Comparing X to direct video access is rather like comparing ssh to the linux console. The latter will always be faster because there is no network bottleneck, but you can't use it to connect to your machine remotely.
Actually, that's not a good comparison, because when X runs locally it does not use the network, but instead uses shared memory. This is really fast, so the assertion that network transparency slows down X is a total myth.
What really makes X on linux slow is that there is almost no hardware acceleration (even with accelerated drivers). The RENDER framework, used for a lot of the gee-whiz graphical effects, is almost entirely non-accelerated. This is due to incompatibility between the X driver design and the RENDER framework which makes it incredibly difficult to write an accelerated implementation of it. This will get fixed when X.Org moves onto the kdrive driver framework.
What also hasn't helped historically is the fact that X runs in a separate process, and so you have to wait until the kernel wakes up the process before you see drawing occur. Older kernels were poor at recognizing when X needed to draw stuff, and so there was a noticeable delay between user action and the corresponding on-screen result. Ofcourse, if X ran in-kernel, any X crash would take down your entire system. I personally would rather have a small speed hit than have an unstable system.
I really wish the default font situation would be better in the world of X and nix/bsd distros.
The problem is that apple and microsoft have both invested a lot of money having people hand-tune their fonts, and do not allow linux distro's to distribute their fonts. But you CAN download and install the windows fonts for free and have identical fonts to your XP setup on your linux box. In debian it's as easy as "apt-get install msttcorefonts". Most distro's have specific one-liners that will install the fonts for you, and there is a more involved generic routine as well.
The open source community does have the bitstream vera fonts to include with distro's, and they are very nice, but they're not quite as good as the windows fonts.
I think it would be nice if the distro's gave you an "install windows fonts" link in the start menu post install. But that's really the only criticism I have of fonts on linux right now. After all, if you have fontconfig installed, installing fonts can be as simple as copying them to the.fonts folder in your home directory.
If science or scientific methodology is not part of the story then why should it be eligible for this award? What happened to the heritage of Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, and others?
I guess we're approaching the singularity and are finally becoming aware that it exists, and therefore no longer assume the future will look like the present, only with higher tech, and so put much higher believability requirements on pure sci-fi.
No but they usually have a hard(er) time learning it.
See it as if they do have a Word2Phonemic function but it basicly returns the input unaltered...
Hey, I'm not arguing it doesn't help to have phonemic information. But the article said mandatory. There is a difference between something that helps, and something that is required.
The internal representations for these models convert the letter information to phonemic information, which is seen as a mandatory step for word recognition. It is well known that words that have a consistent spelling to sound correspondence such as mint, tint, and hint are recognized faster than words that have an inconsistent spelling to sound correspondence such as pint
I can not believe this is in a serious paper. Mandatory? Please. What about people born deaf? Are they all unable to read?
This is no longer the case. The Google toolbar reports home to Google about sites people visit. Within a couple of minutes of someone viewing a URL that was private and only meant for them with a browser with the google toolbar installed the googlebot will come along to the site and grab the file for indexing. Nasty if you're not expecting it.
If you want to share something without google indexing it, there are many strategies you can use, all outlined on google.com itself.
Google does not index anything you have not allowed it to.
The problem is people putting private information in a public forum, not someone indexing that private information.
Dell does consumer 64bit systems for that price? You're missing one of the big points of the G5.
You're acting as if 64-bit matters for a consumer system. It is irrelevant. Since the imac g5 maxes out at 2 gigs you're not going to see a situation where you need the addressability of a 64-bit system.
Now, I admit, it sounds cool, but then apple has always sold more on image and sleekness than on raw hardware performance.
Having said that, my next computer purchase will likely be apple. Just for the one reason I think you CAN buy apple for: less headache.
I personally believe that the governments are still in the hands of the people, and the most efficacious way of changing said government is through the political process. There is no reason to jeopardize your life and liberty in an act of futility.
