But the superior quality of the product isn't enough for the vast majority of people to justify buying a browser - just as the vast majority of people don't change their browser's default homepage - sad but true. They've been conditioned to eat what they're given, and that what they're given is "good enough".
Exactly, and that's why Opera can't be successful. I know two (and a half) people who use Opera as their daily browser (on Linux). The first time I saw it I guessed it was Opera, from what I had read about it (big honking ad as part of the browser... that's kind of distinctive). I looked at it and I hated it instantly (I don't like the interface and I don't like the look and I don't like installing something that I couldn't compile by myself). When I asked these people why they liked it they said it was more stable than Netscape (I told one one them about Mozilla, but at the time PSM and Java where flaky and they are not the kind of people that put up with bugs, least report them, every know and then). This "more stable" meant "Opera crashes 1/10th of the times". When I asked if they planned on registering Opera, they said "what for?". When I asked if they didn't find the ads annoying, they said "nuh". As far as I understand the WebAd bussiness, you make a profit if your clients actually *click* on the things. If these people I know represent the opinion of the majority of Opera's users, how's this company going to make money?
But it comes with an "ATI Technologies® XPERT 2000 PROTM AGP adapter"! Arrgh.
What's painful is that the "twin" system from HP does have a Quadro2. SGI is probably cutting US$600 off the price that way, but... wasn't SGI about graphics in the first place? Looks like the guy that said this is a development tool just to let people play on a SGI Itanium box before the next generation comes out is right, but what will I do with the high-end SGI system once it comes out? File serving? Pleeease!
This is not a cheap toy, you have to wonder what SGI has in mind for its target audience... I mean, they are bundling "NAG Libraries, Vampir, CAPTools [and] SCSL", all either math or parallel computing oriented. It's got one full gigabyte of RAM and the monitor is optional. That makes you think SGI wants to sell this thing as a node in parallel computing cluster. But then you note it's got a big fat SCSI drive with a big fat SCSI controller, neither of which have much to do in a Beo-node type of machine. So, it's a workstation. But then again, the monitor is optional and the graphic card (ATI XPERT 2000, read: Rage 128 Pro) is lame, to say the lest. If this is a workstation, why didn't they include the SGI VPro (read: GeForce)? Are they having trouble getting NVIDIA to support the IA64 architecture?
which completely violates any Open Source style license
No, it non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and not open source, according to the Open Source Definition, but it doesn't violate any license. It's incompatible with Free Software and Open Source licenses, but that's a very different wording.
I really hope someone will pick up maintaining XFS as a full-time project.
Hel-loooooo! SGI laid off one of their fulltime developers, it didn't pull the plug on the whole thing... but what am I thinking, this is/., the piece basically says "XFS is dead, it won't be developed anymore", no matter what's actually written.
You have to wonder what the editors are smoking here. Yes, Russell Cattelan is no longer being paid by SGI to work on XFS. Yes, SGI is having financial trouble, but that's hardly news. Yes, SGI is no longer paying LinuxCare to work on this either. Yes, the guys that SGI is still paying to work on XFS will have a harder time, this is not the kind of project where someone comes and says "hmm... this is wrong, let's fix it here and there". Does this mean that XFS is dead? No. Precisely because SGI is having financial trouble is why they are doing this. Big Iron is not sexy anymore, at least not for the reasons it used to be. And SGI is a Big Iron company. Six Origin 3000 systems represent 40% of their volume sales in the last quarter. See the problem here? SGI needs a fast source of money. And small systems is such a source. Since SGI is not going to compete with Gateway and the like, they need to focus on another market. According to the current SGI vision that market is comprised of Itanium based boxes running Linux. But that alone isn't enough (VA, Penguin and whoever else do the same). They have to have an edge. That edge is XFS. Not the XFS you can check out of CVS, but the Cluster version. The version that exists on their MIPS based boxes now. See the big picture already? SGI needs XFS, so stop crying wolf.
On a side note, it's interesting that other sites picked up on this post here. (That thought is terrifying, since it means other sites give/. credit as a "news" source). I wonder how this will impact SGI's share prices. I mean, the very well researched piece says "SGI... layoffs... Linux" (who the fsck cares what XFS is?), and it's being repeated like that elsewhere. Boy, I don't want to be in Steve Lord's shoes now... but that leads to another thought: will Steve think it twice before posting anything else like this to the mailing list? I mean, he's been quoted here two times already. Will he think "no, I better not send this, it might end up in/." That can't be good. Just as hollywood stars think it twice before saying something lest it show up in the Enquirer...
Go write 1000 times on the blackboard...
on
Thief of Time
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· Score: 1
I SHOULD WARN READERS WHEN I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL A BOOK
And no, I'm not going to make it worse by pointing out where you spoiled it, but you spoiled it big time.
