There isn't any plans to include support for DVD in 2.4 and the near future as far as I understand. One of the biggest obstacles of course being patents and closed information. I would still like to know what your opinion is about when we can get that into Linux anyway and how much support in the kernel is needed?
It may not be necessary with special kernel support if the interface is something like IDE,SCSI, etc. and only the protocols to unscramble the video-stream is necessary in user-space, and some kind of reverse-engineering or should I say re-implementation:-) has been done before, eg. Wine and Samba.
The original OS/2 was intended for the 80286 CPU. If you ever tried CCP/M (Concurrent CP/M) you would see a pre-emptive multitasked 16bit OS for the 8086 (I ran it on a 80186 based machine, but those two were pretty close, including the 20bit address and 16bit data bus). And what about Coherent from Williams? It was a simple Unix clone that also ran on 8086 and it was originally pre-OS/2 I think. At least I had version 3.2 in 1991.
YOu see, OS/2 was but one small stepping stone in the history of OS's, and not very new or innovative at all (should I put on my asbestos suit?;-)
The most innovative of Linux also isn't the technology, but the development model (open source on the internet) and the management of it (Linus delegating and collecting the threads), which at least hasn't been done on this scale before. And if you think scale doesn't matter in a software project I can only say that you are wrong.
I Think you are misunderstanding/misusing the word stale when you mean that it is now a commodity. And please don't say that hardware isn't inovative, even in the mainstream:-) Much larger harddisks, new types of interfaces, eg. I2O, USB, firewire are appearing, larger CDROMs (DVD) and what have we. This is not "stale", because that means that it isn't moving anymore and nothing could be further from the truth.
But becaus eit is much more open with interfacing between various components it has become much more of a commodity industry and that is why it is so fiercely competitive. If you can't deliver a product with good performance you wont get a good price if you can sell it at all.
Not all hardware is a commodity yet, though, and has a thin margin. Ask Intel how much their earnings are compared to their investments. Ha sit sunk below 50% and is it perhaps because of growing competition from a very innovative company called AMD? You see?:-)
When you say the "software industry had become stale" I wonder when you mean that was? The internet started a while ago, but didn't get the tremendous growth until the 90's so let me assume you mean until then. If you think the software industry had become stale then, you haven't been exposed to a lot of software in that period. A lot of innovation was going on, eg. SMP on smaller machines (HW and SW) was becoming very interesting and incidentally the first 2CPU Microcomputer wasn't made in the Americas, but outside so if you only know about that continent that is perhaps why you didn't see all the innovation:-) (The company was called DDE, Dansk Data Elektronik and received a lot of guests from the US wondering how some other country's people could be before them;-)
I don't see the HW industry consolidating in general, but I see a lot of movement with shifting around of companies' ownership, but also smaller companies starting up. So nothing has really changed.
If I need to discuss issues about data-processing and moving and storing of data on a larger scale I believe I will have to talk about a "computer industry" because there would be a lot of players and I wouldn't know who to exclude.
Your "transportation industry" is also a good example, because if I am a politician or a CEO of a large company with many thousands employees and I need to build a new factory or close another one down, I will need to talk about a lot of different types of vehicles and that could come pretty close to talking about the whole transportation industry, eg. I need ships to dock and load/unload there (who do I atlk to?) I need some aviation possibilities there because saefty and speed will become important, and employees need their cars, and they need to park, and we need trucks to transport stuff to and from this train-station that carries this heavy goods back and forth.
So, try not to focus so hard on the apparent subject at hand that you instead get tunnel-vision:-)
So you would put the PC above the airplane, the car, the TV, the radio and the phone? I don't know the exact year these were initially invented, but I do know that not until this last century did they have a significant global influence.
What global impact does the PC have? Outside Europe, the Americas, and some areas of Asia I would assume the PC has very little impact on people's lives. I know there are pockets very highly developed outside these areas, but these examples are just for simplicity.
