Re:Won't really help Windows as a server
on
Apache 2.0 vs. IIS
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· Score: 2
Easy, from experience, making the best out of decisions handed down by idiot management. Despite administrative complaints, sometimes the business people make the decisions and thus we are stuck with MS platform because the business people are allowed to make decisions that reallly shouldn't matter. So Apache on Windows is the best way to cope..
I would probably never use this thing as a desktop class system, just not enough expansion. This is clear to most everyone here, and the source of many complaints. But it was intnded more for stuff like a TV-PC.
I think it would be very convenient to have something that small to put in an entertainment system. In this case, the PCI card would likely be used either for a better sound solution to provide Home Theater class playback, or else some sort of Capture card to provide TiVo like functionality.
Another application for a lot of people here would be a small router/internet server. You acheive a form factor and noise level close to the "cable/dsl router/switches", but with the flexibility of a PC class system. This might be appealing to replace my aging P-60 which is a bit too slow and high-profile.
Easy, the sniper rifle replacement is meant to make the weapons more even. Making the old one available would mean there is no reason to use the new weapon, defeating the whole point...
Actually, if AMD weren't around, I'd bet the P4 would not have such crappy performance and higher clock speeds.. One of the major factors in the P4 design was that the Athlon core was able to scale to 1.2 GHz and beyond, while the PIII core started to choke at 1.13 GHz, so to compete with AMD, they lengthened the pipeline and did other not-good stuff to try to pass AMD..
Actually, the P-60 runs at 60 MHz bus, no clock multiplier, or at least it does in m system, which is still running. It was the P-90 and P-75 models that used a multiplier, IIRc.
This is only partially correct. True, the P4 architecture has poor performance per clock, enabling AMD offerings clocked at 1.67 GHz to be quite competitive with 2.2 GHz P4 offerings.
As far for the conservative model numbers, AMD wanted to play it safe and avoid heavy criticism by claiming more than they could back up completely. Better to underestimate yourself than overestimate, as reviewers tend to be much more friendly to companies that do this.
This does not, however, apply to the Duron vs. Celeron scenario. The Celeron is based on the PIII core, a core that acheives much more competitive performance per clock, but will not scale to the higher clock. The P4 architecture move intentionally sacrificed performance per clock to allow higher, thus more marketable, clock speeds. That is not to say I would go with Celeron, Durons are typically cheaper, but the XP vs. P4 discrepencies are not the same thing as Duron vs. Celeron.
This case and appropriate components (flatpanel monitor) could work well for this, so long as you have a nice PCI, USB, or firewire device for your audio. Of course, I don't know if having everything so cramped increases interference in the audio components, but if you are really in need of this quality you probably want a set up that keeps things digital until the signal is well away from the computer itself.
You mention the Game Gear as an example of something that was more advanced than the Gameboy, and it very much failed, as did the Atari Lynx, Nomad, NeoGeo Pocket, and many other handheld systems, against the horrendously outdated Gameboy and Gameboy Color. Nintendo's tech may be behind the times, but in terms of games/battery life, they know what they are doing, and can easily push the units even if the units themselves are mostly pieces of crap. Judging by the X-Box standards of production, I doubt any handheld produced by MS will be efficient in terms of size nor power consumption. Though any offering they make may be mostly tecnologically superior, in all the ways that matter it will probably fall short.
I'm sorry, but I don't see the charm of Final Fantasy translating well to online play. I've always felt the primary plus to Final Fantasy was that it was not as much of a game, but exploring a story, discovering more and more until you reach a definitive end in which everything comes together, after 40-50 hours of gameplay, played as quickly or as slowly as you want. I really don't see how this sort of experience can translate to an online format.
Aside from that, FFX was a big let down to me. Truly, the graphics are fantastic, and the story is quite good, but in trying to make the world more "realistic", they took a lot of the fun out of it. World map navigation as it was in all previous Final Fantasies was fantastic, and now it is completely gone. The closest you ever come is getting to move a cursor with coordinates around a map to search for destinations, hardly the simple fun of the old-school world map. And before that, there is no free movement, if you want to go back to the beginning half-way through, it is impossible. I wish they didn't deny free movement of the world, makes it somehow less engrossing.