First of all, I made no claims about this particular instance. When I first heard about Bikes Against Bush I knew the guy was going to get arrested. It was obvious. He knew what he was getting into, he should bear the consequences. Having said that, I don't think we should criticize him because he stands up for what he believes is right. My point was that just because he broke the law doesn't mean he's a bad person.
And the suggestion that all governments are always open to change via the political process is laughable. If that were true there wouldn't be so many wars and uprisings. It is true that governments only exist by the will of the people. But sometimes the people just saying "enough!" isn't good enough, they have to actually do something about it. Not that that necessarily applies to the US situation. The US hasn't gone too far yet to be impervious to the political process. But that doesn't mean it can never happen.
As for not jeopardizing life and liberty, that presupposes you have liberty. And a lot of people would argue that liberty is more important than life. You don't have to jeopardize anything, but stop complaining when other people are willing to make sacrifices to protect the freedoms you cherish.
No wonder lefties don't buy lefty mice... because there aren't any on the market! I'm not asking for equal numbers here.. You know.. a ninth as many lefthanded mice as there are righthanded mice would be nice..
Look, it's very simple. No right-handed people buy left-handed mice. Tons of left-handed people (including myself) buy right-handed mice. In addition, most people don't buy a mouse at all, they get the mouse that came with their pc. So only a relatively small percentage of a tenth of all mouse users will buy left-handed mice. I guess the market just isn't big enough to support many left-handed mouse models.
When I started out there was no such thing as a left-handed mouse (at least, I didn't see one). They were all symmetric. But I used it right-handed because that's how every mouse I stumbled across was used and I didn't want to move it over to the left side of the keyboard.
It has nothing to do with availability of left-handed mice, just with the practicality of being different just for the sake of being different.
As for it being vandalism you could call almost anything that has to do with protesting a criminal act. Carry a banner? Unlicensed advertising. Hold a sit in? Traffic disruption maybe even holding the people you are stopping against their will.
Excellent point, just because the law forbids something doesn't mean the law should forbid it. When the Indians protested against the British it was illegal, but nobody would dare claim their cause was unjust. Sometimes the right thing to do is to break the law.
Search works well in Google because web pages are connect. My files aren't connected, so I don't think search on my filesystem will ever be half as good as search on the web.
The reason google works is because it associates meaning with search terms. That is, when you link to a document from a term, you're saying "this document is the meaning of this term". Google can be really dumb about how it analyzes this, and still give great results.
To parse regular documents, you would need to be able to associate meaning without href, which would involve actually understanding words, and what they mean in relation to eachother. A truly daunting task, but MS has a sizeable NLP department in their R&D labs, so I would not put it past them to be working on something like that.
Google did it the easy way, but if MS succeeds in doing it the hard way, they will be able to search orders of magnitude more effectively.
I'm assuming that when you say "little credible real world evidence" you are not counting all those times in the past (including the.dom boom during the 90s) when outsourcing didn't kill off the economy?
That's really strong evidence. "Look, it didn't destroy us, so it must be a good thing!" If I drive a staple into my arm every day it's not going to hamper anything I do much, but that doesn't mean it would be a good thing to do.
The.com boom, by the way, was abnormally high investment in the US economy. Investment has moved on now. Outsourcing is one of the mechanisms it has used to move on.
Oh yes, it does... Labour force is a very limited resource, so with outsourcing those low-grade jobs, you have more people who can concentrate on doing the more profitable (ie. higher added value) jobs.
Wait, so you're saying that if we fire people they'll go find better jobs.
I'm sorry, it still doesn't make any sense. If there really were better jobs, people would already have them.
I'm sure Word has a milti-million line codebase. But so does AIX. It's split into different components, and there's quite a few bugs where I know roughly which code must have been running. So stare at the code for a few hours envisioning different inputs/control flows, and eventually a case that's not accounted for properly will show itself.
Likely the word codebase is just not very modular. This kind of unnerved me too:
"In order to understand this, we have to understand a basic principle of fixes. You make the simplest code change required to fix the problem. This reduces the chances that the fix will cause some other problem that is, potentially, worse than the one you're trying to fix."
