But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY! . Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes.
Umm... Isopropyl alcohol is not particularily toxic. The risk of injury from inhaling fumes is almost non-existant. You'd have to be huffing the stuff for a long time.
Isopropyl is about as toxic as ethanol. And we drink that stuff. (MSDS data sheets for isopropyl and ethyl alcohol.)
Note the Occupational Exposure Limit is about a 1 kg/m3 for both. That's a lot.
The truth. There is more than one government in the world, and they can't seem to agree on any single thing. How could they keep a secret among themselves?
Besides that, there are plenty of civilian radiation detectors out there. A guy I know who worked at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden told me that back in 1986, they found out about the Chernobyl accident way before anyone in the Swedish government. (And quite some time before the Soviet authorities admitted anything had happened)
Although they did have a few worried hours trying to figure out where the radiation was coming from, before they realized that it actually had come from outside the plant. The isotope composition told them pretty quickly that it was a reactor failure, and not a bomb. Calculating backwards from the prevailing winds then gave them a pretty good guess of which reactor it was.
latin, which actually has a predictable structure.
WTF are you talking about? Do you actually know any latin? Because if you did, you'd probably know Latin is quite the other way around. The six cases make sentence word order almost irrelevant, and therefore, nearly any word order can constitute a valid sentence.
Ok.. maybe I'm missing something here.. Are these things sold with a mandatory music-download-service subscription or something like that, in order to subsidize the price of the hardware? Or what?
Because if they make their money off selling the things.. that doesn't make sense. Why should they care what you do with their product once they've sold it? This could leads to them selling more units.
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
However, you are missing the point. Of course Avalon isn't the first vector graphics library. It is, however, the first mainstream GUI toolkit to be 100% vector-based.
Which means.. what? "100% vector-based"? What the heck are you talking about?
You're responding to the wrong post, it was the grandfather post who made the weird 'it's SVG so it's 3D' statement..
3D vector graphics is a pretty different area.
However, there is one link.. SVG (and PDF) supports compositing (E.g. semi-tranclucent shapes), and if you're talking about a 2D graphics API which supports everything SVG does, it means that you've got to support compositing.
Most modern graphics cards have the ability to do this in hardware.. so thus, the API backend for on-screen rendering can exploit this for faster rendering.
Apple's Quartz does this via OpenGL, Cairo does so too, and Avalon is going to use DirectX.
90% of anything the average user does daily is RASTER.
I didn't say otherwise.
Most fonts are vector fonts. Not all, but most. Maybe this will change.
About as likely as reverting to punchcards.
I wouldn't say that X11 dosen't have vector graphics
I didn't write that. I write X11 doesn't have device-independent vector graphics. And it certainly doesn't have anything near the capabilities we're talking about here. What do you think Cairo is all about?
Well, Georgian has it's own alphabet. That text was translitterated, i.e. written in the closest match with english pronounciation. So english vowel rules would apply. (Translitteration is of course language-specific. For instance the writer Chekhov is Tschechow in Germany, Tjechov in Sweden, Tchekhov in France, Czechow in Poland)
In the broad sense, any sound you make by letting air out of your throat without restricting it is a 'vowel sound'.
Now.. which and how many of these sounds are considered valid vowels is language-specific.
For instance, Swedish, one of the languages I'm fluent in, has a,e,i,o,u,y,å,ä,ö, (not accents, they're unique letters) and that x2 because there's a 'hard' and 'soft' version of each.
That's an important note.. the number of letters considered 'vowels' doesn't always indicate the number of vowel sounds used. English vowels change depending on where they're used too. But not Japanese ones, for instance.
If it is so similar, surely it should be trivial to write a quick XSLT script to transform from one to the other?
Without being versed in the exact particulars of the incompatibility, that seems to be exactly what the MS guy was saying: "I believe that there is a trivial transform that could be applied to transform SVG to WVG;"
It can't be that similar, otherwise people wouldn't be complaining as loudly as they are...
I don't think I need to remind a/. reader of the problems caused by IE:s non-standard HTML rendering?
SVG is part of the avalon concept done through the XAML interface.
Except that Microsoft does not follow the SVG standard. So it's not SVG, it's just similar.
As for 2d rendering, it has always been pixel/bitmap fill based and not vector based.
