The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
GDI, QuickDraw, and Quartz2D are all hardware accelerated, and you'll even find GPU acceleration in frameworks above those (the functionality provided by such should embarrass X11 desktops), all the way to the compositing systems (yet again an embarrassment for X11 based cousins). How can you POSSIBLY think X11 can be optimized for underlying hardware in a way Windows/OS X analogs can't? Or that display hardware is underutilized in Windows and OS X compared to..... X11 DESKTOPS? The complete opposite is true with 3d accelerator cards everywhere today. You have to use window manager hacks to get any extra utility from these cards at all on a X11 desktop, where newer versions of Windows and OS X have hardware/GPU accelerated rendering and compositing APIs. Where are those in X11?
Now, I can't even imagine what you had meant by "behind the scenes", or why that sounds like such a good thing to you.. sometimes change is good. In this case, it wasn't necessary for non-X11 rendering systems to utilize hardware acceleration, but GPU acceleration for one thing necessitates new APIs. X11 has outlived most of its usefulness, look at flow diagrams for X w&wo DRI, it's pretty obvious. RDP does a better job at remoting a GUI than X on the same networks - with kerberos authentication, and encryption... and sound forwarding. Wake up and smell the roses.
I'm going to read stackoverflow.com from now on. This place is getting a tad stale:\
FTFA: "So computers might suck at maths, but there's always a solution available to circumvent their inherent weaknesses. And in that case, it's probably more accurate to say that computer programmers suck at maths - or at least some of them do."
Thank you, come again.
So in a system that should have clocks synchronized to less than a microsecond nobody bothered to run "ntpdate" even once in hundred days ?
Yes, obviously they just needed to ssh into their patriot missile air defense system, edit a few lines in/etc/inet/ntp.conf and svcadm restart ntp.
The obvious problem in the article, if you read it, is computer's finite precision, and how it is dealt with. By 'computer', the author could have easily included the system libraries that are actually doing all the rounding and overflows instead of implementing arbitrary precision in software.
Everyone defending the way 'computers' is used in this article, and conflating it with 'processor' is a complete idiot.
Fair enough, but I just can't follow the logic that smartphones will eat away at consumer GPS hardware, therefore Apple should buy a company that makes consumer GPS units, among other things.
You know, the overlapping bits usually go away when that happens, so.. what would Apple do with what's left? Is there something there they could not design themselves, better? I don't think so.
If the argument was "The iPhone has decent calculator software, therefore Apple should buy TI." I might bite, for reasons other than that flawed premise though.
uh huh.. like Apple has any interest in nautical or aviation GPS hardware, or any of the other dozens of things Garmin does besides tell you how to get to the nearest McDonalds.
Nevertheless, there is, which is why the fact that Snow Leopard "does not need as much hard disk space" is an expected outcome, not an achievement.
How much space would you save on YOUR OS by removing all redundant 32-bit code from a 64-bit install? Speaking about 64-bit, with the same line of reasoning one could expect Leopard to to need MORE disk space.
Obviously it wasn't the only place they trimmed things up, sheesh, give em some credit..
Do you need permission from the provider of wood to make chairs with it that you will sell? If I buy a vase and paint it, do I need to ask the maker for permission to resell it?
Do you have permission to use that copyrighted chair design? If the holder says you only have permission to use his exotic wood for the project, then so be it. Leave the project at home or design your own chair. You can even resell the boxed design kit along side whichever materials you want and probably get away with it. You cannot sell furniture fashioned from someone else's design without their permission, end of story.
And the odds of one out of millions will be the one is quite high (Unless only one person uses the app)
Unless the app in question is ldd, it's a special case.. oh.. crap, it's not.
However one is still heads and shoulders higher than the number of users of the windows app, even if there are more than a million using it.
The problem is, even in Linux, you are 1000000x more likely to have run into the problem many times before anyone decides to scrutinize the source and discover the problem. In windows it would get black listed in AV programs, in Linux, word of mouth would have to work. I really, really hope nobody believes that available source code means bad behavior has a reasonable chance of being detected before being exploited. That is hogwash.
Detecting the bad behavior would come first in either case, and both systems have tools for that.. UAC, SELinux, etc.
They clearly meant free, not gratis. Gratis is such a weak feature of software that I don't think it deserves to share a meanin with free.
Gratis is THE reason "free software" is as popular as it it today. I'm deadly serious. It's the best marketing free software has because John Q Public does not give a rat's ass about the other meaning of that word unless it's used in the context of people. The marketing implications alone are more than enough.