And it's not the death of mice, it's the Death of Rats. Does this look like "mice" to you? SQUEAK!
And while on the s
ubject of Death's sidekicks, Quoth has to be mentioned. "Croak" (read the book and you'll understand why the quotes).
It should be mentioned that this Carrot fellow Hemos mentions is part of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, which has been masterfully portraied in Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, as well as the more recent The Fifth Elephant.
About Prachett's books it has to be said that there are two publishing companies printing the hardcovers, one at each side of the pond. One is Doubleday (Transworld Publishers) and the other is Harper Prism. One of them sucks and the other is pure joy. It's a matte
r of lenghtly discussions which one is which. Another source of discordance is Paul Kidby vs Josh Kirby as the cover art artist.
What can I say, except buy SuSE. It is better in more than just the filesystem in a whole lot of ways, and you get far more software that has been far better tested before release. I mean, just think "gcc". I don't understand why people don't go with a distro that has a QA before shipping based process. Unfortunately herd instinct rules.
ROTFLMAOL! Good one, Hans, good one. You just lightened my day with that joke. I mean, it's a joke... isn't it? QA for SuSE means "the booklet has pretty colors and one or two really stupid and annoying jokes". Before I moved I hoped to find people who actually could tell a technically solid product appart from a big budget marketing department. *sigh* Then I thought "ok, I'll give this a try, it can't be that bad". I withstanded a little over 14 months of it. Then I broke. SuSE is invasive. "What? You are the sysadmin here? Yeah, right!" Their entire approach to the distribution is painfully invasive. It's their way or the highway (sorry, couldn't resist -- but it still applies). Most of the time that thing called SuSEconfig will respect the changes you have made to config files, but the problem is, most of the time just doesn't cut it. I could just quit using it, but it's not an option if other people "help along" with the adminning, because they like not having to use that horrible program called vi (or any other editor that doesn't have buttons for that matter). In fact, the day I broke was because SuSE decided Magic-SysRq is an spawn of the devil... that spiced up with the horrible (non-existant) upgrade paths they have, which I'm sure their QA department have tested and have made sure it works...
Re:QT is the best gui toolkit out there
on
Qt for Mac
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· Score: 1
I have a problem with wxWindows approach to provision of cross platform portability. wxWindows wraps native widgets which sounds pretty exciting (you get the real stuff) but it has many drawbacks.
Funny, by the look of those shots, it seems this is what TT did. I'm sure Apple wouldn't accept anything "less" than native.
What's all the whining about? It's a two hour hack to recover the "functionality" with the new drivers. Move your OpenGL library out of the way, create a fake one with all the necessary entry points, patch glEnable() to do glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE) and you are set. It will probably screw menus and lots of other stuff, but once you have it up and running it's just a matter of fine tuning. Why glEnable? Because it's probably the function that's called earliest in any OpenGL program. The careful reader will note there are some details left out, but that's an exercise for, uhm, him. This works with any program, free or non-free software and with any driver. There's some minor performance hit involved, but hey, you are not filling polygons anymore! This is actually faster! For extra credits, use alpha blending instead of disabling polygon filling altogether. And for some more extra credit, make it look good. Adjust as necessary to the Windows World. It's possible to do it, ergo someone already did it.
But, this is not correct. GPL was written to ensure that software which were originally free could not be copied by unscrupulous (or uninformed) companies and incorporated within their products.
But they can! They just have to play by the rules and give the source to the products that incorporate GPLed source to their customers. It's what the GPL says and it's the fair thing to do.
What this response points out is, IMO, simple: Bruce is right, it's time to stop talking about "Open Source" and call things by it's name: Free Software. Why? Mundie, and by extension Microsoft, is trying to get a message into the minds of decision makers: with "Open Source" you can't put patents on your software, which in turn means you can't make money out of it, which leads to your company not being able to survive.
It's necessary for the community to emphasize that this is not about money, this is about equal collaboration. By naming their scheme shared Microsoft is trying to give the impression of having all the benefits of Free Software, without the drawbacks, with the drawback obviously being the fact that you can't take the work of other people, put your name on it and make a profit, without giving anything back. Needless to say, Microsoft's scheme doesn't work like this: Microsoft gets their code reviewed, they don't pay for the consulting work and they get to sell the improved product. I don't have a problem with reviewing and improving other people's code, but I want to get paid for it, I won't do it for free. The payment can be money or the right to use the final product in my own projects freely. This "shared source" game is not new for people coming from academic institutions. Almost every UNIX vendor has a deal like this: "you pay us a license and you get the source to the OS. Your students and staff can read the source and you are allowed to 'quote' portions of it in your own work, as long as it's not complete functionalily. Besides the license, you agree to report bug and improvement back to us."
