Your comment would make sense if EFL/E17 did not already support OpenGL ES on embedded devices. Illume, the E17 variant designed for mobile/embedded devices, already runs quite well with hardware/OpenGL acceleration on platforms like Maemo, and I already have built and successfully run EFL-based OpenGL apps on the Palm Pre (available in the WebOS Internals WIDK tree).
Evas was designed from the ground up to be modular and support every graphics platform known to man. Windows GDI, DirectX, iPhone OS, X11, WebOS, native Linux Framebuffer, SDL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES - you name it, EFL runs on it. Evas will take advantage of hardware acceleration when it is available, but benchmarks actually show that in many instances, when it comes to regular UI graphics operations, OpenGL/hardware accelerated interfaces don't necessarily perform better than Evas' own software engine and in several cases are actually worse -- on the Palm Pre, for example, GLES is actually much slower at doing things like alpha blending. So in that respect, yes, hardware does have some catching up to do.
Actually the Pre's homebrew is very different from iPhone jailbreaking and is not even a "hack" anymore. For one, it does not void your warranty. Two, you don't have to circumvent any vendor restrictions to do it, and you don't even have to get root access to your phone to install homebrew apps -- all you have to do is download the novacom component from Palm's web site and a handy app installer utility. In fact, once you've installed the "Preware" app you can install homebrew apps directly to your phone OTA. Apps that start off in the homebrew catalog actually end up graduating to the "official" app catalog once they satisfy Palm's vetting requirements -- e.g. the excellent gDial Pro Google Voice app. Palm's attitude towards homebrew is very, very different from Apple's attitude towards jailbreakers.
Also, you're wrong about OS updates -- the way Palm has opened things up, it would be virtually impossible to disable homebrew without also killing off all public access to the SDK and pretty much breaking everything. Homebrew is pretty much here to stay.
Actually, I don't think so. Nigeria has had a reputation for a long time for being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but ever since the new president Umaru Yar'Adua was elected earlier this year, he has been on a major crusade to eliminate corruption and enforce the rule of law. So I'm not surprised that this happened -- it's only one in what is becoming a long list of surprising moves by the Nigerian government lately. He was the first president ever to declare his personal assets. Just yesterday we heard that he revoked several arbitrary allocations of prime real estate in the most upscale suburb of Abuja (the capital city) that were given by the previous administration to top government officials. One of the plots of land was allocated to Yar'Adua himself. I lived in Nigeria for 17 years, and I have never heard of a president revoking his own land allocation.
I'd say Microsoft *did* try to bribe someone thinking it was business as usual in Nigeria, and the federal government heard about it and said "Uh, no. You can take your $400,000 and shove it."
I just have to remark that one of the websites linked on that page, http://www.2advanced.com/ -- is the most astounding and complete piece of flash work I have ever seen on the web. Seriously. I'm floored.
Er, no. Power Line, Wonkette, Polipundit, Infoshop, and antiwar.com are indexed on Google news. The "blog" argument does not fly, and has never even been an excuse offered by Google over this controversy. Geez, even Democratic Underground is listed on Google News.
The "opinion" vs. "news" argument is incorrect, too. It is easily the popular opinion around here that any site that happens to be critical and frank about the Islamic religion is a "hate" site (but of course, that does not apply to the Christian religion in this case, does it?). We can all hide our heads in the sand here as the good Google fanboys we are here and say Google is being "responsible", but since when did I commission Google to tell me what I should hear and what I shouldn't hear? There is plenty of opinion indexed on Google News -- it is downright dishonest to claim otherwise. So why will Google index Islamofascist propaganda sites al-Manar (owned by Hezbollah) and Khilafah.com, but decide that I don't need to see some other site that happens to point out terrorist bombings in Indonesia and the West Bank all the time? What do you define as "unbiased" or "news" here?
Let's not even begin to talk about cases where Google has been discovered to editorialize news headlines, such as removing the word "alleged" from a headline describing Guantanamo Bay as a "torture camp".