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group supported by some of the world's largest banks, recently issued guidelines urging businesses to carry out all online banking activities from 'a stand-alone, hardened, and completely locked down computer system from where regular e-mail and Web browsing [are] not possible.'
This is not the success of Linux, but the utter failure of... I blame all involved... to deliver a secure eCommerce platform.
When yahoo will render a perfectly forged email from "ebay.com" in two thousand-fuckity NINE, you know the Internet is a joke. SSL certificate policies are jokes. Web apps are a huuuge joke. Web browsers are a joke... it's just a really big toy. God I hope it dies. How about some GD regulation instead of proving once more that left to itself, the 'market' is a nice word for lots of greedy people who don't give a fuck.
I hope my grandchildren can use computers for business and pleasure -safely- without needing to understand the technical underpinnings of the entire electronic ecosystem. Usability needs to trump the desires of computer nerds. When you ask, "What will this be used for?" "Anything" is the wrong fucking answer, _EVERY_ _TIME_.
Daniel, the FCC is going to mandate that you disclose when you get paid to blog or make posts on sites like Slashdot.
When can we expect a breakdown of the money you earn from shilling for Apple? Not revealing your (only) source of income -- since being an Apple 'technician' can't earn you money (they 'just work', right?) -- , especially not the amount that you'd need to churn out a steady steam of slander like you currently do.
I'm breathlessly awaiting your full disclosure (that's 'sarcasm', Dan. I know you're not so good at writing, so take a second to look it up in the dictionary. No, not the OS X dictionary -- a real one). This should be entertaining.
Anything from Bloom/HDR to Anisotropic filtering back all the way to 3d textured FPSes. The jump from, say, Doom to Quake was entirely driven by uptake of hardware 3d acceleration.
Bull. It was (really) 3D and fully software rendered out the box. The 3D part is what drove Quake's success, not hardware. Everything in quake that actually took advantage of 3D hardware was a hack bolted on later. Like transparent water.. hehe.
I started C&C with C&C:Generals (which I really enjoyed, along with Zero Hour and now C&C3:Tiberium Wars). I later found Red Alert, and really did not enjoy it, especially since I didn't start with it.
To each his own.
If you didn't start with the original C&C, were teased by the included C&C2 trailer (google it), disappointed by it being cancelled, then grudgingly admit having fun with RA, then pre-ordered the next tiberium-themed C&C when it came out years later, with the little pewter action figure, and.. well.. if that game didn't rip your heart out..
You probably don't know the heartache real C&C fans have. EA killed them:\
PS All you talking about lore... rofl. Which one? The one with disk chucking grenadiers in it? Mechs? BEARS? Alternate cold war technology? (Could you even guess that later RA's take place in some alternate cold-war era? ALIENS? Kane as terrorist? Kane as time traveler? Kane as timeless godlike mythical alien herder wtf is he still alive? Tiberium as mysterious disease, Tiberium as a fucking weapon?? ALIENS?!?!?!?!
In any C&C MMO world, one thing will be certain. You can look forward to your deer eyed avatar being run over by a mammoth tank as you look on hopelessly. That will probably be a boss battle, low crawling around a tank while your casters* shrug off 120mm HEAP rounds a hundred feet away.
*Aliens + time travel = magic.. eventually. Proven over and over.
So sad that right click won. You can hear thousands of 90's RTS games crying from the grave. The slow death of PC gaming... giant mega games and a forgotten past:\
There has been a lot of hype about ZFS but what use is it in a desktop system? And honestly, while APT is great for desktop systems, I really wouldn't use it much on a server. So unless there is some amazing benefit for the average user with ZFS why even have this port as a main system?
You must be kidding. You can snapshot your whole root, or your home directory, or anything and automate it for backups. There is even integration with GNOME's Nautilus to browse ZFS snapshots at the file level. You can create new filesystems and snapshots on the fly, compress them, enforce quotas, export via NFS, send snaps to a remote system or dump as flat file, etc, etc, etc.. if you don't have enough disks to use single or dual parity RAID-Z, you can even have ZFS record multiple copies of each block. ALL of those have uses on desktop or workstation systems.
I'm not sure if freeBSD supports ZFS root or not, but Solaris does if you want a taste. If anything, ZFS-root is under-hyped. When troubleshooting updates, instead of booting into your old kernel with a trashed userland, you can boot into an old BOOT ENVIRONMENT. As easy as picking a different grub entry.