And all this propaganda making it sound like Square is being a pioneer is plain bs. As many others have pointed out, Phantasy Star Online is at least one example of it being done before...
ROX is a fantastically great, small, and fast filemanager, http://rox.sourceforge.net/
Very cool, has most of the features I liked of Nautilus/Konqueror, but makes my AMDK6-2 400 work *so* much faster..... Give it a try, really great project.
Aside from Sorenson Quicktime, I have found Linux Multimedia apps quite well-behaved, often better behaved than Windows Media player. One huge thing about the linux versions I use is that they tend to work better at displaying movies acceptably on an underpowered machine, much more intelligent with things like frame dropping and maintaining sync. It seems that Windows developers are becoming less and less concerned with the older hardware, and that is disappointing. It will be quite a while longer before I will be able to afford an upgrade, but linux apps makes my 400 MHz display even high-quality movies acceptably. I may drop a lot of frames, but at least it maintains decent framerates and maintains sync...
Of course, Sorenson is *licensed* by Apple, but not owned by...
And Wine CVS with the Quicktime player (basically what crossover is....) is a valid, free option.. I have verified it to work (though the UI is a bit quirky on redraw, the movie displays fine)... Of course it won't embed in a browser, but works fine stand alone...
It would be news if it supported Sorenson at all. We already have a number of applications to chose from that will play non-Sorenson quicktime back, xanim being the first that I ever knew of. Quicktime for Linux project has all sorts of stuff that is non-Sorenson. Sorenson playback has always been the gotcha that matters.
The only thing I can see is if they can use the Windows binary code to decode the Sorenson without the huge performance hit of running the entire player within a Wine context, and having the added benefit of XVideo availability for Sorenson playback. But it doesn't look like this will be the case.
More noteworthy is the VIVO support and xanim support, the VIVO support is a first (AFAIK) under linux natively, and the xanim support really helps bridge the gap between new and old-school media playback, xanim gets a lot of those files that have been overlooked in the "new wave" of media players for linux...
Also, another nit-pick, the crossover plugin, as such is not so much a player, but a nicely done wine modification within which the Windows Quicktime player runs... You can use the latest Wine CVS repository in much the same way (outside a browser at least).
I would dare say that Luna, if anything is *more* patronizing, that is the whole point. In any event, the My Computer, My Documents, can easily be renamed, if that is such a huge deal...
I dunno, "Butz" and "Tidus" can work into similar jokes if you think about it... OF course, you can bet the goatse.cx guy's name wouldn't be "Tidus" considering.. ick...
I knew that, I was refering to the second sort of shimmering phenomenon. I know I've heard a technical term for it, but it escapes me (pixels on textures slip between renderable pixels and back in, making small details of the texture disappear and reappear quite rapidly...)
Don't know about FF8, it didn't really pull on my emotions much, it was just too... strange. Squall really goes from seeming to like Rinoa, to being indifferent, and then *really* liking her in very sudden changes. And when he is liking her, it really seems to be shown very corny. Even FFIX made a better love story, simply because it wasn't so much the focus that it got hammed up too much. FF7 on the romance end is more allowing adolescents to endulge in delusions of "pimp-daddiness". Of the SNES games, I've only made significant progress in FF5, and there is a complete lack of Love story. In fact, FF5 feels kinda flat all around in terms of story.
On the other hand, other emotional aspects change things. When it comes to the plight of the characters/people of the World, FF6 and FF7 have thus far held me the most, FF5, again, seemed too flat. FF9 came close to that level too, but with FF8, I just found the characters to be too affected to identify with. In general this is the case, but it seems worse in 8, either becasue the game tries to take itself more seriously than others (which is why chocobos just seem *so* out of placee), or because maybe they are more affected and exagerated, I'm not sure.
In any case, FF8 really didn't grab me that much. In addition to the story issues, the graphics disapponted. The FMVs were some of the nicest of the series, but the realtime graphics aimed too high, and delivered some really good textures and geometric detail, but the geometry level was still insufficient to pull off the "realistic" look they were aiming for and also the number of polygons and how small things were allowed to get looked horrible at PS1 resolutions.
