I will answer this as politely as I can, based on the fact that you, being an AC, wouldn't know how the posting system works for high karmas. Basically, the +1 bonus is given by default. You have to actively choose not to apply it. It was originally a mandatory mark of pride, of sorts, of being a consistently good poster. It has only been very recently that you were even able to not have it applied, and even then you have to make a conscious choice to do it. I usually forget to check the checkbox until it's too late. After this thread, I will definitely try to make more of a conscious effort to check the box when appropriate.
And as I said, I did read the article, just not in incredible detail. It appeared to only talk about various fusion techniques, and not about the various forms of atomic bomb.
There is no need to cuss. I have tried to relent on the points where I have been mistaken. If you look at the thread by posting order, you'll see that after something has been pointed out to me I generally relent on it. People tend to relent more freely when they're not insulted or yelled at. It is also very hard to be apologetic or relenting when someone is being yelled at and insulted for being a "fucking moron." Especially by ACs who don't understand the posting mechanism for karmas >20. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Broadcast power is in use, in a very limited fashion. You know those crystal radio kits you get at Radio Shack for $6? Well, those, and other crystal radios, are powered off of broadcast power. I'm not a physics type, so I don't really understand the mechanism, but my impression is that the crystal (or diode, in the newer ones) converts the power from all the random radio stations out there into just enough power to power its incredibly-simple AM radio. If anything, that's proof that it's possible on a wide scale, and that Marconi's abuse of the possibility didn't lead to a complete loss of broadcast power.:)
My main problem with broadcast power is that any usable levels of electricity in the air will make things difficult on our modern transistor-based way of life. It's already hard enough to keep CPUs from crashing from their own stray electrons. We'd need to start having properly-shielded computer cases if we're going to go to broadcast power on a nontrivial scale. Fortunately, I don't see a problem with having to actually shield the computer.:) The other problem which people are quick to point out is there's no way for this to be regulated; the only way I can see is that the tesla magnifiers would have to be government-subsidized, probably with a massive tax on broadcast-powered consumer goods or something, thus basically paying the power bills up front or something.
But broadcast power coupled with cheap fusion could easily lead to utopia, if humans at large can get altruism through their thick skulls.... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Eh, whatever. I keep forgetting to do that. It's not like the option's always been there, but I've been using slashdot for well over a year now and the simple 'type and hit submit' mentality dies hard.:) I'm trying to remind myself to check it when appropriate these days, but it usually just slips my mind. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, although it's not very educational, Stephen Baker is working on Tux: A Quest for Herring, a Mario64-esque game. I mention this because he uses his kid as his primary beta-tester.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Er, no, not quite. Usually I post either because I think I have something to say or because I'm horribly bored and want to contribute my two cents. I don't care about my karma, except that I was explaining why my post's score was 2. You might want to look at my user info and notice how in general, I have a high number of posts on certain threads and almost none on most others. You might also notice that I have very few upwards moderations within the last few weeks; if people are being fooled, there sure aren't that many of them. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They Might Be Giants. Though they got at least part of the lyrics from an old Golden Books book about the sun. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ah, okay. I guess my memory of how this stuff works from high school chemistry has gotten flaky.:) (Yes, they taught it in my chemistry class. Part of an example of how the public education system has gone downhill. Oh, and they didn't teach it at all in any of my college courses.)
As far as helium balloons, that was what I was trying to get at with the "boon to the balloon animal industry" comment. (Yes, I know you don't use helium in balloon animals.) Isn't helium generally 'mined' from areas with high levels of alpha particles anyway? If my (obviously flaky) memory serves, helium was discovered around the same areas that radium was, correct? --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ah, sorry. My bad. I'm a CS geek, not a history or physics buff.:) My foot would be in my mouth but I'm not that flexible... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hey, thanks for calling me an idiot. A random insult from an AC; I'm mortally wounded. Okay, so I might not know everything about what I talk about, and sometimes tend to run at the mouth about certain things. Those posts rarely get moderated up. It's the other things I post where I do know what I'm talking about which do. Of course, it doesn't help that you phrased your previous message (assuming this is the same AC) in such a way that I'd be unable to make a kindly response. Generally when someone points out I'm wrong, I accept that I'm wrong, and try to act civilly about it. It's just rather hard to do that when someone insults me for being wrong. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Admittedly, I've never had to deal with XiG's tech support, but everything I've heard about them is that they never acknowledge bug reports and just tend to sit on bugs for a long time. Just because a company has a support department doesn't mean things will get fixed. To the contrary, if you email the XFree people about a bug, they will try their best to fix it.