Where I am people call Linux and the GNU tools "Open Source" and they feel awkward when I insist on calling it "Free Software". "Free Software" is a strong and nasty word. "Open Source" is ok, because it's bland. It doesn't carry any meaning in itself beyound the fact that of "I have the source and I don't have to pay for it". Qt is good, either when it was under the QPL or now. The license doesn't matter, what matters is that someone else already did the necessary modifications to get it to compile with the PITA that is the HPUX C++ compiler and I can use the time to work on my closed source program. Don't get me wrong: I recognize non-free software has its time and place. What I'm saying is that people has to be made aware of facts like this, that they have more time because this is a collaborative effort, because everyone has the freedom to help others.
Emphasize on free. Emphasize on freedom. Emphasize on the fact that it's only fair to ask other people to play by the rules if they want to benefit from your work. Remember this the next time you have to spend an afternoon devising a workarround for a bug on your non-free compiler and god knows when the fix is going to be out and how much it's going to cost you, and when you can't use a free compiler because it can't use your vendor's libraries. Remember this the next time your X server crashes because the company that makes the chip on your video card won't release specifications in other to protect their rights as a company and bulldoze over your own ones as a paying customer.
It's when you pull the plug on your daily XFS CVS compilation and stress testing because someone finds it annoying that the machine reboots every night even if you plucked all the problems this was causing, namely the not-in-the-kernel-because-they-are-binary-only-cra p NVIDIA drivers weren't being recompiled along and the some people left some mp3 players open on a no-longer-existant NFS mount, and then they complain because now there are bugs showing up in that freaking old version of the kernel because the machine no longer rebooted (bugs which incidentally wouldn't have showed up if the recompiles had kept their pace) and someone claims they lost two whole freaking hours of valuable work because of this problem (which I'm sure wouldn't have happened if he hadn't heard of the problem in the first place) and then to calm people down you upgrade the kernel to a current version only to find that hardware thing that had been creeping on the box suddenly shows up in all its glory and some moron that thinks he knows (dick) about the problem because he reads LinuxToday starts giving his unrequested opinion about it. This while all you want to do is some real work. This is a crisis week, and it spans over 14 days and counting.
No, seriously, rant aside, I'd love to have something like this. Maybe people would actually learn to differentiate between it doesn't work *whine* and this particular part of the infrastructure has this particular problem, where that part of infrastructure is something more specific than the network and the problem goes beyond it doesn't do what I want (I'd pay for "it worked ok until I did this"). I'd also love if people were able to spot a problem ("hmm... I type ls --weird-option and it doesn't recognize it anymore") and report it instead of thinking "oh, the planets must be in the wrong position, I'll try again next week" and do zilch about it.
And while day dreaming, can people stop saying "could it be possible that foo and bar have a problem?" if a) they know there's a problem and b) they try to smooth it out because they know it pisses the hell out of me when I hear "foo and bar just don't work". If you are going to say that, say it without the sugar, please.
[1] ReiserFS has a high (reproducible) variance when copying the kernel tarball.
All test ran three times with the exception of the reiserfs kernel tarball copy, which ran six times. Machine is running in single user mode. Results timed with time(1).
Dios mios!
[...]
Keeping/. free of grammatical errors for 3 years.
Actually, that's a grammatical noun number error. mios is a possesive plural pronoun but Dios is singular noun. And you are missing an inverted exclamation mark at the begining of the sentence.
Pal, hats off. It's been a loooooooong time since/. had a troll worthy of the name. It's so good, I think another "tag" is needed, namely "Troll worth of being called so". Moderators, read and learn.
What you are saying is basically that: a) Every now and then a new DirectX release comes out that supports new hardware features; b.1) vendors update their DirectX driver in order to accomodate the new release or or b.2) vendors don't update their drivers and leave users with drivers only for the previous release; c) developers rewrite their applications in order to take advantage of the new features this "uniform hardware" is exposing via DirectX. See the flaw already? If b.1 happens, and whatever prompted a really calls for an API revision/redesign, that driver is offering a software implementation of the "new features" of this "virtual hardware". Since the program is running painfully slow the developer has to offer a possibility to turn off the use of the spiffy feature, meaning, effectively, that he's anyways coding twice. One with, one without. But since we seem to be talking about games (you at least), the game is going to plain suck with that feature naively turned off, so the developer needs to offer either an alternative that doesn't look as good or isn't as fast but doesn't suck as bad as not having something there at all, or he chooses to slap a "Bloodsucker Company's Card required to run this" on the box. I don't even have to spell out what happens with b.2, I hope. At the end, how is that different from using OpenGL extensions, this vendor hell you are trying to depict?
Another point you mention is that the game developer has to see if the OpenGL implementation supports a particular extension. Yes, that's true. Implementations, unless they are software only implementations, normally don't list an extension as supported unless the extension is somehow implemented directly in hardware (instead of emulated in software, NVIDIA being a notable exception to this, listing support for 3D textures even if the hardware doesn't support that feature). That means, the developer can be somewhat sure that if he finds an extension, it's actually a hardware feature. Somewhat different to this fictive "uniform hardware" you imply DirectX supports.
