Well - 3 or 4% is not much, that's about as much as spiders and bots on my site. Either they use Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 or they switch to IE or Opera, I don't care, but I'd rather spend 1 hour improving the site for the 97% of visitors that use a modern browser than for the 3-4% loosers that are still using the old Netscape 4.x. Heck, some people still go around with horses, yet nobody gives a sh* about designing roads for horses.
I'm asking myself the same question - this copy-protection scheme look useless without the active cooperation of the OS. How can the hard drive know that the next 1000 bytes to save or copyrighted or not ? If the OS doesn't tell him anything - then the hard drive will have to save and read like a good little puppy... Copyright protection is as strong as the weakest link of the digital system - if the OS doesn't care about what datas are moving around, then no copyright can be enforced.
And since Microsoft doesn't seem to like the whole concept, I don't think there's anything to worry about either. So our hard drives will have keys and built-in encryption - a feature that will never be used by 99.9% of the population... big deal.
Eventually, the threat of lawsits and jail time will force us to stop doing what we want to with our own PC's
Humm yeah, like the threat of lawsuits and jail has forced everybody to stop pirating software and music and pay all required licences...
Every computer enthousiast has broken copyrights law at one time or another (even Open Source zealots sometimes download an MP3 file). Breaking the DMCA won't be much of a problem for anyone (especially people like me, who don't live in the US:).
Seriously, the proprietarity of SECAM held back the advent of VCRs and DVD players in France until people bought converters.
Definitely not ! All TV sold in France are PAL/SECAM capable thru the video in, and most will take NTSC as well. The DVD player you buy here are the same as anywhere else in Europe (or in the world, since most have a PAL/NTSC switch). Nobody ever needed a PAL -> SECAM converter to use its DVD player in France.
For a time, French televisions actually let you lock the controls (so your children wouldn't watch that "excessively violent" cartoon show on La Cinq).
What are you on ? Never seen or heard anything like this.
Matter of fact is that English has become the worlds language of choice.
No it hasn't yet. If there's a world language of choice, it's Chinese and certainly not English. You might call it the "western world international language of choice", but that's it. And what kind of English do you talk about anyway ? English English ? US English ? Aussie English ? Singapore English ?
So trying to 'protect' yourself against english seems to be a bad idea.
Why ? Is that a threat ? Is the US gonna nuke countries that refuse to speak English ? France (and many other country) is doing fine without English, thank you ! Instead of trying to force your own way of life and culture onto others, you should rather try to teach your fellow countrymen how to right and write their own language properly (and trust me, you've got a lot of work ahead).
Thay's my understanding too - I quite don't imagine the GIGN (French SWAT) assaulting a house to bust someone who bought, for his own use, a Z1 movie thru the Internet at Express.com.
Yep - next they'll announce something unheard of, like "better than 160x160" resolution, 16 bit stereo sound or even (gasp) CompactFlash extension slots ! Gee, to think of all this crowd of PalmOS fanatics despizing Windows CE, only to have them chear up when Palm announce features that Windows CE have had for years...
Actually the thermal dissipation of P4 is about equivalent to a 1.2 Ghz Athlon (slightly less if my memory is right, in the range of 55 Watts). But contrary to AMD, Intel took care to design large heatsink/fan and larger dissipation surfaces, while AMD still use the same Socket 7 heatsink type (way not enough). Also Intel CPU have an embedded thermal probe, which allow the BIOS to turn of the system in case of overheating.
Problem is - until AMD comes out with new cores (Q2 2001 I think), there won't be faster Athlon coming out. Those 1.2 Ghz Athlons are probably the real cause to global warming... and I've seen plenty of fried one coming back at dealers.
Yep - and in Sim City 2000 you could build an orbitting solar central/microwave receiver as a power plant. The trick was that sometimes the microwave ray would get out of its path and set fire to buildings nearby the receiver:)
When it comes to 3D rendering, it DOES RELY on OpenGL, since this is about the only serious 3D API that works under X11... until someone comes up with an extended X API with 3D functionnality, OpenGL is the only game in town.
Maybe you were specifcally talking about Direct3D when saying DirectX
Nope - although Direct3D is the "hotest" part of DirectX, DirectDraw is nice too (it's the 2D part, since we were talking about X11). I won't even go into the other DirectX API, which are out of the subject yet have no real equivalent under Unix.
