One thing to note about VMWare is that it could care less about the Windows API, it is just providing an x86 box on top of x86, passing native calls when possible, so it can happen to run windows.
Wine is in no way analogous to vmware except in how end-users tend to use it. VMWare can't be used, for example, to port a windows app to native code (ala winelib).
A comparable project to vmware is plex86 (www.plex86.org). Though it lacks the spit and polish of VMWare, they have had less time to develop and have made great progress in their relatively short life.
Interesting point, but you neglect to recognize the fact that Office is written by MS. Most every non-MS written app that can run in Win95 I've been able to get to work in wine with not much of a headache. DirectX is a little shaky still, but aside from that...
The thing about MS applications is that they have full access to the APIs, even features that may not have been documented for some reason or another. It is hard for a project like wine to create a environment when there might be API calls to functions that aren't documented outside of MS. All this said, I have never tried Office 2000 under wine, (don't have it) but Office 97 seems to work under wine...
I would say wine is an exceptionally successful project considering the scope of the problem they have decided to address.
The key I see here is that he pawned them off without deleting his copies, and that might not be good...
Now if he had said he was a pirate because he has ripped all his CDs to mp3 without indicating he sold the CDs or distributed the music, then we would see a sad artifact of the RIAA fud about customer rights...
Also, the P2P file sharing mention indicates sharing, and I seriously wonder if his divx content is from the net or from DVD...
Of course, not saying this is as bad as bootleggers, but still could be considered piracy legitimately...
How long was VHS around before DVD started to make inroads? That amount of time is what consumers expect and like to see tech like this last.
As an aside, you can bet your ass that any future standard will be even more of a pain in the ass to linux and such than before.
All this aside, I personally like anamorphic widescreen. Sure, you can't get 4:3 pan and scan, but if you have a 16:9 TV, you get the best of both worlds. IIRC 16:9 aspect ratio is part of the HDTV spec, and since HDTV is mandated in U.S. by 2006, then anamorphic widescreen will play great on all TVs. So from this view, DVDs are not so much showing their age, but showing that TVs aren't up to what DVDs want yet (16:9 ratio)
Additionally, gaim supports that stuff too if you know how to ask it:) So if everybuddy doesn't work well, gaim is worth a shot. At the very least it handles AIM (including 'buddy icons' and such) extremely well.
I don't know, could you point to another company that does this, checking up to make sure they aren't buying other products and then penalize for it? That is not simply good practice, it is as blatant of an example of anti-competitive you can get. This is leveraging your current dominant market share to raise barrier for entry to everyone else... Pretty much textbook anti-competitive..
Your comment seems to make the assumption that the money remains in the country, but it doesn't. A portion of the money spent on foreign goods (which are cheaper), and that is money leaving the country, so it's not a perfect cycling, like, say the human cardiovascular system, it is like a person walking around bleeding a bit faster than they are getting a transfusion.
It does hurt the average american industrial worker, because jobs are disappearing in america and not as many are being generated.
All this being said, this is a selfish, US-centric view. In the end, the pay that would go to one US factory worker ends up making more Taiwanese people more content than that one US worker would be, and so your last point is well put. I view things as it would be foolish to say all this outsourcing is replaced by new, higher paying jobs, it just doesn't work that simply. A closer approximation is that as the flow of money and goods becomes more free, the working classes of different nations become more equivalent...
There is a *huge* problem with your last statement. You say Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies, but let's look at this realistically for a second.
Not everyone can start their own company nor can everyone get a skilled job, there are just too many people. Whatever segment of the economy where you could move that huge mass of people, that segment will either reduce in pay to the point of minimum wage, or whatever salary is handed out becomes equivalent to minimum wage. There simply isn't enough out there to go everywhere.
The US has acheived it's relatively high standard of living because the US has historically controlled a substantial amount of the world's resources, and has kept the money inside, while other nations have more people than resources to go around. The easier it is to move jobs out, the more companies can exploit the larger labor force oversees, and slowly equalize the resources between the foreign nation and the US. If the foreign nation had the same amounte of resources per person as the US, the foreign nation would not be nearly as appealing. Of course, even if Mexico or China has the same resources as the US, they are so overpopulated that they will still be an appealing labor market.