Lord help my karma for pointing out the unpopular opinion.
The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently
Evas is up to 150 times faster than XRender in plain software mode (with no hardware acceleration) at rendering images. In fact, we often prefer running in software mode than in GL mode because it's more stable and often works better. This is the wrongest statement I've ever heard in my life. Have you ever seen Engage? It does the OSX docker effect absolutely smoothly even on a relatively slow CPU and the crappiest of video cards. That complex, multi-layered animated background you see in the video runs on my system smoothly while taking less than 40% CPU... and that's an EET that was designed to push the limits of what Evas/Edje can do. With GL acceleration that falls to 10-15%.
However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better.
So you think it would be better if we had one big monolithic, inflexible library that was full of bugs? Or you're one of those people who think that somehow the EFL is slower because it's componentized -- even though it beats the crap out of anything comparable that exists performance-wise? How does "consolidated" translate into "scalable", anyway, Mr. professor of software engineering?
This technology is there, it has been carefully thought out, solidly and cleanly implemented. Go take a look at the code/API yourself before you begin to comment. It is usable NOW, and you don't need to wait until E17 is released before you can use it. None of those things you see in the videos are simulated, that is presently working software available to anyone who wants to install it.
The E17 that was in CVS has been dead for a very long time. It was nothing more than a glorified test app while the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries were still in development. This is a brand new window manager and it was just committed to CVS earlier this week.
Now please don't go rushing to check it out yet. It is still barely functional and is not usable as a day-to-day wm yet - this is pre-alpha code essentially. We need more people who are interested in actually helping to contribute code than excited users especially at this stage.
I've been using RC1 for over a month now, and I'll tell you confidently that
-- Performance is MUCH better than it used to be. It scans messages much faster than I've ever seen SA 2.x do, and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
-- THIS THING ROCKS. For almost two weeks after I installed it I kept instinctively sending myself test emails to make sure I hadn't broken my mail system, because my volume of incoming mail had reduced so drastically. I was used to getting at least a new spam every 2 minutes. After installing SA 3.0 I got one false negative in a 72 hour period. It is *that* good. To date I still have not recorded a single false positive. I really had to convince myself that this thing was real.
This spamfilter rocks. I'd award it product of the year if I could.
The window management is Enlightenment running the new default Winter theme.
The kicker bar is Engage, an OS X docker clone based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. It is NOT a gdesklet, and it performs a lot better and smoother than that one. As you can see, he is running Enlightenment and drop shadows work fine, so the answer to your last question is yes.
Does that works for any random X application without modification ?
Apparently you weren't even reading. I said "Evas-based apps".
And while NX is still a hack that attempts to get around the problem of poor network performance for X11 apps (by wrapping/translating X calls with its own calls), Evas solves the problem directly by making efficient use of Xlib and eliminating unneeded roundtrips. Evoak, the shared canvas goes even further: the host canvas is running on the same machine as the X server, and clients connect to Evoak (which has a much leaner protocol, supports compression *and* encryption) rather than to X. This is the kind of technology that could make running remote X apps on your cellphone possible if resources were available to implement it.
Evas-based apps (including the upcoming E17 window manager) perform extremely well over remote X connections, using traditional Xlib. I have tested this myself, over remote connections Evas-based apps are at least 10 times more responsive than GTK/QT apps, using the same traditional X11 connection. Evas is designed to minimize roundtrips to the server so everything gets drawn the first time. And there's a new canvas server in CVS called Evoak that allows remote canvas sharing among applications, complete with gzip compression etc....NX probably won't even be able to touch it performance wise.
- I have filed more patents and owned/managed more businesses than you can think of. This deal was a microscopic, ultimately forgettable fraction of my business.
- I have nothing to say about the money Microsoft funneled to SCO (my excuse is that they won't let me).
- Everybody licenses Unix and they've been doing so for years. SCO as a licensor is only executing a rational business decision based on current market trends. Microsoft bought SCO licenses for SFU just like everybody else has been doing for years, there's nothing wrong with it.