I wasn't making any claims as to Gnome's reliability. I know how much it sucks. I was just citing it as an example of one of the many free software choices which you can use instead of CDE. Personally, I prefer KDE, and I rarely even use a desktop environment anyway (I just use straight fvwm2). Also, if you want a functional, usable system without any downtime, Enlightenment isn't exactly the best WM to use.
Also, XFree 4.0 does have separate drivers dynamically linked to a single server.
For developer vs. executive... well, yes, you have a valid point assuming proprietary, binary-only closed-source software. The only such program I use is Netscape. I'm not paying for RAID on my home system, but that has more to do with the fact that Linux didn't cost me anything for the total package anyway. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
It wasn't moderated up. I have a default score of 2. My karma is 85 or thereabouts.:)
Yes, I've heard of the hydrogen bomb. I was under the impression that most nuclear bombs are Uranium (and fission) based, as they have much more destructive power than H-bombs. Yes, I know, H-bombs were what ended WW2. Yes, I was using a sweeping generalization, and wasn't thinking completely straight. My bad, and no need to be insulting. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Er, I think you're getting fusion and fission confused. Fusion generally involves deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron) into helium. That is, 2(1p,1n) becomes one helium, i.e. (2p,2n). All that comes out besides energy and neutrinos is a boon to the balloon animal industry.:)
Fission goes the other way. It's what takes large isotopes such as U238 and splits them apart into smaller atoms, which then spew off the extra neutrons.
Hey, here's an idea... have a fission reactor surrounded by Hydrogen-rich water. The excess neutrons convert the free hydrogen in the water into deuterium. Then you use the deuterium as fusionable mass.:) (I know, that's impractical on many stages, but it was a silly thought.)
But anyway, if you ever get confused about the direction of the atomic reactions, just remember: the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen becomes helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. (This helps because helium has a higher atomic number than hydrogen, indicating that the atoms fuse together - hence fusion - rather than break (fissure) apart.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
My strategy is similar, though I only have two zones - accounts I care about, and accounts I don't. I have a set of 3 or 4 pronounceable-linenoise passwords I cycle through periodically (so far I've yet to have any problem with this); lately every time I cycle back to one, I change one character from a letter to a h4x0r-sp33k letter, though I keep that to letters which have a tactile mapping (e to 3, o to 0) since that also coincidentally makes it so that on my Datahand I just push down the numbershift key.
Personally, I don't see the need to change them very often. I don't let people see them while I'm typing them (touchtyping has many advantages:) and I usually ssh to other systems. The only ones I don't ssh to are the ones I don't care about anyway (such as slashdot and the various MUCKs I'm on), and for those I just use a common word. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh god... I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I scrolled down and saw more and more repetitive art, with basically the same motif on both sides of the page.:) That's just too funny... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They probably used winelib (aka libwine), the basis of Wine. Wine is not an emulator, but an alternate binary loader which dynamically relinks Windows programs to winelib. Kinda screwy.:) I wouldn't be surprised at all if Corel just used winelib to 'port' (i.e. recompile) their Windows programs for Linux; I believe their whole interest in supporting Wine was specifically for this point. (After all, any functionality added into winelib gets implicitly added into Wine.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, shortly after getting the G400 which I won in LokiHack, I tried this out, and all it did was cause Xfree to hang, hard. Then again, I didn't really give it what could be considered a fair shake, but I'm rather busy trying to get my life in order these days. (Though you wouldn't know it by the amount I've been posting to/. recently.:)
When I had a TNT card (well, I still HAVE it, just not installed:) the nVidia-provided GLX driver was nice, but not nice enough to put up with the server instability it introduced. For now, I'm content with software rendering; as I've said elsewhere, it helps me get my OpenGL code as fast as possible, at the very least.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I'm not saying it was dishonest, but that it was using Microsoftian half-truths. X servers can quite easily crash the kernel, yes, and AccelX is just as likely as XFree, though XFree has the distinct advantage that someone who is so inclined can fix it.
I personally feel that free software has caught up to commercial software. We don't need CDE or Motif; we have KDE and Qt, or Gnome and GTK, or Windowmaker and GNUstep, or...