Kicking workers out of manufacturing, and even giving them enough education will not guarantee a better job, it just means the better jobs will get worse and harder to find.
Really, in my experience I only see problems if I try to tape off the DVD. My understanding is that MacroVision consists in spikes in the signal that occur outside of our ability to see. When a recording VCR sees the signal spike, it decreases the recording level to compensate for the apparently strong signal, reducing the useful information signal strength to an insignificant amount. I was under the impression that VCRs only did this when trying to write the signal to tape, but I guess some may do it all the time to inputs. In any case there are special devices (even at bestbuy) that claim to be signal enhancers that simply filter out macrovision spikes, it may be the ticket to get things to work better.
You would probably be singing an entirely different tune if you actually *worked* in manufacturing, but that is a whole other story.
I can't follow your logic. You are saying eliminating semi-skilled jobs is good because it makes them do more skilled work? Without semi-skilled jobs available, the only thing it means is that more education (more expensive education) is required to be competitive. The loss of Manufacturing does not create any jobs, in fact, service jobs related to manufacturing go away. So, with no increase in a job market, and assuming the semi-skilled workers got the training to enter the skilled market, then you have such a huge labor market that pay in the skilled sector go down.
The low pay of semi-skilled labor is *not* because it is semi-skilled, it is because of the number of people available for that work. If the same number people were "skilled" salaries would plummet.
Hey, that is reminiscent of my Aunt and Uncle going to buy a computer. I'm over there and they bring home everything they bought. They wanted something that could be used for basic word processing and stuff. They come home with a top of the line system, as well as a CD-RW and Uninterruptible power Supply. They said they didn't think they needed this much, but said the salesman first insisted anything but top of the line was a waste of time, even if they just want word processing, and that a UPS and CDRW were absolutely necessary for the computer to function properly...
Of course, this from the same class of salespeople who said "if you hook a DVD player into a VCR, the VCR will probably fry, so you best avoid going through the VCR, or else you mught void the warranty and have to get a new VCR..." The floor salespeople at most retail outlets are so unbeleivably incompetent..
Have you ever configured IPSEC connections, particularly accross platforms? The most cross platform methods are x509 certificates and preshared keys. Neither method is viable to distribute among everyone. Sure, with x509, you can in theory have common CAs sign your keys and use that with x509, but that costs money. You could preshareyour own CA certificate and sign it yourself, but then you need the same amount of connection set up for every site you connect to you had before.
More likely solutio is to configure your own proxy beyond the ISPs contorl. Also not easy, since most people don't have machines in that position, but your suggestion is strange enough by itself.
IPSEC wasn't ever meant to be used for oppurtunistic encryption applications (like https, ssh, etc), but to establish connections on a more long term basis that would be used for arbitrary protocols, not such common ones.
But with X you get tied to a similar problem, the application's well being inevitably gets tied up withg the client's. If the X server on the "client" dies, the X connection is closed, and the application using that connection will exit/close/whatever as a result. It's like sshing in and starting an ftp, then the client dies, the ftp client may die a horrible screaming death by not being able to access the controlling terminal. Even if it goes on fine, you have no way of ever seeing the output to know for sure. The solution for ssh stuff is to run screen, to abstract the interface from the current device of access. In much the same way, you can use something like VNC to provide the same abstraction for graphical apps.
Two things with this, one, you can't access to Win from X (though X from Win is possible).
Another disadvantage when compared with VNC, if the client dies and you are running a remote App using X, the X connection dies and then the underlying application dies with it. With VNC, the server is agnostic about client crashes. Plus, when you need to move, you can detach the VNC session and pick it up elsewhere (like screen for X:).
