The application startup speed problem is a fundamental quirk (and a flaw IMO) of ELF. You can't really solve that easily.
X itself is fast, even in theory. Look at the insane amount of bandwidth available even in a (from today's point of view) lower-class PC and find out that the bottleneck is somewhere else: Less (or not at all) optimized graphics drivers, said ELF problems, memory hogging. The big DEs eat RAM like crazy. A fresh Gnome 1.4 session easily sums up to 60M, which is almost as much as what a freshly started Win2K uses (70M). Add Galeon (30 M) and Nautilus (25 M) and watch everything lag and stutter. But that is not because X is flawed.
X is a fantastic concept, IMO. The implementations still need work (and XFree86 another big revamping), but the concept of X kicks Windows' fat ass.
Yes, your average TV-Out jack is generally sucky.
But software DVD players on fast (> 450 MHz on Linux, > 600 if you're using Windows) PCs generally have a better decoding quality than many DVD players. There are two ways to make a PC really shine in terms of video quality:
1) Get an output device with a VGA in jack (and use the exact same resolution on your PC the device would rescale to - your video card's scaler is better in 99% of cases) - this would probably be a digital projector, as VGA in ports on TVs almost always suck. This also makes progressive scan possible.
2) Make an VGA->RGB converter cable and use a TV-suitable modeline to output it to your TV. It's not that simple, you have to understand some electronics and video signal theory, but quality is good. There are some howtos on the Internet. Be sure to have your DVD software output interlaced 30fps animation (for NTSC) instead of 24fps progressive, as the latter will make the animation even jerkier than the 3:2 pull-down.
Windows' dpi setting (default 96) *is* user changeable. Ever wondered what the "large fonts" setting actually does? Sets your dpi to 112. Ever wondered what "user defined font size" is? Sets dpi to anything you want and even tells you that.
The problem is that measuring stuff in points is so common. Applications should ask the user for a pixel size first when it comes to screen-displayed things. After all, yes, most GUI elements are pixel-based and there is no reason why the font should be specified in points, breaking all cross-platform compatibility. It has gone so far that some applications have even designed their user interfaces with your typical broken default X server in mind.
DPI will always matter, because that's what's important when scaling screen-displayed stuff for the printer.
Wrong. Hardcore porn isn't allowed after 11pm either (I think Pay TV has different rules). TV stations sometimes try to override that rule, but usually get kicked in the butt afterwards.
I agree that the idea is a joke, but first I want to clarify something that probably got lost in all the babelfishification (I'm German).
The article says that "content not suitable for minors may only be made accessible between 11pm and 6am, if there are no access-control facilities installed".
First, Germany's laws about erotica are rather lax. Softcore is rated "16 years" per se, so it's not even affected.
Second, the law would only affect sites that freely distribute their content without stuff like adult content.
So the bottom line is that the only sites affected would be free-access hard core porn sites. Of course, controlling all this is technically impossible, and the very arising of the idea is due to technically illiterate German politicians. Several of ideas like this were turned down over the past few years when the people who know what they're talking about basically told them that they would be either technically impossible or extremely expensive.
The problem is that
a) most default X server configurations are broken (set to 75dpi, where most modern displays have > 100dpi)
b) most distributions have no reliably working font management (I think "most distributions" can be replaced by "every distro except debian*").
I agree that this is a major problem, but it's not the fault of any linux software developer. The broken X server configurations are the distributor's problem, as is the second issue. Defoma is free, after all, and building a pretty frontend wouldn't be that hard.
* apt-get defoma on woody. integrating truetype in defoma still is a pain in the behind, but once they're in you can even *gasp* print them. Which leads us to another major problem. The printing functions of most toolkits or applications are broken, and setting up a printer is an exhausting task. The sick and twisted concept of patching printer drivers into gs is an example.
The menu layout in Windows is incredibly confusing. I don't want to memorize the vendor of each application, because that's how the program menu folder is called. And how is anybody supposed to remember that Excel is a spreadsheet or that Explorer is a web browser, file manager, bad ftp client and responsible for some GUI elements? The naming of Windows programs is very hard to understand, and while these names might work in the Linux world as "brand names", new users facing hundreds of unfamiliar programs deserve something more helpful.
While we're doing the "keep the text and switch words" game, there's a lot of discussion going on in the Gnome project to remedy this situation in Gnome 2 (beta out in a couple of weeks), and last time I checked the solution of having the app menu split in topics (graphics, internet, etc.) and the entries themselves saying things to the like of "GIMP, image manipulator" was quite popular.
