* - Altorught this version is known as "SVG", the icons are still in PNG format, the SVG files will be relased once the support for the format improves in KDE.
I think the one in "I've" is warranted, but otherwise "me too!". As well the, superfluous, use of, comma's, gets on my nerves. What are they teaching in the schools these days?
If I saw you engulfed in flames, I would be under no legal or ethical obligation to give you the benefit of my fire extinguisher.
I am not a lawyer, in fact I don't even live in the United States of Attorneys, but I do believe you are blatantly wrong on both counts. I am fairly certain that most states have some kind of "Good Samaritan" law that requires you to help - I certainly would not want to be the defendant (legal) in this case, nor would I want to shoulder the social (ethical) implications of being the guy who watched someone burn while I stood by with a fire extinguisher.
That being said, Microsoft is not watching people burn - they are simply refusing a convenience (i.e. instant free downloads) to people who may not be paying them any money. I gotta side with MS on this one, although I will miss "webfonts.sh" and I am very curious of the implications for Codeweavers.
And lastly, who modded you "Insightful"? "Interesting", maybe, but not "Insightful".
Re:"Client server is slow" myth dispelled, once mo
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Fast redraws, fast scrolling increase my productivity. Sync on vertical refreshes reduces my eye strain. Shadows help differentiate windows and layers. And eye candy makes me more content.
It's amazing how far common sense goes before one even needs to invoke a "study".
Re:OS X had composited windowing long ago blablabl
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
·
· Score: 1
[apple fanboi imitation]
Ha! As an Honourary Apple Fanboy (TM), I can appreciate your comment. I have to say though, it is much more fun monkeying around with this kind of stuff on my linux PC with commodity (i.e. not Apple) hardware.
And it is looking as though the linux/X/freedesktop guys may actually be ahead of Microsoft with this feature, if not Apple.
Re:"Client server is slow" myth dispelled, once mo
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
·
· Score: 1
Very cool.
Although I can't say I have ported X servers to new platforms, I can tell you it is interesting to play around with the "other" X server at freedesktop.org, here. It is well worth the effort if you are stuck with an ATI card. Don't follow the install directions on the site though - use jhbuild with the "freedesktop" moduleset and the "xserver" module. This is also where the XGL server is.
Bonus points if you can get openGL working without X, and then XGL running on top;-)
"Client server is slow" myth dispelled, once more
on
X.Org 6.8.2 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
With all due respect, you don't really seem to know much on this subject. As I understand it, it is not the client-server model, nor the inefficiency of the X protocol that is at issue here. It is rather a the stagnancy of the x toolkit (which could be blamed on the xfree86 organization, if one likes to point fingers) that has caused this.
As has been stated in another thread, X11R6 was first released in 1994. No significant changes were made to its drawing libraries before the addition or the render extension (with anti-aliased fonts) by Keith Packard in the 2001/2002 timeframe. In 1994, things that we take for granted like true-colour displays. Windows 95 had not been released - Windows 3.1 was mostly seen in 256 colours!
As more graphical applications (e.g. web browsers, image viewers) became the norm, and 32-bit colour became common, application writers sought solutions that would allow them the functionality they needed. GTK+ and QT became toolkits that supplied the features that X lacked, at the cost or having to perform client side rendering. This pushes more and more pixels with higher bit-depths through the X protocol to the server. Some solutions were devised for special cases like OpenGL (GLX) and video (Xvideo), but X's core display system did without updates.
Since the clients now had to push lots of bits through the X protocol to the server, 2D graphics displayed the latency that you describe, even on really fast hardware. In a way, the Render extension seems to have pushed this over the edge since software fallbacks required (esp. for text) made rendering crawl.
The solution that the X.org guys have come up with is this: reduce the reading and writing over the X "pipe". There are a few methods that they are using. First is the XFixes extension. This extension supplies some additional functions that were missing in the core protocol - like the ability to address a region. Once this was in place, the Damage extension could be created, which allows the client and server to pass less information back in forth because they can now identify when a region has been damaged and needs to be redrawn.
The next piece is Composite and the composite manager. Composite allows the server to draw windows into an offscreen region so that the composite manager can redraw them on the screen. By doing this, the composite manager can use the hardware acceleration in the video card to do smooth opaque moves, and additionaly special effects. Theoretically, a composite manager could be written to use OpenGL, which would be really smooth. I can testify, however, that using Composite and xcompmgr on my PC at home is smooth as glass. 32 bit colour, drop shadows, and all the niceties...
The next step will be Cairo, Glitz, and XGL. I am anxiously waiting for a release of this stuff, because it is way cool.