Are you still in control of the system hosting the remote desktop? Is there truly an expected higher reliability factor involved with that server? You need to carefully consider this question, as it may be the case that you are only buying yourself an imagined higher level of reliability.
If you can justify your assumption, then it depends on platform.
Under Unix systems, two very good tools come into play. screen provides very good abstraction for text based applications from controlling ptys. Now for X stuff, you are pretty much stuck with something like VNC. VNC is kinda bandwidth heavy, but tightVNC (wwww.tightvnc.com) really helps with low bandwidth. VNC is a recommendation *only* if you need guaranteed persistence of apps, even if the client machine crashes or you need to relocate and cannot afford to close the App. If you just need to pull up the apps as you need them, native X11 can be used pretty much from any client. From Windows you can use either Exceed or WeirdX (free), and you have remote access, but if your client machines goes haywire, so does your app. In this way, vnc could be considered analogous to X11 in the way screen in analogous to ssh or telnet, they both prevent client problems from destroying control or output of an application.
Now under Windows, Terminal Services can be used to fill this role. Your client disconnects and you can resume with another right where the screen left off. You might be able to get Citrix to do that as well, but my experience with Citrix has been more about providing X11-type functionality as opposed to VNC type reliability. VNC also works with Windows, but Terminal Services is a much more lightweight beast.
All this said, I personally use VNC on a Unix system for long term graphical applications. That way if I need to reboot my desktop for some reason, the VNC sessions and the various screen controlled terminals will be available for pickup at my next convenience.
I was just making blanket statements about visual percetption and how many frames can be dropped without being noticed. It's anecdotal, but I have seen some clips that can drop up to 40% of frames without much noticed (very low motion video). But if there is only enough of a glitch to interrupt a frame or two of video, then it will be smoothed over by the sensory system without it ever being missed, while with audio, any interruption will result in a waveform that has an undefined derivitave, a crack in the audio. Under very heavy loads, you'll drop more than 1-2 frames per second, you'll have probably up to 40-60% frame drop, and for almost any content that would indeed be noticable.
In any event, low latency is good, and my entire point is irrelevant except as a nitpick.
Well, there is plenty of hypocrisy here. So what if they play the free demo and tell everyone how great it is? Well this gives Blizzard much more than the price of a copy of the game, they get really good, free publicity, and the word of Slashdot editors endorsing the product may not give them profit immediately, but at release time it may very well influence quite a few buyers to buy the product. While I personally feel that duality about comments is fine, there are plenty of readers with different views, but for the stories themselves to have the dicotomy of "Blizzard is evil, but they are soooo cool" is certainly hypocritical...
Obviously, if an opponent rushing you easily defeats you, then your strategy is flawed. This complaint is just like saying Chess doesn't allow for strategy, because an opponent can always rush with a bishop and a queen and you lose in 4 turns.If rushing is a better strategy than what you use, improve your strategy. I think your complaint is that you can't sit around as long as you like builiding up cool stuf without setting up a proper defense. When you have a small group of friends it is cool to build yourselves up until you have massively advanced units beating the crap out of each other, it may be fun and time consuming, but don't mistake this for strategy.
I was meaning to say that of course nVidia isn't an issue for me, because I'm not even running nVidia hardware. Anyway, I still ike the system, but still think the XFree provided drivers are far from perfect in the "stable" release. The core maybe very good, but they still have a number of issues to work out. I remember every release from 4.0 to 4.1.0 that was considered "stable" I could write an application to crash any tdfx X server, by trying to open up a UYUV or YUY2 colorspace.... This kind of bug was resolved many many many months before they release 4.2.0. They really need to make more frequenct bugfix releases..
What you say about desktop responsiveness being more of an issue for these patches than server applications is accurate. And I agree that mouse and audio responsiveness is very noticable to user (if audio skips, very loud popping is usually heard). However, with video there is a little more wiggle room if the decoder handles things gracefully. Even if interrupted for 2/30s to even a tenth of a second as an isolated incident, you can probably get away with it. Certainly 1/30th of a second will almost certainly not be noticed (single frame drop), 2/30ths (2 frames) probably will slip under the radar. 3 frames dropped and then you start getting into a perceptible skip if there is a decent amount of movement in the scene. Of course, 1/30th of a second is much higher than most all latencies you see even under the unpatched kernel.