- Microsoft is actually cooperating with you Linux guys with their SFU. They're good guys!
- The GPL makes IP matters confusing, and we have to leave it to the big companies like Sun and SCO to figure it out for the rest of us. They might even be kind enough to give it all away for free!
- Red Hat is still a bunch of small boys. Do you really think this johnny-just-come company with a few hundred million in the bank can actually indemnify its customers from the devastating effects of a settlement? They will be obliterated in no time! Better leave it to the big guys (Sun, MS, SCO...).
- We used to have all this crap figured out with patents and cross-licensing and stuff. You GPL people came around and messed up the whole thing, and now we're trying to clean up your mess. Stop making noise and let's clean this whole thing up for you.
- Why is everyone picking on me? I've done a lot of good stuff, and nobody says anything about that!
[Wow. I have to give this guy an award for managing to say so little in so many words.]
It definitely is about time. I wish Qwest was available in the Houston area -- I would switch over to their service in a heartbeat. I currently have to pay SBC $15 a month for a voice line that I have absolutely no use for, just so I can get DSL. And I don't get DSL from SBC either (I hate PPPoE), I get it from a local company called Oplink.net. Vonage provides me with my primary phone service at $24.99 a month. My combined phone and DSL bills are still like $20 less than what it used to be with SBC, but why should I be throwing away $15 for no reason every month for a service I don't need?
Then they call me every other week asking me why I switched over from them to Vonage. It is really annoying.:(
Here's to hoping SBC eventually follows suit. You Qwest customers are lucky.
Even then....3 HDTV streams = 57.6Mbps. Plus about 256K for all the voice you would ever need. And you still have 42Mbps for your Internet access. The argument is stupid, period.
RTFA. The network he proposes is a "next generation fiber network". The idea is that each home will be able to get about 100mbps at least. Fiber bandwidth is much higher than 100mbps, and that's quite an understatement.
100mbps *is* enough for you. A couple of HDTV streams would take at most 10mbps (I'm sure it's a lot less than that, but let's give it the benefit of doubt). Voice conversations..puhleeze, I get crystal clear quality from Vonage running at 96Kbps either way. I could handle 30 of those comfortably on 100mbps and I wouldn't even notice it!
Exactly which part of your brain did you use to think before posting this, by the way?
But it certainly is pretty cool, nonetheless. For me, TVTime for watching live TV (kicks xawtv's butt to the curb!), and mencoder + atd/crond for recording. I can't automatically skip commercials, but at least I can cram 2.5 hours of TV into less than 800MB with reasonably good quality to boot!
Enlightenment has already a similar feature for at least three years. It's called the pager.
For those who aren't familiar with it: Enlightenment's pager continually takes a live snapshot of each window's contents and displays them in a miniature form inside the pager.
- You can focus any window by clicking on it in the pager - You can drag windows around inside the pager to move them - You can drag a window out of the pager from any virtual desktop onto your current desktop - You can iconify (minimize) a window by dragging it from the pager to the iconbox
Just make the pager fullscreen and give it a "transparent" background. Expose and its clones can keep on trying to catch up.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment would make sense if EFL/E17 did not already support OpenGL ES on embedded devices. Illume, the E17 variant designed for mobile/embedded devices, already runs quite well with hardware/OpenGL acceleration on platforms like Maemo, and I already have built and successfully run EFL-based OpenGL apps on the Palm Pre (available in the WebOS Internals WIDK tree).
Evas was designed from the ground up to be modular and support every graphics platform known to man. Windows GDI, DirectX, iPhone OS, X11, WebOS, native Linux Framebuffer, SDL, OpenGL, OpenGL ES - you name it, EFL runs on it. Evas will take advantage of hardware acceleration when it is available, but benchmarks actually show that in many instances, when it comes to regular UI graphics operations, OpenGL/hardware accelerated interfaces don't necessarily perform better than Evas' own software engine and in several cases are actually worse -- on the Palm Pre, for example, GLES is actually much slower at doing things like alpha blending. So in that respect, yes, hardware does have some catching up to do.