It is truly a beautifully done game. It does suffer from one huge problem: aliasing. Most all PS2 games have this problem worse than Gamecube, X-Box, and even Dreamcast games. I do wish Sony had provided some form of Anti-Aliasing. PS2 can certainly push the polygons, put the polygons are just too low res. Particularly with how much FFX pushes things, at distances things become really jagged, and if a textured surface is in movement, I don't know the world for the effect, but the texture kinda flickers as pixels of the texture move between viewable, non-viewable, and viewable again between pixels, if that makes any sense.
Nonetheless, it is a truly remarkable game, really engaging story and the graphics are really detailed in terms of both texture and geometry, but the available resolution and lack of AA unfortunately detracts from the otherwise stunning game. It's better than the PS1 FFs in this respect, (except that shimmering effect I notice...) but with that level of geometry it becomes more disappointing..
Note the careful phrasing "for Windows *desktop* systems." By default, most "desktop" installs of Windows have historically had file and print sharing not installed by default. Though about 7 times out of 10 people install it anyway, MS can claim that a file sharing system is not really a "desktop" system. Sneaky and underhanded, but valid.
So, if I understand you right, you are saying that it is better that they do everything by hand than to use a word processing application that will be outdated by the time they use it? I think the pen and paper approach is more archaic and a waste of time. Besides, the applications used by high schoolers are a lot more mature than they were in the days of Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos. The office apps of 95 don't look drastically different from today, for example.
High school provides more than reading, writing, and arithmetic, at least beyond grade school.
Even in grade school, "edutainment" software is a very good tool to instruct children. Besides, I think you underestimate how far high school went for you. In my Senior year I was admining a network of Sun4 systems running SunOS 4.1.3 for the school. Don't think that can be done on pen and paper... Granted, this was a very different high school than normal...
In normal high schools, there are some curriculums that include at least rudimentary programming. In most other classes, as well as in libraries, computers serve as a good research tool. Also, even for something like learning typing, a computer keyboard is a lot different than, say a typewriter.
Computers have become such a ubiqitous thing in our lives that it would be insane to say the kids have no business having them in school. Yes, applications change over time, but with current versions widely used and understood, companies shy away from the idea of changing interfaces drastically anymore for fear of losing consumer loyalty.
I noticed on the list of features that they are going to extend the keyboard shortcut mechanism to support more extended keyboard shortcuts and enable them to make DCOP calls from shortcuts. Why is this so important to me? I have a Gateway multimedia keyboard, which, for the "special" buttons sends 3-4 keycodes per button, the windows key combined with at least two letter keycodes and other modifier keys depending on the button. Until now I haven't seen a clean way of getting these keys to work (the few apps concerned with this are limited to single keycodes...). Now I can bind this to applications. Now, is there a DCOP enabled mixer that supports XOSD, or am I going to have to write one? The KDE mixer should suffice. Can't wait to get off of work and try this sucker out, for this stupid little feature alone.
It's not that Linux needs killer apps unavailable to windows. In this day and age, the OS is more important and people buy OS seperate from systems. Back in the days of DOS, DOS provided minimal operation, a glue for applications to be accessed and applications for the most part hijack and take over the system. Most applications on exit returned control to the OS (but not all), but the OS had little to do with operation while an app was loaded.
In this day and age it is important that equal applications need to be available for a platform to be viable. Once it has requisite apps, even if other platforms have similar apps, the platform itself offers a lot more than it did back in the days of DOS. A lot more time is spent in the UI, multiple applications are being run (TSRs don't really count in DOS), and the OS never takes the backseat in the way it did with DOS.
Linux with apps equal to Windows is mostly enough. The stability of Windows is catching up to Linux with the move toward the NT platform (in terms of home usage). Security and performance seem to be the current big things about linux that could matter to the average home user. To me, the power and flexibility of the platform is good, but to the average user, this type of power and flexibility don't matter....
The applications do matter, but the OS is not insignificant as it was in the days of DOS.
