One thing that is keeping me from letting Vista any where near my computer is the fear of excess DRM and lack of OpenGL support.
I cannot believe this FUD hasn't died down yet. In case you haven't noticed, no version of Windows provides hardware-accelerated OpenGL support out of the box. This includes Windows 2000 and XP. Such support has always been added by drivers supplied by hardware manufacturers. Why would Vista be any different?
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately firefox is still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch it grow."
I dunno man, I would rather use real-world statistics. Like... you know, marketshare and installed base?
"While the fanboys of XFS, JFS, ZFS may promise that their filesystems are faster, had no problems, secure and will not eat your data, it simply is not as proven as ext2 and ext3."
I am sorry, but you got this quite the wrong way around:)
XFS and JFS have been used in enterprise enviroments far longer than EXT2 (not to mention EXT3) has been in existance.
"I'm less worried about the console than a new desktop PCs. Rumour has it that 1000W and 1200W powersupplies are soon to be standard fair (my spaceheater is only 800W) to support these pigs (and that doesn't include the monitor or peripherials."
That is one ridiculous and unfounded rumor. Most PC's these days come with 300-350W power supplies. While it is obvious that power requirements have been risen over the years, the growth isn't anywhere near what you are implying it to be. It took us many years to go from 250W PSUs being standard to 350W PSUs and I don't expect 500W PSUs in off-the-shelf PC's for at least another 2 years. Let alone 1000W or 1200W.
"Lamassoure, a member of Jacques Chirac's UMP party, is proposing to add a tax of around 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every email sent."
For the ability to send 100 SMS a month, I pay a flat 2,00 euro/month fee to my GSM operator. Do the math, it comes out to 2 cents per 1 SMS. If they are somehow thinking that a 75% increase in price will fly, they need their heads checked.
There are exactly 2 reasons why email and SMS are very popular: they are convenient and cheap (with email being free). Take away one of the 2 (or in the worst case, both) and people will move on to something else.
"The content of your post clearly presents the fact that you are not part of the "we" here."
I assume the parent refers to "We" as the rational people on Slashdot, I know there aren't many.
"Linux needs no registry. Refer to/etc where everything related to a system-wide configuration belongs."
/etc is a huge mess across different distributions. The X config can be found in/etc... or in/etc/X11... or in/usr/local/X11... or wherever. It's even worse for other apps as they can have half of their settings somewhere in/home, whilst the rest are scattered all over the system. Sorry, but as long as there isn't a unified system of storing all system and application settings and configuration in ONE place, across ALL major Linux distribution, it's broken.
"We need a unified configuration system and configuration user interface.
There are several: xterm + vi, aterm + emacs, konsole + nano, the combinations are nearly endless!"
I am sorry, this isn't 1990 anymore. A user expects his system to be configurable by nice, friendly, intuitive and easy-to-use GUI apps that come with a nice in-built help section. It's what 95% of the world use, it's what 95% of the world expects.
"Again, several. The one that rocks the most IMO is KDevelop for GUI stuff. Emacs works for everything else."
So I guess you haven't worked on a large-scale project involving 50+ developers and containing millions lines of code, huh? Hint: there are quite a lot of reasons why so many programmers DEMAND the latest and greatest release of Visual Studio. It *IS* a great tool.
JAVA source code has been freely avaible for many years now. If that wasn't that case, you wouldn't be able to for example, build the native FreeBSD JDK...
"Exactly! I use the horribly outdated and underpowered Geforce FX6600 card and I can play ANY game very nicely. Even the Quake 4 watermark is very VERY playable at 1024X768 at mid level quality settings."
Until you try playing online.
I have a 2,45 Ghz AMD Opteron system with 1 GB ram and a 6600GT. Quake 4 singleplayer runs pretty smoothly at 1024x768 with high detail. However when I want to play online, the increased amount of action that happens on the screen forces me to turn the game down to 800x600, medium quality, static low detail lighting as well as turn off bump- and specular maps to get reasonable framerates.
At this point Quake 4 looks way worse than UT2004 and still runs about 3 times slower...
