And regarding the performance, benchmark tests show a negligible difference between X and MS Win, and why give up a pile of advantages just for a few more fps?
The biggest speed limitation I see with XFree86 is hardware support. Windows has much better graphics drivers and it shows. NVIDIA-based cards or other mainstream chipsets work fine, but you can't just buy any old card and expect it to work.
I suspect that many people who complain about X's speed have done just that. What's more, they've generally only tried XFree86 and not other implementations of X, and since XFree86 was slow on their machine, they have assumed X is slow.
Fallacies like this happen every day, though, and don't surprise me in the least. I've learned to realize they are irrelevant and move on.
The "run length codes" mentioned in the patent appears to be quite different from "run length encoding" (RLE). Not being an expert in compression (I've only dabbled), I can only say that it has something to do with huffman codes, which are key to JPEG. RLE is different, often results in a larger size than the original file, and afaik is not used in JPEG.
Perhaps a closer analogy is Unisys. For many years, GIF files were the thing to use. They were popular on Compuserve, then on local BBSes, and along with JPEG, became the image file format of choice on the web. After all of that, Unisys decided to take advantage over their LZW patent, and require a small royalty for any applications that used GIFs.
It wasn't too much later that slashdot came around and posted a link to http://burnallgifs.org/. I wonder how long it will be until they post a link to http://burnalljpegs.org/.
1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
It sounds to me like the author of this article expects Microsoft and IBM to pull a trick like Unisys pulled a few years ago.
(For those who don't know, Unisys owned the patent for LZW, the compression algorithm used in GIF files. GIF was the standard Compuserve graphics format, and became the de-facto standard for the web, too. Once it became popular, Unisys began to ask for royalties for software that used LZW. It was at that point that the online pr0n industry moved to JPG files instead of GIF).
I don't know what kinds of rights MS and IBM retain on these standards, so I don't know what kinds of royalties they would ask for (would it be per program, per software license, or per copy of the standard, etc), but I would hope that the industry would have learned from their mistakes in the past with using proprietary technologies.
According to http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html, apache was based on NCSA httpd, which I presume was written in C.
C++ is nice for large projects, but its lack of a standard ABI makes dynamically loading modules a little interesting. This usually isn't an issue for GUIs, but for things like plugins, it would be nice to simply be able to inherit from a base class with a bunch of pure virtual functions, and have their implementation be the implementation of the plugin. Too bad I have to settle for a C-style hack if I want to be sure my code will work between different compilers.
Blackbox development seems to have stopped since some time in 1999. A hacker known as fluxgen has picked up the project, and is doing some really cool things with it. None of that drag and drop silliness (which doesn't belong in a window manager), but lots of other useful features that blackbox is missing. He's also cleaning up the code, too -- not that blackbox's code was ugly, but it was written in a "C++ is a better C" form, which just isn't a good development model for large projects.
Do you really think people will know that a floppy disk icon is supposed to mean "save as"? When I see a floppy disk icon, I usually think "put this file somewhere that I will never want to access it again because it probably will be exposed to an insignificant magnetic field and will have all its bits scrambled into tiny pieces like eggs with little bits of chewy spam."
AFAIK, telenet is still around, but it's sprintnet now. I don't know who or what still uses it, though; does anyone else have more information than I do?
As for using it as a BBS door game, that would be pretty slick, but a huge security hole. But how about adding RIP or NAPLPS graphics?
Re:I have just one question.....
on
Textmode Quake 2
·
· Score: 1
Excuse me while a go write a program that will help Windows render my wallpaper as a text box of ASCII characters...
Cutting of someone's ISP without warning is like losing phone service without warning and not being able to get the same number again once phone service is resumed. It can screw your whole life up and I feel sorry for the people I know who aren't technical enough to buy and manage their own domain.
If you are really so attached to the internet that losing your ISP screws up your life, then you really ought to reconsider your priorities. There really are much more important things in life than instant messaging and email. There's also this thing called a phone; if you don't know how to use it, then just dial "0" and the operator will probably laugh at you, but will be more than willing to help.
