It's probably because you don't touch-type properly. Proper touch-typing keeps the wrists rather still, and involves a lot of flexing of the fingers, whereas the half-assed touch-typing that most people do involves more hand movement and less finger movement. Everyone I know who types as much as me who doesn't touch-type has little to no wrist problems, whereas I've touch-typed properly since I was 8 (I was bored and had a C64) and so I've had various carpal tunnel problems on and off for the last few years. My solution to it is to use programs like xwrits to force myself to not type for very long periods of time and to occasionally switch between various keyboards (a cheapo MS Natural clone, a DataHand, and a few others) and try to vary my typing style. For example, right now I'm typing with the cheapo Natural clone and using a semi-lackluster touchtyping style, though I've kinda been spoiled by the Datahand's keyboard layout, but I'm doing a pretty good job of letting my hands do most of the work rather than my fingers. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It took 3dfx long enough to realize that they needed to redo their 3D core, rather than keep on kludging on new features and marketing-hype to the same old tired Voodoo1 that, until now, all their chipsets have been based on. Finally they support real 32bit rendering, 24bit zbuffering, and stencils, which many programmers have been clamoring for for quite some time. Now maybe the 3dfx-induced standstill on game rendering technology can finally come to an end. 3D cards have had stencils, which are useful for several things (realtime, dynamic shadows being just one of them) for a couple years now, but nobody has yet to release a game using them; I have a feeling this is due largely to the fact that 3dfx owners would get hostile when their holiest card was no longer good enough.
Finally getting rid of the 256x256 texture resolution limit is a Good Thing as well. Even Quake2 uses textures larger than that, and on the Voodoo[1-3] chips it just looked blurry and crappy because of it.
That said, I wonder what sort of marketing spin 3dfx's wonderful PR people will put on this decision, when for the longest time they were constantly saying how worthless 32bpp rendering and large textures and the like were. I also wonder if these chips will have true accumulator buffers (the press release didn't say anything about this) or their bastardized, crippled "T-buffer" crap. I also wish they'd drop extending Glide (for a number of reasons) and only have Glide 3 for backwards compatability, especially since Glide can be relatively trivially implemented in terms of OpenGL and adding on more features to Glide to try to make it catch up will just cause more cumbersomeness and an even greater rift between their Windows and Linux support. (I feel even sorrier for Darryl Strauss if he's got to do even more for-free work on extending Glide for a relatively thankless company.)
On the whole, though, 3dfx has a chance to actually redeem themselves with this new card. I hope they don't blow it; I'm all for giving them another chance. I just hope that they decide to actually have a good product instead of good marketing. For the longest time they seem to have just been resting on their laurels from having been the first usable (and not even decent) 3D card on the market. Maybe now that can finally change. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I use JPilot for desktop-side editing of the Big Four PDBs and synchronizing the changes, but I have lots more programs than just the Big Four that I want to keep backed up. In the meantime, I've been thinking of hacking conduit functionality into it (or, better yet, into pilot-link itself) but I'm not quite sure where to begin and it seems to me that malsync would need to be hacked as well, since the whole point to conduits is a single-session form of the separate syncs.
Doesn't JPilot just call pilot-link anyway? I mean, that's what it looks like it does...
I think the easiest way to add in conduits would be to add something into the pilot-link library for a sync program to happen in an already-existing sync session. Nice and simple, yaknow? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Kinda hard to emulate something without a dedicated CPU to emulate. Pong was purely transistor-based, hard-coded logic. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm, perhaps this is one of those places where Steven Levy's pontification in Hackers was somewhat inaccurate then.:) I seem to recall it stating that no actual CRT-based display was ever used on a system before, this particular CRT being an oscilloscope hacked as a vector display. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Actually, they didn't have text yet. Text was a very advanced display capability yet to be seen. Spacewar's display involved an oscilloscope and a ramp generator.:) (Remember the Vectrex, or the original Star Wars arcade game?) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The display was the first computer-based CRT; they took an oscilloscope and hooked up outputs from the PDP11 to, IIRC, a ramp generator which made the oscilloscope act as a vector display. The first joystick was created for this game, as well, to stop the hackers' fingers from getting chewed up on the front panel switches. Read Hackers by Stephen Levy, as others have mentioned. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Similarly, in Albuquerque, it's quite common to see a "Don't mess with Texas" bumper sticker altered to say "mess with Texas." New Mexico has lots of anti-Texan resentment. Although nobody's been able to explain it, here's a list of factors which definitely apply:
that damned annoying drawl
thinking they invented spicy food (the hottest tex-mex can't hold a candle to your average New Mexican cuisine, which is much closer to authentic Mexican - spicy and yet still tastes good, not just spicy for the machismo factor or for covering up bad cooking)
thinking that New Mexico is another country (come on! it's just one state over!)
that damned 'Don't mess with Texas' thing...