I think you're getting drivers (the different servers/drivers in XFree) and 'editions' (having different versions of CDE for developers and executives, and different versions for notebooks and desktops) confused. The difference between the different Xi editions seems to be equivalent to WinNT Server vs. Workstation; there's no technology difference, just a price, interface and licensing difference. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
One of Xi's many Accelerated X ads doesn't exactly make them seem honest to anyone who knows what they're talking about. They make a lot of implied connections between the Linux kernel's stability and AccelX's, and imply (but never state) that XFree86 (they only refer to 'an X server') is inherently unstable. They also lovingly embrace the older closed standards, such as CDE and Motif, and appear to love trapping their customers into using those highly proprietary products.
My advice: Don't buy this GL server. Wait for XFree 4. Just because they're first to market doesn't mean they're the best; personally, I can't stand the thought of supporting any company which resorts to Microsoftian tactics to try to put themselves above the rest of the Linux world.
Speaking of Microsoftian tactics, they even have separate versions of their CDE for executives and developers each on desktop and laptop computers! Four different versions "optimized" to the supposedly different needs of different users, rather than having a single product which can be tuned to the needs of the individual! Pathetic. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
From Xi's homepage they have some feature lists for the entertainment vs. professional versions. According to this, the entertainment version only allows one 3D window at any given time, is OpenGL 1.1.1 compliant, and does, in fact, support stencil buffers. The professional version is basically the same except it supports multiple rendering windows, color index mode (which, frankly, I don't think anyone cares about anymore), overlay planes (if available in hardware), and better display list management, among some other miscellaneous things.
Basically, this amounts to "only professionals need multiple GL contexts, and so you need to pay 2.5x as much to get multiple GL contexts." I find this somewhat outrageous, myself. They also make a big deal about features which are standard parts of OpenGL and which, as I already stated, are basically just parts of a graphics card driver which are only being enabled for people willing to pay more.
Also, 64 MB RAM for an X server? That's just beyond ridiculous. (That's for both the entertainment and pro versions.)
None of the feature lists say anything about GLX (network-transparent OpenGL), either. XFree can do GLX now.
Oh, another thing: they are a bit incomplete, at best, when saying what cards they support. The only nVidia chipset they seem to support is the TNT2 - they don't have any listed support for the TNT, or the Riva 128 series. They also don't have any listed supported Matrox cards. For their sake I hope they just forgot to complete their supported cards list. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Matrox is supported as well; Matrox released the specs to the G200 some time ago (and the G400 is basically a faster version of the G200 with a few more features; it's low-level compatible, apparently). Xi has a history of trying to pollute the free software world with important commercial software; it's well-known that they like to sling mud at XFree86 to try to sell AcceleratedX, for example. If they took a route that MetroX did (make a commercially-supported XFree-based server and contribute their changes back into the XFree codebase) I wouldn't have a problem with them, but as it is, they make a big deal over nothing, and charge lots of money for it.
Yes, they're the first to release a commercial hardware OpenGL-capable X server for Linux. nVidia released an alpha-quality free OpenGL-capable X server quite some time ago, Matrox released the specs for one... I can't help but wonder if Xi has taken the various design documents put on the web by the various parties developing the free servers and used them to try to undercut them, beating them to market and trying to make a first impression.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm waiting for XFree 4.0. I know they can deliver, and will put out something which will hopefully work much better, and will certainly be freer. I'd be willing to accept a slightly slower OpenGL performance if it meant not having to spend $100 for a video card driver. So far the various clued-in vendors seem to be supporting the XFree efforts, in the meantime. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I wonder what 'added functionality' will be in the professional edition on top of the entertainment edition. I'm quite concerned that they may consider the advanced OpenGL functionality (stencils, accumulation buffer) to be something which only the professional edition should have. Games are starting to use them for shadows, reflections, and motionblur. It used to be that having to support 3dfx cards led to stencil/accumulator-less legacy.
Regardless, what functionality could pros need which isn't in the entertainment edition? Don't they realize OpenGL is OpenGL, and that to restrict the hardware based on what amounts to not paying as much for drivers is somewhat asinine? If the professional edition means having better/faster emulation for what the card doesn't support in hardware, that's fine, but if it means crippling the hardware, that's outrageous. Then again, $100 is a bit outrageous for a video card driver, too.:P
I'm just going to wait for XFree 4.0. It'll be out soon enough; in the meantime, Mesa's software renderer is enough for me. (Yes, it's slow, but that just helps me optimize my code even better.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Not quite. The Rush, Banshee, and Voodoo3 series all can do windowed 3D as well. However, I think I have a better explanation as to why no 3dfx support - 3dfx cards just plain suck for actual 3D applications. Sure, they might be fine for games, but Xi's stuff tends to be for more practical, workstation-oriented applications. A real OpenGL card and not the crappy Voodoo chipsets are what's called for.