Perhaps cutting off all these geeks who spend their entire lives online is a good thing. Perhaps now they will actually go somewhere and do something with a real person for a change. They complain all the time about not having social skills, and they use that excuse to justify their lack of direct contact with any other human being, but never once do they consider that the lack of social skills is due to lack of practice. I hope that can now change.
Access to the internet is a privelege, not a right. It's not the end of the world if you lose connectivity for a while. You will survive.
I've been an on and off observer of meteor showers for many years. Each year, I watch the geminids and the quadrantids (because that's the time of year at which I actually have free time). I'm familiar with the red "fireballs"; I'll never forget watching the perseids in 1991 and seeing a fireball light up the sky, reflecting from the ocean (a very beautiful sight!).
But I've never before seen anything like what I saw last night: bright flashes of light moving across the sky, followed by an eerie green trail. Is the composition of this comet different from other comets, or was this just a result of strange lighting effects from the nearby city?
This is slashdot. Linux is everything you want it to be. It slices! It dices! It even runs emacs. All this for the amazing price of not much more than it costs to remove that bubble gum off the bottom of your shoe! Call now and we'll even throw in a CD-shaped bubble gum removal device for free! See if you get that useless feature with other operating systems; we Linux users KNOW what's important. Don't delay. Operators are sitting by playing Quake.
Check out this link for what might be some interesting benchmarks. Ruby seems to do quite well against Perl and Python (and in some cases better), but in other cases it is downright awful (look at the recursion problems). Ruby is not as mature as Perl or Python, so there are definitely some places where it could be optimized better.
One thing you may want to consider is that Ruby has many different ways of doing loops; some of them open a new scope (which takes time), and others just iterate in the current scope. So where you may have:
j = 0
1..1000000.each do |i|
j = j + 1
end
You may want to rewrite as:
j = 0
for i in 1..1000000 do
j = j + 1
end
or even:
j = 0
1000000.times do
j = j.succ # faster than j = j + 1
end
Re:I can tell you why *I* am not using Ruby.
on
Why not Ruby?
·
· Score: 1
it has several prefixes (@ and $) for varaibles to change the interpretation of those variables,
No, Ruby uses @ and $ to denote scope of a variable. Many people do the same thing in other languages (such as adding a trailling underscore to member variables in C++), because it's easy to get confused. Ruby forces the issue on you so that your code will be clean and easy to maintain; this is not a bad thing.
Python has several implementations available, whereas Ruby has only one.
Ruby currently has only one non-developmental implementation, but there are a couple of projects in the works for "Ruby-in-Ruby" and for a "Ruby to C" compiler (see rb2c and rubyjit in the RAA, for example).
There is the Ruby Application Archive (RAA), but it's pretty disorganized and there aren't nearly as many modules available as there are in CPAN. RAA.succ (the successor to the RAA, for those who don't speak Ruby) is a big topic right now. A project called RubyGems is in the works, and many other ideas have also been proposed.
I've written several modules for Ruby in C, and integration is easy. What's more, you get free garbage collection in your C code, just from calling Data_Wrap_Struct, because the object gets handled by the Ruby garbage collector and is garbage collected (it's free() function is called) sometime after you return to the Ruby interpreter (or as soon as you run out of memory and the GC gets invoked). If you want your code to be automatically wrapped, then there is also Swig support (though the Ruby module for Swig lacks the documentation that the TCL, Python, and Perl modules have).
Where the integration becomes tricky is when you try to interface with C++ code. Ruby uses setjmp and longjmp for its exception handling, so if you call rb_raise, you'd better make sure you don't have any objects sitting on your stack that might need to be destructed! I don't think Perl or Python do much better at this (though I could be wrong).
For a long time, I've thought that it might be fun for the students to learn programming using robots. Students would write software that reads data from stdin and writes to stdout, and controls a robot that moves around in a virtual environment.
The idea here is that the hardest part about freshman programming courses is not the material, but rather getting the students motivated to learn. By making it fun, creating a challenge, and perhaps offering a small prize for the best robot, I believe that students will learn the basics of the language much quicker than by writing mindless menu-based "hello, world" variants.