Quake: you could have a full-blown singleplayer map, tested and everything done in 2 weeks, by a single person. Quake 2: basically the same, but the development time increased slightly due to increased complexity of the game worlds Quake 3: map geometry development time alone pushed to over 2 months, designers now have to turn to other people for help with custom textures and meshes if they can't develop them by themselves (further increasing the dev time). Doom 3: singleplayer map development time pushed to over 6 months, now you need to make meshes, textures are WAY harder to do than in Quake 3 and be able to write map scripts.
Quake 3 was already pushing the level of patience custom content producers have, because you had to spent a relatively long amount of time working on it before having it reach a state where it would be comparable to "commercial quality". With Doom 3, the situation is even worse. I can only expect that the next generation of FPS games will REQUIRE a full blown team to make even small level packs (let alone Total Conversions). The days of the lone, all-around game map designer are long gone.
"Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, part of the solution? No way, it's part of the problem!
Every minute a student spends with Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition is one less minute spent learning how to program, and one more minute spent learning how to use Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition. Microsoft IDEs are enormously complex tools. They're quite useful in the hands of professionals who know how to use them, but they're an impediment to actually learning how to program. Students need to learn how the nuts and bolts of programming work before they start using a Microsoft IDE, which attempts to write code for them."
Has it crossed your mind that there is a reason why all professional Windows programmers DEMAND access to the latest version of Visual Studio? After all, they all surely can be using the Windows version of VIM, DevCPP or plain Notepad + GCC, right? An IDE will not help you learn programming, but it will definately cut down the amount of time you would otherwise have to spend on useless crap. In the real world out there, increased productivity = money.
"In defence of text messaging, in most markets/countries, it's a hell of a lot cheaper, or even free, versus the cost of making a one minute phone call, so it's a highly cost-efficient (not to mention more private) way of communicating."
Cost isn't even the issue for me, in my case 1 SMS message costs EXACTLY as much as a 1 minute phone call. It's all about the convinience. You can reply WHEN you want and you have time to think about WHAT you actually want to reply. Where I live (Finland), it's not uncommon for the youth to keep their phones on "silent mode" and communicate via SMS.
You also must realise that content providers are not really interested in "providing DVDrip-quality material for cheap". They are interested in making money, lots of it. They also realise that charging full price for DVDrip-quality material isn't going to fly. So why would content providers be interested in screwing around with all this? They can continue to ream us with high prices on hard media and will continue to do so as long as they possibly can.
"Perhaps not immediately, but within a few years a system will exist which will allow the streaming of any movie ever made via broadband instantly."
I have been hearing this for the past... what... 10 years now? The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come. As long as this is the case, hard media will continue to exist and drive big business. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies have a datarate of 8-9 MB/s (which is rather impressive, considering they are packing about 6 times the amount of video data due to the increased resolution, into the same bitrate DVD video is in). Forget about Asia, how many people in the US actually have lines that fast?
Funny you should say that Linus, seeing how much of a fucking disaster was changing the VM in the middle of the 2.4 kernel branch that is supposed to be STABLE.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot believe this FUD hasn't died down yet. In case you haven't noticed, no version of Windows provides hardware-accelerated OpenGL support out of the box. This includes Windows 2000 and XP. Such support has always been added by drivers supplied by hardware manufacturers. Why would Vista be any different?
I dunno man, I would rather use real-world statistics. Like... you know, marketshare and installed base?
...COST ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
I am sorry, but you got this quite the wrong way around
XFS and JFS have been used in enterprise enviroments far longer than EXT2 (not to mention EXT3) has been in existance.
No.
- Quake/QuakeWorld player.
That is one ridiculous and unfounded rumor. Most PC's these days come with 300-350W power supplies. While it is obvious that power requirements have been risen over the years, the growth isn't anywhere near what you are implying it to be. It took us many years to go from 250W PSUs being standard to 350W PSUs and I don't expect 500W PSUs in off-the-shelf PC's for at least another 2 years. Let alone 1000W or 1200W.
For the ability to send 100 SMS a month, I pay a flat 2,00 euro/month fee to my GSM operator. Do the math, it comes out to 2 cents per 1 SMS. If they are somehow thinking that a 75% increase in price will fly, they need their heads checked.