For example: 3dfx cards are limited to 256x256 textures, 16bpp rendering (don't give me any of that 22bit crap, all that is is a lowpass filter on the RAMDAC's lower bits to 'compensate' for the dithering), have a really crappy memory architecture, no stencil or accumulator buffer... there's no real reason for a workstation graphics developer to support what amounts to a kludgy legacy gaming card. A TNT1 is much cheaper and much more powerful, in terms of OpenGL features if not fillrate, than 3dfx's highest-end card.
That said, there's much less of a need for 3dfx support in the X server, Mesa already supports it through Daryll Strauss's Glide port. It works about as well as can be expected. (The buffer-copying thing you mentioned has been in fxmesa for quite some time, though it's quite slow.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
And, of course, this is all opinion, as you and I both stated.:) (Oh, and I'm a commandline freak too, I just happen to use commandlines within graphical environments; right now, of the 12 windows I have open, 10 are xterms, the other two being Emacs and Netscape.)
...OS is the collection of software needed to communicate with the hardware, and make the hardware work.
Well, isn't that what an X server does? It communicates with your graphics card and makes it work. Thus, X11 (maybe I should have been more specific and said 'the X11 server') is part of the OS.
Of course, even for windows, things like drivers etc, are part of the OS. But something like explorer is not, because it allready is high enough level to do things you don't specifically tell it to do. Application that take away action/control from the end-user, are exactly that, applications and no part of the OS.
Well, XFree86 is mostly a collection of large drivers, in the form of X11 servers.:) As far as taking away action or control from the end user, mmap() takes control away from me - I can't specify which pages are loaded into memory at any given time, for example; it's an abstraction of the low-level paging code. Also, doesn't sh and ls take away my complete control? They both identify inodes and content of files and deal with them in appropriate ways, rather than allowing me to specify what happens with the bits.:)
So the OS basically entails in my definition: The runtime system, drivers and a shell to communicate with the user.
Your definition is even wider than mine, then; explorer.exe is a shell, albeit a graphical one. I classify that as part of the operating environment, the part which makes an OS useful. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Slashdot Mirror
And as I said, I did read the article, just not in incredible detail. It appeared to only talk about various fusion techniques, and not about the various forms of atomic bomb.
There is no need to cuss. I have tried to relent on the points where I have been mistaken. If you look at the thread by posting order, you'll see that after something has been pointed out to me I generally relent on it. People tend to relent more freely when they're not insulted or yelled at. It is also very hard to be apologetic or relenting when someone is being yelled at and insulted for being a "fucking moron." Especially by ACs who don't understand the posting mechanism for karmas >20.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
My main problem with broadcast power is that any usable levels of electricity in the air will make things difficult on our modern transistor-based way of life. It's already hard enough to keep CPUs from crashing from their own stray electrons. We'd need to start having properly-shielded computer cases if we're going to go to broadcast power on a nontrivial scale. Fortunately, I don't see a problem with having to actually shield the computer. :) The other problem which people are quick to point out is there's no way for this to be regulated; the only way I can see is that the tesla magnifiers would have to be government-subsidized, probably with a massive tax on broadcast-powered consumer goods or something, thus basically paying the power bills up front or something.
But broadcast power coupled with cheap fusion could easily lead to utopia, if humans at large can get altruism through their thick skulls....