Again, you are wrong. Although you seem to believe it, SVG isn't the first vector graphics format in existance. Not by a long shot. (PostScript is from 1984) Nor is Avalon the first device-independent 2D-graphics API.
Providing a ref to the SVG spec doesn't make it true.
Ok? Now, I've contributed fixes to Apache Batik, (an SVG library) and I've also written PostScript generators, and most recently I've contributed stuff to the Java2D library for libgcj. (another 2D library which is not 'pixel based')
unlike the current pixel based 2d rendering system of today.
Um... say what? Ok, to begin with Avalon doesn't support SVG, which is one of the things Miguel was blasting them for.
Secondly.. 2D rendering is not 'pixel based' today. It's never been 'pixel based'. Windows has had device-independent 2D rendering since.. well, forever. (Windows Metafiles ring a bell?) So has just about everything else (Mac, Atari) too, (X doesn't, but the Unix platform tended to use PostScript for that stuff).
What is new here is the support of more advanced things like compositing (something you couldn't do device-independently before). OS X already has this of course in Quartz.
In most of the (western) world, the damages awarded by courts are pretty down-to-earth.
It's the USA with its runaway legal system which is the sad exception to the rule.
As an american living in europe.. it's nice to see a court system work the way it's supposed to: As a last resort when you can't sort things out between yourselves, and where the damages you receive can only be expected to recover your losses, not make you a profit.
But. It can't really compete. SDL is "Simple", and doesn't provide the same amount of functionality.
Also, SDL doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The 2.0 version has been 'in the works' for years now..
(I've written a bunch of posts on this.. The lack of good crossplatform graphics API:s, both for 2D and 3D is one of my pet peeves, and IMHO a major barrier to Linux on the desktop.)
LOL.. That's even funnier if one knows something about georgian.
With wonderful phrases like: "gvprc'k'vni" (He's ripping us off!).. no vowels for miles. And they're really prounounced without vowels!!
(Unlike Russian and other slavic languages where vowels sometimes look like they're missing, but just aren't written out. For instance 'v' in russian meaning 'in', which is pronounced like something between 'v' and 'va')
At the risk of getting flamed.. How about reading the GCC mailing list instead?
RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.
While RMS did code gcc in the beginning, I don't feel one should give RMS credit for what it is today. The GCC that RMS developed was IMHO amateurish. It was primarily the work done by the people at Cygnus (now Red Hat) who turned GCC into the quality real-world compiler it is today.
Not to mention that RMS opposed this. He opposed including C++ support, and then opposed supporting it properly, causing the Cygnus ecgs fork. (which is now gcc again, since everybody else finally overruled RMS)
As for Linux, RMS spent a good amount of time back then actively discouraging people from contributing to Linux.. talking about the vaporware Hurd would be so much better and how it was all wasted effort.
I'd agree we owe a lot to RMS, but not with respect to GCC and Linux. The positive contributions he's made with respect to those two have been cancelled out by his counter-productive dogmatism. (Even today, it continues. Many, if not most, GCC developers currently want to re-write parts of the front-end in C++. There are good technical arguments for this, and it's been shown that some code can be simplified greatly that way.
While most of the GCC steering committe recently said, "OK, well if you can show there are benifits, we're open to the idea". Except RMS who was STRONGLY against the idea. Not for any ideological reason, but simply because RMS doesn't like C++.
Is it really the same for NES, and do you know from experience?
No. I don't have a direct experience. But every single thing I've ever read on this says that the NES and SNES connectors are identical, just differently shaped.
Ironically, I'm looking into all of this right now. My ideal goal would be to hook 2 SNES controllers (#1 and #2) and 2 NES controllers (#3 and #4) into a single parallel port. That way, it would be almost completely authentic: load up ZSNES and use controllers 1 and 2 (SNES) for input, or load up FCE Ultra and use controllers 3 and 4 (NES) for input.
That's quite doable, in my experience. You probably won't be able to have all four switched in at the same time though, because you'll drain too much power off the port. (same thing goes for very long cables. But you can work around that by using a different power source though)
As I said, what I would recommend is the "B" design on the latter link I gave, the one using 6 diodes, and a transistor. And if it doesn't work, try changing or removing the resistor. That's exactly what I did.
Have you ever built / used an actual NES connector without a problem?