Nobody "deserves to be mocked" unless they are themselves mocking others, and especially not because of their ignorance. If you don't know about something you may not know that you don't know, so how would you know?
I'll humor you (he-he) and I agree with your line of thought in general. However, I don't understand how you can say "stale industry... and fierce competition"? If there is fierce competition, how can the industry be considered stale, and what industry are you thinking about specifically, and how is it different from the industry of MS? I know that SGI sells system-hardware and MS doesn't, but I consider them both to be in the computer industry. Please elaborate.
And why do you not step forward and reveal yourself in your very asshole way of responding? Why do you think that dealing with the interactive unit is all he will be doing when he apparently has so much more to bring to a technologically weak company?
I meant that he would then sell them while they were high-priced (I can't make myself say that they have a high-value... oh, I just did, but I didn't mean it!;-) and then just live off whatever high salary he supposedly gets until he doesn't care about the job anymore. He could pick up playing golf.
Perhaps he was contacted by MS to help them deal with the Linux-threat and they need someone to help them out with multimedia anyways. He accepts because he will probably receive a lot of stockoptions and better get them now before the MS shareprice sinks, ie. a path to a good life with a good pension. This is of course pure speculation:-)
A Windows installation program is still just a program under Windows and as such Wine should be able to run it as well as other programs under Windows.
And that is probably more important than the very narrow thought to just sell more PPC chips, which is also a part of the equation of course. Nobody really knows where and how far Linux will go, but IBM isn't stupid so they are probably at least just making sure to be in on what seems to have a huge potential. They wouldn't want to miss the boat if it became big and apparently enough important people in IBM seems to think that is a possibility. Even if Linux don't they wouldn't have lost anything because the source is free and they will have enough capacity of their own to continue if they have to.
It just isn't too reliable, but that could be because of other things.
plr@murasaki:~>/usr/sbin/ping -s crack.linuxppc.org PING crack.linuxppc.org: 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=0. time=504. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=1. time=408. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=2. time=514. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=3. time=662. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=4. time=526. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=5. time=616. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=6. time=511. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=7. time=519. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=9. time=463. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=12. time=658. ms 64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=13. time=575. ms ^C ----crack.linuxppc.org PING Statistics---- 17 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 35% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 408/541/662
Trying the same with the W2Ktest box it pinged reliably even with 1KB packets, but for some reason didn't like 5KB packets. Again I don't know where on the link between here and there the deficiency would be.
plr@murasaki:~>/usr/sbin/ping -s www.windows2000test.com 1000 PING www.windows2000test.com: 1000 data bytes 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=0. time=344. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=1. time=267. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=2. time=277. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=3. time=640. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=4. time=264. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=6. time=440. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=7. time=381. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=8. time=459. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=9. time=469. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=10. time=277. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=11. time=463. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=12. time=291. ms 1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=13. time=269. ms ^C ----www.windows2000test.com PING Statistics---- 14 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 7% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 264/372/640 plr@murasaki:~>/usr/sbin/ping -s www.windows2000test.com 5000 PING www.windows2000test.com: 5000 data bytes 5008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=1. time=745. ms 5008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=2. time=958. ms ^C ----www.windows2000test.com PING Statistics---- 43 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 95% packet loss round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 745/851/958
For local performance, what about D11?
on
Is X The Future?
·
· Score: 2
If you check out:
http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/d11/d11.html
there is a really good article about how to extend X11 with the special case of 'local host' and that would improve the performance that I find could be made better. And that would definitely be good if it is to be used for games and such.
All other stuff about easier configuration, prettier window managers and such is already being worked on and will get better and better. If you can't wait for it you could donate money to people doing it for you unless you can yourself:-)
Trust me, none of my CDs have *any* scratch as well as none of my vinyl records. What you say about properly made CDs may be right, but we wont know until a few years will we? The only ones that I trust will last are the ones using gold as backcoting instead of aluminium.