Additionally, by using stdin and stdout to control the robots rather than a specific API, students who already know a language can use that language, and students who don't already know a language can learn the one that is being taught in class. And it doesn't really matter which language is taught; C/C++ would probably do just as well as Java, or Lisp, or perhaps even Ruby.
One such environment is RealTimeBattle. It's written in GTK, so it should be reasonably portable (though I don't seen any Win32 ports on their webpage). There are a number of other variants out there, too, including GNU Robots, though that uses Guile for its language, so it's not as flexible.
Interesting article. Odd, though, that half the distributions mentioned are also noted to be dead projects.
Perhaps one of WinLinux's biggest features is that it was the first partitionless versions of Linux.
Hmm, I remember using doslinux long before WinLinux was ever around. Since it ran on top of umsdos, no partitioning was needed. I believe Slackware also supported umsdos (and possibly does still? dunno, I don't use it any more...).
Mandrake's GUI enhancements often require more memory than a stock Linux distribution, often requiring 32 MB just for their DrakX graphical installer.
Yet there's no mention of RedHat 7.1's ftp installer, which won't run on my system with 48 megs of RAM. I don't know how much it needs, but that's absurd. (Note that the NFS install works just fine with 48 megs).
Well, I don't know about Direct3D, but with OpenGL the library was designed in such a way as to make drawing over the network fast and easy. In fact, the bus to the video card is a network of sorts; it's much faster to upload a bunch of data over the "network" (bus) to the video card and have the video card process it than it is to process it in advance and send much more data to the card (that's why we have display lists, texture id's, etc.).
X has the potential to work in much the same way.
This means it also has the potential to be faster than a non-networked protocol, since the video card can do most of the processing without having to re-upload commands. Imagine how fast a window manager could be if you just put the borders into a GL display list!
Slashdot Mirror
And regarding the performance, benchmark tests show a negligible difference between X and MS Win, and why give up a pile of advantages just for a few more fps?
The biggest speed limitation I see with XFree86 is hardware support. Windows has much better graphics drivers and it shows. NVIDIA-based cards or other mainstream chipsets work fine, but you can't just buy any old card and expect it to work.
I suspect that many people who complain about X's speed have done just that. What's more, they've generally only tried XFree86 and not other implementations of X, and since XFree86 was slow on their machine, they have assumed X is slow.
Fallacies like this happen every day, though, and don't surprise me in the least. I've learned to realize they are irrelevant and move on.
The "run length codes" mentioned in the patent appears to be quite different from "run length encoding" (RLE). Not being an expert in compression (I've only dabbled), I can only say that it has something to do with huffman codes, which are key to JPEG. RLE is different, often results in a larger size than the original file, and afaik is not used in JPEG.
Perhaps a closer analogy is Unisys. For many years, GIF files were the thing to use. They were popular on Compuserve, then on local BBSes, and along with JPEG, became the image file format of choice on the web. After all of that, Unisys decided to take advantage over their LZW patent, and require a small royalty for any applications that used GIFs.
It wasn't too much later that slashdot came around and posted a link to http://burnallgifs.org/. I wonder how long it will be until they post a link to http://burnalljpegs.org/.
1) Patent 4,698,672 can be searched for at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm. The URL is too long to paste here.
2) The jpeg.org page seems to indicate that the patent only affects the baseline implementation of JPEG. If this is true, then it should be possible to write a new baseline implementation that doesn't infringe on the patent.
3) I'm curious what prior art will show up. In 1986, many people were still using BSAVE/BLOAD to store images.
It sounds to me like the author of this article expects Microsoft and IBM to pull a trick like Unisys pulled a few years ago.
(For those who don't know, Unisys owned the patent for LZW, the compression algorithm used in GIF files. GIF was the standard Compuserve graphics format, and became the de-facto standard for the web, too. Once it became popular, Unisys began to ask for royalties for software that used LZW. It was at that point that the online pr0n industry moved to JPG files instead of GIF).
I don't know what kinds of rights MS and IBM retain on these standards, so I don't know what kinds of royalties they would ask for (would it be per program, per software license, or per copy of the standard, etc), but I would hope that the industry would have learned from their mistakes in the past with using proprietary technologies.