Re:Put down the PS2 Controller and Pay Attention
on
Linux 2001 Timeline
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· Score: 1
Umm, isn't that nitpicking, it's close enough to a year. The editors make dumb mistakes a *lot* around here, but this time I think they made a reasonable round off.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy, from experience, making the best out of decisions handed down by idiot management. Despite administrative complaints, sometimes the business people make the decisions and thus we are stuck with MS platform because the business people are allowed to make decisions that reallly shouldn't matter. So Apache on Windows is the best way to cope..
I would probably never use this thing as a desktop class system, just not enough expansion. This is clear to most everyone here, and the source of many complaints. But it was intnded more for stuff like a TV-PC.
I think it would be very convenient to have something that small to put in an entertainment system. In this case, the PCI card would likely be used either for a better sound solution to provide Home Theater class playback, or else some sort of Capture card to provide TiVo like functionality.
Another application for a lot of people here would be a small router/internet server. You acheive a form factor and noise level close to the "cable/dsl router/switches", but with the flexibility of a PC class system. This might be appealing to replace my aging P-60 which is a bit too slow and high-profile.
Easy, the sniper rifle replacement is meant to make the weapons more even. Making the old one available would mean there is no reason to use the new weapon, defeating the whole point...
Actually, if AMD weren't around, I'd bet the P4 would not have such crappy performance and higher clock speeds.. One of the major factors in the P4 design was that the Athlon core was able to scale to 1.2 GHz and beyond, while the PIII core started to choke at 1.13 GHz, so to compete with AMD, they lengthened the pipeline and did other not-good stuff to try to pass AMD..
Actually, the P-60 runs at 60 MHz bus, no clock multiplier, or at least it does in m system, which is still running. It was the P-90 and P-75 models that used a multiplier, IIRc.
This is only partially correct. True, the P4 architecture has poor performance per clock, enabling AMD offerings clocked at 1.67 GHz to be quite competitive with 2.2 GHz P4 offerings.
As far for the conservative model numbers, AMD wanted to play it safe and avoid heavy criticism by claiming more than they could back up completely. Better to underestimate yourself than overestimate, as reviewers tend to be much more friendly to companies that do this.
This does not, however, apply to the Duron vs. Celeron scenario. The Celeron is based on the PIII core, a core that acheives much more competitive performance per clock, but will not scale to the higher clock. The P4 architecture move intentionally sacrificed performance per clock to allow higher, thus more marketable, clock speeds. That is not to say I would go with Celeron, Durons are typically cheaper, but the XP vs. P4 discrepencies are not the same thing as Duron vs. Celeron.
This case and appropriate components (flatpanel monitor) could work well for this, so long as you have a nice PCI, USB, or firewire device for your audio. Of course, I don't know if having everything so cramped increases interference in the audio components, but if you are really in need of this quality you probably want a set up that keeps things digital until the signal is well away from the computer itself.
You mention the Game Gear as an example of something that was more advanced than the Gameboy, and it very much failed, as did the Atari Lynx, Nomad, NeoGeo Pocket, and many other handheld systems, against the horrendously outdated Gameboy and Gameboy Color. Nintendo's tech may be behind the times, but in terms of games/battery life, they know what they are doing, and can easily push the units even if the units themselves are mostly pieces of crap. Judging by the X-Box standards of production, I doubt any handheld produced by MS will be efficient in terms of size nor power consumption. Though any offering they make may be mostly tecnologically superior, in all the ways that matter it will probably fall short.
I'm sorry, but I don't see the charm of Final Fantasy translating well to online play. I've always felt the primary plus to Final Fantasy was that it was not as much of a game, but exploring a story, discovering more and more until you reach a definitive end in which everything comes together, after 40-50 hours of gameplay, played as quickly or as slowly as you want. I really don't see how this sort of experience can translate to an online format.
Aside from that, FFX was a big let down to me. Truly, the graphics are fantastic, and the story is quite good, but in trying to make the world more "realistic", they took a lot of the fun out of it. World map navigation as it was in all previous Final Fantasies was fantastic, and now it is completely gone. The closest you ever come is getting to move a cursor with coordinates around a map to search for destinations, hardly the simple fun of the old-school world map. And before that, there is no free movement, if you want to go back to the beginning half-way through, it is impossible. I wish they didn't deny free movement of the world, makes it somehow less engrossing.