Yes, it does if you can figure out how to build it yourself. When I say future, I mean when this is all released and distributers pick it up so that I can rpm it (or apt, as the case may be.) I have spent the past several days trying to build the freedesktop x server with the opengl goodies, and I haven't had much luck.
Yes, you missed something. This has very little to do with the size of your icons.
This will allow all gtk application to render everything using cairo, much like gdk was used in the past. This makes high quality vector (and bitmap) operations available in gtk, where they weren't before. And the plan is to later accelerate this through the graphic cards GPU or 3d engine to make all graphics fast and smooth.
And you can have some honkin' big icons if you want...
But you can get the same behavior under X11--turn on "backing store",
Except it's not quite that easy. Many applications do not use the backing store, mostly because the way the old backing store system works in X is not useful. Just as a test, turn on backingstore and drag one firefox window over another - you will see trails of the top window in the bottom one, no matter how fast your hardware is. This is because X is continually telling the lower window to redraw itself because the upper window has exposed a different portion of it.
The real solution to this problem is the Damage and Composite extensions. Damage allows the server to be more intelligent about what needs to be redrawn, listening for changes from clients. Composite allows a compositing manager to run which can keep all the windows contents available and redraw changed windows (via damage). The compositing manager is then using a backing store properly to make opaque move smooth.
A backing store is no good if you don't/can't use it for anything.
Just so you know you're not crazy, I have the same problem with totem/xine (totem-xine-0.99.22-1.1.fc3.fr, xine-0.99.3-2.1.fc3.fr, xine-lib-1.0.0-1.1.fc3.fr). Played it three times before I decided to try mplayer, which worked fine.
The price for the motherboard varies depending on the dealer you are purchasing from (yes, there still Amiga dealers in existence!) but is around US$700.... Basically, these are "early adopter" prices.
Am I the only one that finds the quoted phrase ironic?
I can't find the Mini Cooper mentioned on the site
Because it's not.
(what, is BMW scared of diluting its brand name?)
Yes, I think they are. Although I don't own a Mini so I can't check, I don't remember them having a BMW badge on them anywhere. Although I think it is really more the other way around - BMW does not run around shouting "The Mini is a BMW" for the sake of the Mini brand, not the BMW brand.
but it works perfectly fine in mine.
Am I allowed to hate you because you own a Beemer and an iPod, and I own neither?;-)
This may be a little off-topic, but you're comment struck my funny and made me think.
Remember when Apple had a promotion with Volkswagen to give Volkswagen buyers free iPods? Well I wonder if the Apple marketing dudes are already chatting with BMW about possible product tie-ins between the Mac Mini, the iPod Mini, and the Mini Cooper.
GotApex? has a "headless Dell" on their site for $449.
This is not really a reasonable comparison. This Mac Mini is a super small form-factor PC. Try this: Mini-itx system with Morex case
After I added the optical drive, upgraded to the 1200 processor/motherboard, upgraded hard disk to match apple, etc, I came in around $730. And that's for a PC with shared video (unichrome) that is still over twice the size of the Mac Mini, running WinXP, and looking about as attractive as a big warm turd. The Cappuccinopc web site has some PCs that may be a closer comparison, but they are also more expensive and include Intel Extreme video.
If someone out there made a 6.5 by 6.5 by 2 PC with a real video card and slot-loading dvd drive for 499, I would be all over it.
Ha ha, just kidding. 'XP' is only 1,213 in base-36
ah, but if they were using a base 128 system (a la ASCII) then it would be 11344. Definitely more version inflastion than 490 in Roman numerals, (if the scribe slipped up a little on the "P")
On second thought, no, I've got no idea what they were thinking.
I think it is insane for someone to spend 25 grand on buying a virtual island. But apparantly this person is going to be selling prime-time virtual real-estate on this island. People apparantly want it, and are paying for it. So we are all insane.
That's precisely my point. We live in a culture that has nothing better to do with our cash than buy virtual real estate. We have never been richer (in the western world, anyways) than we are now.
In general, the software industry (which is what I assume you are talking about) does not sell "intangible works" - they sell functionality. Businesses will not buy your software if you are not willing to service and support them. Consumers require want to buy toys, and toy-makers (hardware vendors) will pay for the software to provide features that consumers want. PC game-makers are suffering more in the face of piracy, but what can you expect? Someone with the patience to use a PC can generally figure out how to copy a game. Even so, many of us buy the game so we can get the box, the handbook, or subscription to the online service. And most of us can't be bothered, and we simply by the console version.
The copyright laws are there to protect people who invest this time and money.