OpenGL have no real need to evolve
Yes it does ! Every API that talks to hardware need to evolve sometimes - since hardware always add new functions and possibilities.
as it have a very open extension method ('ext') that enable developers to add features in hardware and release drivers with extended functionality. Such a functionality become standard only when proved usefull.
Which is why it doesn't evolve : since every 3D hardware manufacturer wants different extensions, there's not one that stands out and nothing change. At least with Direct3D, there's a clear direction that is shown, someone (MS) says what's right or not and drivers are written accordingly. OpenGL would already be dead if Quake III wasn't around. So yeah, people can moan and bitch about the choices Bill's minion do, but at least they somewhat listen between every iteration of DirectX and everyone has a chance to write a game that use the latest hardware capabilities (which are cool:)
That's why X11 is actually quite fast, efficient, and gives you a lot of low-level hooks.
LOL. Good one ! Now lets program the graphic chipset thru X11, and order a bunch of hardware bitblt with a few binary operations. Mix it with a bunch of multiplane hardware scrolling. Isn't that low-level graphic programming ? You can do it with Windows...
It's a myth that X11 is slower than the Win32 API. In fact, whenever I have compared the two, X11 wins hands down.
LOL (again). Please provide benchmarks or even a way to witness such amazing behavior.
In fact, in these days of accelerated graphics cards with their own processors, the X11 model is much closer to what is going on under the hood than the antiquated and inefficient Win32 "graphics library" model.
First X11 is (way way) older than Win32 (so much for the "antiquated" adjective, at least as far as history is concerned).
Secondly, I find it extremely suprising that all graphic processors, being all designed and optimised for Windows (up to putting in hardware the function handling the shadow of the mouse cursor that appears in Windows 2000), with drivers specifically optimised for Windows by big teams of programmers with excellent documentation (and direct access to the hardware engineers who made the beast) could be better managed by X11.
So please stop the FUD. X11 is slower than Win32, and infinitely slower than DirectX (which speaks the graphic processors language). X11 has its good points - but it is definitely not the best graphic API in the world... (and not only bested by Win32, but also BeOS, MacOS X, etc.). And there's a reason the DirectX API is regularly updated : it follows the evolution of graphic hardware. Which X11 is doing very poorly (still relying on the good old OpenGL, which doesn't evolve much either)
- there are now 256 mb cards (CompactFlash type I)
- since the Cassiopeia also takes type II cards, you can else well mention the 1 gb Microdrive (well enough to install Windows 2000 and IE 5.5, talk about embedded browser;)
I'm not very familiar with the Alpha's, but from what I know they have a "lightweight" architecture, which explains why they can run at such high frequencies (less complexity = less transistors = less heat = higher frequency). Although they are 64 bits, they don't carry so many speed-enhancing mechanism as the Itanium. They are also more "traditionnal RISC" than the Itanium.
AMD Sledgehammer (their 64 bits CPU) is more of a joke : it's just a x86 CPU with extended registers. They basically do the same thing as Intel did when introducing 32 bits x86 CPU : extend existing 16 bits register to 32 bits, with a special "32 bit" running mode to address 4 Gig of RAM. While Itanium is a radically new CPU, with a x86 compatibility layer but completly new concepts and design, AMD is reusing (very) old tricks to push the aging x86 legacy one step further.
In software terms : Pentium III/Athlon is akin to Windows 3.1. Sledgehammer is like Windows 98 (a hack that is fully compatible with 3.1 yet not very nicely done or high performance). Itanium is like Windows NT : new core, new cleaner design, higher performance but less compatibility and more work to do for the designers.
Try using Internet Explorer... it is way more stable than Netscape, render faster and the JVM has never crashed on me even once ! Yeah so it is made by Microsoft, but when they face real competition they can produce some pretty good stuff (also see their excellent mouse and joysticks for a good example of what they can do right)
Well he was pretty damn right about nVidia vs 3dfx. Voodoo 3 was crippled hardware and, despite honorable framerate, was really lagging behind the TNT/TNT2 features. The Voodoo 3 was basically an overclocked 3D core from the Voodoo 2 with a 2D engine. And since the Voodoo 2 was basically the same core as the original Voodoo, but with a second pipeline. So Voodoo 3 was a very fast Voodoo 1, but with no real feature improvement (same max 256x256 textures, same lack of AGP support, same 16 bit rendering, etc.)
Looking back to what nVidia and 3dfx are now, I don't think Tom made a mistake in saying 3dfx products sucked...
