, and its important.
In the case of "GNU", pronouncing the "guh" was the only reasonable choice. Saying it like "new" would've misled 95% of all listeners. "new" is an existing English word, it doesn't sound artificial, so hearers won't think its describing an active organization. Even worse, its an adjective that can apply to nearly anything. "Apple" works as a name for computers because edible seedpods are unlikely.
Imagine sentences like this: "Hey, I have you tried this new image processor yet? You can download it for free because it has a new public license. I've got the source code here, you can use that if you have the new C compiler"
The listener would be forever worrying that he's getting behind on software updates!
The pronunciation you call "wrong" was the only sane choice. (Aside from using a different acronymn. Which would've been best by far. "GNU" is a willfully incomprehensible)
I wish you were right, but your simply incorrect. Europe and Asia will go as does America.
From a practical standpoint, this planet has only ONE consumer operating system producer. All of the PC manufactures in Europe and Asia need Microsoft just as badly as Dell and Compaq do.
In fact, unlike the rest of the planet, the US has a few companies that might be able to sell PCs without Microsoft's help: Apple (of course), Sun, and IBM. (Sony could give it a shot, but they've shown no inclination. They have enough to benefit from the content business that strong DRM will be right up their alley.)
All of today's Wintel-clone builders will move as a group to either accept or reject Microsoft's hardware demands en-mass. Any of them who lags- whose customers start returning computers because it was incompatible with MS Word 2004- will be dragged down into bankrupcy.
Besides, the "OneWorldGovernment" thing is happening- its not coming from traditional governments though, but from multinational corporations. They influence the political process of each state to maximize their profits, molding the "developed world" into a conforming shape. (Laws which don't directly business profits will be left alone for a while, so nations will retain distinctiveness on "irrelevant" things like gun control, abortion, and taxation patterns.)
Pseudo-governmental entities like G7, IMF, and WIPO drive this conformity forward. WIPO tries to convince all nations to increase their intellectual property laws- they promoted some kind of "copyright duration parity" as support for the Sonny Bono act, for instance.
The citizens of the world CANNOT sit back and laugh at the hapless American consumers who are locking themselves into subjugation- soon the tendrils of DMCA-equivalency laws will penetrate their homelands, bootstapped as conditions of Favored Nation trading status, or by more insidious means.
I'm being pessimistic here- maybe Germany et all will be smart enough to read the fine print on some of these treaties before their parliaments rubber-stamp them- but its safer to assume the worst, and spread the warning about it.
Hehe, that's the opposite of true. If anything, your performance would've increased (assuming you could reach the server at all), because other internet users were unable to expend your shared bandwidth.
Anytime you play a game with someone you create an internet connection, that means your machine has to know their IP address.
Untrue. Some games, like Warcraft3, use a grid topology (each player connects to each other), so you do know their IP addresses. But many other popular games like HalfLife/Counterstrike are star topologies, where each player only connects to the central server. In those cases netstat can't show you their IP addresses.
(Sometimes the developers of star topology games create an ingame option to reveal other player's IPs, but they usually drop off the last one or two octets.)
In the old days of internet Quake, it wasn't unheard of for an annoying player to suffer a PingOfDeath or plain old overload DOS.
Yes, I've done that too. Maybe the display is multiheaded, but the input isn't. I know of no way under linux to assign different keyboards to different X servers.
This can already be changed on the fly. (The fact that it was too obscure for you to find can be called a design flaw of sorts, though).
Look at the setxkbmap program. Many desktop environments (Gnome, etc) include utilities (often embedded in the taskbar) to change this. Usually called "International keyboard settings", and featuring icons of national flags to tell you the current configuration.
(Does dvorak have a flag? It's a breakaway Soviet republic, right?)
that kind of thing was one of the original goals for Java (long before it had that name)- the platform independent bytecode could modify to wherever the user was, reducing the back&forth needed to the server for simple GUI navigation. (It wasn't a bad idea, but even after ten years of hardware improvements, Java GUIs still lag in the performance and integration aspects).
Also, the idea of a "layer on top of X" sounds a lot like GTK or QT. Or fltk, or wxWindows, or dozens of other things for that matter.