I personally haven't been able to tell between the pre-empt kernel and traditional, they both give the same 'feel' on the desktop level.
Interesting what you say about USB mice, in my experience a USB mice provides smoother use than PS/2. I don't have PS/2 at all in my kernel anymore. With my Logitech MouseMan+, it came as USB with a PS/2 converter. I had to use it because I played with BeOS and BeOS didn't like it unless it was on the PS/2 port. In any case, when using a USB port instead of PS/2, the mouse can be polled much more frequently, allowing for more precise movement (particularly of interest in, say, first person shooters). Plus, the ability to plug and unplug, and plug my mouse into any USB port I feel like is nice.
I am lying huh? Try it yourself, kill -9 the X server. It will *not* grock the display, unless your video card is *really* whack. I had a friend who had that issue.
Of course nVidia doesn't work well for me, and my voodoo3 is immediately good to go after I kill off the funked up X server. Face it, XFree 4.2.0 isn't the perfect display system you believe it is, it can have bugs, just like anything else. It is attitudes like yours that are very dangerous for people to have, believing your favorite open source programs are bullet proof and would believe a user is lying before you would believe a bug exists in a program is just ludicrous..
Re:Falcon's Eye
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What, graphics with netHack? Blashpemer! We get our ASCII and we like it that way. May an @ devour you for even suggesting anything but ASCII:)
Re:I've never played this game..
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Well, for one, the graphics of netHack have always been *so* much more advanced than Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I mean, just take one glance at the detail of a nethack shot and you'll fall in love. Avoid those things like Falcon's Eye, or X11 enhanced interfaces, the original ASCII is truly beautiful..
Plus, there are cute animals in nethack, can't beat that.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing to note about VMWare is that it could care less about the Windows API, it is just providing an x86 box on top of x86, passing native calls when possible, so it can happen to run windows.
Wine is in no way analogous to vmware except in how end-users tend to use it. VMWare can't be used, for example, to port a windows app to native code (ala winelib).
A comparable project to vmware is plex86 (www.plex86.org). Though it lacks the spit and polish of VMWare, they have had less time to develop and have made great progress in their relatively short life.
Interesting point, but you neglect to recognize the fact that Office is written by MS. Most every non-MS written app that can run in Win95 I've been able to get to work in wine with not much of a headache. DirectX is a little shaky still, but aside from that...
The thing about MS applications is that they have full access to the APIs, even features that may not have been documented for some reason or another. It is hard for a project like wine to create a environment when there might be API calls to functions that aren't documented outside of MS. All this said, I have never tried Office 2000 under wine, (don't have it) but Office 97 seems to work under wine...
I would say wine is an exceptionally successful project considering the scope of the problem they have decided to address.
The key I see here is that he pawned them off without deleting his copies, and that might not be good...
Now if he had said he was a pirate because he has ripped all his CDs to mp3 without indicating he sold the CDs or distributed the music, then we would see a sad artifact of the RIAA fud about customer rights...
Also, the P2P file sharing mention indicates sharing, and I seriously wonder if his divx content is from the net or from DVD...
Of course, not saying this is as bad as bootleggers, but still could be considered piracy legitimately...
How long was VHS around before DVD started to make inroads? That amount of time is what consumers expect and like to see tech like this last.
As an aside, you can bet your ass that any future standard will be even more of a pain in the ass to linux and such than before.
All this aside, I personally like anamorphic widescreen. Sure, you can't get 4:3 pan and scan, but if you have a 16:9 TV, you get the best of both worlds. IIRC 16:9 aspect ratio is part of the HDTV spec, and since HDTV is mandated in U.S. by 2006, then anamorphic widescreen will play great on all TVs. So from this view, DVDs are not so much showing their age, but showing that TVs aren't up to what DVDs want yet (16:9 ratio)
Additionally, gaim supports that stuff too if you know how to ask it :) So if everybuddy doesn't work well, gaim is worth a shot. At the very least it handles AIM (including 'buddy icons' and such) extremely well.