Many people accuse Tom of being biased against this or that etc... the reason is probably that in Europe, newspaper and journalistw have the tradition of voicing opinions. There are very few newspapers or news programs that keep the "no opinion" line that you can find in many US medias (like CNN). So, Tom is not affraid of saying "Intel sucks" when truly, Intel products sucks. That might not be neutral, but that is not the way journalism work in Europe (and remember, Tom is German).
Well especially since, in the "pro" camp, we have Cyprus, Monaco and Switzerland which are NOT part of the EU - and therefor not part of the EU parliement...
Well it's not that easy for new artists :
- sign the contract being offered (and you get the label whore)
- don't sign or try to negociate, but then chances are you'll never have another contract offered and can just try to look for a "real job" and forget about being a pro-musician
The way CDs are made and sold, you need the backing of a label to get a chance to success and fame. Only the advent of things like MP3 can make music distribution accessible to small budget, and hence, free artists from slaving for the big 5.
Why are you saying X is slow if you KNOW the drivers are the true bottleneck?
To make good efficient drivers, you need to have a good driver model. For example, if a graphic system only know how to use a framebuffer and nothing else, no matter what you do, your driver will never be able to yield any speed. For example, Windows API support video offloading to the hardware (DCT conversion, subsampling, etc...). This greatly speed up DVD decoding and improve visual quality. But what do you do if your graphic system doesn't have any "plug" for these kind of functionnality ?
Apps that need direct hardware access can use the DRI.
Again, DRI is not the answer to all hardware access needs. It's an API that is limited to what the API designer THOUGHT the hardware could do. If DRI only provides direct access to the video framebuffer, it is very poor speed wise. One need to provide a standard API to all hardware accelerable functions (bitblit engine, vector drawing, hardware font antialiasing, hardware cursor, etc.) to take advantages of those functions.
Slashdot Mirror
Well - 3 or 4% is not much, that's about as much as spiders and bots on my site. Either they use Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 or they switch to IE or Opera, I don't care, but I'd rather spend 1 hour improving the site for the 97% of visitors that use a modern browser than for the 3-4% loosers that are still using the old Netscape 4.x. Heck, some people still go around with horses, yet nobody gives a sh* about designing roads for horses.
I'm asking myself the same question - this copy-protection scheme look useless without the active cooperation of the OS. How can the hard drive know that the next 1000 bytes to save or copyrighted or not ? If the OS doesn't tell him anything - then the hard drive will have to save and read like a good little puppy... Copyright protection is as strong as the weakest link of the digital system - if the OS doesn't care about what datas are moving around, then no copyright can be enforced.
And since Microsoft doesn't seem to like the whole concept, I don't think there's anything to worry about either. So our hard drives will have keys and built-in encryption - a feature that will never be used by 99.9% of the population... big deal.
Eventually, the threat of lawsits and jail time will force us to stop doing what we want to with our own PC's
:).
Humm yeah, like the threat of lawsuits and jail has forced everybody to stop pirating software and music and pay all required licences...
Every computer enthousiast has broken copyrights law at one time or another (even Open Source zealots sometimes download an MP3 file). Breaking the DMCA won't be much of a problem for anyone (especially people like me, who don't live in the US
The VisorPhone does use SIM cards (and so it's a GSM phone according to their FAQ)
Seriously, the proprietarity of SECAM held back the advent of VCRs and DVD players in France until people bought converters.
Definitely not ! All TV sold in France are PAL/SECAM capable thru the video in, and most will take NTSC as well. The DVD player you buy here are the same as anywhere else in Europe (or in the world, since most have a PAL/NTSC switch). Nobody ever needed a PAL -> SECAM converter to use its DVD player in France.
For a time, French televisions actually let you lock the controls (so your children wouldn't watch that "excessively violent" cartoon show on La Cinq).
What are you on ? Never seen or heard anything like this.
Matter of fact is that English has become the worlds language of choice.
No it hasn't yet. If there's a world language of choice, it's Chinese and certainly not English. You might call it the "western world international language of choice", but that's it. And what kind of English do you talk about anyway ? English English ? US English ? Aussie English ? Singapore English ?
So trying to 'protect' yourself against english seems to be a bad idea.
Why ? Is that a threat ? Is the US gonna nuke countries that refuse to speak English ? France (and many other country) is doing fine without English, thank you ! Instead of trying to force your own way of life and culture onto others, you should rather try to teach your fellow countrymen how to right and write their own language properly (and trust me, you've got a lot of work ahead).
