I see "Linux needs DirectX equivalent" a lot. I disagree:
Direct3D: Obviously not, OpenGL.
DirectDraw: Nope, this was necessary on Windows because the normal GDI method were so bad for games. X has already had MITSHM for a long time and more recently there is DGA.
DirectSound: This is the only one where there might be a point. Linux has a good sound API and it is trivial to write a mixing sound server, but the problem is everyone writes their own (I'm guilty too, I wrote one last year) so different apps don't mediate access to sound device well. Nevertheless a defacto standard will probably emerge based on the new desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, although I haven't checked yet if their solutions are adequate for realtime gaming performance.
DirectInput: Nope, check out the 2.2 kernels for the extensive joystick-like input device support.
DirectPlay: This is nonsense, trivial syntactic sugar. Any serious networked game is going to write their own networking code on low level sockets.
Scrolled off the main slashdot page so no one will read this but what the hell.
Re:Mozilla! Baloney!!
on
Netscape 4.6
·
· Score: 1
You're insanse. The Mozilla binary releases do include all the necessary libraries out of the box.
The real problem is that there are still two major areas that need fixing in the Unix version before it is usable:
1. The scrolling performance is utterly horrible, with lots of gray flicker and flashing.
2. The form widgets using Gtk have major problems. I don't blame them, sometimes it's hard to get Gtk to behave in some way other than its hardcoded defaults, but in any case this needs a lot of work.
I've heard that neither of these problems exist on the windows version, although I've never seen it first-hand.
I personally can't wait to dump netscape and use start using mozilla.
And you don't know what you're talking about. I'm so sick of people trivializing the act of taking someones life.
A rape victim's life may be very bad for some time after, or even for the rest of their life, but unless they prove it by commiting suicide, they'd rather live their life than be killed.
Nonsense. If the author thought she would be better off dead she would be dead. Period. Don't underestimate the will of people (and other living beings for that matter) to live, even in what seems to us to be the most miserable circumstances.
Rape is not worse than murder. Give me a break. I am _not_ trivializing rape but I get tired of people trivializing murder.
Trivializing murder is also an argument often used by death penalty supporters and it annoys the hell out of me. People seem to VASTLY underestimate the will to live.
For example, to take your scenario of torture and legs and arms being cut off, I would say that yes that would be much preferable to being killed.
I'd like to have the ability to see the comments in date order, oldest first.
I select "Flat" and "Oldest First", but it STILL insists on sorting by thread first, which makes it really annoying to come back and try to find the new comments.
Yawn. A bunch of ad-hominim attacks, but I notice you refuse to argue against any of the points of the free software supporters.
For what it's worth, I've become _more_ idealistic and convinced I was "right all along" the more time I spend in the so-called "real", business world.
>Am I the only person who thinks X should die and be replaced with a lightweight window system?
No, but you and the others that think so are wrong.
Berlin is an interesting experiment in archictecture, but most of their perceived shortcomings of X aren't. Most of them are merely shortcomings with the current XFree86 implementation version 3.2.
> Canvas items are not Gtk+ widgets. Widgets are derived from GtkWidget, and canvas items are derived from GnomeCanvasItem -- these two have nothing in common except for the base GtkObject.
Right. This was exactly my point. You've now got two parallel hierachies of widgetry rather than a simple unified functionality common to all widgets. So I have to create and maintain two versions of all my widgets?
Regarding the layout, does it support a huge widget inside the scrollable area, or merely many 32k x 32k sized widgets spread out over a huge area? A decent viewport, in my opinion, should allow the widget writer to completely forget about the scrollbars and simply have a huge canvas to deal with. Unfortunely the current Gtk design does not allow this because Gdk is not object-oriented. You are passed a rectangle to your draw function which merely has the X level coordinates as 16-bit ints, and you draw using the gdk_* X wrapper functions. You should instead be passed a Graphics object that you draw with. A scrollable viewport would pass you a Graphics-derived object that translates (or even rotates and scales) your coords.
In summary, it should be possible to write, for example, a text area widget without thought of scrollbars and have it pop in a viewport widget to get scrollbars transparently, with no limitation on the size of the text area. Note that this does _not_ mean you give up the ability to specify proper line and page increments based on the contents of your text area (or whatever widget). See Java Swing's Viewport for an example of this.