I won't address all the points you mention because you managed to hit the crux of the issue and you don't even realize it:
take a look at how MS does it. They talk to game developers and ask what features they want. They talk to hardware manufacturers and ask what features they're working on. They combine this input and come up with a new API every year or so.
What you are saying is that it's good to have an API that "gets fixed" every year. Wow. That's a good thing? With DirectX (and in particular, with Direct3D) that's doable. Why? There's one implementation. DirectX is not a standard. The "standard" is the implementation du jour. And that implementation is done by one company. That company gets input from other companies, but they get to decide what DirectX is today. "Oops, that didn't work out as well as we expected... never mind, we can change it again". On the other hand, OpenGL is defined by a standard. You implement the standard. There's a sample implementation but you are not forced to use it. Brian Paul didn't, and his implementation does pretty well conformance-test-wise.
You don't understand. Stuff like vertex shaders DO change the order of the pipeline!
No, it doesn't. It adds stages to the pipeline. You can still do traditional T&L with DX8.
And, BTW, you assume I have an NVIDIA card. I don't. The OpenGL implementation I use just happens to support some GL_NV extensions. It's a very different thing.
Let's see what's bull. If you look at the extensions carefully, you'll see NV in their names. There is a reason to it - the extensions are NVIDIA-specific. Only patent-free extensions have gone into the ARB extensions - and they are for all to implement.
Then howcome the OpenGL implementation I use lists some non-trivial ammount of non ARB non EXT extensions? But don't take my word for it:
Promoting an extension refers to moving it from single-vendor to multi-vendor or ARB-approved status, usually by changing the vendor tag attached to the extension name string, enumerants and API entry points. This is sometimes done when an extension is successful and more licensees want to support it. This document describes the steps to follow when promoting an extension.
The fact that the extension is called GL_NV_foo doesn't mean, alone, that it can't be implemented by other vendors. In fact, other vendors are encouraged to implement those extensions. The problem is they can not do it without entering into an IP problem. You can get a license and blah blah blah, but that's not the point. The point is why is there are patent in the first place? Afraid someone comes up with a better idea, uh?
OpenGL is a low-level API but not a touch-the-metal API. The NV extensions is so close to the chip it is almost not possible to port it to another chip.
Well, duh! That's the whole point, isn't it? You don't want this to be implemented in software, do you?
Are you expecting the driver to recognize this and that sequence of calls
Of course not. Why would I want to do such a thing if there are proper ways to do it?
OpenGL -->**HAS**-- to be extended to support most new hardware features.
OpenGL has to be extended... funny, that sounds awfully like extensions to me, doesn't it? The one thing you can't do with extensions is changing the order of the pipeline. Your triangles will be transformed before they are discarded by a depth test. You can turn things on and off, but you can't change the order of the pipeline. Other than that, you are pretty much free to do whatever you want.
Hey, don't blame this on NVIDIA. ATI does it too. The reason they have to do this is because OpenGL doesn't implement any cool features in the core API. Because Microsoft works with vendors to release a new version of DirectX every year or so, it supports the latest technologies
That's bull. The core OpenGL doesn't have to be changed in order to support new hardware features. The OpenGL extension mechanism is perfectly capable of exposing the features in a portable way. It is not necessary for OpenGL to go arround chaning the pipeline every other release. And I'm complaining about the fact that other
vendors can't implement certain registered extensions because the vendor has patents covering them.
One way to handle this would be to pull a Microsoft on Microsoft. Emulate (embrace) DirectX and then extend its functionality in a way that appeals to game developers. Perhaps some easy to use calls that tie more directly into Linux, for improved speed. Developers still get to code to only one API, but they also have an opportunity to use one or two "special" calls to improve performance under Linux.
Hell, no! If you are going to improve on DirectX, improve it on every platform. This "special feature" is exactly the kind of crap NVIDIA pulls with their OpenGL extensions. It works faster/it looks better but now you put the weight on the programmer: either figure out a way to work with and without the "special feature" or tell the player to get himself an NVIDIA card. Fuck it! I don't want to! I choose not to support a company that doesn't support me as a customer. All I want to do is spend US$40 on some stupid game, but the game won't run with my hardware. Well, bad luck, I'm not as happy, move on. Problem is, the day will come when every bloody game I'd like to run will be calling for the bloody card. And why? Because some greedy company not only designed an extension but put a patent on it. That is to say, some greedy company took away from me exactly what makes OpenGL a good thing: it's a well specified standard; it's vendor independent; it the back of your skull doesn't hurt when you read a program that uses it; but more important, it's extensible in such a way that a vendor is free to implement any given extension. That is, if there isn't a patent arround it.