Thay's my understanding too - I quite don't imagine the GIGN (French SWAT) assaulting a house to bust someone who bought, for his own use, a Z1 movie thru the Internet at Express.com.
94% of the transfers accounted for on Minitel involved software pirating
Humm yeah, I can just imagine all these people downloading ISOz at the 1200 bps top speed of the Minitel...
such as Euridile, the national register of commerce) can only be accessed through the Minitel system
Not anymore - you can get pretty much the same thing thru www.societe.com , which is free.
Yep - next they'll announce something unheard of, like "better than 160x160" resolution, 16 bit stereo sound or even (gasp) CompactFlash extension slots ! Gee, to think of all this crowd of PalmOS fanatics despizing Windows CE, only to have them chear up when Palm announce features that Windows CE have had for years...
Actually the thermal dissipation of P4 is about equivalent to a 1.2 Ghz Athlon (slightly less if my memory is right, in the range of 55 Watts). But contrary to AMD, Intel took care to design large heatsink/fan and larger dissipation surfaces, while AMD still use the same Socket 7 heatsink type (way not enough). Also Intel CPU have an embedded thermal probe, which allow the BIOS to turn of the system in case of overheating.
Problem is - until AMD comes out with new cores (Q2 2001 I think), there won't be faster Athlon coming out. Those 1.2 Ghz Athlons are probably the real cause to global warming... and I've seen plenty of fried one coming back at dealers.
Yep - and in Sim City 2000 you could build an orbitting solar central/microwave receiver as a power plant. The trick was that sometimes the microwave ray would get out of its path and set fire to buildings nearby the receiver :)
For a start, X11 have no dependency on OpenGL.
:)
When it comes to 3D rendering, it DOES RELY on OpenGL, since this is about the only serious 3D API that works under X11... until someone comes up with an extended X API with 3D functionnality, OpenGL is the only game in town.
Maybe you were specifcally talking about Direct3D when saying DirectX
Nope - although Direct3D is the "hotest" part of DirectX, DirectDraw is nice too (it's the 2D part, since we were talking about X11). I won't even go into the other DirectX API, which are out of the subject yet have no real equivalent under Unix.
OpenGL have no real need to evolve
Yes it does ! Every API that talks to hardware need to evolve sometimes - since hardware always add new functions and possibilities.
as it have a very open extension method ('ext') that enable developers to add features in hardware and release drivers with extended functionality. Such a functionality become standard only when proved usefull.
Which is why it doesn't evolve : since every 3D hardware manufacturer wants different extensions, there's not one that stands out and nothing change. At least with Direct3D, there's a clear direction that is shown, someone (MS) says what's right or not and drivers are written accordingly. OpenGL would already be dead if Quake III wasn't around. So yeah, people can moan and bitch about the choices Bill's minion do, but at least they somewhat listen between every iteration of DirectX and everyone has a chance to write a game that use the latest hardware capabilities (which are cool
That's why X11 is actually quite fast, efficient, and gives you a lot of low-level hooks.
LOL. Good one ! Now lets program the graphic chipset thru X11, and order a bunch of hardware bitblt with a few binary operations. Mix it with a bunch of multiplane hardware scrolling. Isn't that low-level graphic programming ? You can do it with Windows...
It's a myth that X11 is slower than the Win32 API. In fact, whenever I have compared the two, X11 wins hands down.
LOL (again). Please provide benchmarks or even a way to witness such amazing behavior.
In fact, in these days of accelerated graphics cards with their own processors, the X11 model is much closer to what is going on under the hood than the antiquated and inefficient Win32 "graphics library" model.
First X11 is (way way) older than Win32 (so much for the "antiquated" adjective, at least as far as history is concerned).
Secondly, I find it extremely suprising that all graphic processors, being all designed and optimised for Windows (up to putting in hardware the function handling the shadow of the mouse cursor that appears in Windows 2000), with drivers specifically optimised for Windows by big teams of programmers with excellent documentation (and direct access to the hardware engineers who made the beast) could be better managed by X11.