Re:So how much power you think they using per minu
on
Dreamhack 2001
·
· Score: 1
Well... let's do some math. Suppose 2500 people are there (this is realistic, I've seen 6K people parties here in Germany). Suppose most people are l33t d00ds and thus use some > 1.2 GHz Athlons OC'd to 1.4 with vacuum cleaner engines as fans. So let's say 250W average for the PC and 100W for the monitor, that's 350W per machine. Times 2500... 850kW. This sounds much, but on the other hand, electricity is ass cheap.
The good news is that XFree86 has had the capability of hardware-accelerated alpha blending for quite some time now via the XRender extension. That's the same playing field as AAed fonts. Now it's up to the hardware drivers to get the acceleration done, and to toolkit and wm developers to include the support in their software.
If internationalisation matters...
on
GTK-- vs. QT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...go for Qt. Gtk, IMO, has the huge disadvantage that the current 1.2 revision doesn't support Unicode, whereas Qt fully relies on it and even provides GUI-independent helper classes for all kinds of Unicode conversion that you can use anywhere in the program. This would also help for the mathematical symbols that you probably want to display.
It looks like Gtk2 will use Unicode and Pango, thus potentially blowing away the competition, but as long as there's no stable version of Gtk2, I'd go for Qt.
Have you tried getting/making patches for 0.9.5->0.9.6, fetching Debian source and making your own 0.9.6?
I've found the Debian mozilla packages rather slow to update, so that's probably what I'll do to get to 0.9.6, if it's feasible without pain.
Wild guess: Perhaps Moz on Windows uses Windows' default "Mail notification" sound, which is what Outlook uses as well. Try to change that and see what happens.
This is simply because the CPUs are so insanely fast now that other bottlenecks (architecture, RAM, buses and humans) are the brake 99.9% of the time. Test it. Go to a Linux box and look at the load average after a day worth of office work. I doubt it would be over 0.1.
However, MHz sells, and that's why the CPUs are "improved" more and more. Same thing with hard drives. Hardly anybody uses 100GB or saturates a 133MB/s bus. They're there and getting sold anyway.
I wanted to give Vorbis the ultimate stress test, seeing whether I could stand its sound at 40 kbps or not. This is the bitrate I would use for my mp3 player if it didn't sound so damn awful in mp3.
I couldn't get ogg under 64k (which sounded surprisingly good, like 112k or so mp3 - good enough for El Cheapo earplugs). IIRC "low bitrate support" came around RC1. Any hints on that?
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X itself is fast, even in theory. Look at the insane amount of bandwidth available even in a (from today's point of view) lower-class PC and find out that the bottleneck is somewhere else: Less (or not at all) optimized graphics drivers, said ELF problems, memory hogging. The big DEs eat RAM like crazy. A fresh Gnome 1.4 session easily sums up to 60M, which is almost as much as what a freshly started Win2K uses (70M). Add Galeon (30 M) and Nautilus (25 M) and watch everything lag and stutter. But that is not because X is flawed.
X is a fantastic concept, IMO. The implementations still need work (and XFree86 another big revamping), but the concept of X kicks Windows' fat ass.
Yes, your average TV-Out jack is generally sucky.
But software DVD players on fast (> 450 MHz on Linux, > 600 if you're using Windows) PCs generally have a better decoding quality than many DVD players. There are two ways to make a PC really shine in terms of video quality:
1) Get an output device with a VGA in jack (and use the exact same resolution on your PC the device would rescale to - your video card's scaler is better in 99% of cases) - this would probably be a digital projector, as VGA in ports on TVs almost always suck. This also makes progressive scan possible.
2) Make an VGA->RGB converter cable and use a TV-suitable modeline to output it to your TV. It's not that simple, you have to understand some electronics and video signal theory, but quality is good. There are some howtos on the Internet. Be sure to have your DVD software output interlaced 30fps animation (for NTSC) instead of 24fps progressive, as the latter will make the animation even jerkier than the 3:2 pull-down.
Whoops, wrong. Cups, for some reason, comes with its own rasterizer and doesn't need ghostscript. Anyway:
$ apt-cache show cupsys | grep ^Depends
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), [...] cupsys-pstoraster, [...]
No dependency problem here.
Windows' dpi setting (default 96) *is* user changeable. Ever wondered what the "large fonts" setting actually does? Sets your dpi to 112. Ever wondered what "user defined font size" is? Sets dpi to anything you want and even tells you that.
The problem is that measuring stuff in points is so common. Applications should ask the user for a pixel size first when it comes to screen-displayed things. After all, yes, most GUI elements are pixel-based and there is no reason why the font should be specified in points, breaking all cross-platform compatibility. It has gone so far that some applications have even designed their user interfaces with your typical broken default X server in mind.
