essential libraries (X clients can't function without them, toplevel X11R6/lib): 12M
Think about that for a second. I have a *Lisp* system that takes less disk space than 12M. That is a huge, huge, amount of code. Sure, it is less than the drivers, but considering that X does very little, it is positively *enormous*.
Sigh. At one time the Amiga was the pinnacle of personal computer design, but the Amiga community degenerated into an inbred group that other people couldn't stand to be around. I kept wanting to scream "If you like your Amiga, then that's great, but if you think it's so superior then why do you have such a defensive tone?"
So, yay, Linux fanatics can start bragging that they have faster pipes. And the rest of the world can get even more annoyed with the weird rantings of said Linux fanatics.
But isn't this exactly what X is? The X server is just a very dumb program that only knows how to draw lines, boxes, circles, and fonts. Everything else (i.e., the complexity) is layered on top of this through toolkits and window managers.
Maybe so, but then the question is "Why the heck is X so _huge_." I mean, come on, if you're going to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code then they should do something more than provide something so minimal that you need to write another hundred thousand lines of code to get a halfway decent interface.
Sort of... it compiles to VB bytecode, not to machine language.
No. You are flat out wrong here. Visual C++ and Visual Basic share the same code generator. From Microsoft's VB feature list:
"High-performance native-code compiler.
Create applications and both client- and server-side components that are optimized for throughput by the world-class Visual C++® 6.0 optimized native-code compiler."
Embedded market is very price sensitive
on
Transmeta Goes Embedded
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Maybe you don't blink at paying an extra $100 for a fancier CPU for your home machine, but in embedded systems price is a huge part of the deal. If you can shave $1 off of a CPU then that that's a big difference when you're selling a $50 appliance. Transmeta's chips are even *more* expensive than offerings from other companies, so it isn't at all clear how they're going to go up against processors like the 8051, ARM, MIPS, and so on.
dumbass. here's a little lecture in net.talk. perhaps you should read GLS' jargon file, but I digress.
Sigh. The trouble here is that you're assuming the original poster was trolling. He gave what were purportedly his experiences with switching from Linux to Windows. If legit, then that's useful. You're assuming that he's not legit, simply because his conclusion is pro-Windows, and thus label him a troll. But just as easily it could be that you're shouting loudly because you don't like what he has to say.
The fee developers have to pay is very substantial. It's not just a few thousand dollars. It's well into the five figures. Who is going to support this?
I'm absolutely amazed at how people don't mind the fact that EVERYONE is selling out these days. Of course who do I see endorsing a beer company that will remain nameless? Ben Stiller... In fact, the same unnamed beer company as Michael Myers. And who's music do we hear in commercials, and as the themes for hit shows? Enya, Aerosmith, etc.
This is not "selling out." Aerosmith, etc., have already "sold out," in that they're businessesd designed to make money. They have professional management, they get tour sponsors, they have contractual obligations, if they decided to push an album back six months they'd have to explain to record company middle management why they decided to do so.
Many young Slashdotters have selective vision when it comes to corporations. They pretend not so see that the popular geek TV show Enterprise is corporate to the bone, but then if the storylines go off in a direction they disagree with they will blame the actors and writers as having gone corporate or selling out. People hate Microsoft and Intel because they are big corporations, but they don't mind Coke or cable TV networks. And many dearly believe that The Simpsons is an underground inside joke of a show made for a handful of geeks, and not the corporate franchise that it actually is.
Unfortunately the hydrogen problem's not solved yet... Would people feel OK if they've got a highly flammable and explosive gas cannister in their home?
You mean as oppposed to having natural gas piped into their home that would fill the house with gas if the pilot light just happened to go out while you on vacation? Tens of millions of families are living with this every day.
MacOS won't run too well on the hardware that runs Windows. But Linux will (this from a Linux/PPC user;)
But at least on the Mac you can run lots of the same sofware as on Windows (e.g. Photoshop, Filemaker Pro). Linux would be a much, much bigger change for most people.