However, many of my CDs are not even from this decade as I started out around 1985 lulled in by the hype that they last forever and sound much better, both which aren't true. Now I always buy a vinyl record if I can get my hands on one with music that I like, but it is unfortunately getting more and more expensive and more and more difficult to find a decent quality vinyl record.
I am in the 17-35 age group, but I haven't a lot of MP3 files and still I haven't bought a CD in the last 6months. That isn't because I don't listen to music, but all the new music I hear on the radio is close enough to crap that I wouldn't want to spend my money on it. But then, I love my present vinyl/CD collection so I am perhaps not your usual music-joe:-) I have recently, however thought about ripping all my CDs (300) because they aren't as long lived as vinyl and when they start to skip they are gone. The problem of course being that the aluminium on the back side corrodes. Vinyl gets worn, but if you treat them nicely and as I do, copy them to a high-quality tape and listen to that one and make a new one when that one is gone, the vinyl record will last a pretty long time. Just an opinion:-)
So what you are saying is that capitalism is an unstable system that must be nurtured and kept alive (much like a computer running NT;-)
I am not sure I agree with you and I am not sure that even MS would be able to keep their almost monopoly even if DOJ hadn't interacted.
Since late 1993 I chose not to use any MS product so that would be a monopoly minus one that had a choice, right? (this is excluding the thousands others at the time running Linux, *BSD, UNIX, etc.).
You keep mentioning stuff like "the/. crowd" in a way that sounds as you aren't a part of it. You are! And I think we should all be happy for it:-)
I know no one who is able to put such different spin on everything MS related in such a way that somebody just *has* to answer. It makes reading/. a lot more fun and I wouldn't be without it.
With your display of well thought opinions, which I think you do even if I don't always agree, I am a little puzzled about your previous statement:
There is no such thing as a software project, there are only business projects with a software element.
So what is Linux, X, sendmail and perhaps most of all UNIX? They all started as software projects and except UNIX they all still are. I know that sendmail is now sold differently in a commercial version, but it is still freely available and is therefore still a software project
Being well-versed in Linux for example you should know that if anything it is only now becoming a software project with a business element.
It and all CPUs after the 8086 are however backcompatible. But picking as easy items as MMU, Protected Memory, SMP capability and an extended instructionset (eg. MMX and KNI, but there were others before them) I would beg to differ that present Intel CPUs basically are 8086 with a 'little extra', which is how I read your comment.
I am not a huge Intel fan, but I just see them as protecting their cash-cow as best as they can. They will probably be in for a rude awakening when they release IA64 anyway.
I even have two 386SX (16 and 20MHz, 6 and 4MB RAM) and I use them as text-terminals in other rooms of my house. Little neat notebooks, very quiet and doesn't take up any space:-) Great for email and surfing with Lynx.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't any plans to include support for DVD in 2.4 and the near future as far as I understand. One of the biggest obstacles of course being patents and closed information. I would still like to know what your opinion is about when we can get that into Linux anyway and how much support in the kernel is needed?
:-) has been done before, eg. Wine and Samba.
It may not be necessary with special kernel support if the interface is something like IDE,SCSI, etc. and only the protocols to unscramble the video-stream is necessary in user-space, and some kind of reverse-engineering or should I say re-implementation
The original OS/2 was intended for the 80286 CPU.
;-)
If you ever tried CCP/M (Concurrent CP/M) you would see a pre-emptive multitasked 16bit OS for the 8086 (I ran it on a 80186 based machine, but those two were pretty close, including the 20bit address and 16bit data bus). And what about Coherent from Williams? It was a simple Unix clone that also ran on 8086 and it was originally pre-OS/2 I think. At least I had version 3.2 in 1991.
YOu see, OS/2 was but one small stepping stone in the history of OS's, and not very new or innovative at all (should I put on my asbestos suit?