A Nebraskan, a Texan, and a New Mexican find a lamp with a genie inside. In keeping with a polite manner, they decide to split the genie three ways, each getting one wish. The Nebraskan wished for his home state to always have rich and plentiful soil, and the Genie granted it. The Texan wished for his home state to be surrounded by a large impenetrable brick wall, so that nobody who hated the state could get in and soil it, and the Genie granted it. The New Mexican first asked some questions...
"The wall is tall, yes?"
"Taller than the tallest building in the state, master," replied the genie.
"And nothing can get in or out?"
"Nothing, master."
"I wish for you to fill it with water." --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
PalmPilots have decent Linux connectivity, but it's still not on-par with the Windows equivalent. For example, there's still no conduits (i.e. programs which run desktop-side to do special synchronization with certain Palm databases). It's quite usable, though, and there's generally workarounds (for example, I have a shell script called 'hotsync' which does three syncs, one for files, one for mail, and one for AvantGo).
In any case, assuming that a USB serial device can be setup to look like an ordinary/dev/ttyS* device, the current pilot-link stuff should work just fine. I've not used any of the USB stuff though. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
This is my absolute last post to this article. I doubt anyone will read it anyway, so I don't give a shit.
I shouldn't have to do more stuff simply because I've earned an automatic +1 score. I don't care about my karma. I think it's laughable that it's gotten as high as it has. But I shouldn't be penalized for having an on-the-average positive posting history. "The rules" used to be that if you have such a bonus, you get the bonus, no matter what.
I'm very much so playing within the rules. If I weren't, I'd be posting random insults as an AC. Oh wait, that's a certain AC's job. Never mind. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I wonder whatever happened to the days that an automatic +1 was a mark of pride, a reward. Come on, seriously now, does any post inherently deserve a higher initial score? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The assumption would be that since it was the first post, it was a 'first post,' and thus immediately should be moderated down. Of course, that theory only works if the first post is an obviously first-postish post, which this wasn't, as it had actual content. Thus, the new assumption would be that some moderator is on crack. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Of course Mesa's slower. With the exception of fxmesa, it's a software-only renderer right now. DRI and GLX are separate things which work with Mesa, but don't replace it and aren't part of it. Comparing Mesa to the OpenGL ICD is like comparing a Honda Civic with a racecar. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
My opinion (and this is, of course, just opinion) is somewhat the opposite... I find KDE/Qt to be much better, in many respects, than CDE/Motif. Qt is much more streamlined, efficient, and modern, and KDE is, as a result much faster. KDE is also much more flexible and configurable, and easier to use (IMO). It also looks much nicer, and if you don't like the look of it, you can change it easily. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
If your OpenGL-using program is dynamically linked against some GL (such as Mesa), it will generally immediately use the new GL libraries, and thus use the 3D functions. It has very little to do with X itself, and mostly to do with OpenGL. The only time the X server gets involved in the rendering itself (aside from synchronization, anyway) is if it's doing GLX (remote rendering where GL calls are encapsulated in X protocol messages).
For the most part, it's automatic. Quake3 will be pretty much automatic, for example, since it's linked against OpenGL correctly (i.e. dynamically against libGL). Quake2 is kinda borked in how it's linked to OpenGL, and so can only work with fxmesa unless you do a lot of serious tweaking. I'm not sure how Quake1 is. Since most Linux programs are distributed in source form, on average all you have to do is recompile, and at worst you'll just have to fire off an email to the maintainers of the program to properly link their binary dynamically against libGL (and ones improperly dynamically linked to libMesaGL, which has been deprecated, can be coerced into working with libGL anyway by just symlinking libMesaGL to libGL). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hey, now, no need to be rude. A lot of rendering is done with OpenGL these days, as although it's not as high-quality as true raytracing, a lot of raytracing can be faked very well. 3DS Max, for example, is all polygonal and OpenGL-accelerated. Also, with OpenGL it's relatively simple to get procedural curve primitives (such as NURBS) which are just as pixel-accurate as the raytraced counterparts (though you generally have to forego reflections, in that case).