It's true, you should always keep a fix minimal, but it was made clear here that the problem was architectural, and any "fix" would not really be one, just a hack that pretended to be a fix. I'm wondering how much (or how little) refactoring of the word codebase really goes on, and I would guess "not much".
Go digging through the press releases and gushing "journalists" for every single release (except WinME) since (and including) Win95. You'll see the same quotes over and over and over.
I remember when NT 3.1 was originally released and the technical press was all gung-ho about how it was going to destroy unix and herald a new age of computing revolution. I was 12, I ate it up. I thought Microsoft developers were geniuses and I couldn't wait until there was a copy of NT on every desktop. Today there is, and what a wonderful world it is indeed:)
And inevitably, some web designer who's even more hardcore than you will say that you should hang yourself with CAT5 cable if your website uses any kind of HTML that Lynx can't render...
Not lynx, it doesn't do tables, which are quite useful, but I've for a long time been of the opinion that the majority of websites have no excuse if they don't show up in links. Stuff like popup menus, tab navigation and hover effects can be done with CSS in a cross-browser way that degrades gracefully on older/simpler browsers and integrates nicely with browsers for the blind. What I could conceivably see people need IE-only code for is in-page rich text editing (afaik there's no W3C mechanism for that yet) or complex real-time data layout controls like grids and charts. But your average, run-of-the-mill website really has no excuse to be running IE-only code.
The future of the web is not in jazzy code that will only work on one browser, one OS and one hardware platform. It is code that will degrade gracefully and is not tied to any specific style of output device so it runs agreeably on any platform. The W3C model is WAY better suited for that than anything coming out of redmond.
of course, you got modded up by the "I'm cool because I don't follow Slashdot groupthink" people, who, amusingly, have their own groupthink... so there you go... I'll probably be modded down by the same people.
No, you made a reasonably insightful comment, appended it with a suggestion that anti-groupthink is involved, and then made the prediction you would get modded down for offending the groupthinkers. That's an automatic +5. Ah, groupthink moderation at work:)
Now, before anyone mods this up as insightful or funny, start thinking, are you following the group? Are you really being an individual? What is the independent course of action here? Up, down or no moderation? Ah, sweet sweet moderation conflict.
Hint: if you have to think about whether you're acting like an individual, you're not being one. Only a person who truly is aloof of all social worries is a complete freethinker. Which is why they're all weirdo assholes.
And now you can give me that off-topic moderation, thank you.
Flying cars capable of carrying 500Kg of explosives [Assume a flying car designed to carry 2 USsians], in reprogrammed autopilot could do the trick.
So could electromagnetic catapults operated from off-shore former oil tankers.
Re:Compositing
on
The Power of X
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Laugh all you want, but at one point I would occasionally check my email by dialing with my modem-equipped palmpilot into the internet, running a telnet session to my mailserver, and running pine in a shell session.
Amazingly, it worked just fine, and was perfectly usable.
On the other hand, VNC from that palmpilot, though I tried it a few times, was just not usable. So I will admit that every once in a while those who claim the shell has better usability do have a point.
One of the things that has always bothered me about XFree86 in the past 6 years I have used linux is XFree86's kind of lag in new releases... development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
Which, together with the license change, is the reason people have given up on xfree86. X.org 6.8 will include all the flashy cool new stuff people have been talking about for years, like translucent goodness a la mac os x.
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
Given that X.org is the original X foundation that has been maintaining the X11 codebase XFree86 split off of, and all the non-xfree86 X projects are now basically working under the X.org umbrella, I wouldn't say that we're seeing all that many forks.
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing X to direct video access is rather like comparing ssh to the linux console. The latter will always be faster because there is no network bottleneck, but you can't use it to connect to your machine remotely.
Actually, that's not a good comparison, because when X runs locally it does not use the network, but instead uses shared memory. This is really fast, so the assertion that network transparency slows down X is a total myth.