The most innovative of Linux also isn't the technology, but the development model (open source on the internet) and the management of it (Linus delegating and collecting the threads), which at least hasn't been done on this scale before. And if you think scale doesn't matter in a software project I can only say that you are wrong.
I Think you are misunderstanding/misusing the word stale when you mean that it is now a commodity. And please don't say that hardware isn't inovative, even in the mainstream :-) Much larger harddisks, new types of interfaces, eg. I2O, USB, firewire are appearing, larger CDROMs (DVD) and what have we. This is not "stale", because that means that it isn't moving anymore and nothing could be further from the truth.
:-)
:-) (The company was called DDE, Dansk Data Elektronik and received a lot of guests from the US wondering how some other country's people could be before them ;-)
:-)
But becaus eit is much more open with interfacing between various components it has become much more of a commodity industry and that is why it is so fiercely competitive. If you can't deliver a product with good performance you wont get a good price if you can sell it at all.
Not all hardware is a commodity yet, though, and has a thin margin. Ask Intel how much their earnings are compared to their investments. Ha sit sunk below 50% and is it perhaps because of growing competition from a very innovative company called AMD? You see?
When you say the "software industry had become stale" I wonder when you mean that was? The internet started a while ago, but didn't get the tremendous growth until the 90's so let me assume you mean until then. If you think the software industry had become stale then, you haven't been exposed to a lot of software in that period. A lot of innovation was going on, eg. SMP on smaller machines (HW and SW) was becoming very interesting and incidentally the first 2CPU Microcomputer wasn't made in the Americas, but outside so if you only know about that continent that is perhaps why you didn't see all the innovation
I don't see the HW industry consolidating in general, but I see a lot of movement with shifting around of companies' ownership, but also smaller companies starting up. So nothing has really changed.
If I need to discuss issues about data-processing and moving and storing of data on a larger scale I believe I will have to talk about a "computer industry" because there would be a lot of players and I wouldn't know who to exclude.
Your "transportation industry" is also a good example, because if I am a politician or a CEO of a large company with many thousands employees and I need to build a new factory or close another one down, I will need to talk about a lot of different types of vehicles and that could come pretty close to talking about the whole transportation industry, eg. I need ships to dock and load/unload there (who do I atlk to?) I need some aviation possibilities there because saefty and speed will become important, and employees need their cars, and they need to park, and we need trucks to transport stuff to and from this train-station that carries this heavy goods back and forth.
So, try not to focus so hard on the apparent subject at hand that you instead get tunnel-vision
So you would put the PC above the airplane, the car, the TV, the radio and the phone? I don't know the exact year these were initially invented, but I do know that not until this last century did they have a significant global influence.
What global impact does the PC have? Outside Europe, the Americas, and some areas of Asia I would assume the PC has very little impact on people's lives. I know there are pockets very highly developed outside these areas, but these examples are just for simplicity.
Nobody "deserves to be mocked" unless they are themselves mocking others, and especially not because of their ignorance. If you don't know about something you may not know that you don't know, so how would you know?
I'll humor you (he-he) and I agree with your line of thought in general. However, I don't understand how you can say "stale industry ... and fierce competition"? If there is fierce competition, how can the industry be considered stale, and what industry are you thinking about specifically, and how is it different from the industry of MS? I know that SGI sells system-hardware and MS doesn't, but I consider them both to be in the computer industry.
Please elaborate.
And why do you not step forward and reveal yourself in your very asshole way of responding?
Why do you think that dealing with the interactive unit is all he will be doing when he apparently has so much more to bring to a technologically weak company?
I meant that he would then sell them while they were high-priced (I can't make myself say that they have a high-value ... oh, I just did, but I didn't mean it! ;-) and then just live off whatever high salary he supposedly gets until he doesn't care about the job anymore. He could pick up playing golf.