DPI will always matter, because that's what's important when scaling screen-displayed stuff for the printer.
Wrong. Hardcore porn isn't allowed after 11pm either (I think Pay TV has different rules). TV stations sometimes try to override that rule, but usually get kicked in the butt afterwards.
Ugh, of course, "adult content" in the first paragraph should read "adult check". Note to self: Use the preview button.
So the bottom line is that the only sites affected would be free-access hard core porn sites. Of course, controlling all this is technically impossible, and the very arising of the idea is due to technically illiterate German politicians. Several of ideas like this were turned down over the past few years when the people who know what they're talking about basically told them that they would be either technically impossible or extremely expensive.
The problem is that a) most default X server configurations are broken (set to 75dpi, where most modern displays have > 100dpi) b) most distributions have no reliably working font management (I think "most distributions" can be replaced by "every distro except debian*"). I agree that this is a major problem, but it's not the fault of any linux software developer. The broken X server configurations are the distributor's problem, as is the second issue. Defoma is free, after all, and building a pretty frontend wouldn't be that hard. * apt-get defoma on woody. integrating truetype in defoma still is a pain in the behind, but once they're in you can even *gasp* print them. Which leads us to another major problem. The printing functions of most toolkits or applications are broken, and setting up a printer is an exhausting task. The sick and twisted concept of patching printer drivers into gs is an example.
The menu layout in Windows is incredibly confusing. I don't want to memorize the vendor of each application, because that's how the program menu folder is called. And how is anybody supposed to remember that Excel is a spreadsheet or that Explorer is a web browser, file manager, bad ftp client and responsible for some GUI elements? The naming of Windows programs is very hard to understand, and while these names might work in the Linux world as "brand names", new users facing hundreds of unfamiliar programs deserve something more helpful. While we're doing the "keep the text and switch words" game, there's a lot of discussion going on in the Gnome project to remedy this situation in Gnome 2 (beta out in a couple of weeks), and last time I checked the solution of having the app menu split in topics (graphics, internet, etc.) and the entries themselves saying things to the like of "GIMP, image manipulator" was quite popular.
Well... let's do some math. Suppose 2500 people are there (this is realistic, I've seen 6K people parties here in Germany). Suppose most people are l33t d00ds and thus use some > 1.2 GHz Athlons OC'd to 1.4 with vacuum cleaner engines as fans. So let's say 250W average for the PC and 100W for the monitor, that's 350W per machine. Times 2500... 850kW. This sounds much, but on the other hand, electricity is ass cheap.
Hate to disappoint you, but CDs *are* aluminium-coated plastic discs.
The good news is that XFree86 has had the capability of hardware-accelerated alpha blending for quite some time now via the XRender extension. That's the same playing field as AAed fonts. Now it's up to the hardware drivers to get the acceleration done, and to toolkit and wm developers to include the support in their software.
...go for Qt. Gtk, IMO, has the huge disadvantage that the current 1.2 revision doesn't support Unicode, whereas Qt fully relies on it and even provides GUI-independent helper classes for all kinds of Unicode conversion that you can use anywhere in the program. This would also help for the mathematical symbols that you probably want to display. It looks like Gtk2 will use Unicode and Pango, thus potentially blowing away the competition, but as long as there's no stable version of Gtk2, I'd go for Qt.
Have you tried getting/making patches for 0.9.5->0.9.6, fetching Debian source and making your own 0.9.6? I've found the Debian mozilla packages rather slow to update, so that's probably what I'll do to get to 0.9.6, if it's feasible without pain.
Wild guess: Perhaps Moz on Windows uses Windows' default "Mail notification" sound, which is what Outlook uses as well. Try to change that and see what happens.
This is simply because the CPUs are so insanely fast now that other bottlenecks (architecture, RAM, buses and humans) are the brake 99.9% of the time. Test it. Go to a Linux box and look at the load average after a day worth of office work. I doubt it would be over 0.1.
However, MHz sells, and that's why the CPUs are "improved" more and more. Same thing with hard drives. Hardly anybody uses 100GB or saturates a 133MB/s bus. They're there and getting sold anyway.
Yes, unless you got a CD player that sets a copy protection bit in the stream and a sound card that won't record if that bit is set.
I wanted to give Vorbis the ultimate stress test, seeing whether I could stand its sound at 40 kbps or not. This is the bitrate I would use for my mp3 player if it didn't sound so damn awful in mp3.
I couldn't get ogg under 64k (which sounded surprisingly good, like 112k or so mp3 - good enough for El Cheapo earplugs). IIRC "low bitrate support" came around RC1. Any hints on that?