Yes, I have built two connectors, both for two ordinary NES pads. They work just fine with every machine I've tested them on, which is admittedly only 4-5 different ones.
The design I used was basically the same as I told you, except modified for two pads (which is probably why I had to remove the resistor), so in total I used 6 diodes, and two transistors.
There are simpler ways.. like this parallel port interface (page is SNES, but the same design works for NES controllers too)
I've personally built several of these interfaces, and they work just fine, with one caveat: depending on your parallel port you might want to put a transistor in there, like in this design. I haven't had any problems with the latter design with any parallel port type, although you might need to change resistor. (or just skip it altogether)
(Yes, there are drivers for Linux, Win95/98/Me and 2000/XP)
Well.. I think it's kind of a general thing for all good Science too.
Einstein's original paper on Special relativity was named "On the electrodymanics of moving bodies".. It was not named "Revolutionary new discovery by me, Albert Einstein which will revolutionize the world of physics".
I guess there are several reasons for this.. one is simply manners. Boasting is unpolite. Scientific papers rarely have exciting titles, even when the results are exciting.
The second is of course, that a good scientist realizes the if a result may be revolutionary. A good scientist also always leaves room for doubt.
So the natural behaviour would of course to be careful and discreet, and not go confidently telling the world of your revolution until it has been verified. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of egg on your face.
Conversely, most scientists are highly sceptical of 'revolutionary' results which are announced in the press before being published. In fact, most pseudoscientists are very good at publicizing themselves and their 'revolutions', probably because they are totally convinced of their own theories, and are lacking the 'self-doubt' bit.
The only people who would be affected is OpenGL elitists
No, the only people who would be affected would be everyone who wants to play Doom 3 on their video card. That's a significant number of people.
Remember that Microsoft created PC gaming as we know it.
What the heck are you smoking? Microsoft was a pioneer in writing flight sims. But that's about it. You must be too young to remember what PC gaming was like before Microsoft ruled the universe.
There is nothing wrong with DirectX, except that such a brilliant idea came out of Microsoft.
There are plenty of things wrong with DirectX. One is that it is a proprietary standard created by MS to stop OpenGL. And unexpectedly, DirectX is locked-in to the Windows platform, unlike OpenGL.
It is not a 'brilliant idea' by any stretch of the imagination. It's was a mind-numbingly obvious idea. When DirectX was developed, essentially all PC apps had moved off DOS to Windows, except games. Obviously, Microsoft needed to get game developers to start using Windows. DirectX was an obvious solution. But they could, had they been less 'evil', just as well integrated OpenGL support into Windows instead.
Which I suspect is the real reason that certain people are as pro-OpenGL as they are. It's just more anti-Microsoft sentiment.
No, it's because OpenGL is a non-proprietary, cross-platform standard. DirectX is a proprietary API locked to the Windows platform.
That said, I'll concede that DirectX is better than OpenGL. It must be better than OpenGL to ensure its survival, because no developer wants to lock himself to a single vendor and platform if there is an equally good option.
I'm not making any apologies, because I have bnot and would not claim that X is better.
I think the X support has been lacking, and does just about everyone with any kind of insight into these matters. The fact that the development in this area exploded as soon as X.org forked only underlines that.
I think the Quartz API is far ahead of anything Linux or Windows has to offer in that area. (There is a reason for this too.. Apple wants to keep their grasp on the advertising/publishing market. Good device-independent graphics is a must.)
Excuse me, but who the f*** are you to give orders?
Do you think that just because you managed to install Linux that you somehow have a right to tell me, and thousands of other OSS developers what they should choose to spend their time on?
It's OPEN-SOURCE software we're talking about here. If you're not happy. Take that energy you spend bitching and go do something constructive instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that was a typo.
My point wasn't that it's safe. Almost every single chemical out there thing is dangerous in sufficient quantities. Especially organic solvents.
However, as far as organic solvents go, isopropyl is about as safe as they get. You'd pretty much have to drink it to get those overdose symptoms.
And we're talking about cleaning something here, as a one-off, not about cronic exposure.
But as for doing this job inside, NO WAY! . Not unless you have access to a fume hood. The LAST thing you want to do is poison yourself with the fumes.
Umm... Isopropyl alcohol is not particularily toxic. The risk of injury from inhaling fumes is almost non-existant. You'd have to be huffing the stuff for a long time.