Getting into your details, though, it sounds a lot like GUIS. The focus of GUIS is running the same system, not across a network (but that could probably work). But it does address problems like keeping the program running across Xserver restarts.
That's an important point, but something that the authors of the OpenGL drivers will be able to adapt to. (Or, preferably, patches to the OpenGL extensions could be included when RandR is inserted to XFree86)
Once a system is already reliably running, the most common change will be adjusting the resolution, or rotating the screen. Those are linear transformations of the image, so its fairly simple for the OpenGL driver to add one extra step to its coordinate-pipeline to account for the change.
Screen bitdepth is harder to change on the fly (since textures may already have been uploaded to the card, and so forth). If the 3d engine on top of OpenGL was aware of that possibility, it could handle the event by just reloading all textures from disk. It would be possible for the OpenGL driver to virtualize texture access and hide the bitdepth changes from the application, but like you say, this would be slow. And complicated to implement, for a low payoff.
It might be better if the OpenGL extensions were modified to set a flag while their programs were running. The utilities that reconfigure the screen could check the flag, and disable the changing of resolution while the apps are still running. (More likely, show a dialog box with "Warning, the following programs are 3d accelerated: DooM3. To change bit-depth, please quit those programs and try again") Explaining the problem beforehand is infinitely better than waiting for a mysterious crash.
It's about time this came out. For a long time I've wondered why X11 (and XFree86 in particular) wasn't making lots of obvious, incremental usability improvements. Not only does it have the (much repeated) opensource advantage of "don't just complain, submit a patch!", but also the modular "extension" architexture, which should allow changes to be made without damaging backwards compatibility.
However, centuries passed (of computer time, which is rapider than the Julian calendar) before this fundamental capability appeared. Microsoft Windows(tm) has done this since 1996 (or earlier?). Apple surely did it long before. The fact that it took so long led me to doubt the soundness of the X11 system design- either no one else noticed those obvious deficienies (unlikely!), or the vast complexity of the protocol prohibited the creation of new functionality without the developer first learning each little secret of the large xfree86 codebase.
We now see that the latter interpretation was somewhat correct, as this paper explains that the creation of RandR was possible only due to new software (TinyX, etc) that isolated the RandR guys from needing to deal with all of the complexities of X itself. Of course, the relentless increase in processing speed (fruit of Moore's Observation) helped too.
I hope that changes like this have "lowered the hackivation energy" enough so that XFree86 can quickly get some other useful improvements added- within a short time, it might be possible to regain a little Wow Factor over the Microsoft and Apple GUI interfaces. I'll list some improvements I'd like to see. The RandR writeup mentioned some of these, hopefully the same team is already planning work on them) Others of these things can be done already, but with awkward, unstable configurations, or through VNC. We need these capabilities in popular linux distributions, and without VNC's least-common-denominator slowness.
Migrate a program from one Xserver to another We should be able to use a utility program or a window-manager icon to select a window to send elsewhere. This should be possible from a remote command line login as well (so that if I wander into another person's office I can show him either a single program I'm running, or my whole desktop). It should be your option whether or not the program permantently relocates to the new server (or returns when the window is dismissed). This brings up another feature,
Run the same program on multiple X displays aka xfork. Operator's choice as to whether the remote display is read-only, or also accepts input. The default should be read-only, unless the toolkit has coded support for this feature, in which case it should default to allowing the remote to provided logically read-only input only (scroll around in the window, but not change the document).
(I've heard Microsoft's Netmeeting software does something like this. Probably just a screen scraper, but still a workable feature.)
Lock your desktop without locking the Xserver When I run xlock, it shouldn't only allow MY password to reactivate the display- other persons should be able to walk over and login as well. I can either wait for her turn to be up, or find another Xserver and use the above features to migrate my display to my new desk. This is a natural match for X11's capabilities, but one that Microsoft got last year. *nix has to catch up quick!
Dynamically reassign input devices Now that a user can change his resolution without restarting X, he should be able to do the same with his input devices. Boot your computer without having any mice installed, get to X, run mozilla to see a web-page on how to configure your Wacom table, and get that working, without needing to restart. (Linux does this to some extent with things like symlinks in/dev and the/dev/input/mice devices, but it could be better).