So, no. You don't need to take DirectX and extend it in such a way that your "version" appeals to developers better than Microsoft's "version". If screwing people over is what is takes to make Linux "better", then screw Linux! Free Software is not about getting more people to use it, it's about helping to make better software for people who are willing to help along. It's about giving people the freedom to improve on the software people willingly use. It's not about screwing with some company to force others to move to my camp. If I wanted to do that I'd be writing non-free software to aid people at robbing with the click of a button.
Re:Too Bad George Lucas Didn't Do This:
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Park Wars Released
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· Score: 1
Dam you, George Lucas, for foxing a project with a massive amount of potential.
Think about while you shell out those US$50 when Episode II comes out... 50 you ask? Well, you aren't going to watch Episode II just once, are you? And you have to have that cool Pepsi/Taco Bell/Whatever merchandise. And you need that Episode II t-shirt, don't you?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, and that's why Opera can't be successful. I know two (and a half) people who use Opera as their daily browser (on Linux). The first time I saw it I guessed it was Opera, from what I had read about it (big honking ad as part of the browser... that's kind of distinctive). I looked at it and I hated it instantly (I don't like the interface and I don't like the look and I don't like installing something that I couldn't compile by myself). When I asked these people why they liked it they said it was more stable than Netscape (I told one one them about Mozilla, but at the time PSM and Java where flaky and they are not the kind of people that put up with bugs, least report them, every know and then). This "more stable" meant "Opera crashes 1/10th of the times". When I asked if they planned on registering Opera, they said "what for?". When I asked if they didn't find the ads annoying, they said "nuh". As far as I understand the WebAd bussiness, you make a profit if your clients actually *click* on the things. If these people I know represent the opinion of the majority of Opera's users, how's this company going to make money?
What's painful is that the "twin" system from HP does have a Quadro2. SGI is probably cutting US$600 off the price that way, but... wasn't SGI about graphics in the first place? Looks like the guy that said this is a development tool just to let people play on a SGI Itanium box before the next generation comes out is right, but what will I do with the high-end SGI system once it comes out? File serving? Pleeease!
This is not a cheap toy, you have to wonder what SGI has in mind for its target audience... I mean, they are bundling "NAG Libraries, Vampir, CAPTools [and] SCSL", all either math or parallel computing oriented. It's got one full gigabyte of RAM and the monitor is optional. That makes you think SGI wants to sell this thing as a node in parallel computing cluster. But then you note it's got a big fat SCSI drive with a big fat SCSI controller, neither of which have much to do in a Beo-node type of machine. So, it's a workstation. But then again, the monitor is optional and the graphic card (ATI XPERT 2000, read: Rage 128 Pro) is lame, to say the lest. If this is a workstation, why didn't they include the SGI VPro (read: GeForce)? Are they having trouble getting NVIDIA to support the IA64 architecture?
No, it non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and not open source, according to the Open Source Definition, but it doesn't violate any license. It's incompatible with Free Software and Open Source licenses, but that's a very different wording.
Editors... your job... please?
Hel-loooooo! SGI laid off one of their fulltime developers, it didn't pull the plug on the whole thing... but what am I thinking, this is /., the piece basically says "XFS is dead, it won't be developed anymore", no matter what's actually written.
You have to wonder what the editors are smoking here. Yes, Russell Cattelan is no longer being paid by SGI to work on XFS. Yes, SGI is having financial trouble, but that's hardly news. Yes, SGI is no longer paying LinuxCare to work on this either. Yes, the guys that SGI is still paying to work on XFS will have a harder time, this is not the kind of project where someone comes and says "hmm... this is wrong, let's fix it here and there". Does this mean that XFS is dead? No. Precisely because SGI is having financial trouble is why they are doing this. Big Iron is not sexy anymore, at least not for the reasons it used to be. And SGI is a Big Iron company. Six Origin 3000 systems represent 40% of their volume sales in the last quarter. See the problem here? SGI needs a fast source of money. And small systems is such a source. Since SGI is not going to compete with Gateway and the like, they need to focus on another market. According to the current SGI vision that market is comprised of Itanium based boxes running Linux. But that alone isn't enough (VA, Penguin and whoever else do the same). They have to have an edge. That edge is XFS. Not the XFS you can check out of CVS, but the Cluster version. The version that exists on their MIPS based boxes now. See the big picture already? SGI needs XFS, so stop crying wolf.
On a side note, it's interesting that other sites picked up on this post here. (That thought is terrifying, since it means other sites give /. credit as a "news" source). I wonder how this will impact SGI's share prices. I mean, the very well researched piece says "SGI ... layoffs ... Linux" (who the fsck cares what XFS is?), and it's being repeated like that elsewhere. Boy, I don't want to be in Steve Lord's shoes now... but that leads to another thought: will Steve think it twice before posting anything else like this to the mailing list? I mean, he's been quoted here two times already. Will he think "no, I better not send this, it might end up in /." That can't be good. Just as hollywood stars think it twice before saying something lest it show up in the Enquirer...