Isopropyl is about as toxic as ethanol. And we drink that stuff. (MSDS data sheets for isopropyl and ethyl alcohol.)
Note the Occupational Exposure Limit is about a 1 kg/m3 for both. That's a lot.
The fire hazard is of course a real risk.
(Yes, I am a chemist.)
the question is - what will they tell us?
The truth. There is more than one government in the world, and they can't seem to agree on any single thing. How could they keep a secret among themselves?
Besides that, there are plenty of civilian radiation detectors out there. A guy I know who worked at the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden told me that back in 1986, they found out about the Chernobyl accident way before anyone in the Swedish government. (And quite some time before the Soviet authorities admitted anything had happened)
Although they did have a few worried hours trying to figure out where the radiation was coming from, before they realized that it actually had come from outside the plant. The isotope composition told them pretty quickly that it was a reactor failure, and not a bomb. Calculating backwards from the prevailing winds then gave them a pretty good guess of which reactor it was.
latin, which actually has a predictable structure.
WTF are you talking about? Do you actually know any latin?
Because if you did, you'd probably know Latin is quite the other way around. The six cases make sentence word order almost irrelevant, and therefore, nearly any word order can constitute a valid sentence.
How is that a "predictable structure"? Further reading.
Ok.. maybe I'm missing something here.. Are these things sold with a mandatory music-download-service subscription or something like that, in order to subsidize the price of the hardware? Or what?
Because if they make their money off selling the things.. that doesn't make sense. Why should they care what you do with their product once they've sold it? This could leads to them selling more units.
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
Thank the PATRIOT act.
This is another victory in the 'war on terror', obviously.
Naw.. Lego being Danish, the canonical plural must be the Danish. Hence, I present you with: legoklodser.
(And "Lego" is an abbreviation of the danish "LEg GOdt" = "play well")
However, you are missing the point. Of course Avalon isn't the first vector graphics library. It is, however, the first mainstream GUI toolkit to be 100% vector-based.
Which means.. what? "100% vector-based"? What the heck are you talking about?
You're responding to the wrong post, it was the grandfather post who made the weird 'it's SVG so it's 3D' statement..
3D vector graphics is a pretty different area.
However, there is one link.. SVG (and PDF) supports compositing (E.g. semi-tranclucent shapes), and if you're talking about a 2D graphics API which supports everything SVG does, it means that you've got to support compositing.
Most modern graphics cards have the ability to do this in hardware.. so thus, the API backend for on-screen rendering can exploit this for faster rendering.
Apple's Quartz does this via OpenGL, Cairo does so too, and Avalon is going to use DirectX.
90% of anything the average user does daily is RASTER.
I didn't say otherwise.
Most fonts are vector fonts. Not all, but most. Maybe this will change.
About as likely as reverting to punchcards.
I wouldn't say that X11 dosen't have vector graphics
I didn't write that. I write X11 doesn't have device-independent vector graphics. And it certainly doesn't have anything near the capabilities we're talking about here. What do you think Cairo is all about?
Well, Georgian has it's own alphabet. That text was translitterated, i.e. written in the closest match with english pronounciation. So english vowel rules would apply.
(Translitteration is of course language-specific. For instance the writer Chekhov is Tschechow in Germany, Tjechov in Sweden, Tchekhov in France, Czechow in Poland)
In the broad sense, any sound you make by letting air out of your throat without restricting it is a 'vowel sound'.
Now.. which and how many of these sounds are considered valid vowels is language-specific.
For instance, Swedish, one of the languages I'm fluent in, has a,e,i,o,u,y,å,ä,ö, (not accents, they're unique letters) and that x2 because there's a 'hard' and 'soft' version of each.
That's an important note.. the number of letters considered 'vowels' doesn't always indicate the number of vowel sounds used. English vowels change depending on where they're used too. But not Japanese ones, for instance.
If it is so similar, surely it should be trivial to write a quick XSLT script to transform from one to the other?
/. reader of the problems caused by IE:s non-standard HTML rendering?
Without being versed in the exact particulars of the incompatibility, that seems to be exactly what the MS guy was saying: "I believe that there is a trivial transform that could be applied to transform SVG to WVG;"
It can't be that similar, otherwise people wouldn't be complaining as loudly as they are...
I don't think I need to remind a
SVG is part of the avalon concept done through the XAML interface.