Resurrect the multi-headed display In ancient times, one computer would run 16 interactive sessions on terminals attached to its serial ports. Those capabilities were lost as displays became more complicated and PCs and fat clients emerged. But now, with the rise of USB peripherals and multiple active PCI video cards, commidity hardware could again support this functionality. On an Athlon 1500, I should be able to install a 2nd video card, 2 usb mice, and one usb keyboard, and get a fully independent GUI desktop. (Yes, this usage is a geek stunt- its real-life utility will be bounded by the length of a VGA cable)
Support joysticks in X This should be an easy one, right guys?
And many more Any ideas?
An interesting consequence of some changes like this is that users might tend to leave X11 programs running for weeks at a time, with virtual memory becoming like a form of application serialization/persistence. That could have negative implications for efficiency and design. ("Oh, I don't need to put XMMS in my startup folder, I just left it running from last year")
No, Redhat (and most existing linuxy systems) don't have anything like this.
For a long time, XFree86 has allowed its own resolution to switch while it was running, but already running programs would be oblivious of this fact, and can't do anything to cope. Nor did the Xserver or window manager take any steps to help them. (If not in the highest possible configured resolution, then you have to very painfully pan across a virtual-desktop area with your mouse. No person could stay sane operating in that environment)
In the case of a fullscreen game, that limitation doesn't matter- while the game is running, you don't care about seeing any programs you already had up. And you're unlikey to want to start any other stuff until done with the game.
The RandR improvement could help with games like that, a little (unify how their startup process works, and make it easier to background UT2003 to check your email). But the real use is with GUI software like image/movie viewers and art packages.
If RandR worked, here's what we'd have: Suppose I've got a new computer with a SOTA video card, but an older 17 inch monitor. It can run at 1600x1400, but only at a poor refresh rate, so I set the default resolution to 1280x1024. However sometimes I'd like to view an entire scanned magazine page at once. I can switch up to the higher resolution temporarily, and for that time period, all my programs will resize correctly.
Conversely, if I wanted to play a video/animation (but still retain access to my other running X11 programs) I could drop down to 800x600, creating a performance advantage for the fast-refresh software.
Any such person would've long since adjusted his perception to compensate- probably without even having been aware of the "problem". (Assuming for speculative purposes that the condition didn't bring with it any other problems, such as overall bluriness. Which is unlikely)
Even if he hadn't been born like that, he still could've adapted without much difficulty. In fact, perceptual scientists often demonstrate that people can quickly become perfectly acclimated to having a transformation (like rotation or mirroring) applied to their vision.
For rotation this is accomplished by prisms in goggles (I don't know the optics behind mirroring your view, or if that's even possible without a digital-camera-headset rig).
The hilarious part is that test subjects go through the same acclimation time after the goggles are removed- they've temporarily forgotten how the real world is suppose to look.
Have you been to Hiroshima lately? It looks pretty good- in fact, it looks better than some other Japanese cities because all the buildings are less than 50 years old*.
There's no detectable radioactivity- a simple fission blast is moderately clean, as far as nukes go. It does NOT turn the target into an uninhabitable wasteland. In fact, the damage from a nuclear power-plant meltdown would be much longer-lasting than from an atomic bomb. (The shear volume of radioactive material is so much greater).
(*Ok, honestly, Japanese buildings were never meant to last. Plenty of other cities got 100% flattened by conventional weapons, too)
You're correct, this is a widespread language problem- quantum leaps are really very small.
However, the factor in defense of this usage is that particles which quantum-leap go between two points without crossing the intermediate. That seems special to people who are used to thinking of motion in purly Newtonian terms.
I think the MVC concept is mostly interpreted as a simple design pattern. But it is a much older (measured in IT eons) concept than a design pattern.
That's a truism for you! ALL "Design Patterns" are restatements of concepts that existed well before the Group of Four began writing. They just assembled them in one place, and created a new (often confusing) vocabulary to use when adding further bits of wisdom to the collection.
For a specific example of how America's development was spurred by IP violations, run a websearch on "Francis Cabot Lowell spy".
Tis said that in ~1810 he memorized the schematics to the automated weaving machine to get around the British prohibition on the export of technical schematics.