So please stop the FUD. X11 is slower than Win32, and infinitely slower than DirectX (which speaks the graphic processors language). X11 has its good points - but it is definitely not the best graphic API in the world... (and not only bested by Win32, but also BeOS, MacOS X, etc.). And there's a reason the DirectX API is regularly updated : it follows the evolution of graphic hardware. Which X11 is doing very poorly (still relying on the good old OpenGL, which doesn't evolve much either)
- there are now 256 mb cards (CompactFlash type I) ;)
- since the Cassiopeia also takes type II cards, you can else well mention the 1 gb Microdrive (well enough to install Windows 2000 and IE 5.5, talk about embedded browser
I'm not very familiar with the Alpha's, but from what I know they have a "lightweight" architecture, which explains why they can run at such high frequencies (less complexity = less transistors = less heat = higher frequency). Although they are 64 bits, they don't carry so many speed-enhancing mechanism as the Itanium. They are also more "traditionnal RISC" than the Itanium.
AMD Sledgehammer (their 64 bits CPU) is more of a joke : it's just a x86 CPU with extended registers. They basically do the same thing as Intel did when introducing 32 bits x86 CPU : extend existing 16 bits register to 32 bits, with a special "32 bit" running mode to address 4 Gig of RAM. While Itanium is a radically new CPU, with a x86 compatibility layer but completly new concepts and design, AMD is reusing (very) old tricks to push the aging x86 legacy one step further.
In software terms : Pentium III/Athlon is akin to Windows 3.1. Sledgehammer is like Windows 98 (a hack that is fully compatible with 3.1 yet not very nicely done or high performance). Itanium is like Windows NT : new core, new cleaner design, higher performance but less compatibility and more work to do for the designers.
Yep - sorry, I red a translated version and didn't knew they translated that...
Read 1984 from George Orwell, and what there is about "Novlang"... then think again about what you wrote.
Try using Internet Explorer... it is way more stable than Netscape, render faster and the JVM has never crashed on me even once ! Yeah so it is made by Microsoft, but when they face real competition they can produce some pretty good stuff (also see their excellent mouse and joysticks for a good example of what they can do right)
Well he was pretty damn right about nVidia vs 3dfx. Voodoo 3 was crippled hardware and, despite honorable framerate, was really lagging behind the TNT/TNT2 features. The Voodoo 3 was basically an overclocked 3D core from the Voodoo 2 with a 2D engine. And since the Voodoo 2 was basically the same core as the original Voodoo, but with a second pipeline. So Voodoo 3 was a very fast Voodoo 1, but with no real feature improvement (same max 256x256 textures, same lack of AGP support, same 16 bit rendering, etc.)
Looking back to what nVidia and 3dfx are now, I don't think Tom made a mistake in saying 3dfx products sucked...
Many people accuse Tom of being biased against this or that etc... the reason is probably that in Europe, newspaper and journalistw have the tradition of voicing opinions. There are very few newspapers or news programs that keep the "no opinion" line that you can find in many US medias (like CNN). So, Tom is not affraid of saying "Intel sucks" when truly, Intel products sucks. That might not be neutral, but that is not the way journalism work in Europe (and remember, Tom is German).
Well, that's my idea on it anyway...
Well especially since, in the "pro" camp, we have Cyprus, Monaco and Switzerland which are NOT part of the EU - and therefor not part of the EU parliement...
Well it's not that easy for new artists :
- sign the contract being offered (and you get the label whore)
- don't sign or try to negociate, but then chances are you'll never have another contract offered and can just try to look for a "real job" and forget about being a pro-musician
The way CDs are made and sold, you need the backing of a label to get a chance to success and fame. Only the advent of things like MP3 can make music distribution accessible to small budget, and hence, free artists from slaving for the big 5.
Why are you saying X is slow if you KNOW the drivers are the true bottleneck?
To make good efficient drivers, you need to have a good driver model. For example, if a graphic system only know how to use a framebuffer and nothing else, no matter what you do, your driver will never be able to yield any speed. For example, Windows API support video offloading to the hardware (DCT conversion, subsampling, etc...). This greatly speed up DVD decoding and improve visual quality. But what do you do if your graphic system doesn't have any "plug" for these kind of functionnality ?
Apps that need direct hardware access can use the DRI.
Again, DRI is not the answer to all hardware access needs. It's an API that is limited to what the API designer THOUGHT the hardware could do. If DRI only provides direct access to the video framebuffer, it is very poor speed wise. One need to provide a standard API to all hardware accelerable functions (bitblit engine, vector drawing, hardware font antialiasing, hardware cursor, etc.) to take advantages of those functions.