I SHOULD WARN READERS WHEN I AM ABOUT TO SPOIL A BOOK
And no, I'm not going to make it worse by pointing out where you spoiled it, but you spoiled it big time.
And it's not the death of mice, it's the Death of Rats. Does this look like "mice" to you? SQUEAK!
And while on the s ubject of Death's sidekicks, Quoth has to be mentioned. "Croak" (read the book and you'll understand why the quotes).
It should be mentioned that this Carrot fellow Hemos mentions is part of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, which has been masterfully portraied in Guards! Guards! and Men at Arms, as well as the more recent The Fifth Elephant.
About Prachett's books it has to be said that there are two publishing companies printing the hardcovers, one at each side of the pond. One is Doubleday (Transworld Publishers) and the other is Harper Prism. One of them sucks and the other is pure joy. It's a matte r of lenghtly discussions which one is which. Another source of discordance is Paul Kidby vs Josh Kirby as the cover art artist.
And the for dessert, pay a visit to L-space.
ROTFLMAOL! Good one, Hans, good one. You just lightened my day with that joke. I mean, it's a joke... isn't it? QA for SuSE means "the booklet has pretty colors and one or two really stupid and annoying jokes". Before I moved I hoped to find people who actually could tell a technically solid product appart from a big budget marketing department. *sigh* Then I thought "ok, I'll give this a try, it can't be that bad". I withstanded a little over 14 months of it. Then I broke. SuSE is invasive. "What? You are the sysadmin here? Yeah, right!" Their entire approach to the distribution is painfully invasive. It's their way or the highway (sorry, couldn't resist -- but it still applies). Most of the time that thing called SuSEconfig will respect the changes you have made to config files, but the problem is, most of the time just doesn't cut it. I could just quit using it, but it's not an option if other people "help along" with the adminning, because they like not having to use that horrible program called vi (or any other editor that doesn't have buttons for that matter). In fact, the day I broke was because SuSE decided Magic-SysRq is an spawn of the devil... that spiced up with the horrible (non-existant) upgrade paths they have, which I'm sure their QA department have tested and have made sure it works...
Funny, by the look of those shots, it seems this is what TT did. I'm sure Apple wouldn't accept anything "less" than native.
What are you? EMACS?
What's all the whining about? It's a two hour hack to recover the "functionality" with the new drivers. Move your OpenGL library out of the way, create a fake one with all the necessary entry points, patch glEnable() to do glPolygonMode(GL_FRONT_AND_BACK, GL_LINE) and you are set. It will probably screw menus and lots of other stuff, but once you have it up and running it's just a matter of fine tuning. Why glEnable? Because it's probably the function that's called earliest in any OpenGL program. The careful reader will note there are some details left out, but that's an exercise for, uhm, him. This works with any program, free or non-free software and with any driver. There's some minor performance hit involved, but hey, you are not filling polygons anymore! This is actually faster! For extra credits, use alpha blending instead of disabling polygon filling altogether. And for some more extra credit, make it look good. Adjust as necessary to the Windows World. It's possible to do it, ergo someone already did it.
But they can! They just have to play by the rules and give the source to the products that incorporate GPLed source to their customers. It's what the GPL says and it's the fair thing to do.
What this response points out is, IMO, simple: Bruce is right, it's time to stop talking about "Open Source" and call things by it's name: Free Software. Why? Mundie, and by extension Microsoft, is trying to get a message into the minds of decision makers: with "Open Source" you can't put patents on your software, which in turn means you can't make money out of it, which leads to your company not being able to survive.
It's necessary for the community to emphasize that this is not about money, this is about equal collaboration. By naming their scheme shared Microsoft is trying to give the impression of having all the benefits of Free Software, without the drawbacks, with the drawback obviously being the fact that you can't take the work of other people, put your name on it and make a profit, without giving anything back. Needless to say, Microsoft's scheme doesn't work like this: Microsoft gets their code reviewed, they don't pay for the consulting work and they get to sell the improved product. I don't have a problem with reviewing and improving other people's code, but I want to get paid for it, I won't do it for free. The payment can be money or the right to use the final product in my own projects freely. This "shared source" game is not new for people coming from academic institutions. Almost every UNIX vendor has a deal like this: "you pay us a license and you get the source to the OS. Your students and staff can read the source and you are allowed to 'quote' portions of it in your own work, as long as it's not complete functionalily. Besides the license, you agree to report bug and improvement back to us."