Using OpenGL to do rendering is more common than you'd think. Also, there's more to rendering than doing the final render - it's nice to have a preview of the image too, and even if it's at lower quality, it's better to wait 10 seconds for a high-quality OpenGL render than 10 minutes for a low-quality raytrace. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I've noticed a huge influx of ACs lately who don't seem to understand the concept of a default score. I've gotten into quite a few flamewars recently because people were wondering why my crap posts are "moderated up" when really they start at 2, due to my high karma. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Actually, his exact words (I was at that talk too) were, "Currently, it's sometime around December the 48th." --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I'm all for payware. If someone wants to pay for it, they can. In the meantime, I prefer to use free equivalents, since even if they're later in coming, they tend to be a lot better. That and it doesn't cost me money up the wazoo.
Let me tell you my experience with 4front's OSS. It was decent, and nearly worth the $30 I paid for it ($20 base license, $10 additional for AWE64 functionality). Then I upgraded my computer (from a K6-233 to a Celeron 300A), and then the troubles began. First off, I changed my kernel's scheduler to operate at 1000Hz instead of the default 100Hz, and OSS was horribly confused by this. So I tried explaining this to the 4front guys. Their response was that I was obviously an evil overclocker, that soundcards are proven not to work on overclocked PCs, and that their product was only for newbies. This angered me, and I responded my views, stating that I wasn't an overclocker, but even if I was, a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 looks to the bus just like a normally-clocked P2-450, and that it would make no difference. This was all the 'proof' that the 4front representative needed to claim that I was a dirty overclocker. It took many messages to explain that I wasn't overclocking, and the problem was with the kernel scheduler, and that I had bought OSS for the purpose of having a fully-functioning AWE64, and if there wasn't any way for OSS to deal with a simple change in kernel scheduling latency, then there is a problem with OSS, and not with me, whether I was a "dirty overclocker" or not.
Eventually, I got my money back (I didn't even care about it, but they sent me a refund anyway even though it was over a year after I'd purchased the license), but it was still frustrating to have assumptions made about me and to be lambasted for something which was irrelevant to the discussion.
To sum up, they (4front) evidently only care about their largest market segment, because that's where their profit is, and don't care about any sort of improved quality of Linux multimedia, which is their business. I think 4front can go collectively screw an active toaster for all I care. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, antialiasing should be up to the game to do, as it typically involves fun manipulations of the accumulator buffer and multiply-rendering the scene using knowledge which, frankly, only the application can have. It looks like they're not allowing the application to access an accumulation buffer at all - this is bad, because then not even pro applications can do depth buffering or motionblur, since the accumulator buffer will be presumably tied up doing fullscreen AA. (You can mix-and-match these effects, but only if you're careful, know what you're doing, and don't mind a HUGE hit to the fillrate. It's all too easy to overflow the accumulator buffer, resulting in very nasty side effects.)
Now, I could be charitable and say that Xi is somehow just doing supersampling, but I know that isn't true because none of the chipsets it supports support supersampled operations. The only graphics hardware I know of which does are the top-of-the-line SGIs (in the Onyx2 territory); even the higher-end Octanes don't have this capability. Also, I think SGI has some evil patents on their particular technique, which I think involves doing the equivalent of accumulation-based AA but on a per-primitive basis; like, I think it stores the area affected by the primitive into a dedicated multisample buffer, does some serious blend-intensive stuff, and then blits the multisample buffer back into the image buffer. Someone else might be able to clear this up. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably because you don't touch-type properly. Proper touch-typing keeps the wrists rather still, and involves a lot of flexing of the fingers, whereas the half-assed touch-typing that most people do involves more hand movement and less finger movement. Everyone I know who types as much as me who doesn't touch-type has little to no wrist problems, whereas I've touch-typed properly since I was 8 (I was bored and had a C64) and so I've had various carpal tunnel problems on and off for the last few years. My solution to it is to use programs like xwrits to force myself to not type for very long periods of time and to occasionally switch between various keyboards (a cheapo MS Natural clone, a DataHand, and a few others) and try to vary my typing style. For example, right now I'm typing with the cheapo Natural clone and using a semi-lackluster touchtyping style, though I've kinda been spoiled by the Datahand's keyboard layout, but I'm doing a pretty good job of letting my hands do most of the work rather than my fingers.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Finally getting rid of the 256x256 texture resolution limit is a Good Thing as well. Even Quake2 uses textures larger than that, and on the Voodoo[1-3] chips it just looked blurry and crappy because of it.