Regular people are starting to see that this whole monolpoly thing really isn't a good idea.
Maybe so, but people still want to be able to use the software they know: Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word, PowerPoint. I'm not saying that it's good software, just that many, many businesses have gotten themselves reliant on it. When pro-Linux people talk about the monopoly, the angle is always "If people don't use Windows, they'll use Linux." But this isn't necessarily how things will work or even what people want. If anything, the Macintosh looks like the more reasonable alternative.
This is typical geek issue that's being blown way out of proportion.
What do 99% of all CD buyers do with CDs? They listen to them in CD players at home and in the car. Then there's the 1% of people who put audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives. Some of those people are actually listening to them at work using their $2000 computer instead of a $50 CD player. Most of them, though, are ripping the files, especially from CDs that they borrowed from fellow office workers or dorm mates.
The bottom line is that record companies aren't doing anything that interferes with what CDs are designed for. The people who are complaining are, as is the norm for these kind of topics, cash-poor students who use ripping as a primary method of getting new music. You can try to bring up other exotic justifications ("making mix CDs"), but they're too irrelevant to bring up. This cannot be considered any kind of breach of civil rights. Heck, if you want to record a friend's copy protected CD on to audio tape, no one is stopping you.
Either (A) you're overstating your case, or (B) Linux distributions have finally become much more bloated than Windows. I've done serious software development with 128M under Windows 98.
I think people don't have a real clue about memory.
Kinda funny how Slashdot readers consider themselves to have better taste than the average person because they use Linux over Windows. But then they have to go and ruin it by promoting Star Trek.
Of course "Digger" is just a complete knock-off (not just "inspired by") of the circa 1982 arcade game Mr. Do.
"Passionate" does not mean "intelligent."
on
Slashdot in Politics?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Now that sounds like trolling, but I mean this as honest criticism. To quote Nathan Torkington from a presentation he gave at a Perl conference: "Passion doesn't convince. Passion makes you look like an idiot or an asshole."
The problem with most Slashdot discussion is that it comes from people with tremendous lack of experience. Language battles and API wars are fought by college students defending and regurgitating what they learned last semester or what they read in John Carmack's.plan file or a Larry Wall speech. Realistically, especially in politics, you cannot force everything into a black or white extreme. A middle ground, like "I use Perl sometimes, and I also use Python, Lisp, and TCL" is more reasoned.
On Slashdot, you find people who not only stick to the extremes, but they stick to the extremes for extreme ideological reasons. A typical example is someone arguing the superiority of Linux over Windows XP without ever having used the latter. Because the former is Open Source, so it goes, it must be better. You won't get far outside of geek circles with these kind of hard-liner views. A geek in politics is like Jerry Falwell running for president.
The significant differences between Linux and Windows XP are very few. They aren't worth arguing. You can say "Oh, but the Linux kernel is prettier!" but it doesn't matter when both OSes are rock solid. And the stability of a PC OS mostly comes down to drivers as it. Run Linux with a poor video driver and you'll have endless headaches. Ditto for Windows XP. You can say that Windows XP is bloated and slow, but you can say the same of Linux + XWindows + KDE/Gnome as well.
So it all comes down to Windows XP being a Microsoft product and Linux being free, and that there is some software you can only get for one or the other. That's about all you can argue, though most people don't care.
Re:Hmmm.... where have I seen this before?
on
NVidia nForce Reviewed
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Oh my God, they've invented the Amiga!
Or a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800 (the latter of which was released in 1979).
It is interesting to note that the blitting capabilities of an Amiga can be emulated in software on a 486 and still be significantly faster than the Amiga hardware. It wasn't _that_ fast.
Slashdot Mirror
essential libraries (X clients can't function without them, toplevel X11R6/lib): 12M
Think about that for a second. I have a *Lisp* system that takes less disk space than 12M. That is a huge, huge, amount of code. Sure, it is less than the drivers, but considering that X does very little, it is positively *enormous*.
card drivers,
No, it's more than that. The drivers are a relatively small part of the X codebase.