So when is someone going to come out with a portable Ogg Vorbis player?
In theory, it should be possible to build one the same way one would have built one's own MP3 player just a few years ago.
I repeat: this is RUMOUR. Why is it on Slashdot? This is not responsible journalism.
I think you answered that question yourself. It is on slashdot because it is rumor.
Too bad Windows 2000 is just VMS in disguise.
According to http://httpd.apache.org/ABOUT_APACHE.html, apache was based on NCSA httpd, which I presume was written in C.
C++ is nice for large projects, but its lack of a standard ABI makes dynamically loading modules a little interesting. This usually isn't an issue for GUIs, but for things like plugins, it would be nice to simply be able to inherit from a base class with a bunch of pure virtual functions, and have their implementation be the implementation of the plugin. Too bad I have to settle for a C-style hack if I want to be sure my code will work between different compilers.
Blackbox development seems to have stopped since some time in 1999. A hacker known as fluxgen has picked up the project, and is doing some really cool things with it. None of that drag and drop silliness (which doesn't belong in a window manager), but lots of other useful features that blackbox is missing. He's also cleaning up the code, too -- not that blackbox's code was ugly, but it was written in a "C++ is a better C" form, which just isn't a good development model for large projects.
http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net
Do you really think people will know that a floppy disk icon is supposed to mean "save as"? When I see a floppy disk icon, I usually think "put this file somewhere that I will never want to access it again because it probably will be exposed to an insignificant magnetic field and will have all its bits scrambled into tiny pieces like eggs with little bits of chewy spam."
AFAIK, telenet is still around, but it's sprintnet now. I don't know who or what still uses it, though; does anyone else have more information than I do?
As for using it as a BBS door game, that would be pretty slick, but a huge security hole. But how about adding RIP or NAPLPS graphics?
Excuse me while a go write a program that will help Windows render my wallpaper as a text box of ASCII characters...
I think someone's already done that.
It's a window manager for your terminal. http://linuz.sns.it/~max/twin/
Cutting of someone's ISP without warning is like losing phone service without warning and not being able to get the same number again once phone service is resumed. It can screw your whole life up and I feel sorry for the people I know who aren't technical enough to buy and manage their own domain.
If you are really so attached to the internet that losing your ISP screws up your life, then you really ought to reconsider your priorities. There really are much more important things in life than instant messaging and email. There's also this thing called a phone; if you don't know how to use it, then just dial "0" and the operator will probably laugh at you, but will be more than willing to help.
Perhaps cutting off all these geeks who spend their entire lives online is a good thing. Perhaps now they will actually go somewhere and do something with a real person for a change. They complain all the time about not having social skills, and they use that excuse to justify their lack of direct contact with any other human being, but never once do they consider that the lack of social skills is due to lack of practice. I hope that can now change.
Access to the internet is a privelege, not a right. It's not the end of the world if you lose connectivity for a while. You will survive.
Alternatively, you can just use Ctrl-U.
I've been an on and off observer of meteor showers for many years. Each year, I watch the geminids and the quadrantids (because that's the time of year at which I actually have free time). I'm familiar with the red "fireballs"; I'll never forget watching the perseids in 1991 and seeing a fireball light up the sky, reflecting from the ocean (a very beautiful sight!).
But I've never before seen anything like what I saw last night: bright flashes of light moving across the sky, followed by an eerie green trail. Is the composition of this comet different from other comets, or was this just a result of strange lighting effects from the nearby city?
This is slashdot. Linux is everything you want it to be. It slices! It dices! It even runs emacs. All this for the amazing price of not much more than it costs to remove that bubble gum off the bottom of your shoe! Call now and we'll even throw in a CD-shaped bubble gum removal device for free! See if you get that useless feature with other operating systems; we Linux users KNOW what's important. Don't delay. Operators are sitting by playing Quake.
Check out this link for what might be some interesting benchmarks. Ruby seems to do quite well against Perl and Python (and in some cases better), but in other cases it is downright awful (look at the recursion problems). Ruby is not as mature as Perl or Python, so there are definitely some places where it could be optimized better.