Actually the Pre's homebrew is very different from iPhone jailbreaking and is not even a "hack" anymore. For one, it does not void your warranty. Two, you don't have to circumvent any vendor restrictions to do it, and you don't even have to get root access to your phone to install homebrew apps -- all you have to do is download the novacom component from Palm's web site and a handy app installer utility. In fact, once you've installed the "Preware" app you can install homebrew apps directly to your phone OTA. Apps that start off in the homebrew catalog actually end up graduating to the "official" app catalog once they satisfy Palm's vetting requirements -- e.g. the excellent gDial Pro Google Voice app. Palm's attitude towards homebrew is very, very different from Apple's attitude towards jailbreakers.
Also, you're wrong about OS updates -- the way Palm has opened things up, it would be virtually impossible to disable homebrew without also killing off all public access to the SDK and pretty much breaking everything. Homebrew is pretty much here to stay.
Actually, I don't think so. Nigeria has had a reputation for a long time for being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but ever since the new president Umaru Yar'Adua was elected earlier this year, he has been on a major crusade to eliminate corruption and enforce the rule of law. So I'm not surprised that this happened -- it's only one in what is becoming a long list of surprising moves by the Nigerian government lately. He was the first president ever to declare his personal assets. Just yesterday we heard that he revoked several arbitrary allocations of prime real estate in the most upscale suburb of Abuja (the capital city) that were given by the previous administration to top government officials. One of the plots of land was allocated to Yar'Adua himself. I lived in Nigeria for 17 years, and I have never heard of a president revoking his own land allocation.
I'd say Microsoft *did* try to bribe someone thinking it was business as usual in Nigeria, and the federal government heard about it and said "Uh, no. You can take your $400,000 and shove it."
I just have to remark that one of the websites linked on that page, http://www.2advanced.com/ -- is the most astounding and complete piece of flash work I have ever seen on the web. Seriously. I'm floored.
Er, no. Power Line, Wonkette, Polipundit, Infoshop, and antiwar.com are indexed on Google news. The "blog" argument does not fly, and has never even been an excuse offered by Google over this controversy. Geez, even Democratic Underground is listed on Google News.
The "opinion" vs. "news" argument is incorrect, too. It is easily the popular opinion around here that any site that happens to be critical and frank about the Islamic religion is a "hate" site (but of course, that does not apply to the Christian religion in this case, does it?). We can all hide our heads in the sand here as the good Google fanboys we are here and say Google is being "responsible", but since when did I commission Google to tell me what I should hear and what I shouldn't hear? There is plenty of opinion indexed on Google News -- it is downright dishonest to claim otherwise. So why will Google index Islamofascist propaganda sites al-Manar (owned by Hezbollah) and Khilafah.com, but decide that I don't need to see some other site that happens to point out terrorist bombings in Indonesia and the West Bank all the time? What do you define as "unbiased" or "news" here?
Let's not even begin to talk about cases where Google has been discovered to editorialize news headlines, such as removing the word "alleged" from a headline describing Guantanamo Bay as a "torture camp".
Lord help my karma for pointing out the unpopular opinion.
Nah, that ain't nothing. What will really cook your sushi is when Slashdot comes up with a dupe of this prank tomorrow morning!
Brings a whole new meaning to "yellow journalism".
I think MythTV badly needs an Edje UI. That would be a match made in heaven.
(For those unfamiliar with Edje, it is the UI library used in E17 and EFL-based applications like Entrance.)
You sir, are full of crap.
... and that's an EET that was designed to push the limits of what Evas/Edje can do. With GL acceleration that falls to 10-15%.
Let's see here...