Sigh. At one time the Amiga was the pinnacle of personal computer design, but the Amiga community degenerated into an inbred group that other people couldn't stand to be around. I kept wanting to scream "If you like your Amiga, then that's great, but if you think it's so superior then why do you have such a defensive tone?"
So, yay, Linux fanatics can start bragging that they have faster pipes. And the rest of the world can get even more annoyed with the weird rantings of said Linux fanatics.
But isn't this exactly what X is? The X server is just a very dumb program that only knows how to draw lines, boxes, circles, and fonts. Everything else (i.e., the complexity) is layered on top of this through toolkits and window managers.
Maybe so, but then the question is "Why the heck is X so _huge_." I mean, come on, if you're going to write hundreds of thousands of lines of code then they should do something more than provide something so minimal that you need to write another hundred thousand lines of code to get a halfway decent interface.
Sort of... it compiles to VB bytecode, not to machine language.
No. You are flat out wrong here. Visual C++ and Visual Basic share the same code generator. From Microsoft's VB feature list:
"High-performance native-code compiler.
Create applications and both client- and server-side components that are optimized for throughput by the world-class Visual C++® 6.0 optimized native-code compiler."
Maybe you don't blink at paying an extra $100 for a fancier CPU for your home machine, but in embedded systems price is a huge part of the deal. If you can shave $1 off of a CPU then that that's a big difference when you're selling a $50 appliance. Transmeta's chips are even *more* expensive than offerings from other companies, so it isn't at all clear how they're going to go up against processors like the 8051, ARM, MIPS, and so on.
VB is an interpreted language... meaning it NEEDS an interpreter to run it. so by definition it CAN'T BE KERNEL CODE
Visual Basic has been a compiled language for several versions now.
Yeah, offtopic, but I hate to see incorrect info.
dumbass. here's a little lecture in net.talk. perhaps you should read GLS' jargon file, but I digress.
Sigh. The trouble here is that you're assuming the original poster was trolling. He gave what were purportedly his experiences with switching from Linux to Windows. If legit, then that's useful. You're assuming that he's not legit, simply because his conclusion is pro-Windows, and thus label him a troll. But just as easily it could be that you're shouting loudly because you don't like what he has to say.
Flamebait? Why is a real experience tagged as flamebait? Just because you don't agree with the conclusion doesn't mean you're being attacked.
The fee developers have to pay is very substantial. It's not just a few thousand dollars. It's well into the five figures. Who is going to support this?
I'm absolutely amazed at how people don't mind the fact that EVERYONE is selling out these days. Of course who do I see endorsing a beer company that will remain nameless? Ben Stiller... In fact, the same unnamed beer company as Michael Myers. And who's music do we hear in commercials, and as the themes for hit shows? Enya, Aerosmith, etc.
This is not "selling out." Aerosmith, etc., have already "sold out," in that they're businessesd designed to make money. They have professional management, they get tour sponsors, they have contractual obligations, if they decided to push an album back six months they'd have to explain to record company middle management why they decided to do so.
Many young Slashdotters have selective vision when it comes to corporations. They pretend not so see that the popular geek TV show Enterprise is corporate to the bone, but then if the storylines go off in a direction they disagree with they will blame the actors and writers as having gone corporate or selling out. People hate Microsoft and Intel because they are big corporations, but they don't mind Coke or cable TV networks. And many dearly believe that The Simpsons is an underground inside joke of a show made for a handful of geeks, and not the corporate franchise that it actually is.
Unfortunately the hydrogen problem's not solved yet... Would people feel OK if they've got a highly flammable and explosive gas cannister in their home?
You mean as oppposed to having natural gas piped into their home that would fill the house with gas if the pilot light just happened to go out while you on vacation? Tens of millions of families are living with this every day.
MacOS won't run too well on the hardware that runs Windows. But Linux will (this from a Linux/PPC user ;)
But at least on the Mac you can run lots of the same sofware as on Windows (e.g. Photoshop, Filemaker Pro). Linux would be a much, much bigger change for most people.