And all this propaganda making it sound like Square is being a pioneer is plain bs. As many others have pointed out, Phantasy Star Online is at least one example of it being done before...
ROX is a fantastically great, small, and fast filemanager, http://rox.sourceforge.net/
Very cool, has most of the features I liked of Nautilus/Konqueror, but makes my AMDK6-2 400 work *so* much faster..... Give it a try, really great project.
Aside from Sorenson Quicktime, I have found Linux Multimedia apps quite well-behaved, often better behaved than Windows Media player. One huge thing about the linux versions I use is that they tend to work better at displaying movies acceptably on an underpowered machine, much more intelligent with things like frame dropping and maintaining sync. It seems that Windows developers are becoming less and less concerned with the older hardware, and that is disappointing. It will be quite a while longer before I will be able to afford an upgrade, but linux apps makes my 400 MHz display even high-quality movies acceptably. I may drop a lot of frames, but at least it maintains decent framerates and maintains sync...
Of course, Sorenson is *licensed* by Apple, but not owned by...
And Wine CVS with the Quicktime player (basically what crossover is....) is a valid, free option.. I have verified it to work (though the UI is a bit quirky on redraw, the movie displays fine)... Of course it won't embed in a browser, but works fine stand alone...
It would be news if it supported Sorenson at all. We already have a number of applications to chose from that will play non-Sorenson quicktime back, xanim being the first that I ever knew of. Quicktime for Linux project has all sorts of stuff that is non-Sorenson. Sorenson playback has always been the gotcha that matters.
The only thing I can see is if they can use the Windows binary code to decode the Sorenson without the huge performance hit of running the entire player within a Wine context, and having the added benefit of XVideo availability for Sorenson playback. But it doesn't look like this will be the case.
More noteworthy is the VIVO support and xanim support, the VIVO support is a first (AFAIK) under linux natively, and the xanim support really helps bridge the gap between new and old-school media playback, xanim gets a lot of those files that have been overlooked in the "new wave" of media players for linux...
Also, another nit-pick, the crossover plugin, as such is not so much a player, but a nicely done wine modification within which the Windows Quicktime player runs... You can use the latest Wine CVS repository in much the same way (outside a browser at least).
I would dare say that Luna, if anything is *more* patronizing, that is the whole point. In any event, the My Computer, My Documents, can easily be renamed, if that is such a huge deal...
I dunno, "Butz" and "Tidus" can work into similar jokes if you think about it... OF course, you can bet the goatse.cx guy's name wouldn't be "Tidus" considering.. ick...
I knew that, I was refering to the second sort of shimmering phenomenon. I know I've heard a technical term for it, but it escapes me (pixels on textures slip between renderable pixels and back in, making small details of the texture disappear and reappear quite rapidly...)
Don't know about FF8, it didn't really pull on my emotions much, it was just too... strange. Squall really goes from seeming to like Rinoa, to being indifferent, and then *really* liking her in very sudden changes. And when he is liking her, it really seems to be shown very corny. Even FFIX made a better love story, simply because it wasn't so much the focus that it got hammed up too much. FF7 on the romance end is more allowing adolescents to endulge in delusions of "pimp-daddiness". Of the SNES games, I've only made significant progress in FF5, and there is a complete lack of Love story. In fact, FF5 feels kinda flat all around in terms of story.
On the other hand, other emotional aspects change things. When it comes to the plight of the characters/people of the World, FF6 and FF7 have thus far held me the most, FF5, again, seemed too flat. FF9 came close to that level too, but with FF8, I just found the characters to be too affected to identify with. In general this is the case, but it seems worse in 8, either becasue the game tries to take itself more seriously than others (which is why chocobos just seem *so* out of placee), or because maybe they are more affected and exagerated, I'm not sure.
In any case, FF8 really didn't grab me that much. In addition to the story issues, the graphics disapponted. The FMVs were some of the nicest of the series, but the realtime graphics aimed too high, and delivered some really good textures and geometric detail, but the geometry level was still insufficient to pull off the "realistic" look they were aiming for and also the number of polygons and how small things were allowed to get looked horrible at PS1 resolutions.