That said, I wonder what sort of marketing spin 3dfx's wonderful PR people will put on this decision, when for the longest time they were constantly saying how worthless 32bpp rendering and large textures and the like were. I also wonder if these chips will have true accumulator buffers (the press release didn't say anything about this) or their bastardized, crippled "T-buffer" crap. I also wish they'd drop extending Glide (for a number of reasons) and only have Glide 3 for backwards compatability, especially since Glide can be relatively trivially implemented in terms of OpenGL and adding on more features to Glide to try to make it catch up will just cause more cumbersomeness and an even greater rift between their Windows and Linux support. (I feel even sorrier for Darryl Strauss if he's got to do even more for-free work on extending Glide for a relatively thankless company.)
On the whole, though, 3dfx has a chance to actually redeem themselves with this new card. I hope they don't blow it; I'm all for giving them another chance. I just hope that they decide to actually have a good product instead of good marketing. For the longest time they seem to have just been resting on their laurels from having been the first usable (and not even decent) 3D card on the market. Maybe now that can finally change.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Doesn't JPilot just call pilot-link anyway? I mean, that's what it looks like it does...
I think the easiest way to add in conduits would be to add something into the pilot-link library for a sync program to happen in an already-existing sync session. Nice and simple, yaknow?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Okay, now that's just plain cool. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Kinda hard to emulate something without a dedicated CPU to emulate. Pong was purely transistor-based, hard-coded logic.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hm, perhaps this is one of those places where Steven Levy's pontification in Hackers was somewhat inaccurate then. :) I seem to recall it stating that no actual CRT-based display was ever used on a system before, this particular CRT being an oscilloscope hacked as a vector display.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No, silly, it's a Pearl script, not PERL! ;)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Actually, they didn't have text yet. Text was a very advanced display capability yet to be seen. Spacewar's display involved an oscilloscope and a ramp generator. :) (Remember the Vectrex, or the original Star Wars arcade game?)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The display was the first computer-based CRT; they took an oscilloscope and hooked up outputs from the PDP11 to, IIRC, a ramp generator which made the oscilloscope act as a vector display. The first joystick was created for this game, as well, to stop the hackers' fingers from getting chewed up on the front panel switches. Read Hackers by Stephen Levy, as others have mentioned.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
- that damned annoying drawl
- thinking they invented spicy food (the hottest tex-mex can't hold a candle to your average New Mexican cuisine, which is much closer to authentic Mexican - spicy and yet still tastes good, not just spicy for the machismo factor or for covering up bad cooking)
- thinking that New Mexico is another country (come on! it's just one state over!)
- that damned 'Don't mess with Texas' thing...
A Nebraskan, a Texan, and a New Mexican find a lamp with a genie inside. In keeping with a polite manner, they decide to split the genie three ways, each getting one wish. The Nebraskan wished for his home state to always have rich and plentiful soil, and the Genie granted it. The Texan wished for his home state to be surrounded by a large impenetrable brick wall, so that nobody who hated the state could get in and soil it, and the Genie granted it. The New Mexican first asked some questions..."The wall is tall, yes?"
"Taller than the tallest building in the state, master," replied the genie.
"And nothing can get in or out?"
"Nothing, master."
"I wish for you to fill it with water."
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I don't have any problem with their site...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
In any case, assuming that a USB serial device can be setup to look like an ordinary /dev/ttyS* device, the current pilot-link stuff should work just fine. I've not used any of the USB stuff though.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yeah, just change /home to an NFS mount.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I shouldn't have to do more stuff simply because I've earned an automatic +1 score. I don't care about my karma. I think it's laughable that it's gotten as high as it has. But I shouldn't be penalized for having an on-the-average positive posting history. "The rules" used to be that if you have such a bonus, you get the bonus, no matter what.