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Eh, whatever. I keep forgetting to do that. It's not like the option's always been there, but I've been using slashdot for well over a year now and the simple 'type and hit submit' mentality dies hard. :) I'm trying to remind myself to check it when appropriate these days, but it usually just slips my mind.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, although it's not very educational, Stephen Baker is working on Tux: A Quest for Herring, a Mario64-esque game. I mention this because he uses his kid as his primary beta-tester. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Er, no, not quite. Usually I post either because I think I have something to say or because I'm horribly bored and want to contribute my two cents. I don't care about my karma, except that I was explaining why my post's score was 2. You might want to look at my user info and notice how in general, I have a high number of posts on certain threads and almost none on most others. You might also notice that I have very few upwards moderations within the last few weeks; if people are being fooled, there sure aren't that many of them.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They Might Be Giants. Though they got at least part of the lyrics from an old Golden Books book about the sun.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As far as helium balloons, that was what I was trying to get at with the "boon to the balloon animal industry" comment. (Yes, I know you don't use helium in balloon animals.) Isn't helium generally 'mined' from areas with high levels of alpha particles anyway? If my (obviously flaky) memory serves, helium was discovered around the same areas that radium was, correct?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Ah, sorry. My bad. I'm a CS geek, not a history or physics buff. :) My foot would be in my mouth but I'm not that flexible...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Hey, thanks for calling me an idiot. A random insult from an AC; I'm mortally wounded. Okay, so I might not know everything about what I talk about, and sometimes tend to run at the mouth about certain things. Those posts rarely get moderated up. It's the other things I post where I do know what I'm talking about which do. Of course, it doesn't help that you phrased your previous message (assuming this is the same AC) in such a way that I'd be unable to make a kindly response. Generally when someone points out I'm wrong, I accept that I'm wrong, and try to act civilly about it. It's just rather hard to do that when someone insults me for being wrong.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I wasn't making any claims as to Gnome's reliability. I know how much it sucks. I was just citing it as an example of one of the many free software choices which you can use instead of CDE. Personally, I prefer KDE, and I rarely even use a desktop environment anyway (I just use straight fvwm2). Also, if you want a functional, usable system without any downtime, Enlightenment isn't exactly the best WM to use.
Also, XFree 4.0 does have separate drivers dynamically linked to a single server.
For developer vs. executive... well, yes, you have a valid point assuming proprietary, binary-only closed-source software. The only such program I use is Netscape. I'm not paying for RAID on my home system, but that has more to do with the fact that Linux didn't cost me anything for the total package anyway.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I admit, I skimmed the article. However, ICBMs are usually fission-based, not fusion-based.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yes, I've heard of the hydrogen bomb. I was under the impression that most nuclear bombs are Uranium (and fission) based, as they have much more destructive power than H-bombs. Yes, I know, H-bombs were what ended WW2. Yes, I was using a sweeping generalization, and wasn't thinking completely straight. My bad, and no need to be insulting.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Fission goes the other way. It's what takes large isotopes such as U238 and splits them apart into smaller atoms, which then spew off the extra neutrons.
Hey, here's an idea... have a fission reactor surrounded by Hydrogen-rich water. The excess neutrons convert the free hydrogen in the water into deuterium. Then you use the deuterium as fusionable mass. :) (I know, that's impractical on many stages, but it was a silly thought.)
But anyway, if you ever get confused about the direction of the atomic reactions, just remember: the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen becomes helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. (This helps because helium has a higher atomic number than hydrogen, indicating that the atoms fuse together - hence fusion - rather than break (fissure) apart.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Er, no, you're thinking of fission. Nuclear bombs use fission, not fusion.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Personally, I don't see the need to change them very often. I don't let people see them while I'm typing them (touchtyping has many advantages :) and I usually ssh to other systems. The only ones I don't ssh to are the ones I don't care about anyway (such as slashdot and the various MUCKs I'm on), and for those I just use a common word.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh god... I couldn't help but laugh out loud as I scrolled down and saw more and more repetitive art, with basically the same motif on both sides of the page. :) That's just too funny...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
They probably used winelib (aka libwine), the basis of Wine. Wine is not an emulator, but an alternate binary loader which dynamically relinks Windows programs to winelib. Kinda screwy. :) I wouldn't be surprised at all if Corel just used winelib to 'port' (i.e. recompile) their Windows programs for Linux; I believe their whole interest in supporting Wine was specifically for this point. (After all, any functionality added into winelib gets implicitly added into Wine.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
When I had a TNT card (well, I still HAVE it, just not installed :) the nVidia-provided GLX driver was nice, but not nice enough to put up with the server instability it introduced. For now, I'm content with software rendering; as I've said elsewhere, it helps me get my OpenGL code as fast as possible, at the very least. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I personally feel that free software has caught up to commercial software. We don't need CDE or Motif; we have KDE and Qt, or Gnome and GTK, or Windowmaker and GNUstep, or...