Where I am people call Linux and the GNU tools "Open Source" and they feel awkward when I insist on calling it "Free Software". "Free Software" is a strong and nasty word. "Open Source" is ok, because it's bland. It doesn't carry any meaning in itself beyound the fact that of "I have the source and I don't have to pay for it". Qt is good, either when it was under the QPL or now. The license doesn't matter, what matters is that someone else already did the necessary modifications to get it to compile with the PITA that is the HPUX C++ compiler and I can use the time to work on my closed source program. Don't get me wrong: I recognize non-free software has its time and place. What I'm saying is that people has to be made aware of facts like this, that they have more time because this is a collaborative effort, because everyone has the freedom to help others.
Emphasize on free. Emphasize on freedom. Emphasize on the fact that it's only fair to ask other people to play by the rules if they want to benefit from your work. Remember this the next time you have to spend an afternoon devising a workarround for a bug on your non-free compiler and god knows when the fix is going to be out and how much it's going to cost you, and when you can't use a free compiler because it can't use your vendor's libraries. Remember this the next time your X server crashes because the company that makes the chip on your video card won't release specifications in other to protect their rights as a company and bulldoze over your own ones as a paying customer.
It's when you pull the plug on your daily XFS CVS compilation and stress testing because someone finds it annoying that the machine reboots every night even if you plucked all the problems this was causing, namely the not-in-the-kernel-because-they-are-binary-only-cra p NVIDIA drivers weren't being recompiled along and the some people left some mp3 players open on a no-longer-existant NFS mount, and then they complain because now there are bugs showing up in that freaking old version of the kernel because the machine no longer rebooted (bugs which incidentally wouldn't have showed up if the recompiles had kept their pace) and someone claims they lost two whole freaking hours of valuable work because of this problem (which I'm sure wouldn't have happened if he hadn't heard of the problem in the first place) and then to calm people down you upgrade the kernel to a current version only to find that hardware thing that had been creeping on the box suddenly shows up in all its glory and some moron that thinks he knows (dick) about the problem because he reads LinuxToday starts giving his unrequested opinion about it. This while all you want to do is some real work. This is a crisis week, and it spans over 14 days and counting.
No, seriously, rant aside, I'd love to have something like this. Maybe people would actually learn to differentiate between it doesn't work *whine* and this particular part of the infrastructure has this particular problem, where that part of infrastructure is something more specific than the network and the problem goes beyond it doesn't do what I want (I'd pay for "it worked ok until I did this"). I'd also love if people were able to spot a problem ("hmm... I type ls --weird-option and it doesn't recognize it anymore") and report it instead of thinking "oh, the planets must be in the wrong position, I'll try again next week" and do zilch about it.
And while day dreaming, can people stop saying "could it be possible that foo and bar have a problem?" if a) they know there's a problem and b) they try to smooth it out because they know it pisses the hell out of me when I hear "foo and bar just don't work". If you are going to say that, say it without the sugar, please.
What the gut got:
$ddif=/dev/zeroof=./provab s=1Mcount=256
$ddif=./provaof=/dev/nullb s=1Mcount=256
$rm-f./prova
FSWriteReadrm
ReiserFS18.523.410.4
Ext2FS20.321.380.57
XFS16.3219.420.26
FAT3243.6527.981.59
$cplinux-2.4.4.tarprova.tar
$tarxfprova.tar
$rm-fprova.tar
$rm-rflinux
FScpextractrmrmdir
ReiserFS38.4858.440.4510.0 9
Ext2FS21.3159.192.8811.12
XFS16.2135.440.1821.96
FAT3239.76134.191.26.7
[1] ReiserFS has a high (reproducible) variance when copying the kernel tarball.
All test ran three times with the exception of the reiserfs kernel tarball copy, which ran six times. Machine is running in single user mode. Results timed with time(1).
Actually, that's a grammatical noun number error. mios is a possesive plural pronoun but Dios is singular noun. And you are missing an inverted exclamation mark at the begining of the sentence.
Where do I sign? Where do I sign?
Pal, hats off. It's been a loooooooong time since /. had a troll worthy of the name. It's so good, I think another "tag" is needed, namely "Troll worth of being called so". Moderators, read and learn.
What you are saying is basically that: a) Every now and then a new DirectX release comes out that supports new hardware features; b.1) vendors update their DirectX driver in order to accomodate the new release or or b.2) vendors don't update their drivers and leave users with drivers only for the previous release; c) developers rewrite their applications in order to take advantage of the new features this "uniform hardware" is exposing via DirectX. See the flaw already? If b.1 happens, and whatever prompted a really calls for an API revision/redesign, that driver is offering a software implementation of the "new features" of this "virtual hardware". Since the program is running painfully slow the developer has to offer a possibility to turn off the use of the spiffy feature, meaning, effectively, that he's anyways coding twice. One with, one without. But since we seem to be talking about games (you at least), the game is going to plain suck with that feature naively turned off, so the developer needs to offer either an alternative that doesn't look as good or isn't as fast but doesn't suck as bad as not having something there at all, or he chooses to slap a "Bloodsucker Company's Card required to run this" on the box. I don't even have to spell out what happens with b.2, I hope. At the end, how is that different from using OpenGL extensions, this vendor hell you are trying to depict?