True enough, but unfortunately they are being used to as an offensive weapon, and not a defensive one. They are not protecting anyone, they are used to attack by strong corporations. If they didn't exist, the "producers" would simple think harder about how they choose to spend that money.
With this protection companies have motiviation to make more, and as I said in a previous post - how many open source games out there that are in the top 10 gaming lists? Hell top 100.
"Companies" are the bane and boon of western business. One could argue that the economy would collapse without them. But one could not argue that artists, scientists - idea-makers - would stop thinking without them. If the studios did not produce games, then individuals would, and the top 100 games would all be open source. However, I don't believe you when you say that these companies would lack the motivation - people do buy virtual real estate, after all, so they will still buy games. So that negates the point.
Times change, and maybe it wasn't so important back then (or at least people didn't realize it)
I still believe you've got it backwards here - it is this age in which we do not have our priorities straight, when we put dollar figures on ideas and assume that all people are criminals because they have the capacity to understand.
But I don't think that you and I will come to an agreement on these things.
I think it is more that some people are trying to make IP not property.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
"Intellectual Property" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Property means something that one possesses, and it is very difficult to possess something that only exists in someone's head, in my opinion.
Historically, (as far as I can tell) people have not wrangled so much over the ownership of ideas. It only, as you say, since people have started investing so much money into ideas, to be later confronted with better copying techniques, that this has been a problem. Patrons of the art, for instance, have always existed, but generally have not expected a return on their investments. Nowadays, the patrons are all record producers and software companies and the like.
Did it ever occur to you that it is insane to invest millions of dollars into an intangible work? Probably not, because the industry has us trained to believe that that is normal. You are probably worried that without the current industry there would not be new games and books and recordings. But remember that artists have always worked for thousands of years, and that this industry structure is less than a hundred years old.
Slashdot Mirror
From the page you linked:
* - Altorught this version is known as "SVG", the icons are still in PNG format, the SVG files will be relased once the support for the format improves in KDE.
Not SVG. And Jimmac doesn't agree with you anyways.
I think the one in "I've" is warranted, but otherwise "me too!". As well the, superfluous, use of, comma's, gets on my nerves. What are they teaching in the schools these days?
And your post which was factually incorrect is considered "informative". Go figure.
;-)
;-)
Yeah. I guess the mods here are no smarter than I am
Thanks to you, and the 7 other people who straightened me out on this one. My bad.
IWNBALE (I will never be a lawyer either - at least not by Seinfeld as a legal reference
If I saw you engulfed in flames, I would be under no legal or ethical obligation to give you the benefit of my fire extinguisher.
I am not a lawyer, in fact I don't even live in the United States of Attorneys, but I do believe you are blatantly wrong on both counts. I am fairly certain that most states have some kind of "Good Samaritan" law that requires you to help - I certainly would not want to be the defendant (legal) in this case, nor would I want to shoulder the social (ethical) implications of being the guy who watched someone burn while I stood by with a fire extinguisher.
That being said, Microsoft is not watching people burn - they are simply refusing a convenience (i.e. instant free downloads) to people who may not be paying them any money. I gotta side with MS on this one, although I will miss "webfonts.sh" and I am very curious of the implications for Codeweavers.
And lastly, who modded you "Insightful"? "Interesting", maybe, but not "Insightful".
Fast redraws, fast scrolling increase my productivity. Sync on vertical refreshes reduces my eye strain. Shadows help differentiate windows and layers. And eye candy makes me more content.
It's amazing how far common sense goes before one even needs to invoke a "study".
[apple fanboi imitation]
Ha! As an Honourary Apple Fanboy (TM), I can appreciate your comment. I have to say though, it is much more fun monkeying around with this kind of stuff on my linux PC with commodity (i.e. not Apple) hardware.
And it is looking as though the linux/X/freedesktop guys may actually be ahead of Microsoft with this feature, if not Apple.
Very cool.
;-)
Although I can't say I have ported X servers to new platforms, I can tell you it is interesting to play around with the "other" X server at freedesktop.org, here. It is well worth the effort if you are stuck with an ATI card. Don't follow the install directions on the site though - use jhbuild with the "freedesktop" moduleset and the "xserver" module. This is also where the XGL server is.
Bonus points if you can get openGL working without X, and then XGL running on top
With all due respect, you don't really seem to know much on this subject. As I understand it, it is not the client-server model, nor the inefficiency of the X protocol that is at issue here. It is rather a the stagnancy of the x toolkit (which could be blamed on the xfree86 organization, if one likes to point fingers) that has caused this.