Except that Microsoft does not follow the SVG standard. So it's not SVG, it's just similar.
As for 2d rendering, it has always been pixel/bitmap fill based and not vector based.
Again, you are wrong. Although you seem to believe it, SVG isn't the first vector graphics format in existance. Not by a long shot. (PostScript is from 1984) Nor is Avalon the first device-independent 2D-graphics API.
Providing a ref to the SVG spec doesn't make it true.
Ok? Now, I've contributed fixes to Apache Batik, (an SVG library) and I've also written PostScript generators, and most recently I've contributed stuff to the Java2D library for libgcj. (another 2D library which is not 'pixel based')
I do believe I know something of vector graphics.
unlike the current pixel based 2d rendering system of today.
Um... say what?
Ok, to begin with Avalon doesn't support SVG, which is one of the things Miguel was blasting them for.
Secondly.. 2D rendering is not 'pixel based' today.
It's never been 'pixel based'. Windows has had device-independent 2D rendering since.. well, forever. (Windows Metafiles ring a bell?) So has just about everything else (Mac, Atari) too, (X doesn't, but the Unix platform tended to use PostScript for that stuff).
What is new here is the support of more advanced things like compositing (something you couldn't do device-independently before). OS X already has this of course in Quartz.
In most of the (western) world, the damages awarded by courts are pretty down-to-earth.
It's the USA with its runaway legal system which is the sad exception to the rule.
As an american living in europe.. it's nice to see a court system work the way it's supposed to: As a last resort when you can't sort things out between yourselves, and where the damages you receive can only be expected to recover your losses, not make you a profit.
What about SDL?
What about it? It's a great idea.
But. It can't really compete. SDL is "Simple", and doesn't provide the same amount of functionality.
Also, SDL doesn't seem to be going anywhere. The 2.0 version has been 'in the works' for years now..
(I've written a bunch of posts on this.. The lack of good crossplatform graphics API:s, both for 2D and 3D is one of my pet peeves, and IMHO a major barrier to Linux on the desktop.)
LOL.. That's even funnier if one knows something about georgian.
With wonderful phrases like: "gvprc'k'vni" (He's ripping us off!).. no vowels for miles. And they're really prounounced without vowels!!
(Unlike Russian and other slavic languages where vowels sometimes look like they're missing, but just aren't written out. For instance 'v' in russian meaning 'in', which is pronounced like something between 'v' and 'va')
At the risk of getting flamed.. How about reading the GCC mailing list instead?
RMS coding GCC (see The Rebel Code by Gyn Moody) was inspirational... and later on allowed Linus to build his stuff.
While RMS did code gcc in the beginning, I don't feel one should give RMS credit for what it is today.
The GCC that RMS developed was IMHO amateurish. It was primarily the work done by the people at Cygnus (now Red Hat) who turned GCC into the quality real-world compiler it is today.
Not to mention that RMS opposed this. He opposed including C++ support, and then opposed supporting it properly, causing the Cygnus ecgs fork.
(which is now gcc again, since everybody else finally overruled RMS)
As for Linux, RMS spent a good amount of time back then actively discouraging people from contributing to Linux.. talking about the vaporware Hurd would be so much better and how it was all wasted effort.
I'd agree we owe a lot to RMS, but not with respect to GCC and Linux. The positive contributions he's made with respect to those two have been cancelled out by his counter-productive dogmatism.
(Even today, it continues. Many, if not most, GCC developers currently want to re-write parts of the front-end in C++. There are good technical arguments for this, and it's been shown that some code can be simplified greatly that way.
While most of the GCC steering committe recently said, "OK, well if you can show there are benifits, we're open to the idea". Except RMS who was STRONGLY against the idea. Not for any ideological reason, but simply because RMS doesn't like C++.
That is simply just terrible leadership.
Is it really the same for NES, and do you know from experience?
No. I don't have a direct experience. But every single thing I've ever read on this says that the NES and SNES connectors are identical, just differently shaped.
Ironically, I'm looking into all of this right now. My ideal goal would be to hook 2 SNES controllers (#1 and #2) and 2 NES controllers (#3 and #4) into a single parallel port. That way, it would be almost completely authentic: load up ZSNES and use controllers 1 and 2 (SNES) for input, or load up FCE Ultra and use controllers 3 and 4 (NES) for input.