Whole cities (some bearing his name) in Massachusetts sprung up around this invention, and it lead to a spread of large scale agriculture in the south and west. Previously textile raw materials had to be exported to England for manufacture into garments, then imported back to the US for sale- and enormous impediment for efficiency and growth.
The development of American factories also changed the face of urban demographics- large quantities of the lower classes were pulled into dense cities that were previously enclaves of the wealthy (and their abundant domestic help). Since the best (most nimble & most managable) factory workers were girls, unmarried single women finally got the opportunity to support themselves financially while mantaining their virtue.
The violation of patents lead to progress like this, which had a much greater impact than breaking copyright and reading Dickins on the cheap.
No it doesn't. The Zaurus includes Opera, but it lacks this feature ("content reformatting to fit small screens"). And that lack is painful- unless you use the absolutely smallest (4 pixel) text size, when reading a site like slashdot you'll have to horizontally scroll for each and every line of text.
That's additionally painful because the screen updates aren't nearly instantaneous and more importantly, you can't scroll to the end of the line with a single button press. Stupidly, the hardware cursor keys do the equivalent of arrow keys, rather than PageUp/PageDown & Home/End. So to read the last two words of each line of a web page, you've got to scroll 4 right (redrawing each time), then scroll 4 back to start the next sentence. (Then probably scroll 2 down to advance through the document). Ten fairly slow redraws where one should've sufficed.
Its so irritating that I'd often tend to just ignore/guess the last word of each line, rather than crawl over to read it. If the website is nice enough to offer a "printable" or "pda" mode, then that'll generally work, by enabling line breaks based on your viewing width. Slashdot has the "&lite=1" option, for instance- too bad it doesn't stick when you link from the main page to an article!!
Because of those problems, I've often preferred to run lynx when browsing with a Zaurus. It ignores most of the page elements that lead to unflexible formatting. (Oddly, "links", a more advanced text-based browser, supports things like tables and frames, and thus becomes unusable on small screens the same as a pixelized program would)
Opera on the Zaurus will also view PDF files, and the problem is even worse there. All the same obstacles are there, PLUS the document authors probably used a dual column layout, PLUS redrawing after a scroll takes 10 seconds instead of 0.5. PDF is evil! The press release didn't mention it, but I hope they can apply some auto-reformating to PDF files as well.
My other hope, as always, is that they won't try to patent this technique. The Opera developers aren't in the US, so maybe they're not so infected by IP-fever...
Funny, from what I've seen, the calls for help go in the opposite direction (unless we just want someone to haul some 25 inch CRTs around, or hold on the phone for Sun support).
Maybe programming houses tend to hire less competent IT staff, since the averages employees can take care of themselves quite fine.
I consider the skills of a network administrator to be a simple prerequisite to software development. Not because its impossible to write code without having configured your own DNS server- but because they're so EASY- relative to say resolving a exception when JNI code is running as a GC in the Swing thread- that every coder should be able to figure it out for herself.
Of course, there are skills that us programmers disdain, but that network techs might find handy. Like explaining something to an end-user secretary with sentences longer than "rtfm".
Re:But I *like* those functions...
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Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Have you tried Phoenix? It seems that you're not quite sure what it is. I use Debian, and it's mozilla packages are broken up into separate mozilla-browser and mozilla-mailnews components that can be installed independently.
Yet, I'm running Phoenix right now (after it was introduced to/. last week). Its much more (less?) than the mozilla browser by itself. I'm not clear on the technical details (it runs too well for me to need to dig into it), but they've apparently sacrified flexibility and over-abundant options for speed/compactness. There's no preference option to install new GUI themes, for instance, so possibly lots of XUL stuff has been simplified/eliminated. Also things like download manager & password manager have been removed, at least for now.
Slashdot Mirror
In particular, this sentence
unfairly singles out the GPL and ignores all of the other restrictive licenses- such as anything of the form Copyright 2002 XYZZY Corporation!!
These Congressmen+lobbyists are deliberately mistating the position of the "Open Source Government" initiative (or cherry-picking some more extremist proponents to serve as strawmen).