One thing you may want to consider is that Ruby has many different ways of doing loops; some of them open a new scope (which takes time), and others just iterate in the current scope. So where you may have:
1..1000000.each do |i|
j = j + 1
end
You may want to rewrite as:
for i in 1..1000000 do
j = j + 1
end
or even:
1000000.times do
j = j.succ # faster than j = j + 1
end
it has several prefixes (@ and $) for varaibles to change the interpretation of those variables,
No, Ruby uses @ and $ to denote scope of a variable. Many people do the same thing in other languages (such as adding a trailling underscore to member variables in C++), because it's easy to get confused. Ruby forces the issue on you so that your code will be clean and easy to maintain; this is not a bad thing.
Python has several implementations available, whereas Ruby has only one.
Ruby currently has only one non-developmental implementation, but there are a couple of projects in the works for "Ruby-in-Ruby" and for a "Ruby to C" compiler (see rb2c and rubyjit in the RAA, for example).
There is the Ruby Application Archive (RAA), but it's pretty disorganized and there aren't nearly as many modules available as there are in CPAN. RAA.succ (the successor to the RAA, for those who don't speak Ruby) is a big topic right now. A project called RubyGems is in the works, and many other ideas have also been proposed.
I've written several modules for Ruby in C, and integration is easy. What's more, you get free garbage collection in your C code, just from calling Data_Wrap_Struct, because the object gets handled by the Ruby garbage collector and is garbage collected (it's free() function is called) sometime after you return to the Ruby interpreter (or as soon as you run out of memory and the GC gets invoked). If you want your code to be automatically wrapped, then there is also Swig support (though the Ruby module for Swig lacks the documentation that the TCL, Python, and Perl modules have).
Where the integration becomes tricky is when you try to interface with C++ code. Ruby uses setjmp and longjmp for its exception handling, so if you call rb_raise, you'd better make sure you don't have any objects sitting on your stack that might need to be destructed! I don't think Perl or Python do much better at this (though I could be wrong).
For a long time, I've thought that it might be fun for the students to learn programming using robots. Students would write software that reads data from stdin and writes to stdout, and controls a robot that moves around in a virtual environment.
The idea here is that the hardest part about freshman programming courses is not the material, but rather getting the students motivated to learn. By making it fun, creating a challenge, and perhaps offering a small prize for the best robot, I believe that students will learn the basics of the language much quicker than by writing mindless menu-based "hello, world" variants.
Additionally, by using stdin and stdout to control the robots rather than a specific API, students who already know a language can use that language, and students who don't already know a language can learn the one that is being taught in class. And it doesn't really matter which language is taught; C/C++ would probably do just as well as Java, or Lisp, or perhaps even Ruby.
One such environment is RealTimeBattle. It's written in GTK, so it should be reasonably portable (though I don't seen any Win32 ports on their webpage). There are a number of other variants out there, too, including GNU Robots, though that uses Guile for its language, so it's not as flexible.
Interesting article. Odd, though, that half the distributions mentioned are also noted to be dead projects.
Perhaps one of WinLinux's biggest features is that it was the first partitionless versions of Linux.
Hmm, I remember using doslinux long before WinLinux was ever around. Since it ran on top of umsdos, no partitioning was needed. I believe Slackware also supported umsdos (and possibly does still? dunno, I don't use it any more...).
Mandrake's GUI enhancements often require more memory than a stock Linux distribution, often requiring 32 MB just for their DrakX graphical installer.
Yet there's no mention of RedHat 7.1's ftp installer, which won't run on my system with 48 megs of RAM. I don't know how much it needs, but that's absurd. (Note that the NFS install works just fine with 48 megs).
Well, I don't know about Direct3D, but with OpenGL the library was designed in such a way as to make drawing over the network fast and easy. In fact, the bus to the video card is a network of sorts; it's much faster to upload a bunch of data over the "network" (bus) to the video card and have the video card process it than it is to process it in advance and send much more data to the card (that's why we have display lists, texture id's, etc.).
X has the potential to work in much the same way.
This means it also has the potential to be faster than a non-networked protocol, since the video card can do most of the processing without having to re-upload commands. Imagine how fast a window manager could be if you just put the borders into a GL display list!