There are exactly 2 reasons why email and SMS are very popular: they are convenient and cheap (with email being free). Take away one of the 2 (or in the worst case, both) and people will move on to something else.
...I tell the police I simply forgot my encryption key?
I am really curious about this.
I assume the parent refers to "We" as the rational people on Slashdot, I know there aren't many.
I am sorry, this isn't 1990 anymore. A user expects his system to be configurable by nice, friendly, intuitive and easy-to-use GUI apps that come with a nice in-built help section. It's what 95% of the world use, it's what 95% of the world expects.
So I guess you haven't worked on a large-scale project involving 50+ developers and containing millions lines of code, huh? Hint: there are quite a lot of reasons why so many programmers DEMAND the latest and greatest release of Visual Studio. It *IS* a great tool.
JAVA source code has been freely avaible for many years now. If that wasn't that case, you wouldn't be able to for example, build the native FreeBSD JDK...
WOW, I couldn't possibly disagree more.
You got that vise-versa. Players that support DRM actually play more files compared to those which don't.
So you run an ancient OS on an ancient CPU and you expect what to happen exactly?
Until you try playing online.
I have a 2,45 Ghz AMD Opteron system with 1 GB ram and a 6600GT. Quake 4 singleplayer runs pretty smoothly at 1024x768 with high detail. However when I want to play online, the increased amount of action that happens on the screen forces me to turn the game down to 800x600, medium quality, static low detail lighting as well as turn off bump- and specular maps to get reasonable framerates.
At this point Quake 4 looks way worse than UT2004 and still runs about 3 times slower...
Quake: you could have a full-blown singleplayer map, tested and everything done in 2 weeks, by a single person.
Quake 2: basically the same, but the development time increased slightly due to increased complexity of the game worlds
Quake 3: map geometry development time alone pushed to over 2 months, designers now have to turn to other people for help with custom textures and meshes if they can't develop them by themselves (further increasing the dev time).
Doom 3: singleplayer map development time pushed to over 6 months, now you need to make meshes, textures are WAY harder to do than in Quake 3 and be able to write map scripts.
Quake 3 was already pushing the level of patience custom content producers have, because you had to spent a relatively long amount of time working on it before having it reach a state where it would be comparable to "commercial quality". With Doom 3, the situation is even worse. I can only expect that the next generation of FPS games will REQUIRE a full blown team to make even small level packs (let alone Total Conversions). The days of the lone, all-around game map designer are long gone.
...with APPLAUSE
I guess you geeks can get the reference.
Maybe you mean increasing install base? Apple worldwide marketshare hasn't been over 3% for many years.
Has it crossed your mind that there is a reason why all professional Windows programmers DEMAND access to the latest version of Visual Studio? After all, they all surely can be using the Windows version of VIM, DevCPP or plain Notepad + GCC, right? An IDE will not help you learn programming, but it will definately cut down the amount of time you would otherwise have to spend on useless crap. In the real world out there, increased productivity = money.
Cost isn't even the issue for me, in my case 1 SMS message costs EXACTLY as much as a 1 minute phone call. It's all about the convinience. You can reply WHEN you want and you have time to think about WHAT you actually want to reply. Where I live (Finland), it's not uncommon for the youth to keep their phones on "silent mode" and communicate via SMS.
You also must realise that content providers are not really interested in "providing DVDrip-quality material for cheap". They are interested in making money, lots of it. They also realise that charging full price for DVDrip-quality material isn't going to fly. So why would content providers be interested in screwing around with all this? They can continue to ream us with high prices on hard media and will continue to do so as long as they possibly can.
I have been hearing this for the past... what... 10 years now? The cold, hard truth is that there are ENORMOUS markets (asia, russia, many countries in south america and africa) which WILL NOT have the bandwidth required for this for many years to come. As long as this is the case, hard media will continue to exist and drive big business. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies have a datarate of 8-9 MB/s (which is rather impressive, considering they are packing about 6 times the amount of video data due to the increased resolution, into the same bitrate DVD video is in). Forget about Asia, how many people in the US actually have lines that fast?
I thought this was a *BSD thread...
;)
Funny you should say that Linus, seeing how much of a fucking disaster was changing the VM in the middle of the 2.4 kernel branch that is supposed to be STABLE.