Perhaps he was contacted by MS to help them deal with the Linux-threat and they need someone to help them out with multimedia anyways. He accepts because he will probably receive a lot of stockoptions and better get them now before the MS shareprice sinks, ie. a path to a good life with a good pension. This is of course pure speculation :-)
Simple and neat
Ergo, a no-brainer for IBM.
It just isn't too reliable, but that could be because of other things.
plr@murasaki:~>
PING crack.linuxppc.org: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=0. time=504. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=1. time=408. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=2. time=514. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=3. time=662. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=4. time=526. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=5. time=616. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=6. time=511. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=7. time=519. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=9. time=463. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=12. time=658. ms
64 bytes from 169.207.154.108: icmp_seq=13. time=575. ms
^C
----crack.linuxppc.org PING Statistics----
17 packets transmitted, 11 packets received, 35% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 408/541/662
Trying the same with the W2Ktest box it pinged reliably even with 1KB packets, but for some reason didn't like 5KB packets. Again I don't know where on the link between here and there the deficiency would be.
plr@murasaki:~>
PING www.windows2000test.com: 1000 data bytes
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=0. time=344. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=1. time=267. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=2. time=277. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=3. time=640. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=4. time=264. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=6. time=440. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=7. time=381. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=8. time=459. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=9. time=469. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=10. time=277. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=11. time=463. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=12. time=291. ms
1008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=13. time=269. ms
^C
----www.windows2000test.com PING Statistics----
14 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 7% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 264/372/640
plr@murasaki:~>
PING www.windows2000test.com: 5000 data bytes
5008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=1. time=745. ms
5008 bytes from 207.46.171.196: icmp_seq=2. time=958. ms
^C
----www.windows2000test.com PING Statistics----
43 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 95% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max = 745/851/958
If you check out:
:-)
http://reality.sgi.com/opengl/d11/d11.html
there is a really good article about how to extend X11 with the special case of 'local host' and that would improve the performance that I find could be made better. And that would definitely be good if it is to be used for games and such.
All other stuff about easier configuration, prettier window managers and such is already being worked on and will get better and better. If you can't wait for it you could donate money to people doing it for you unless you can yourself
However, many of my CDs are not even from this decade as I started out around 1985 lulled in by the hype that they last forever and sound much better, both which aren't true. Now I always buy a vinyl record if I can get my hands on one with music that I like, but it is unfortunately getting more and more expensive and more and more difficult to find a decent quality vinyl record.
Peter
I am not sure I agree with you and I am not sure that even MS would be able to keep their almost monopoly even if DOJ hadn't interacted.
Since late 1993 I chose not to use any MS product so that would be a monopoly minus one that had a choice, right? (this is excluding the thousands others at the time running Linux, *BSD, UNIX, etc.).
Peter
--
I know no one who is able to put such different spin on everything MS related in such a way that somebody just *has* to answer. It makes reading /. a lot more fun and I wouldn't be without it.
With your display of well thought opinions, which I think you do even if I don't always agree, I am a little puzzled about your previous statement:
There is no such thing as a software project, there are only business projects with a software element.
So what is Linux, X, sendmail and perhaps most of all UNIX? They all started as software projects and except UNIX they all still are. I know that sendmail is now sold differently in a commercial version, but it is still freely available and is therefore still a software project
Being well-versed in Linux for example you should know that if anything it is only now becoming a software project with a business element.
Peter
--
But picking as easy items as MMU, Protected Memory, SMP capability and
an extended instructionset (eg. MMX and KNI, but there were
others before them) I would beg to differ that present Intel CPUs
basically are 8086 with a 'little extra', which is how I read your
comment.
I am not a huge Intel fan, but I just see them as protecting
their cash-cow as best as they can. They will probably be in for
a rude awakening when they release IA64 anyway.
I even have two 386SX (16 and 20MHz, 6 and 4MB RAM) :-) Great for email and surfing with
and I use them as text-terminals in other rooms of
my house. Little neat notebooks, very quiet and doesn't take
up any space
Lynx.