The effects usually look professional, but they run slow and inefficiently
Evas is up to 150 times faster than XRender in plain software mode (with no hardware acceleration) at rendering images. In fact, we often prefer running in software mode than in GL mode because it's more stable and often works better. This is the wrongest statement I've ever heard in my life. Have you ever seen Engage? It does the OSX docker effect absolutely smoothly even on a relatively slow CPU and the crappiest of video cards. That complex, multi-layered animated background you see in the video runs on my system smoothly while taking less than 40% CPU
However, enlightenment is way too layered and has a million different little components... I just personally think it could all be implemented better.
So you think it would be better if we had one big monolithic, inflexible library that was full of bugs? Or you're one of those people who think that somehow the EFL is slower because it's componentized -- even though it beats the crap out of anything comparable that exists performance-wise? How does "consolidated" translate into "scalable", anyway, Mr. professor of software engineering?
This technology is there, it has been carefully thought out, solidly and cleanly implemented. Go take a look at the code/API yourself before you begin to comment. It is usable NOW, and you don't need to wait until E17 is released before you can use it. None of those things you see in the videos are simulated, that is presently working software available to anyone who wants to install it.
All these lame technologies - fossil fuels, steam, air, blah blah. When will people learn that the future lies in Potty fuels?
Thanks for pummeling my poor web server with a direct link to my screenshots page, even though it doesn't have any actual E17 screenshots yet. :)
(At least you didn't link to the video, and no-one's gonna find it since it's all slashdotted and everything now!)
The E17 that was in CVS has been dead for a very long time. It was nothing more than a glorified test app while the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries were still in development. This is a brand new window manager and it was just committed to CVS earlier this week.
Now please don't go rushing to check it out yet. It is still barely functional and is not usable as a day-to-day wm yet - this is pre-alpha code essentially. We need more people who are interested in actually helping to contribute code than excited users especially at this stage.
I've been using RC1 for over a month now, and I'll tell you confidently that
-- Performance is MUCH better than it used to be. It scans messages much faster than I've ever seen SA 2.x do, and doesn't hog my server's resources anymore.
-- THIS THING ROCKS. For almost two weeks after I installed it I kept instinctively sending myself test emails to make sure I hadn't broken my mail system, because my volume of incoming mail had reduced so drastically. I was used to getting at least a new spam every 2 minutes. After installing SA 3.0 I got one false negative in a 72 hour period. It is *that* good. To date I still have not recorded a single false positive. I really had to convince myself that this thing was real.
This spamfilter rocks. I'd award it product of the year if I could.
The window management is Enlightenment running the new default Winter theme.
The kicker bar is Engage, an OS X docker clone based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. It is NOT a gdesklet, and it performs a lot better and smoother than that one. As you can see, he is running Enlightenment and drop shadows work fine, so the answer to your last question is yes.
Does that works for any random X application without modification ?
Apparently you weren't even reading. I said "Evas-based apps".
And while NX is still a hack that attempts to get around the problem of poor network performance for X11 apps (by wrapping/translating X calls with its own calls), Evas solves the problem directly by making efficient use of Xlib and eliminating unneeded roundtrips. Evoak, the shared canvas goes even further: the host canvas is running on the same machine as the X server, and clients connect to Evoak (which has a much leaner protocol, supports compression *and* encryption) rather than to X. This is the kind of technology that could make running remote X apps on your cellphone possible if resources were available to implement it.
If you want to find out more go read http://enlightenment.org/pages/systems.html.
Evas-based apps (including the upcoming E17 window manager) perform extremely well over remote X connections, using traditional Xlib. I have tested this myself, over remote connections Evas-based apps are at least 10 times more responsive than GTK/QT apps, using the same traditional X11 connection. Evas is designed to minimize roundtrips to the server so everything gets drawn the first time. And there's a new canvas server in CVS called Evoak that allows remote canvas sharing among applications, complete with gzip compression etc....NX probably won't even be able to touch it performance wise.
The only solutions are mass immigration or a plague.
I find it disturbing that you would refer to a plague as a solution. Have we utterly lost our humanity in our selfish quest for "life"?