As has been stated in another thread, X11R6 was first released in 1994. No significant changes were made to its drawing libraries before the addition or the render extension (with anti-aliased fonts) by Keith Packard in the 2001/2002 timeframe. In 1994, things that we take for granted like true-colour displays. Windows 95 had not been released - Windows 3.1 was mostly seen in 256 colours!
As more graphical applications (e.g. web browsers, image viewers) became the norm, and 32-bit colour became common, application writers sought solutions that would allow them the functionality they needed. GTK+ and QT became toolkits that supplied the features that X lacked, at the cost or having to perform client side rendering. This pushes more and more pixels with higher bit-depths through the X protocol to the server. Some solutions were devised for special cases like OpenGL (GLX) and video (Xvideo), but X's core display system did without updates.
Since the clients now had to push lots of bits through the X protocol to the server, 2D graphics displayed the latency that you describe, even on really fast hardware. In a way, the Render extension seems to have pushed this over the edge since software fallbacks required (esp. for text) made rendering crawl.
The solution that the X.org guys have come up with is this: reduce the reading and writing over the X "pipe". There are a few methods that they are using. First is the XFixes extension. This extension supplies some additional functions that were missing in the core protocol - like the ability to address a region. Once this was in place, the Damage extension could be created, which allows the client and server to pass less information back in forth because they can now identify when a region has been damaged and needs to be redrawn.
The next piece is Composite and the composite manager. Composite allows the server to draw windows into an offscreen region so that the composite manager can redraw them on the screen. By doing this, the composite manager can use the hardware acceleration in the video card to do smooth opaque moves, and additionaly special effects. Theoretically, a composite manager could be written to use OpenGL, which would be really smooth. I can testify, however, that using Composite and xcompmgr on my PC at home is smooth as glass. 32 bit colour, drop shadows, and all the niceties...
The next step will be Cairo, Glitz, and XGL. I am anxiously waiting for a release of this stuff, because it is way cool.
It already works.
Yes, it does if you can figure out how to build it yourself. When I say future, I mean when this is all released and distributers pick it up so that I can rpm it (or apt, as the case may be.) I have spent the past several days trying to build the freedesktop x server with the opengl goodies, and I haven't had much luck.
Yes, you missed something. This has very little to do with the size of your icons.
This will allow all gtk application to render everything using cairo, much like gdk was used in the past. This makes high quality vector (and bitmap) operations available in gtk, where they weren't before. And the plan is to later accelerate this through the graphic cards GPU or 3d engine to make all graphics fast and smooth.
And you can have some honkin' big icons if you want...
But you can get the same behavior under X11--turn on "backing store",
Except it's not quite that easy. Many applications do not use the backing store, mostly because the way the old backing store system works in X is not useful. Just as a test, turn on backingstore and drag one firefox window over another - you will see trails of the top window in the bottom one, no matter how fast your hardware is. This is because X is continually telling the lower window to redraw itself because the upper window has exposed a different portion of it.
The real solution to this problem is the Damage and Composite extensions. Damage allows the server to be more intelligent about what needs to be redrawn, listening for changes from clients. Composite allows a compositing manager to run which can keep all the windows contents available and redraw changed windows (via damage). The compositing manager is then using a backing store properly to make opaque move smooth.
A backing store is no good if you don't/can't use it for anything.
Just so you know you're not crazy, I have the same problem with totem/xine (totem-xine-0.99.22-1.1.fc3.fr, xine-0.99.3-2.1.fc3.fr, xine-lib-1.0.0-1.1.fc3.fr). Played it three times before I decided to try mplayer, which worked fine.
The price for the motherboard varies depending on the dealer you are purchasing from (yes, there still Amiga dealers in existence!) but is around US$700. ... Basically, these are "early adopter" prices.
Am I the only one that finds the quoted phrase ironic?
Did you totally miss iPodYourBMW?
;-)
Yep I did. Thanks for pointing it out.
I can't find the Mini Cooper mentioned on the site
Because it's not.
(what, is BMW scared of diluting its brand name?)
Yes, I think they are. Although I don't own a Mini so I can't check, I don't remember them having a BMW badge on them anywhere. Although I think it is really more the other way around - BMW does not run around shouting "The Mini is a BMW" for the sake of the Mini brand, not the BMW brand.
but it works perfectly fine in mine.
Am I allowed to hate you because you own a Beemer and an iPod, and I own neither?
thanks. next time i will use copy-and-paste, not retype-and-assume.
...there must only be one or two nails left before the Amigas coffin is finally sealed shut.
Dude, the Amiga has already been buried at sea. And the slashdot editors were there to deliver the eulogy - twice.
What? Another mini?
This may be a little off-topic, but you're comment struck my funny and made me think.