And they're leaving out an important intellectual-property fact about the standard procedures of software contracting: when you contract for code, unless you explicitly specify something different, both the customer AND the contractor get rights to the code. If the contract was for a compiler program, then the customer gets rights to some binaries, and the contractor still keeps code rights. (This many "consultancy" houses work- they resell the same source code over and over, with small customer-specific modifications each time)
What the public should desire is for us to get some benefit from software development paid for by the government. Today, a federal agency will fund a project, get it installed & maybe working, and then forget about it. The contractor typically searches around for other agencies needing the same functionalities and sells it to them, again. (Taking advantage of the government's poor inventory management to rack up more sales- but that's the customer's fault for not being more organized).
The change I'd like to see is, when the government enters into new software contracts, they ask for a GPL (or at least PD) source code package amoung the deliverables. That way all of the researchers and developers in the government, academia, and the private sector can examine and build on the taxpayer funded work. This doesn't have to be a law, just an executive directive, or mere recommendation. Not only will it encourage "the progress of science and the useful arts", but it will increase bueraucratic transparency and reduce dangerous security flaws.
This says NOTHING about taking away the separate right that every contractor has to reuse their own code. The developing company can maintain their own copyrighted version to use as they wish. But that shouldn't be the ONLY copy of the source code- we paid for it, we'd like to look it over too.
Most of the music and films (by total sales) do come from the US, but more importantly, even countries that create their own recordings will be willing to duplicate the US's laws in order to continue getting the US's products. And then the local works will be restricted in the same way.
- - - - -
I don't have to remind anyone that the Chinese government isn't exactly freedom loving. They don't want to be restricted by Microsoft (enemy of my enemy), but they're happy to restrict anyone else they can. Turning to the biggest bastion of fascism to protect your own freedoms isn't just ironic, its dangerous.
They aim to control the speech & thought of their own citizens. The free internet is an irritant to them- so far they've been unable to effectively block it. The only way they could make that work is to have code on the client side to scan your browser cache and send reports back to the police. And the only way to stop people from tampering with the monitoring software will be- dahdahdum- hardware recognition of signed binaries!
Something very similar to Palladium, or possibly even worse. China will either copy the Palladium technology directly (and become their own signing authority) or roll out a cheap clone (fixing any holes left in the Microsoft version).
No, more than false. If true is 1 and false is 0, then I meant -1. Because not only did his claim not occur, but the reverse happened.
A name like Jedidiah, you must already be Amish!
(Responding seriously to a joke)
Of course they weren't illiterates- the authors of an artifical word (company or product name) usually get to tell people how they wish it to be pronounced. It's a marketing thing, and its important.
In the case of "GNU", pronouncing the "guh" was the only reasonable choice. Saying it like "new" would've misled 95% of all listeners. "new" is an existing English word, it doesn't sound artificial, so hearers won't think its describing an active organization. Even worse, its an adjective that can apply to nearly anything. "Apple" works as a name for computers because edible seedpods are unlikely.
Imagine sentences like this:
"Hey, I have you tried this new image processor yet? You can download it for free because it has a new public license. I've got the source code here, you can use that if you have the new C compiler"
The listener would be forever worrying that he's getting behind on software updates!
The pronunciation you call "wrong" was the only sane choice. (Aside from using a different acronymn. Which would've been best by far. "GNU" is a willfully incomprehensible)
I wish you were right, but your simply incorrect. Europe and Asia will go as does America.
From a practical standpoint, this planet has only ONE consumer operating system producer. All of the PC manufactures in Europe and Asia need Microsoft just as badly as Dell and Compaq do.
In fact, unlike the rest of the planet, the US has a few companies that might be able to sell PCs without Microsoft's help: Apple (of course), Sun, and IBM. (Sony could give it a shot, but they've shown no inclination. They have enough to benefit from the content business that strong DRM will be right up their alley.)
All of today's Wintel-clone builders will move as a group to either accept or reject Microsoft's hardware demands en-mass. Any of them who lags- whose customers start returning computers because it was incompatible with MS Word 2004- will be dragged down into bankrupcy.
Besides, the "OneWorldGovernment" thing is happening- its not coming from traditional governments though, but from multinational corporations. They influence the political process of each state to maximize their profits, molding the "developed world" into a conforming shape. (Laws which don't directly business profits will be left alone for a while, so nations will retain distinctiveness on "irrelevant" things like gun control, abortion, and taxation patterns.)