From OpenSolaris (other ZFS-root capable systems may use different commands, output BUTCHERED for junk filter) beadm list BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created opensolaris 25.05M static 2009 04 01 2033 snv_111b 111.89M static 2009 06 03 1846 snv_121 38.18M static 2009 08 31 1617 snv_122 42.10M static 2009 09 14 1522 snv_124 NR / 19.09G static 2009 10 01 2354
Those are whole root file system snapshots I can boot, consuming a piddly ~50MB each.
Junkfilter is retarded.. there is a moderation system for a reason, and this is a technical forum.
I would settle for being put to death at 85 to keep population under control, if it meant my bones, mussels and organs didn't age. One of the worst thing about watching someone get old is to see their self reliance taken away and needing someone to help them into and out of the bath, change their diaper, feed them and put them to bed. THE worst thing is realizing someday it could and probably will happen to you.
You would want to not age, remain healthy throughout your life, then be put to death at 85 years? Somehow, I imagine chasing runaway 84 yr olds becoming a big business.
AFAIK, the only reason a Windows system would need that is if you had an Airport Extreme with a printer attached to it. I've played around with it at work before, and there are actually a LOT of printer manufacturers that support zero-conf, and are detected by Bonjour. We also have Windows print servers, but I could see it being useful in a small workplace. It's analogous to UPnP, which is native to Windows, but I don't think it has the same hardware support zero-conf does.
Slashdot Mirror
The Windows and OSX abstractions for the display don't provide an API that allows these sorts of optimizations to be done behind the scenes. We have incredible display hardware with awesome features that go unused in these environments because the display abstractions do not allow for them.
GDI, QuickDraw, and Quartz2D are all hardware accelerated, and you'll even find GPU acceleration in frameworks above those (the functionality provided by such should embarrass X11 desktops), all the way to the compositing systems (yet again an embarrassment for X11 based cousins). How can you POSSIBLY think X11 can be optimized for underlying hardware in a way Windows/OS X analogs can't? Or that display hardware is underutilized in Windows and OS X compared to ..... X11 DESKTOPS? The complete opposite is true with 3d accelerator cards everywhere today. You have to use window manager hacks to get any extra utility from these cards at all on a X11 desktop, where newer versions of Windows and OS X have hardware/GPU accelerated rendering and compositing APIs. Where are those in X11?
Now, I can't even imagine what you had meant by "behind the scenes", or why that sounds like such a good thing to you.. sometimes change is good. In this case, it wasn't necessary for non-X11 rendering systems to utilize hardware acceleration, but GPU acceleration for one thing necessitates new APIs. X11 has outlived most of its usefulness, look at flow diagrams for X w&wo DRI, it's pretty obvious. RDP does a better job at remoting a GUI than X on the same networks - with kerberos authentication, and encryption... and sound forwarding. Wake up and smell the roses.
I'm going to read stackoverflow.com from now on. This place is getting a tad stale :\
Mod up.
FTFA:
"So computers might suck at maths, but there's always a solution available to circumvent their inherent weaknesses. And in that case, it's probably more accurate to say that computer programmers suck at maths - or at least some of them do."
Thank you, come again.
So in a system that should have clocks synchronized to less than a microsecond nobody bothered to run "ntpdate" even once in hundred days ?
Yes, obviously they just needed to ssh into their patriot missile air defense system, edit a few lines in /etc/inet/ntp.conf and svcadm restart ntp.
The obvious problem in the article, if you read it, is computer's finite precision, and how it is dealt with. By 'computer', the author could have easily included the system libraries that are actually doing all the rounding and overflows instead of implementing arbitrary precision in software.
Everyone defending the way 'computers' is used in this article, and conflating it with 'processor' is a complete idiot.
Fair enough, but I just can't follow the logic that smartphones will eat away at consumer GPS hardware, therefore Apple should buy a company that makes consumer GPS units, among other things.
You know, the overlapping bits usually go away when that happens, so.. what would Apple do with what's left? Is there something there they could not design themselves, better? I don't think so.
If the argument was "The iPhone has decent calculator software, therefore Apple should buy TI." I might bite, for reasons other than that flawed premise though.
So Apple would buy them because they now make a phone with a GPS inside it or a GPS with a phone inside it?
I thiiiiiiiink Apple can figure that much out on their own. It is something new to Garmin though.
uh huh.. like Apple has any interest in nautical or aviation GPS hardware, or any of the other dozens of things Garmin does besides tell you how to get to the nearest McDonalds.