I guess we should be discussing this on the mailing lists.
It seems like the GNOME canvas gives us a lot of features that the advanced free software toolkit Fresco has had all along. (Shameless plug: I compared many Linux GUI toolkits including Fresco and Gtk in my article in the May 1998 issue of Linux Journal. Written almost a year ago, it is still mostly not obsolete, although I didn't have as much experience with Gtk as I do now.)
Still, shouldn't the Gtk API be modified to put this at the heart of the system, rather than as a parallel add-on? It seems kludgy to have two parallel widget APIs, one for "classic" Gtk widgets and one for "Canvas Item" widgets. Also, quick question: does this this canvas allow for huge scrollable areas with a transparent API? The current Gtk ViewPort widget is incredibly lame with its limitation of 32K x 32K.
I'm not complaining though. I'm really glad to see a popular widget set (Gtk) get some nice features of a well-designed (but unfortunately didn't catch on) widget set like Fresco. I decided in July, out of all the choices of widget toolkits for Linux, to use Gtk-- for my current project at work. My reasoning was that even though the API was in some ways inferior to, say Fresco or Java's JFC, the incredible momentum behind it would make up for that because so many people are working on the same base. Gtk is also free software, a big advantage over Java and (at the time at least) Qt. Reading about this cool canvas stuff makes me more sure of my decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I see "Linux needs DirectX equivalent" a lot. I disagree:
Direct3D: Obviously not, OpenGL.
DirectDraw: Nope, this was necessary on Windows because the normal GDI method were so bad for games. X has already had MITSHM for a long time and more recently there is DGA.
DirectSound: This is the only one where there might be a point. Linux has a good sound API and it is trivial to write a mixing sound server, but the problem is everyone writes their own (I'm guilty too, I wrote one last year) so different apps don't mediate access to sound device well. Nevertheless a defacto standard will probably emerge based on the new desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, although I haven't checked yet if their solutions are adequate for realtime gaming performance.
DirectInput: Nope, check out the 2.2 kernels for the extensive joystick-like input device support.
DirectPlay: This is nonsense, trivial syntactic sugar. Any serious networked game is going to write their own networking code on low level sockets.
Scrolled off the main slashdot page so no one will read this but what the hell.
You're insanse. The Mozilla binary releases do include all the necessary libraries out of the box.
The real problem is that there are still two major areas that need fixing in the Unix version before it is usable:
1. The scrolling performance is utterly horrible, with lots of gray flicker and flashing.
2. The form widgets using Gtk have major problems. I don't blame them, sometimes it's hard to get Gtk to behave in some way other than its hardcoded defaults, but in any case this needs a lot of work.
I've heard that neither of these problems exist on the windows version, although I've never seen it first-hand.
I personally can't wait to dump netscape and use start using mozilla.
But what if what you love is programming free software? There's more to job quality than merely the type of project you're working on.
>>If they didn't have monopoly status
>>Arrghh! Why do people insist on treating this as if it were settled and byond debate?
Because it is settled and beyond debate. Glad to help.
Ah the wonderful British "libel" laws that allow McDonalds to sue anyone who criticizes them. Great.
Right on brother. Damn Nixon's megalomania.
And you don't know what you're talking about. I'm so sick of people trivializing the act of taking someones life.
A rape victim's life may be very bad for some time after, or even for the rest of their life, but unless they prove it by commiting suicide, they'd rather live their life than be killed.
Nonsense. If the author thought she would be better off dead she would be dead. Period. Don't underestimate the will of people (and other living beings for that matter) to live, even in what seems to us to be the most miserable circumstances.
Rape is not worse than murder. Give me a break. I am _not_ trivializing rape but I get tired of people trivializing murder.
Trivializing murder is also an argument often used by death penalty supporters and it annoys the hell out of me. People seem to VASTLY underestimate the will to live.
For example, to take your scenario of torture and legs and arms being cut off, I would say that yes that would be much preferable to being killed.
I'd like to have the ability to see the comments in date order, oldest first.