If there was ever anything about Google that sucked, it's the Linux search.
- Search for Gnome
- Search for KDE
- Search for Enlightenment
- Search for Linux Kernel has a link from inside kernel.org as the 4th result!
Not one returns the actual home page of these projects! Yikes.
- I have filed more patents and owned/managed more businesses than you can think of. This deal was a microscopic, ultimately forgettable fraction of my business.
- I have nothing to say about the money Microsoft funneled to SCO (my excuse is that they won't let me).
- Everybody licenses Unix and they've been doing so for years. SCO as a licensor is only executing a rational business decision based on current market trends. Microsoft bought SCO licenses for SFU just like everybody else has been doing for years, there's nothing wrong with it.
- Microsoft is actually cooperating with you Linux guys with their SFU. They're good guys!
- The GPL makes IP matters confusing, and we have to leave it to the big companies like Sun and SCO to figure it out for the rest of us. They might even be kind enough to give it all away for free!
- Red Hat is still a bunch of small boys. Do you really think this johnny-just-come company with a few hundred million in the bank can actually indemnify its customers from the devastating effects of a settlement? They will be obliterated in no time! Better leave it to the big guys (Sun, MS, SCO...).
- We used to have all this crap figured out with patents and cross-licensing and stuff. You GPL people came around and messed up the whole thing, and now we're trying to clean up your mess. Stop making noise and let's clean this whole thing up for you.
- Why is everyone picking on me? I've done a lot of good stuff, and nobody says anything about that!
[Wow. I have to give this guy an award for managing to say so little in so many words.]
It definitely is about time. I wish Qwest was available in the Houston area -- I would switch over to their service in a heartbeat. I currently have to pay SBC $15 a month for a voice line that I have absolutely no use for, just so I can get DSL. And I don't get DSL from SBC either (I hate PPPoE), I get it from a local company called Oplink.net. Vonage provides me with my primary phone service at $24.99 a month. My combined phone and DSL bills are still like $20 less than what it used to be with SBC, but why should I be throwing away $15 for no reason every month for a service I don't need?
:(
Then they call me every other week asking me why I switched over from them to Vonage. It is really annoying.
Here's to hoping SBC eventually follows suit. You Qwest customers are lucky.
Even then....3 HDTV streams = 57.6Mbps. Plus about 256K for all the voice you would ever need. And you still have 42Mbps for your Internet access. The argument is stupid, period.
RTFA. The network he proposes is a "next generation fiber network". The idea is that each home will be able to get about 100mbps at least. Fiber bandwidth is much higher than 100mbps, and that's quite an understatement.
100mbps *is* enough for you. A couple of HDTV streams would take at most 10mbps (I'm sure it's a lot less than that, but let's give it the benefit of doubt). Voice conversations..puhleeze, I get crystal clear quality from Vonage running at 96Kbps either way. I could handle 30 of those comfortably on 100mbps and I wouldn't even notice it!
Exactly which part of your brain did you use to think before posting this, by the way?
Will you hire me please? :)
It is not available for Linux. :(
But it certainly is pretty cool, nonetheless. For me, TVTime for watching live TV (kicks xawtv's butt to the curb!), and mencoder + atd/crond for recording. I can't automatically skip commercials, but at least I can cram 2.5 hours of TV into less than 800MB with reasonably good quality to boot!
Did I mention how much TVTime rocks?
Enlightenment has already a similar feature for at least three years. It's called the pager.
:)
For those who aren't familiar with it: Enlightenment's pager continually takes a live snapshot of each window's contents and displays them in a miniature form inside the pager.
- You can focus any window by clicking on it in the pager
- You can drag windows around inside the pager to move them
- You can drag a window out of the pager from any virtual desktop onto your current desktop
- You can iconify (minimize) a window by dragging it from the pager to the iconbox
Just make the pager fullscreen and give it a "transparent" background. Expose and its clones can keep on trying to catch up.