What really makes X on linux slow is that there is almost no hardware acceleration (even with accelerated drivers). The RENDER framework, used for a lot of the gee-whiz graphical effects, is almost entirely non-accelerated. This is due to incompatibility between the X driver design and the RENDER framework which makes it incredibly difficult to write an accelerated implementation of it. This will get fixed when X.Org moves onto the kdrive driver framework.
What also hasn't helped historically is the fact that X runs in a separate process, and so you have to wait until the kernel wakes up the process before you see drawing occur. Older kernels were poor at recognizing when X needed to draw stuff, and so there was a noticeable delay between user action and the corresponding on-screen result. Ofcourse, if X ran in-kernel, any X crash would take down your entire system. I personally would rather have a small speed hit than have an unstable system.
I really wish the default font situation would be better in the world of X and nix/bsd distros.
.fonts folder in your home directory.
The problem is that apple and microsoft have both invested a lot of money having people hand-tune their fonts, and do not allow linux distro's to distribute their fonts. But you CAN download and install the windows fonts for free and have identical fonts to your XP setup on your linux box. In debian it's as easy as "apt-get install msttcorefonts". Most distro's have specific one-liners that will install the fonts for you, and there is a more involved generic routine as well.
The open source community does have the bitstream vera fonts to include with distro's, and they are very nice, but they're not quite as good as the windows fonts.
I think it would be nice if the distro's gave you an "install windows fonts" link in the start menu post install. But that's really the only criticism I have of fonts on linux right now. After all, if you have fontconfig installed, installing fonts can be as simple as copying them to the
If science or scientific methodology is not part of the story then why should it be eligible for this award? What happened to the heritage of Asimov, Lem, Dick, Heinlein, Clarke, and others?
I guess we're approaching the singularity and are finally becoming aware that it exists, and therefore no longer assume the future will look like the present, only with higher tech, and so put much higher believability requirements on pure sci-fi.
Synesthesia all the way baby!
No but they usually have a hard(er) time learning it.
See it as if they do have a Word2Phonemic function but it basicly returns the input unaltered...
Hey, I'm not arguing it doesn't help to have phonemic information. But the article said mandatory. There is a difference between something that helps, and something that is required.
The internal representations for these models convert the letter information to phonemic information, which is seen as a mandatory step for word recognition. It is well known that words that have a consistent spelling to sound correspondence such as mint, tint, and hint are recognized faster than words that have an inconsistent spelling to sound correspondence such as pint
I can not believe this is in a serious paper. Mandatory? Please. What about people born deaf? Are they all unable to read?
This is no longer the case. The Google toolbar reports home to Google about sites people visit. Within a couple of minutes of someone viewing a URL that was private and only meant for them with a browser with the google toolbar installed the googlebot will come along to the site and grab the file for indexing. Nasty if you're not expecting it.
If you want to share something without google indexing it, there are many strategies you can use, all outlined on google.com itself.
Google does not index anything you have not allowed it to.
The problem is people putting private information in a public forum, not someone indexing that private information.
Dell does consumer 64bit systems for that price? You're missing one of the big points of the G5.
You're acting as if 64-bit matters for a consumer system. It is irrelevant. Since the imac g5 maxes out at 2 gigs you're not going to see a situation where you need the addressability of a 64-bit system.
Now, I admit, it sounds cool, but then apple has always sold more on image and sleekness than on raw hardware performance.
Having said that, my next computer purchase will likely be apple. Just for the one reason I think you CAN buy apple for: less headache.
I personally believe that the governments are still in the hands of the people, and the most efficacious way of changing said government is through the political process. There is no reason to jeopardize your life and liberty in an act of futility.
First of all, I made no claims about this particular instance. When I first heard about Bikes Against Bush I knew the guy was going to get arrested. It was obvious. He knew what he was getting into, he should bear the consequences. Having said that, I don't think we should criticize him because he stands up for what he believes is right. My point was that just because he broke the law doesn't mean he's a bad person.
And the suggestion that all governments are always open to change via the political process is laughable. If that were true there wouldn't be so many wars and uprisings. It is true that governments only exist by the will of the people. But sometimes the people just saying "enough!" isn't good enough, they have to actually do something about it. Not that that necessarily applies to the US situation. The US hasn't gone too far yet to be impervious to the political process. But that doesn't mean it can never happen.