Just read every third post on every third article for Christ's sake. Please, no more fucking plug plugs, we get it already.
It's not that slow twice in a row... so what's your point?
Nevertheless, there is, which is why the fact that Snow Leopard "does not need as much hard disk space" is an expected outcome, not an achievement.
How much space would you save on YOUR OS by removing all redundant 32-bit code from a 64-bit install? Speaking about 64-bit, with the same line of reasoning one could expect Leopard to to need MORE disk space.
Obviously it wasn't the only place they trimmed things up, sheesh, give em some credit..
Do you need permission from the provider of wood to make chairs with it that you will sell? If I buy a vase and paint it, do I need to ask the maker for permission to resell it?
Do you have permission to use that copyrighted chair design? If the holder says you only have permission to use his exotic wood for the project, then so be it. Leave the project at home or design your own chair. You can even resell the boxed design kit along side whichever materials you want and probably get away with it. You cannot sell furniture fashioned from someone else's design without their permission, end of story.
You know what's also awesome?! Sams Club gives away free bite sized pizza pockets!!
Totally rad!
+1 Informative !!!!11
Sorry dude, nothing personal. This whole page is just chock full of hilarious moderation, I can't help myself.
And the odds of one out of millions will be the one is quite high (Unless only one person uses the app)
Unless the app in question is ldd, it's a special case.. oh.. crap, it's not.
However one is still heads and shoulders higher than the number of users of the windows app, even if there are more than a million using it.
The problem is, even in Linux, you are 1000000x more likely to have run into the problem many times before anyone decides to scrutinize the source and discover the problem.
In windows it would get black listed in AV programs, in Linux, word of mouth would have to work. I really, really hope nobody believes that available source code means bad behavior has a reasonable chance of being detected before being exploited. That is hogwash.
Detecting the bad behavior would come first in either case, and both systems have tools for that.. UAC, SELinux, etc.
They clearly meant free, not gratis. Gratis is such a weak feature of software that I don't think it deserves to share a meanin with free.
Gratis is THE reason "free software" is as popular as it it today. I'm deadly serious. It's the best marketing free software has because John Q Public does not give a rat's ass about the other meaning of that word unless it's used in the context of people. The marketing implications alone are more than enough.
When you put in the number from the key fob, you're not sharing a password. You're proving that you have a specific device in your hand.
In most implementations, you enter a PIN along with the key fob number.
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group supported by some of the world's largest banks, recently issued guidelines urging businesses to carry out all online banking activities from 'a stand-alone, hardened, and completely locked down computer system from where regular e-mail and Web browsing [are] not possible.'
This is not the success of Linux, but the utter failure of... I blame all involved... to deliver a secure eCommerce platform.
When yahoo will render a perfectly forged email from "ebay.com" in two thousand-fuckity NINE, you know the Internet is a joke. SSL certificate policies are jokes. Web apps are a huuuge joke. Web browsers are a joke... it's just a really big toy. God I hope it dies. How about some GD regulation instead of proving once more that left to itself, the 'market' is a nice word for lots of greedy people who don't give a fuck.
I hope my grandchildren can use computers for business and pleasure -safely- without needing to understand the technical underpinnings of the entire electronic ecosystem. Usability needs to trump the desires of computer nerds. When you ask, "What will this be used for?" "Anything" is the wrong fucking answer, _EVERY_ _TIME_.
Daniel, the FCC is going to mandate that you disclose when you get paid to blog or make posts on sites like Slashdot.
When can we expect a breakdown of the money you earn from shilling for Apple? Not revealing your (only) source of income -- since being an Apple 'technician' can't earn you money (they 'just work', right?) -- , especially not the amount that you'd need to churn out a steady steam of slander like you currently do.
I'm breathlessly awaiting your full disclosure (that's 'sarcasm', Dan. I know you're not so good at writing, so take a second to look it up in the dictionary. No, not the OS X dictionary -- a real one). This should be entertaining.
I hope you have a good lawyer.
lol, someone takes the Internet vewy sewiouswy.
Anything from Bloom/HDR to Anisotropic filtering back all the way to 3d textured FPSes. The jump from, say, Doom to Quake was entirely driven by uptake of hardware 3d acceleration.
Bull. It was (really) 3D and fully software rendered out the box. The 3D part is what drove Quake's success, not hardware. Everything in quake that actually took advantage of 3D hardware was a hack bolted on later. Like transparent water.. hehe.