Pseudo-governmental entities like G7, IMF, and WIPO drive this conformity forward. WIPO tries to convince all nations to increase their intellectual property laws- they promoted some kind of "copyright duration parity" as support for the Sonny Bono act, for instance.
The citizens of the world CANNOT sit back and laugh at the hapless American consumers who are locking themselves into subjugation- soon the tendrils of DMCA-equivalency laws will penetrate their homelands, bootstapped as conditions of Favored Nation trading status, or by more insidious means.
I'm being pessimistic here- maybe Germany et all will be smart enough to read the fine print on some of these treaties before their parliaments rubber-stamp them- but its safer to assume the worst, and spread the warning about it.
Hehe, that's the opposite of true. If anything, your performance would've increased (assuming you could reach the server at all), because other internet users were unable to expend your shared bandwidth.
Untrue. Some games, like Warcraft3, use a grid topology (each player connects to each other), so you do know their IP addresses. But many other popular games like HalfLife/Counterstrike are star topologies, where each player only connects to the central server. In those cases netstat can't show you their IP addresses.
(Sometimes the developers of star topology games create an ingame option to reveal other player's IPs, but they usually drop off the last one or two octets.)
In the old days of internet Quake, it wasn't unheard of for an annoying player to suffer a PingOfDeath or plain old overload DOS.
Excuse me?? Nothing that was invented before Microsoft was even founded can qualify as new.
Yes, I've done that too. Maybe the display is multiheaded, but the input isn't. I know of no way under linux to assign different keyboards to different X servers.
Hey, I guess that was a good reason that RandR doesn't support bitdepth changing at all.
Look at the setxkbmap program. Many desktop environments (Gnome, etc) include utilities (often embedded in the taskbar) to change this. Usually called "International keyboard settings", and featuring icons of national flags to tell you the current configuration.
(Does dvorak have a flag? It's a breakaway Soviet republic, right?)
Screen bitdepth is harder to change on the fly (since textures may already have been uploaded to the card, and so forth). If the 3d engine on top of OpenGL was aware of that possibility, it could handle the event by just reloading all textures from disk. It would be possible for the OpenGL driver to virtualize texture access and hide the bitdepth changes from the application, but like you say, this would be slow. And complicated to implement, for a low payoff.
It might be better if the OpenGL extensions were modified to set a flag while their programs were running. The utilities that reconfigure the screen could check the flag, and disable the changing of resolution while the apps are still running. (More likely, show a dialog box with "Warning, the following programs are 3d accelerated: DooM3. To change bit-depth, please quit those programs and try again") Explaining the problem beforehand is infinitely better than waiting for a mysterious crash.
However, centuries passed (of computer time, which is rapider than the Julian calendar) before this fundamental capability appeared. Microsoft Windows(tm) has done this since 1996 (or earlier?). Apple surely did it long before. The fact that it took so long led me to doubt the soundness of the X11 system design- either no one else noticed those obvious deficienies (unlikely!), or the vast complexity of the protocol prohibited the creation of new functionality without the developer first learning each little secret of the large xfree86 codebase.
We now see that the latter interpretation was somewhat correct, as this paper explains that the creation of RandR was possible only due to new software (TinyX, etc) that isolated the RandR guys from needing to deal with all of the complexities of X itself. Of course, the relentless increase in processing speed (fruit of Moore's Observation) helped too.
I hope that changes like this have "lowered the hackivation energy" enough so that XFree86 can quickly get some other useful improvements added- within a short time, it might be possible to regain a little Wow Factor over the Microsoft and Apple GUI interfaces. I'll list some improvements I'd like to see. The RandR writeup mentioned some of these, hopefully the same team is already planning work on them) Others of these things can be done already, but with awkward, unstable configurations, or through VNC. We need these capabilities in popular linux distributions, and without VNC's least-common-denominator slowness.