It is truly a beautifully done game. It does suffer from one huge problem: aliasing. Most all PS2 games have this problem worse than Gamecube, X-Box, and even Dreamcast games. I do wish Sony had provided some form of Anti-Aliasing. PS2 can certainly push the polygons, put the polygons are just too low res. Particularly with how much FFX pushes things, at distances things become really jagged, and if a textured surface is in movement, I don't know the world for the effect, but the texture kinda flickers as pixels of the texture move between viewable, non-viewable, and viewable again between pixels, if that makes any sense.
Nonetheless, it is a truly remarkable game, really engaging story and the graphics are really detailed in terms of both texture and geometry, but the available resolution and lack of AA unfortunately detracts from the otherwise stunning game. It's better than the PS1 FFs in this respect, (except that shimmering effect I notice...) but with that level of geometry it becomes more disappointing..
Note the careful phrasing "for Windows *desktop* systems." By default, most "desktop" installs of Windows have historically had file and print sharing not installed by default. Though about 7 times out of 10 people install it anyway, MS can claim that a file sharing system is not really a "desktop" system. Sneaky and underhanded, but valid.
So, if I understand you right, you are saying that it is better that they do everything by hand than to use a word processing application that will be outdated by the time they use it? I think the pen and paper approach is more archaic and a waste of time. Besides, the applications used by high schoolers are a lot more mature than they were in the days of Wordperfect 5.1 for Dos. The office apps of 95 don't look drastically different from today, for example.
High school provides more than reading, writing, and arithmetic, at least beyond grade school.
Even in grade school, "edutainment" software is a very good tool to instruct children. Besides, I think you underestimate how far high school went for you. In my Senior year I was admining a network of Sun4 systems running SunOS 4.1.3 for the school. Don't think that can be done on pen and paper... Granted, this was a very different high school than normal...
In normal high schools, there are some curriculums that include at least rudimentary programming. In most other classes, as well as in libraries, computers serve as a good research tool. Also, even for something like learning typing, a computer keyboard is a lot different than, say a typewriter.
Computers have become such a ubiqitous thing in our lives that it would be insane to say the kids have no business having them in school. Yes, applications change over time, but with current versions widely used and understood, companies shy away from the idea of changing interfaces drastically anymore for fear of losing consumer loyalty.
Try http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/kde.txt instead...
Ok, so it is still in the TODO stage, but it still ought to be pretty cool when it is finished...
I noticed on the list of features that they are going to extend the keyboard shortcut mechanism to support more extended keyboard shortcuts and enable them to make DCOP calls from shortcuts. Why is this so important to me? I have a Gateway multimedia keyboard, which, for the "special" buttons sends 3-4 keycodes per button, the windows key combined with at least two letter keycodes and other modifier keys depending on the button. Until now I haven't seen a clean way of getting these keys to work (the few apps concerned with this are limited to single keycodes...). Now I can bind this to applications. Now, is there a DCOP enabled mixer that supports XOSD, or am I going to have to write one? The KDE mixer should suffice. Can't wait to get off of work and try this sucker out, for this stupid little feature alone.
It's not that Linux needs killer apps unavailable to windows. In this day and age, the OS is more important and people buy OS seperate from systems. Back in the days of DOS, DOS provided minimal operation, a glue for applications to be accessed and applications for the most part hijack and take over the system. Most applications on exit returned control to the OS (but not all), but the OS had little to do with operation while an app was loaded.
In this day and age it is important that equal applications need to be available for a platform to be viable. Once it has requisite apps, even if other platforms have similar apps, the platform itself offers a lot more than it did back in the days of DOS. A lot more time is spent in the UI, multiple applications are being run (TSRs don't really count in DOS), and the OS never takes the backseat in the way it did with DOS.
Linux with apps equal to Windows is mostly enough. The stability of Windows is catching up to Linux with the move toward the NT platform (in terms of home usage). Security and performance seem to be the current big things about linux that could matter to the average home user. To me, the power and flexibility of the platform is good, but to the average user, this type of power and flexibility don't matter....
The applications do matter, but the OS is not insignificant as it was in the days of DOS.
Umm, isn't that nitpicking, it's close enough to a year. The editors make dumb mistakes a *lot* around here, but this time I think they made a reasonable round off.