As for not jeopardizing life and liberty, that presupposes you have liberty. And a lot of people would argue that liberty is more important than life. You don't have to jeopardize anything, but stop complaining when other people are willing to make sacrifices to protect the freedoms you cherish.
No wonder lefties don't buy lefty mice... because there aren't any on the market! I'm not asking for equal numbers here.. You know.. a ninth as many lefthanded mice as there are righthanded mice would be nice..
Look, it's very simple. No right-handed people buy left-handed mice. Tons of left-handed people (including myself) buy right-handed mice. In addition, most people don't buy a mouse at all, they get the mouse that came with their pc. So only a relatively small percentage of a tenth of all mouse users will buy left-handed mice. I guess the market just isn't big enough to support many left-handed mouse models.
When I started out there was no such thing as a left-handed mouse (at least, I didn't see one). They were all symmetric. But I used it right-handed because that's how every mouse I stumbled across was used and I didn't want to move it over to the left side of the keyboard.
It has nothing to do with availability of left-handed mice, just with the practicality of being different just for the sake of being different.
As for it being vandalism you could call almost anything that has to do with protesting a criminal act. Carry a banner? Unlicensed advertising. Hold a sit in? Traffic disruption maybe even holding the people you are stopping against their will.
Excellent point, just because the law forbids something doesn't mean the law should forbid it. When the Indians protested against the British it was illegal, but nobody would dare claim their cause was unjust. Sometimes the right thing to do is to break the law.
Search works well in Google because web pages are connect. My files aren't connected, so I don't think search on my filesystem will ever be half as good as search on the web.
The reason google works is because it associates meaning with search terms. That is, when you link to a document from a term, you're saying "this document is the meaning of this term". Google can be really dumb about how it analyzes this, and still give great results.
To parse regular documents, you would need to be able to associate meaning without href, which would involve actually understanding words, and what they mean in relation to eachother. A truly daunting task, but MS has a sizeable NLP department in their R&D labs, so I would not put it past them to be working on something like that.
Google did it the easy way, but if MS succeeds in doing it the hard way, they will be able to search orders of magnitude more effectively.
I'm assuming that when you say "little credible real world evidence" you are not counting all those times in the past (including the .dom boom during the 90s) when outsourcing didn't kill off the economy?
.com boom, by the way, was abnormally high investment in the US economy. Investment has moved on now. Outsourcing is one of the mechanisms it has used to move on.
That's really strong evidence. "Look, it didn't destroy us, so it must be a good thing!" If I drive a staple into my arm every day it's not going to hamper anything I do much, but that doesn't mean it would be a good thing to do.
The
So outsourcing is a labor market version of trickle-down economics?
Exactly, which is why despite all its rabid proponents it has as little credible real world evidence to support its validity as an economic theory.
Oh yes, it does... Labour force is a very limited resource, so with outsourcing those low-grade jobs, you have more people who can concentrate on doing the more profitable (ie. higher added value) jobs.
Wait, so you're saying that if we fire people they'll go find better jobs.
I'm sorry, it still doesn't make any sense. If there really were better jobs, people would already have them.
I'm sure Word has a milti-million line codebase. But so does AIX. It's split into different components, and there's quite a few bugs where I know roughly which code must have been running. So stare at the code for a few hours envisioning different inputs/control flows, and eventually a case that's not accounted for properly will show itself.
Likely the word codebase is just not very modular. This kind of unnerved me too:
"In order to understand this, we have to understand a basic principle of fixes. You make the simplest code change required to fix the problem. This reduces the chances that the fix will cause some other problem that is, potentially, worse than the one you're trying to fix."
It's true, you should always keep a fix minimal, but it was made clear here that the problem was architectural, and any "fix" would not really be one, just a hack that pretended to be a fix. I'm wondering how much (or how little) refactoring of the word codebase really goes on, and I would guess "not much".