- Migrate a program from one Xserver to another We should be able to use a utility program or a window-manager icon to select a window to send elsewhere. This should be possible from a remote command line login as well (so that if I wander into another person's office I can show him either a single program I'm running, or my whole desktop). It should be your option whether or not the program permantently relocates to the new server (or returns when the window is dismissed). This brings up another feature,
- Run the same program on multiple X displays aka xfork. Operator's choice as to whether the remote display is read-only, or also accepts input. The default should be read-only, unless the toolkit has coded support for this feature, in which case it should default to allowing the remote to provided logically read-only input only (scroll around in the window, but not change the document).
- Lock your desktop without locking the Xserver When I run xlock, it shouldn't only allow MY password to reactivate the display- other persons should be able to walk over and login as well. I can either wait for her turn to be up, or find another Xserver and use the above features to migrate my display to my new desk. This is a natural match for X11's capabilities, but one that Microsoft got last year. *nix has to catch up quick!
- Dynamically reassign input devices Now that a user can change his resolution without restarting X, he should be able to do the same with his input devices. Boot your computer without having any mice installed, get to X, run mozilla to see a web-page on how to configure your Wacom table, and get that working, without needing to restart. (Linux does this to some extent with things like symlinks in
/dev and the /dev/input/mice devices, but it could be better).
- Resurrect the multi-headed display In ancient times, one computer would run 16 interactive sessions on terminals attached to its serial ports. Those capabilities were lost as displays became more complicated and PCs and fat clients emerged. But now, with the rise of USB peripherals and multiple active PCI video cards, commidity hardware could again support this functionality. On an Athlon 1500, I should be able to install a 2nd video card, 2 usb mice, and one usb keyboard, and get a fully independent GUI desktop. (Yes, this usage is a geek stunt- its real-life utility will be bounded by the length of a VGA cable)
- Support joysticks in X This should be an easy one, right guys?
- And many more Any ideas?
An interesting consequence of some changes like this is that users might tend to leave X11 programs running for weeks at a time, with virtual memory becoming like a form of application serialization/persistence. That could have negative implications for efficiency and design. ("Oh, I don't need to put XMMS in my startup folder, I just left it running from last year")(I've heard Microsoft's Netmeeting software does something like this. Probably just a screen scraper, but still a workable feature.)
No, Redhat (and most existing linuxy systems) don't have anything like this.
For a long time, XFree86 has allowed its own resolution to switch while it was running, but already running programs would be oblivious of this fact, and can't do anything to cope. Nor did the Xserver or window manager take any steps to help them. (If not in the highest possible configured resolution, then you have to very painfully pan across a virtual-desktop area with your mouse. No person could stay sane operating in that environment)
In the case of a fullscreen game, that limitation doesn't matter- while the game is running, you don't care about seeing any programs you already had up. And you're unlikey to want to start any other stuff until done with the game.
The RandR improvement could help with games like that, a little (unify how their startup process works, and make it easier to background UT2003 to check your email). But the real use is with GUI software like image/movie viewers and art packages.
If RandR worked, here's what we'd have: Suppose I've got a new computer with a SOTA video card, but an older 17 inch monitor. It can run at 1600x1400, but only at a poor refresh rate, so I set the default resolution to 1280x1024. However sometimes I'd like to view an entire scanned magazine page at once. I can switch up to the higher resolution temporarily, and for that time period, all my programs will resize correctly.
Conversely, if I wanted to play a video/animation (but still retain access to my other running X11 programs) I could drop down to 800x600, creating a performance advantage for the fast-refresh software.
Any such person would've long since adjusted his perception to compensate- probably without even having been aware of the "problem". (Assuming for speculative purposes that the condition didn't bring with it any other problems, such as overall bluriness. Which is unlikely)
Even if he hadn't been born like that, he still could've adapted without much difficulty. In fact, perceptual scientists often demonstrate that people can quickly become perfectly acclimated to having a transformation (like rotation or mirroring) applied to their vision.
For rotation this is accomplished by prisms in goggles (I don't know the optics behind mirroring your view, or if that's even possible without a digital-camera-headset rig).
The hilarious part is that test subjects go through the same acclimation time after the goggles are removed- they've temporarily forgotten how the real world is suppose to look.
Have you been to Hiroshima lately? It looks pretty good- in fact, it looks better than some other Japanese cities because all the buildings are less than 50 years old*.