I don't know, could you point to another company that does this, checking up to make sure they aren't buying other products and then penalize for it? That is not simply good practice, it is as blatant of an example of anti-competitive you can get. This is leveraging your current dominant market share to raise barrier for entry to everyone else... Pretty much textbook anti-competitive..
Your comment seems to make the assumption that the money remains in the country, but it doesn't. A portion of the money spent on foreign goods (which are cheaper), and that is money leaving the country, so it's not a perfect cycling, like, say the human cardiovascular system, it is like a person walking around bleeding a bit faster than they are getting a transfusion.
It does hurt the average american industrial worker, because jobs are disappearing in america and not as many are being generated.
All this being said, this is a selfish, US-centric view. In the end, the pay that would go to one US factory worker ends up making more Taiwanese people more content than that one US worker would be, and so your last point is well put. I view things as it would be foolish to say all this outsourcing is replaced by new, higher paying jobs, it just doesn't work that simply. A closer approximation is that as the flow of money and goods becomes more free, the working classes of different nations become more equivalent...
There is a *huge* problem with your last statement. You say Americans on minimum wage slotting PCBs together, or Americans buying cheap laptops and starting their own companies, but let's look at this realistically for a second.
Not everyone can start their own company nor can everyone get a skilled job, there are just too many people. Whatever segment of the economy where you could move that huge mass of people, that segment will either reduce in pay to the point of minimum wage, or whatever salary is handed out becomes equivalent to minimum wage. There simply isn't enough out there to go everywhere.
The US has acheived it's relatively high standard of living because the US has historically controlled a substantial amount of the world's resources, and has kept the money inside, while other nations have more people than resources to go around. The easier it is to move jobs out, the more companies can exploit the larger labor force oversees, and slowly equalize the resources between the foreign nation and the US. If the foreign nation had the same amounte of resources per person as the US, the foreign nation would not be nearly as appealing. Of course, even if Mexico or China has the same resources as the US, they are so overpopulated that they will still be an appealing labor market.
Kicking workers out of manufacturing, and even giving them enough education will not guarantee a better job, it just means the better jobs will get worse and harder to find.
Really, in my experience I only see problems if I try to tape off the DVD. My understanding is that MacroVision consists in spikes in the signal that occur outside of our ability to see. When a recording VCR sees the signal spike, it decreases the recording level to compensate for the apparently strong signal, reducing the useful information signal strength to an insignificant amount. I was under the impression that VCRs only did this when trying to write the signal to tape, but I guess some may do it all the time to inputs. In any case there are special devices (even at bestbuy) that claim to be signal enhancers that simply filter out macrovision spikes, it may be the ticket to get things to work better.
I personally think their stuff looks bad. Though cheaper material, the badges here are at least much more colorful.
You would probably be singing an entirely different tune if you actually *worked* in manufacturing, but that is a whole other story.
I can't follow your logic. You are saying eliminating semi-skilled jobs is good because it makes them do more skilled work? Without semi-skilled jobs available, the only thing it means is that more education (more expensive education) is required to be competitive. The loss of Manufacturing does not create any jobs, in fact, service jobs related to manufacturing go away. So, with no increase in a job market, and assuming the semi-skilled workers got the training to enter the skilled market, then you have such a huge labor market that pay in the skilled sector go down.
The low pay of semi-skilled labor is *not* because it is semi-skilled, it is because of the number of people available for that work. If the same number people were "skilled" salaries would plummet.
Hey, that is reminiscent of my Aunt and Uncle going to buy a computer. I'm over there and they bring home everything they bought. They wanted something that could be used for basic word processing and stuff. They come home with a top of the line system, as well as a CD-RW and Uninterruptible power Supply. They said they didn't think they needed this much, but said the salesman first insisted anything but top of the line was a waste of time, even if they just want word processing, and that a UPS and CDRW were absolutely necessary for the computer to function properly...