I think you're getting drivers (the different servers/drivers in XFree) and 'editions' (having different versions of CDE for developers and executives, and different versions for notebooks and desktops) confused. The difference between the different Xi editions seems to be equivalent to WinNT Server vs. Workstation; there's no technology difference, just a price, interface and licensing difference.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
My advice: Don't buy this GL server. Wait for XFree 4. Just because they're first to market doesn't mean they're the best; personally, I can't stand the thought of supporting any company which resorts to Microsoftian tactics to try to put themselves above the rest of the Linux world.
Speaking of Microsoftian tactics, they even have separate versions of their CDE for executives and developers each on desktop and laptop computers! Four different versions "optimized" to the supposedly different needs of different users, rather than having a single product which can be tuned to the needs of the individual! Pathetic.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Basically, this amounts to "only professionals need multiple GL contexts, and so you need to pay 2.5x as much to get multiple GL contexts." I find this somewhat outrageous, myself. They also make a big deal about features which are standard parts of OpenGL and which, as I already stated, are basically just parts of a graphics card driver which are only being enabled for people willing to pay more.
Also, 64 MB RAM for an X server? That's just beyond ridiculous. (That's for both the entertainment and pro versions.)
None of the feature lists say anything about GLX (network-transparent OpenGL), either. XFree can do GLX now.
Oh, another thing: they are a bit incomplete, at best, when saying what cards they support. The only nVidia chipset they seem to support is the TNT2 - they don't have any listed support for the TNT, or the Riva 128 series. They also don't have any listed supported Matrox cards. For their sake I hope they just forgot to complete their supported cards list.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Yes, they're the first to release a commercial hardware OpenGL-capable X server for Linux. nVidia released an alpha-quality free OpenGL-capable X server quite some time ago, Matrox released the specs for one... I can't help but wonder if Xi has taken the various design documents put on the web by the various parties developing the free servers and used them to try to undercut them, beating them to market and trying to make a first impression.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, I'm waiting for XFree 4.0. I know they can deliver, and will put out something which will hopefully work much better, and will certainly be freer. I'd be willing to accept a slightly slower OpenGL performance if it meant not having to spend $100 for a video card driver. So far the various clued-in vendors seem to be supporting the XFree efforts, in the meantime.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Regardless, what functionality could pros need which isn't in the entertainment edition? Don't they realize OpenGL is OpenGL, and that to restrict the hardware based on what amounts to not paying as much for drivers is somewhat asinine? If the professional edition means having better/faster emulation for what the card doesn't support in hardware, that's fine, but if it means crippling the hardware, that's outrageous. Then again, $100 is a bit outrageous for a video card driver, too. :P
I'm just going to wait for XFree 4.0. It'll be out soon enough; in the meantime, Mesa's software renderer is enough for me. (Yes, it's slow, but that just helps me optimize my code even better. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
For example: 3dfx cards are limited to 256x256 textures, 16bpp rendering (don't give me any of that 22bit crap, all that is is a lowpass filter on the RAMDAC's lower bits to 'compensate' for the dithering), have a really crappy memory architecture, no stencil or accumulator buffer... there's no real reason for a workstation graphics developer to support what amounts to a kludgy legacy gaming card. A TNT1 is much cheaper and much more powerful, in terms of OpenGL features if not fillrate, than 3dfx's highest-end card.
That said, there's much less of a need for 3dfx support in the X server, Mesa already supports it through Daryll Strauss's Glide port. It works about as well as can be expected. (The buffer-copying thing you mentioned has been in fxmesa for quite some time, though it's quite slow.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, isn't that what an X server does? It communicates with your graphics card and makes it work. Thus, X11 (maybe I should have been more specific and said 'the X11 server') is part of the OS.
Of course, even for windows, things like drivers etc, are part of the OS. But something like explorer is not, because it allready is high enough level to do things you don't specifically tell it to do. Application that take away action/control from the end-user, are exactly that, applications and no part of the OS.
Well, XFree86 is mostly a collection of large drivers, in the form of X11 servers. :) As far as taking away action or control from the end user, mmap() takes control away from me - I can't specify which pages are loaded into memory at any given time, for example; it's an abstraction of the low-level paging code. Also, doesn't sh and ls take away my complete control? They both identify inodes and content of files and deal with them in appropriate ways, rather than allowing me to specify what happens with the bits. :)
So the OS basically entails in my definition: The runtime system, drivers and a shell to communicate with the user.
Your definition is even wider than mine, then; explorer.exe is a shell, albeit a graphical one. I classify that as part of the operating environment, the part which makes an OS useful.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.