I started C&C with C&C:Generals (which I really enjoyed, along with Zero Hour and now C&C3:Tiberium Wars). I later found Red Alert, and really did not enjoy it, especially since I didn't start with it.
To each his own.
If you didn't start with the original C&C, were teased by the included C&C2 trailer (google it), disappointed by it being cancelled, then grudgingly admit having fun with RA, then pre-ordered the next tiberium-themed C&C when it came out years later, with the little pewter action figure, and.. well.. if that game didn't rip your heart out..
You probably don't know the heartache real C&C fans have. EA killed them :\
PS
All you talking about lore... rofl. Which one? The one with disk chucking grenadiers in it? Mechs? BEARS? Alternate cold war technology? (Could you even guess that later RA's take place in some alternate cold-war era? ALIENS? Kane as terrorist? Kane as time traveler? Kane as timeless godlike mythical alien herder wtf is he still alive? Tiberium as mysterious disease, Tiberium as a fucking weapon?? ALIENS?!?!?!?!
In any C&C MMO world, one thing will be certain. You can look forward to your deer eyed avatar being run over by a mammoth tank as you look on hopelessly. That will probably be a boss battle, low crawling around a tank while your casters* shrug off 120mm HEAP rounds a hundred feet away.
*Aliens + time travel = magic.. eventually. Proven over and over.
I thought it was left-clicker or right-clicker?
So sad that right click won. You can hear thousands of 90's RTS games crying from the grave. The slow death of PC gaming... giant mega games and a forgotten past :\
If ZFS has raid5, it's more of a chimera than I thought. RAID belongs below the FS, not in the FS.
WHY does software RAID belong underneath the FS? Because HW RAID does and that's what we're emulating? That's a very silly reason.
On the topic of merging layers no longer of use to us, what is your opinion on Converged Ethernet *cough*Fibre Channel*cough*?
There has been a lot of hype about ZFS but what use is it in a desktop system? And honestly, while APT is great for desktop systems, I really wouldn't use it much on a server. So unless there is some amazing benefit for the average user with ZFS why even have this port as a main system?
You must be kidding. You can snapshot your whole root, or your home directory, or anything and automate it for backups. There is even integration with GNOME's Nautilus to browse ZFS snapshots at the file level. You can create new filesystems and snapshots on the fly, compress them, enforce quotas, export via NFS, send snaps to a remote system or dump as flat file, etc, etc, etc.. if you don't have enough disks to use single or dual parity RAID-Z, you can even have ZFS record multiple copies of each block. ALL of those have uses on desktop or workstation systems.
I'm not sure if freeBSD supports ZFS root or not, but Solaris does if you want a taste. If anything, ZFS-root is under-hyped.
When troubleshooting updates, instead of booting into your old kernel with a trashed userland, you can boot into an old BOOT ENVIRONMENT. As easy as picking a different grub entry.
From OpenSolaris (other ZFS-root capable systems may use different commands, output BUTCHERED for junk filter)
beadm list
BE Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
opensolaris 25.05M static 2009 04 01 2033
snv_111b 111.89M static 2009 06 03 1846
snv_121 38.18M static 2009 08 31 1617
snv_122 42.10M static 2009 09 14 1522
snv_124 NR / 19.09G static 2009 10 01 2354
Those are whole root file system snapshots I can boot, consuming a piddly ~50MB each.
Junkfilter is retarded.. there is a moderation system for a reason, and this is a technical forum.
I would settle for being put to death at 85 to keep population under control, if it meant my bones, mussels and organs didn't age. One of the worst thing about watching someone get old is to see their self reliance taken away and needing someone to help them into and out of the bath, change their diaper, feed them and put them to bed. THE worst thing is realizing someday it could and probably will happen to you.
You would want to not age, remain healthy throughout your life, then be put to death at 85 years? Somehow, I imagine chasing runaway 84 yr olds becoming a big business.
Why?
I probably don't need Bonjour either.
AFAIK, the only reason a Windows system would need that is if you had an Airport Extreme with a printer attached to it.
I've played around with it at work before, and there are actually a LOT of printer manufacturers that support zero-conf, and are detected by Bonjour. We also have Windows print servers, but I could see it being useful in a small workplace. It's analogous to UPnP, which is native to Windows, but I don't think it has the same hardware support zero-conf does.
ROM/RAM != execute in place