I select "Flat" and "Oldest First", but it STILL insists on sorting by thread first, which makes it really annoying to come back and try to find the new comments.
And most importantly: after the case mcdonalds FIXED their coffee machines.
Numerous people complained before but they never fix them. It took a lawsuit to make them fix them.
I agree lawsuits generally suck, but you need to come up with some alternative to force corps to do the right thing if you want to get rid of them.
Like most interviews with him that I've read, I come to the conclusion that Bill Gates is either very stupid or a lier.
I don't think he is stupid. He is smart (though not wise).
So I wouldn't be complacent. I doubt he believes his own nonsense. Behind the scenes he is probably doing everything he can to forcibly kill Linux.
God damn the pedantic Welsh...
Uh, I think rdf is xml.
It is supported in Mozilla, but not Internet Explorer 5.
Yawn. A bunch of ad-hominim attacks, but I notice you refuse to argue against any of the points of the free software supporters.
For what it's worth, I've become _more_ idealistic and convinced I was "right all along" the more time I spend in the so-called "real", business world.
Wrong. The word is maths.
Godwin's law is for lazy-brains who can't think for themselves.
Repetition in America.
See Life is Beautiful. One of the best movies I've seen in years.
>Am I the only person who thinks X should die and be replaced with a lightweight window system?
No, but you and the others that think so are wrong.
Berlin is an interesting experiment in archictecture, but most of their perceived shortcomings of X aren't. Most of them are merely shortcomings with the current XFree86 implementation version 3.2.
> Canvas items are not Gtk+ widgets. Widgets are derived from GtkWidget, and canvas items are derived from GnomeCanvasItem -- these two have nothing in common except for the base GtkObject.
Right. This was exactly my point. You've now got two parallel hierachies of widgetry rather than a simple unified functionality common to all widgets. So I have to create and maintain two versions of all my widgets?
Regarding the layout, does it support a huge widget inside the scrollable area, or merely many 32k x 32k sized widgets spread out over a huge area? A decent viewport, in my opinion, should allow the widget writer to completely forget about the scrollbars and simply have a huge canvas to deal with. Unfortunely the current Gtk design does not allow this because Gdk is not object-oriented. You are passed a rectangle to your draw function which merely has the X level coordinates as 16-bit ints, and you draw using the gdk_* X wrapper functions. You should instead be passed a Graphics object that you draw with. A scrollable viewport would pass you a Graphics-derived object that translates (or even rotates and scales) your coords.
In summary, it should be possible to write, for example, a text area widget without thought of scrollbars and have it pop in a viewport widget to get scrollbars transparently, with no limitation on the size of the text area. Note that this does _not_ mean you give up the ability to specify proper line and page increments based on the contents of your text area (or whatever widget). See Java Swing's Viewport for an example of this.
I guess we should be discussing this on the mailing lists.
It seems like the GNOME canvas gives us a lot of features that the advanced free software toolkit Fresco has had all along. (Shameless plug: I compared many Linux GUI toolkits including Fresco and Gtk in my article in the May 1998 issue of Linux Journal. Written almost a year ago, it is still mostly not obsolete, although I didn't have as much experience with Gtk as I do now.)
Still, shouldn't the Gtk API be modified to put this at the heart of the system, rather than as a parallel add-on? It seems kludgy to have two parallel widget APIs, one for "classic" Gtk widgets and one for "Canvas Item" widgets. Also, quick question: does this this canvas allow for huge scrollable areas with a transparent API? The current Gtk ViewPort widget is incredibly lame with its limitation of 32K x 32K.
I'm not complaining though. I'm really glad to see a popular widget set (Gtk) get some nice features of a well-designed (but unfortunately didn't catch on) widget set like Fresco. I decided in July, out of all the choices of widget toolkits for Linux, to use Gtk-- for my current project at work. My reasoning was that even though the API was in some ways inferior to, say Fresco or Java's JFC, the incredible momentum behind it would make up for that because so many people are working on the same base. Gtk is also free software, a big advantage over Java and (at the time at least) Qt. Reading about this cool canvas stuff makes me more sure of my decision.
Michael Babcock
michael@kanji.com