That's quite doable, in my experience. You probably won't be able to have all four switched in at the same time though, because you'll drain too much power off the port. (same thing goes for very long cables. But you can work around that by using a different power source though)
As I said, what I would recommend is the "B" design on the latter link I gave, the one using 6 diodes, and a transistor. And if it doesn't work, try changing or removing the resistor. That's exactly what I did.
Have you ever built / used an actual NES connector without a problem?
Yes, I have built two connectors, both for two ordinary NES pads. They work just fine with every machine I've tested them on, which is admittedly only 4-5 different ones.
The design I used was basically the same as I told you, except modified for two pads (which is probably why I had to remove the resistor), so in total I used 6 diodes, and two transistors.
There are simpler ways.. like this parallel port interface (page is SNES, but the same design works for NES controllers too)
I've personally built several of these interfaces, and they work just fine, with one caveat: depending on your parallel port you might want to put a transistor in there, like in this design. I haven't had any problems with the latter design with any parallel port type, although you might need to change resistor. (or just skip it altogether)
(Yes, there are drivers for Linux, Win95/98/Me and 2000/XP)
Well.. I think it's kind of a general thing for all good Science too.
Einstein's original paper on Special relativity was named "On the electrodymanics of moving bodies".. It was not named "Revolutionary new discovery by me, Albert Einstein which will revolutionize the world of physics".
I guess there are several reasons for this.. one is simply manners. Boasting is unpolite. Scientific papers rarely have exciting titles, even when the results are exciting.
The second is of course, that a good scientist realizes the if a result may be revolutionary. A good scientist also always leaves room for doubt.
So the natural behaviour would of course to be careful and discreet, and not go confidently telling the world of your revolution until it has been verified. Otherwise, you'll end up with a lot of egg on your face.
Conversely, most scientists are highly sceptical of 'revolutionary' results which are announced in the press before being published. In fact, most pseudoscientists are very good at publicizing themselves and their 'revolutions', probably because they are totally convinced of their own theories, and are lacking the 'self-doubt' bit.
The only people who would be affected is OpenGL elitists
No, the only people who would be affected would be everyone who wants to play Doom 3 on their video card. That's a significant number of people.
Remember that Microsoft created PC gaming as we know it.
What the heck are you smoking? Microsoft was a pioneer in writing flight sims. But that's about it. You must be too young to remember what PC gaming was like before Microsoft ruled the universe.
There is nothing wrong with DirectX, except that such a brilliant idea came out of Microsoft.
There are plenty of things wrong with DirectX. One is that it is a proprietary standard created by MS to stop OpenGL. And unexpectedly, DirectX is locked-in to the Windows platform, unlike OpenGL.
It is not a 'brilliant idea' by any stretch of the imagination. It's was a mind-numbingly obvious idea. When DirectX was developed, essentially all PC apps had moved off DOS to Windows, except games. Obviously, Microsoft needed to get game developers to start using Windows. DirectX was an obvious solution. But they could, had they been less 'evil', just as well integrated OpenGL support into Windows instead.
Which I suspect is the real reason that certain people are as pro-OpenGL as they are. It's just more anti-Microsoft sentiment.
No, it's because OpenGL is a non-proprietary, cross-platform standard. DirectX is a proprietary API locked to the Windows platform.
That said, I'll concede that DirectX is better than OpenGL. It must be better than OpenGL to ensure its survival, because no developer wants to lock himself to a single vendor and platform if there is an equally good option.
Assuming that a Slashdot 'debate' actually is one.
I'm not making any apologies, because I have bnot and would not claim that X is better.
I think the X support has been lacking, and does just about everyone with any kind of insight into these matters. The fact that the development in this area exploded as soon as X.org forked only underlines that.
I think the Quartz API is far ahead of anything Linux or Windows has to offer in that area.
(There is a reason for this too.. Apple wants to keep their grasp on the advertising/publishing market. Good device-independent graphics is a must.)
Quit pointing fingers and start innovating.
Excuse me, but who the f*** are you to give orders?
Do you think that just because you managed to install Linux that you somehow have a right to tell me, and thousands of other OSS developers what they should choose to spend their time on?
It's OPEN-SOURCE software we're talking about here. If you're not happy. Take that energy you spend bitching and go do something constructive instead.