Of course, this from the same class of salespeople who said "if you hook a DVD player into a VCR, the VCR will probably fry, so you best avoid going through the VCR, or else you mught void the warranty and have to get a new VCR..." The floor salespeople at most retail outlets are so unbeleivably incompetent..
Have you ever configured IPSEC connections, particularly accross platforms? The most cross platform methods are x509 certificates and preshared keys. Neither method is viable to distribute among everyone. Sure, with x509, you can in theory have common CAs sign your keys and use that with x509, but that costs money. You could preshareyour own CA certificate and sign it yourself, but then you need the same amount of connection set up for every site you connect to you had before.
More likely solutio is to configure your own proxy beyond the ISPs contorl. Also not easy, since most people don't have machines in that position, but your suggestion is strange enough by itself.
IPSEC wasn't ever meant to be used for oppurtunistic encryption applications (like https, ssh, etc), but to establish connections on a more long term basis that would be used for arbitrary protocols, not such common ones.
But with X you get tied to a similar problem, the application's well being inevitably gets tied up withg the client's. If the X server on the "client" dies, the X connection is closed, and the application using that connection will exit/close/whatever as a result. It's like sshing in and starting an ftp, then the client dies, the ftp client may die a horrible screaming death by not being able to access the controlling terminal. Even if it goes on fine, you have no way of ever seeing the output to know for sure. The solution for ssh stuff is to run screen, to abstract the interface from the current device of access. In much the same way, you can use something like VNC to provide the same abstraction for graphical apps.
Two things with this, one, you can't access to Win from X (though X from Win is possible).
:).
Another disadvantage when compared with VNC, if the client dies and you are running a remote App using X, the X connection dies and then the underlying application dies with it. With VNC, the server is agnostic about client crashes. Plus, when you need to move, you can detach the VNC session and pick it up elsewhere (like screen for X
Are you still in control of the system hosting the remote desktop? Is there truly an expected higher reliability factor involved with that server? You need to carefully consider this question, as it may be the case that you are only buying yourself an imagined higher level of reliability.
If you can justify your assumption, then it depends on platform.
Under Unix systems, two very good tools come into play. screen provides very good abstraction for text based applications from controlling ptys. Now for X stuff, you are pretty much stuck with something like VNC. VNC is kinda bandwidth heavy, but tightVNC (wwww.tightvnc.com) really helps with low bandwidth. VNC is a recommendation *only* if you need guaranteed persistence of apps, even if the client machine crashes or you need to relocate and cannot afford to close the App. If you just need to pull up the apps as you need them, native X11 can be used pretty much from any client. From Windows you can use either Exceed or WeirdX (free), and you have remote access, but if your client machines goes haywire, so does your app. In this way, vnc could be considered analogous to X11 in the way screen in analogous to ssh or telnet, they both prevent client problems from destroying control or output of an application.
Now under Windows, Terminal Services can be used to fill this role. Your client disconnects and you can resume with another right where the screen left off. You might be able to get Citrix to do that as well, but my experience with Citrix has been more about providing X11-type functionality as opposed to VNC type reliability. VNC also works with Windows, but Terminal Services is a much more lightweight beast.
All this said, I personally use VNC on a Unix system for long term graphical applications. That way if I need to reboot my desktop for some reason, the VNC sessions and the various screen controlled terminals will be available for pickup at my next convenience.
I was just making blanket statements about visual percetption and how many frames can be dropped without being noticed. It's anecdotal, but I have seen some clips that can drop up to 40% of frames without much noticed (very low motion video). But if there is only enough of a glitch to interrupt a frame or two of video, then it will be smoothed over by the sensory system without it ever being missed, while with audio, any interruption will result in a waveform that has an undefined derivitave, a crack in the audio. Under very heavy loads, you'll drop more than 1-2 frames per second, you'll have probably up to 40-60% frame drop, and for almost any content that would indeed be noticable.