There's no detectable radioactivity- a simple fission blast is moderately clean, as far as nukes go. It does NOT turn the target into an uninhabitable wasteland. In fact, the damage from a nuclear power-plant meltdown would be much longer-lasting than from an atomic bomb. (The shear volume of radioactive material is so much greater).
(*Ok, honestly, Japanese buildings were never meant to last. Plenty of other cities got 100% flattened by conventional weapons, too)
You're correct, this is a widespread language problem- quantum leaps are really very small.
However, the factor in defense of this usage is that particles which quantum-leap go between two points without crossing the intermediate. That seems special to people who are used to thinking of motion in purly Newtonian terms.
By publishing this press release, they've already (prior-art) prevented any other patents.
That's a truism for you!
ALL "Design Patterns" are restatements of concepts that existed well before the Group of Four began writing. They just assembled them in one place, and created a new (often confusing) vocabulary to use when adding further bits of wisdom to the collection.
Tis said that in ~1810 he memorized the schematics to the automated weaving machine to get around the British prohibition on the export of technical schematics.
Whole cities (some bearing his name) in Massachusetts sprung up around this invention, and it lead to a spread of large scale agriculture in the south and west. Previously textile raw materials had to be exported to England for manufacture into garments, then imported back to the US for sale- and enormous impediment for efficiency and growth.
The development of American factories also changed the face of urban demographics- large quantities of the lower classes were pulled into dense cities that were previously enclaves of the wealthy (and their abundant domestic help). Since the best (most nimble & most managable) factory workers were girls, unmarried single women finally got the opportunity to support themselves financially while mantaining their virtue.
The violation of patents lead to progress like this, which had a much greater impact than breaking copyright and reading Dickins on the cheap.
That's additionally painful because the screen updates aren't nearly instantaneous and more importantly, you can't scroll to the end of the line with a single button press. Stupidly, the hardware cursor keys do the equivalent of arrow keys, rather than PageUp/PageDown & Home/End. So to read the last two words of each line of a web page, you've got to scroll 4 right (redrawing each time), then scroll 4 back to start the next sentence. (Then probably scroll 2 down to advance through the document). Ten fairly slow redraws where one should've sufficed.
Its so irritating that I'd often tend to just ignore/guess the last word of each line, rather than crawl over to read it. If the website is nice enough to offer a "printable" or "pda" mode, then that'll generally work, by enabling line breaks based on your viewing width. Slashdot has the "&lite=1" option, for instance- too bad it doesn't stick when you link from the main page to an article!!
Because of those problems, I've often preferred to run lynx when browsing with a Zaurus. It ignores most of the page elements that lead to unflexible formatting. (Oddly, "links", a more advanced text-based browser, supports things like tables and frames, and thus becomes unusable on small screens the same as a pixelized program would)
Opera on the Zaurus will also view PDF files, and the problem is even worse there. All the same obstacles are there, PLUS the document authors probably used a dual column layout, PLUS redrawing after a scroll takes 10 seconds instead of 0.5. PDF is evil! The press release didn't mention it, but I hope they can apply some auto-reformating to PDF files as well.
My other hope, as always, is that they won't try to patent this technique. The Opera developers aren't in the US, so maybe they're not so infected by IP-fever...
Maybe programming houses tend to hire less competent IT staff, since the averages employees can take care of themselves quite fine.
I consider the skills of a network administrator to be a simple prerequisite to software development. Not because its impossible to write code without having configured your own DNS server- but because they're so EASY- relative to say resolving a exception when JNI code is running as a GC in the Swing thread- that every coder should be able to figure it out for herself.
Of course, there are skills that us programmers disdain, but that network techs might find handy. Like explaining something to an end-user secretary with sentences longer than "rtfm".
Yet, I'm running Phoenix right now (after it was introduced to /. last week). Its much more (less?) than the mozilla browser by itself. I'm not clear on the technical details (it runs too well for me to need to dig into it), but they've apparently sacrified flexibility and over-abundant options for speed/compactness. There's no preference option to install new GUI themes, for instance, so possibly lots of XUL stuff has been simplified/eliminated. Also things like download manager & password manager have been removed, at least for now.