I'm very much so playing within the rules. If I weren't, I'd be posting random insults as an AC. Oh wait, that's a certain AC's job. Never mind.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I wonder whatever happened to the days that an automatic +1 was a mark of pride, a reward. Come on, seriously now, does any post inherently deserve a higher initial score?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
The assumption would be that since it was the first post, it was a 'first post,' and thus immediately should be moderated down. Of course, that theory only works if the first post is an obviously first-postish post, which this wasn't, as it had actual content. Thus, the new assumption would be that some moderator is on crack.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Of course Mesa's slower. With the exception of fxmesa, it's a software-only renderer right now. DRI and GLX are separate things which work with Mesa, but don't replace it and aren't part of it. Comparing Mesa to the OpenGL ICD is like comparing a Honda Civic with a racecar.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
My opinion (and this is, of course, just opinion) is somewhat the opposite... I find KDE/Qt to be much better, in many respects, than CDE/Motif. Qt is much more streamlined, efficient, and modern, and KDE is, as a result much faster. KDE is also much more flexible and configurable, and easier to use (IMO). It also looks much nicer, and if you don't like the look of it, you can change it easily.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
For the most part, it's automatic. Quake3 will be pretty much automatic, for example, since it's linked against OpenGL correctly (i.e. dynamically against libGL). Quake2 is kinda borked in how it's linked to OpenGL, and so can only work with fxmesa unless you do a lot of serious tweaking. I'm not sure how Quake1 is. Since most Linux programs are distributed in source form, on average all you have to do is recompile, and at worst you'll just have to fire off an email to the maintainers of the program to properly link their binary dynamically against libGL (and ones improperly dynamically linked to libMesaGL, which has been deprecated, can be coerced into working with libGL anyway by just symlinking libMesaGL to libGL).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Using OpenGL to do rendering is more common than you'd think. Also, there's more to rendering than doing the final render - it's nice to have a preview of the image too, and even if it's at lower quality, it's better to wait 10 seconds for a high-quality OpenGL render than 10 minutes for a low-quality raytrace.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I've noticed a huge influx of ACs lately who don't seem to understand the concept of a default score. I've gotten into quite a few flamewars recently because people were wondering why my crap posts are "moderated up" when really they start at 2, due to my high karma.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Actually, his exact words (I was at that talk too) were, "Currently, it's sometime around December the 48th."
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Let me tell you my experience with 4front's OSS. It was decent, and nearly worth the $30 I paid for it ($20 base license, $10 additional for AWE64 functionality). Then I upgraded my computer (from a K6-233 to a Celeron 300A), and then the troubles began. First off, I changed my kernel's scheduler to operate at 1000Hz instead of the default 100Hz, and OSS was horribly confused by this. So I tried explaining this to the 4front guys. Their response was that I was obviously an evil overclocker, that soundcards are proven not to work on overclocked PCs, and that their product was only for newbies. This angered me, and I responded my views, stating that I wasn't an overclocker, but even if I was, a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450 looks to the bus just like a normally-clocked P2-450, and that it would make no difference. This was all the 'proof' that the 4front representative needed to claim that I was a dirty overclocker. It took many messages to explain that I wasn't overclocking, and the problem was with the kernel scheduler, and that I had bought OSS for the purpose of having a fully-functioning AWE64, and if there wasn't any way for OSS to deal with a simple change in kernel scheduling latency, then there is a problem with OSS, and not with me, whether I was a "dirty overclocker" or not.
Eventually, I got my money back (I didn't even care about it, but they sent me a refund anyway even though it was over a year after I'd purchased the license), but it was still frustrating to have assumptions made about me and to be lambasted for something which was irrelevant to the discussion.
To sum up, they (4front) evidently only care about their largest market segment, because that's where their profit is, and don't care about any sort of improved quality of Linux multimedia, which is their business. I think 4front can go collectively screw an active toaster for all I care.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Now, I could be charitable and say that Xi is somehow just doing supersampling, but I know that isn't true because none of the chipsets it supports support supersampled operations. The only graphics hardware I know of which does are the top-of-the-line SGIs (in the Onyx2 territory); even the higher-end Octanes don't have this capability. Also, I think SGI has some evil patents on their particular technique, which I think involves doing the equivalent of accumulation-based AA but on a per-primitive basis; like, I think it stores the area affected by the primitive into a dedicated multisample buffer, does some serious blend-intensive stuff, and then blits the multisample buffer back into the image buffer. Someone else might be able to clear this up.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I prefer to think of it as actually being imaginative.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.