Remember when Apple had a promotion with Volkswagen to give Volkswagen buyers free iPods? Well I wonder if the Apple marketing dudes are already chatting with BMW about possible product tie-ins between the Mac Mini, the iPod Mini, and the Mini Cooper.
Just a thought.
This $500 Apple is still insanely overpriced.
GotApex? has a "headless Dell" on their site for $449.
This is not really a reasonable comparison. This Mac Mini is a super small form-factor PC. Try this:
Mini-itx system with Morex case
After I added the optical drive, upgraded to the 1200 processor/motherboard, upgraded hard disk to match apple, etc, I came in around $730. And that's for a PC with shared video (unichrome) that is still over twice the size of the Mac Mini, running WinXP, and looking about as attractive as a big warm turd. The Cappuccinopc web site has some PCs that may be a closer comparison, but they are also more expensive and include Intel Extreme video.
If someone out there made a 6.5 by 6.5 by 2 PC with a real video card and slot-loading dvd drive for 499, I would be all over it.
using a descendent of the 38cm tall VisiON...
at 38 cm tall, I think the VisiON is more likely to be kicked than it is to kick.
Ha ha, just kidding. 'XP' is only 1,213 in base-36
ah, but if they were using a base 128 system (a la ASCII) then it would be 11344. Definitely more version inflastion than 490 in Roman numerals, (if the scribe slipped up a little on the "P")
On second thought, no, I've got no idea what they were thinking.
The headline from the article you linked:
Phantom is unveiled at CES - sort of
Rob Fahey 14:43 09/01/2004
It seems you're looking at an article about last year's CES. Compare the photos in the articles - definitely not this year's box.
Well, it's the thought that counts...
I think it is insane for someone to spend 25 grand on buying a virtual island. But apparantly this person is going to be selling prime-time virtual real-estate on this island. People apparantly want it, and are paying for it. So we are all insane.
That's precisely my point. We live in a culture that has nothing better to do with our cash than buy virtual real estate. We have never been richer (in the western world, anyways) than we are now.
In general, the software industry (which is what I assume you are talking about) does not sell "intangible works" - they sell functionality. Businesses will not buy your software if you are not willing to service and support them. Consumers require want to buy toys, and toy-makers (hardware vendors) will pay for the software to provide features that consumers want. PC game-makers are suffering more in the face of piracy, but what can you expect? Someone with the patience to use a PC can generally figure out how to copy a game. Even so, many of us buy the game so we can get the box, the handbook, or subscription to the online service. And most of us can't be bothered, and we simply by the console version.
The copyright laws are there to protect people who invest this time and money.
True enough, but unfortunately they are being used to as an offensive weapon, and not a defensive one. They are not protecting anyone, they are used to attack by strong corporations. If they didn't exist, the "producers" would simple think harder about how they choose to spend that money.
With this protection companies have motiviation to make more, and as I said in a previous post - how many open source games out there that are in the top 10 gaming lists? Hell top 100.
"Companies" are the bane and boon of western business. One could argue that the economy would collapse without them. But one could not argue that artists, scientists - idea-makers - would stop thinking without them. If the studios did not produce games, then individuals would, and the top 100 games would all be open source. However, I don't believe you when you say that these companies would lack the motivation - people do buy virtual real estate, after all, so they will still buy games. So that negates the point.
Times change, and maybe it wasn't so important back then (or at least people didn't realize it)
I still believe you've got it backwards here - it is this age in which we do not have our priorities straight, when we put dollar figures on ideas and assume that all people are criminals because they have the capacity to understand.
But I don't think that you and I will come to an agreement on these things.
I think it is more that some people are trying to make IP not property.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means.
"Intellectual Property" is a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it? Property means something that one possesses, and it is very difficult to possess something that only exists in someone's head, in my opinion.
Historically, (as far as I can tell) people have not wrangled so much over the ownership of ideas. It only, as you say, since people have started investing so much money into ideas, to be later confronted with better copying techniques, that this has been a problem. Patrons of the art, for instance, have always existed, but generally have not expected a return on their investments. Nowadays, the patrons are all record producers and software companies and the like.
Did it ever occur to you that it is insane to invest millions of dollars into an intangible work? Probably not, because the industry has us trained to believe that that is normal. You are probably worried that without the current industry there would not be new games and books and recordings. But remember that artists have always worked for thousands of years, and that this industry structure is less than a hundred years old.
and produce man's best friend who ignores him?
I believe the word you're looking for is "wife".
Hell, HP became number 2 overnight simply by playing nice with Apple.
hee hee, you said "number 2".
ok, I need to do some work now...