Go digging through the press releases and gushing "journalists" for every single release (except WinME) since (and including) Win95. You'll see the same quotes over and over and over.
:)
I remember when NT 3.1 was originally released and the technical press was all gung-ho about how it was going to destroy unix and herald a new age of computing revolution. I was 12, I ate it up. I thought Microsoft developers were geniuses and I couldn't wait until there was a copy of NT on every desktop. Today there is, and what a wonderful world it is indeed
And inevitably, some web designer who's even more hardcore than you will say that you should hang yourself with CAT5 cable if your website uses any kind of HTML that Lynx can't render...
Not lynx, it doesn't do tables, which are quite useful, but I've for a long time been of the opinion that the majority of websites have no excuse if they don't show up in links. Stuff like popup menus, tab navigation and hover effects can be done with CSS in a cross-browser way that degrades gracefully on older/simpler browsers and integrates nicely with browsers for the blind. What I could conceivably see people need IE-only code for is in-page rich text editing (afaik there's no W3C mechanism for that yet) or complex real-time data layout controls like grids and charts. But your average, run-of-the-mill website really has no excuse to be running IE-only code.
The future of the web is not in jazzy code that will only work on one browser, one OS and one hardware platform. It is code that will degrade gracefully and is not tied to any specific style of output device so it runs agreeably on any platform. The W3C model is WAY better suited for that than anything coming out of redmond.
One more vote for crimson. I just wrote a compiler in it. It's a good editor. Doesn't get in your way at all.
of course, you got modded up by the "I'm cool because I don't follow Slashdot groupthink" people, who, amusingly, have their own groupthink... so there you go... I'll probably be modded down by the same people.
:)
No, you made a reasonably insightful comment, appended it with a suggestion that anti-groupthink is involved, and then made the prediction you would get modded down for offending the groupthinkers. That's an automatic +5. Ah, groupthink moderation at work
Now, before anyone mods this up as insightful or funny, start thinking, are you following the group? Are you really being an individual? What is the independent course of action here? Up, down or no moderation? Ah, sweet sweet moderation conflict.
Hint: if you have to think about whether you're acting like an individual, you're not being one. Only a person who truly is aloof of all social worries is a complete freethinker. Which is why they're all weirdo assholes.
And now you can give me that off-topic moderation, thank you.
They are throttling them because they don't want to degrade the quality of service for games already released on Steam
Or, alternately, everyone gets an individually encrypted copy, and the speed at which the copies can be encrypted is the bottleneck.
Flying cars capable of carrying 500Kg of explosives [Assume a flying car designed to carry 2 USsians], in reprogrammed autopilot could do the trick.
So could electromagnetic catapults operated from off-shore former oil tankers.
Laugh all you want, but at one point I would occasionally check my email by dialing with my modem-equipped palmpilot into the internet, running a telnet session to my mailserver, and running pine in a shell session.
Amazingly, it worked just fine, and was perfectly usable.
On the other hand, VNC from that palmpilot, though I tried it a few times, was just not usable. So I will admit that every once in a while those who claim the shell has better usability do have a point.
One of the things that has always bothered me about XFree86 in the past 6 years I have used linux is XFree86's kind of lag in new releases... development seems to move at a snail's pace, and let's be frank, it's almost the same as it was back in the good ol' unix days.
Which, together with the license change, is the reason people have given up on xfree86. X.org 6.8 will include all the flashy cool new stuff people have been talking about for years, like translucent goodness a la mac os x.
I for one enjoy X.org and a windowing system that can hopefully be kept up to date and have more active development.
But my question is... how many more forks will we have?
Given that X.org is the original X foundation that has been maintaining the X11 codebase XFree86 split off of, and all the non-xfree86 X projects are now basically working under the X.org umbrella, I wouldn't say that we're seeing all that many forks.
They're toshiba drives designed specifically for embedding in portable devices.
The 20 gig toshiba 1.8 inch hard drive (which I think is the one in the ipod) has these specs:
I don't really know what that means, but I'm thinking it means it can take quite a beating.