Another point you mention is that the game developer has to see if the OpenGL implementation supports a particular extension. Yes, that's true. Implementations, unless they are software only implementations, normally don't list an extension as supported unless the extension is somehow implemented directly in hardware (instead of emulated in software, NVIDIA being a notable exception to this, listing support for 3D textures even if the hardware doesn't support that feature). That means, the developer can be somewhat sure that if he finds an extension, it's actually a hardware feature. Somewhat different to this fictive "uniform hardware" you imply DirectX supports.
BTW, wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?
I won't address all the points you mention because you managed to hit the crux of the issue and you don't even realize it:
What you are saying is that it's good to have an API that "gets fixed" every year. Wow. That's a good thing? With DirectX (and in particular, with Direct3D) that's doable. Why? There's one implementation. DirectX is not a standard. The "standard" is the implementation du jour. And that implementation is done by one company. That company gets input from other companies, but they get to decide what DirectX is today. "Oops, that didn't work out as well as we expected... never mind, we can change it again". On the other hand, OpenGL is defined by a standard. You implement the standard. There's a sample implementation but you are not forced to use it. Brian Paul didn't, and his implementation does pretty well conformance-test-wise.
No, it doesn't. It adds stages to the pipeline. You can still do traditional T&L with DX8.
And, BTW, you assume I have an NVIDIA card. I don't. The OpenGL implementation I use just happens to support some GL_NV extensions. It's a very different thing.
Then howcome the OpenGL implementation I use lists some non-trivial ammount of non ARB non EXT extensions? But don't take my word for it:
The fact that the extension is called GL_NV_foo doesn't mean, alone, that it can't be implemented by other vendors. In fact, other vendors are encouraged to implement those extensions. The problem is they can not do it without entering into an IP problem. You can get a license and blah blah blah, but that's not the point. The point is why is there are patent in the first place? Afraid someone comes up with a better idea, uh?
Well, duh! That's the whole point, isn't it? You don't want this to be implemented in software, do you?
Of course not. Why would I want to do such a thing if there are proper ways to do it?
OpenGL has to be extended... funny, that sounds awfully like extensions to me, doesn't it? The one thing you can't do with extensions is changing the order of the pipeline. Your triangles will be transformed before they are discarded by a depth test. You can turn things on and off, but you can't change the order of the pipeline. Other than that, you are pretty much free to do whatever you want.
That's bull. The core OpenGL doesn't have to be changed in order to support new hardware features. The OpenGL extension mechanism is perfectly capable of exposing the features in a portable way. It is not necessary for OpenGL to go arround chaning the pipeline every other release. And I'm complaining about the fact that other vendors can't implement certain registered extensions because the vendor has patents covering them.
Hell, no! If you are going to improve on DirectX, improve it on every platform. This "special feature" is exactly the kind of crap NVIDIA pulls with their OpenGL extensions. It works faster/it looks better but now you put the weight on the programmer: either figure out a way to work with and without the "special feature" or tell the player to get himself an NVIDIA card. Fuck it! I don't want to! I choose not to support a company that doesn't support me as a customer. All I want to do is spend US$40 on some stupid game, but the game won't run with my hardware. Well, bad luck, I'm not as happy, move on. Problem is, the day will come when every bloody game I'd like to run will be calling for the bloody card. And why? Because some greedy company not only designed an extension but put a patent on it. That is to say, some greedy company took away from me exactly what makes OpenGL a good thing: it's a well specified standard; it's vendor independent; it the back of your skull doesn't hurt when you read a program that uses it; but more important, it's extensible in such a way that a vendor is free to implement any given extension. That is, if there isn't a patent arround it.
So, no. You don't need to take DirectX and extend it in such a way that your "version" appeals to developers better than Microsoft's "version". If screwing people over is what is takes to make Linux "better", then screw Linux! Free Software is not about getting more people to use it, it's about helping to make better software for people who are willing to help along. It's about giving people the freedom to improve on the software people willingly use. It's not about screwing with some company to force others to move to my camp. If I wanted to do that I'd be writing non-free software to aid people at robbing with the click of a button.
Think about while you shell out those US$50 when Episode II comes out... 50 you ask? Well, you aren't going to watch Episode II just once, are you? And you have to have that cool Pepsi/Taco Bell/Whatever merchandise. And you need that Episode II t-shirt, don't you?
That's not rigt. Read the apt design docs, and look here afterwards. (42? coincidence? I don't think so)
oh, sorry... 400 um... still impressive