Regular people are starting to see that this whole monolpoly thing really isn't a good idea.
Maybe so, but people still want to be able to use the software they know: Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Word, PowerPoint. I'm not saying that it's good software, just that many, many businesses have gotten themselves reliant on it. When pro-Linux people talk about the monopoly, the angle is always "If people don't use Windows, they'll use Linux." But this isn't necessarily how things will work or even what people want. If anything, the Macintosh looks like the more reasonable alternative.
I'd say it's a clear-cut breach of rights.
This is such a classic geek view it kills me. You need a better understanding of the term "rights."
This is typical geek issue that's being blown way out of proportion.
What do 99% of all CD buyers do with CDs? They listen to them in CD players at home and in the car. Then there's the 1% of people who put audio CDs in their CD-ROM drives. Some of those people are actually listening to them at work using their $2000 computer instead of a $50 CD player. Most of them, though, are ripping the files, especially from CDs that they borrowed from fellow office workers or dorm mates.
The bottom line is that record companies aren't doing anything that interferes with what CDs are designed for. The people who are complaining are, as is the norm for these kind of topics, cash-poor students who use ripping as a primary method of getting new music. You can try to bring up other exotic justifications ("making mix CDs"), but they're too irrelevant to bring up. This cannot be considered any kind of breach of civil rights. Heck, if you want to record a friend's copy protected CD on to audio tape, no one is stopping you.
I find it personally and professionally offensive that you would mention Star Trek and Windows in the same sentence.
This sentence pretty much defines the term "geek."
you're going to need 256 or better.
Either (A) you're overstating your case, or (B) Linux distributions have finally become much more bloated than Windows. I've done serious software development with 128M under Windows 98.
I think people don't have a real clue about memory.
From Slashdot readers? I don't believe it!
Kinda funny how Slashdot readers consider themselves to have better taste than the average person because they use Linux over Windows. But then they have to go and ruin it by promoting Star Trek.
Of course "Digger" is just a complete knock-off (not just "inspired by") of the circa 1982 arcade game Mr. Do.
Now that sounds like trolling, but I mean this as honest criticism. To quote Nathan Torkington from a presentation he gave at a Perl conference: "Passion doesn't convince. Passion makes you look like an idiot or an asshole."
.plan file or a Larry Wall speech. Realistically, especially in politics, you cannot force everything into a black or white extreme. A middle ground, like "I use Perl sometimes, and I also use Python, Lisp, and TCL" is more reasoned.
The problem with most Slashdot discussion is that it comes from people with tremendous lack of experience. Language battles and API wars are fought by college students defending and regurgitating what they learned last semester or what they read in John Carmack's
On Slashdot, you find people who not only stick to the extremes, but they stick to the extremes for extreme ideological reasons. A typical example is someone arguing the superiority of Linux over Windows XP without ever having used the latter. Because the former is Open Source, so it goes, it must be better. You won't get far outside of geek circles with these kind of hard-liner views. A geek in politics is like Jerry Falwell running for president.
I love C, but there are huge design benefits in going OO with C++.
Then use C++ for your game code. There is no need to make OpenGL be object-oriented.
The significant differences between Linux and Windows XP are very few. They aren't worth arguing. You can say "Oh, but the Linux kernel is prettier!" but it doesn't matter when both OSes are rock solid. And the stability of a PC OS mostly comes down to drivers as it. Run Linux with a poor video driver and you'll have endless headaches. Ditto for Windows XP. You can say that Windows XP is bloated and slow, but you can say the same of Linux + XWindows + KDE/Gnome as well.
So it all comes down to Windows XP being a Microsoft product and Linux being free, and that there is some software you can only get for one or the other. That's about all you can argue, though most people don't care.
Oh my God, they've invented the Amiga!
Or a Commodore 64 or an Atari 800 (the latter of which was released in 1979).
It is interesting to note that the blitting capabilities of an Amiga can be emulated in software on a 486 and still be significantly faster than the Amiga hardware. It wasn't _that_ fast.