In any event, low latency is good, and my entire point is irrelevant except as a nitpick.
Well, there is plenty of hypocrisy here. So what if they play the free demo and tell everyone how great it is? Well this gives Blizzard much more than the price of a copy of the game, they get really good, free publicity, and the word of Slashdot editors endorsing the product may not give them profit immediately, but at release time it may very well influence quite a few buyers to buy the product. While I personally feel that duality about comments is fine, there are plenty of readers with different views, but for the stories themselves to have the dicotomy of "Blizzard is evil, but they are soooo cool" is certainly hypocritical...
Obviously, if an opponent rushing you easily defeats you, then your strategy is flawed. This complaint is just like saying Chess doesn't allow for strategy, because an opponent can always rush with a bishop and a queen and you lose in 4 turns.If rushing is a better strategy than what you use, improve your strategy. I think your complaint is that you can't sit around as long as you like builiding up cool stuf without setting up a proper defense. When you have a small group of friends it is cool to build yourselves up until you have massively advanced units beating the crap out of each other, it may be fun and time consuming, but don't mistake this for strategy.
I was meaning to say that of course nVidia isn't an issue for me, because I'm not even running nVidia hardware. Anyway, I still ike the system, but still think the XFree provided drivers are far from perfect in the "stable" release. The core maybe very good, but they still have a number of issues to work out. I remember every release from 4.0 to 4.1.0 that was considered "stable" I could write an application to crash any tdfx X server, by trying to open up a UYUV or YUY2 colorspace.... This kind of bug was resolved many many many months before they release 4.2.0. They really need to make more frequenct bugfix releases..
What you say about desktop responsiveness being more of an issue for these patches than server applications is accurate. And I agree that mouse and audio responsiveness is very noticable to user (if audio skips, very loud popping is usually heard). However, with video there is a little more wiggle room if the decoder handles things gracefully. Even if interrupted for 2/30s to even a tenth of a second as an isolated incident, you can probably get away with it. Certainly 1/30th of a second will almost certainly not be noticed (single frame drop), 2/30ths (2 frames) probably will slip under the radar. 3 frames dropped and then you start getting into a perceptible skip if there is a decent amount of movement in the scene. Of course, 1/30th of a second is much higher than most all latencies you see even under the unpatched kernel.
I personally haven't been able to tell between the pre-empt kernel and traditional, they both give the same 'feel' on the desktop level.
Interesting what you say about USB mice, in my experience a USB mice provides smoother use than PS/2. I don't have PS/2 at all in my kernel anymore. With my Logitech MouseMan+, it came as USB with a PS/2 converter. I had to use it because I played with BeOS and BeOS didn't like it unless it was on the PS/2 port. In any case, when using a USB port instead of PS/2, the mouse can be polled much more frequently, allowing for more precise movement (particularly of interest in, say, first person shooters). Plus, the ability to plug and unplug, and plug my mouse into any USB port I feel like is nice.
I am lying huh? Try it yourself, kill -9 the X server. It will *not* grock the display, unless your video card is *really* whack. I had a friend who had that issue.
Of course nVidia doesn't work well for me, and my voodoo3 is immediately good to go after I kill off the funked up X server. Face it, XFree 4.2.0 isn't the perfect display system you believe it is, it can have bugs, just like anything else. It is attitudes like yours that are very dangerous for people to have, believing your favorite open source programs are bullet proof and would believe a user is lying before you would believe a bug exists in a program is just ludicrous..
What, graphics with netHack? Blashpemer! We get our ASCII and we like it that way. May an @ devour you for even suggesting anything but ASCII :)
Well, for one, the graphics of netHack have always been *so* much more advanced than Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I mean, just take one glance at the detail of a nethack shot and you'll fall in love. Avoid those things like Falcon's Eye, or X11 enhanced interfaces, the original ASCII is truly beautiful..
Plus, there are cute animals in nethack, can't beat that.