The existence of subtleties in a movie does not make it a good movie - it just means you might gain some enjoyment from noticing them.
And balancing out these subtleties were blatantly stupid parts, like the goofy attack robots that used war tactics from the 1700s--lining up in a big row so they could be mowed down--rather than being bent on actually killing things. Heck, humanoid robots weren't even needed.
dude you missed the point, I was just saying that Linux doesn't cater to idiots like MS does
Again, you are wrong. How do Windows Explorer or Microsoft Word cater to idiots as opposed to KDE or Star Office? They're both shooting for exactly the same markets. And if you want to be a Windows haxOr, then you can write Perl and Python scripts and be happy.
Nobody uses a computer in order to use an operating system. An operating system enables people to write other software, and that's the software that is important. Focusing on the OS above all else is a distraction.
The trouble with attempting to clone the Windows environment is that we're getting 80% of the way there in almost all cases. Star Office is 80% of Microsoft Office. KDE is 80% of the Windows desktop. Mozilla is 80% of Internet Explorer. The total result is that Linux environments feel unfinished and shabby compared to Windows.
Cloning, by definition, is doomed to fail because it is a game of catch-up. A better approach is to think "What exactly do people _need_ to do?" as opposed to providing big and bloated toolsets which do all sorts of irrelevant things (for example, people don't want or need to be able to design a custom GUI for each application). As the risk of being considered a troll (and I guess light criticism is always considered trolling at Slashdot), I think that many people developing for Linux are not looking to "scratch as itch," as ESR likes to say. Rather they're gung-ho about putting Microsoft out of business by attempting to reproduce a popular Windows application.
... is the computer litteracy gap. I know that I'm going to get flamed for saying this, but it's true. The average secretary or marketing person for that matter probably would have problems with Linux applications just because they aren't developed for complete idiots like MS apps are.
Your're going to get flamed for saying that because you're wrong. Knowing how to use a poorly designed application is not the same as "computer literacy." You're one notch away from having everyone write their own applications in C++ because everyone else is a moron.
The main thing to expect from the PS2 is that you have minimal to no library support. If you want to get polygons or bitmaps on the screen, you have to manage video memory yourself, you have to talk to the graphics hardware directly, and so on. If you want to really get performance, then you have to write custom assembly code for the vector processors.
The bottom lines are: (A) the learning curve is very steep; and (B) expect to do very embedded-systems type of work, and not be able to rely on fancy C++, Java, or the like.
Ah, now these are the comments of a silly fanboy who hasn't been around:
The P4 has proven to be really good executing SSE2 float instructions - is a server likely to ever do a single SSE2 float instruction? Any floating point operations at all?
Every Intel CPU since the 386 has been tagged by both Intel and the press as for being used in servers only. It's simply a way of saying "the price is outrageous at the moment."
The P4 has also proven to have a really weak integer part.
If "really weak" means "faster than just about anything out there," then, yes, I will agree. You might mean "really weak" as a way of saying "not as good as it theoretically could be," but it's still damn fast.
Lucas's big mistake with TPM was creating a more sophisticated plot than the original trilogy. A plot that apparently went completely over the heads of all the Lucas bashers out there.
No, Lucas's big mistake with TPM was that he created a trite, predictable movie, which assumed that the viewer had the intelligence of a third grader.
1. Phantom Menace was a poor to mediocre movie no matter what your point of view, unless you saw it when you were 7 without seeing the original movies. It does not deserve to be talked about any more that Waterworld does.
Not surprisingly, this issue is not simply a choice between A and B. Most of the replies disagreeing with Katz seem to be from people who lean way toward one side of things and view the slightest move in the opposite direction as all hell breaking loose. We can't just treat this issue the same as the Python advocates trying their darndest to put down Perl users. I've never understood that kind of unflinching devotion to one idea at all costs. We're not playing the same goofy game as usual here, the one where people scream that their civil liberties have been taken away because they can't afford to buy a new CD and want to justify ripping it instead. This is real. Being a miltitant and out-of-context radical is not a worthy alternative to a huge future terrorist act that kills half the population of LA. This cannot be viewed in such a simpleminded manner as "If we crack down on security then the terrorists win."
The problem is that mac os x uses display technology that is not easily accelerated by current graphics cards. A lot of screen drawing is done with vectors and bezier curves that are closer to the type of acceleration that a 3d card provides and not a 2d card.
The above comment may have been modded up to 4 ("Insightful"), but it is wrong.
Bezier curves and vectors are just lines. The former breaks down into discrete line segments. Both of these can make use of 2D line drawing acceleration.
Second of all, we're not talking about a 66 MHz 486 here. We're talking about a 300+ MHz superscalar processor. Breaking down some curves and such is not a huge load on such a CPU. I am routinely astounded at how slow people think processors are ("Oh, that package has context sensitive help? It must need a 1.2 GHz Athlon!").
Bottom line: This is bad coding, plain and simple.
The possibility of Linux becoming more widely used in schools and colleges scares Microsoft witless I'm sure.
Now wait a minute. This is not a war with Linux on one side and Windows on the other. It never has been There is only the issue of getting a desktop OS that is reliable and generally works well for what people want and need to do. Windows does that right now. Linux does it too, for the most part. Linux is better in some ways, but the differences are fairly small and technical, and no one really cares, so people use the one that has the software they want. It sure would be nice to have an operating system that provided significant benefits over what Windows does, but Linux isn't it. It's more or less the same thing. Now something that provided significant, tangible benefits to the user...now that would be something worth positioning as an alternative.
It is sad, but that does not mean that Linux will disapear or become weak because there are
people who read slashdot and actualy enjoy thinking.
This sentence invokes a couple of favorite fallacies:
1. Ease-of-use is something that only morons want.
2. Only people who are technologically uninformed and uneducated use Windows.
3. The technologically elite *like* things to be difficult to use, because "difficult" translates into "more powerful."
They're handy to trot out if you want to get moderated up, I guess.
I love the PowerPC, I really do. Very, very nice from a programmer's point of view, and very low power consumption--a major win--compared to anything from Intel (and AMD, of course, as AMD is higher power than Intel). But G4-based machines are still outrageously priced. The cheapest G4, with the lowest clock speed, is $1700. Bump up the clock speed a bit and we're at $2500. That's _crazy_, considering that you can get a roughly equivalent Pentium III or Athlon system for under $800. (The G4 is a better CPU than the Pentium III or Athlon, but not _that_ much better, and the better memory systems on the PC balance out the difference in most cases.)
The question is _Why_? Apple's machines require much less cooling hardware, plus the PowerPC chips have fewer transistors and should be easier to produce in quantity. Most likely this is where Apple is making most of its money.
But _why_ should window transparency be an issue? That's all taken care of by the video card. Sure, it makes a blit slower, but we're still talking "insanely fast" here. Bits of interface fluff should not be hogging up significant portions of the CPU.
Now, now, now, that's not a troll. Let's look at this realistically.
All the fancy new video card features, especially vertex shaders, are not supported in the only widespread open graphics library out there: OpenGL. Sure, you can use vendor-specific extensions, but that's not much of a solution. No one wants to have to write for specific makes of video card. Under Windows, DirectX just keeps advancing and, though it is still clunky and bloated, is at least keeping up--for the most part--with new developments in hardware. Under Linux, all of these features are irrelevant, as are features from the previous generation of video cards, like compressed textures (finally added to OpenGL 1.3 in the last several months). We're hopelessly behind.
It's not just Linux that's behind, it's any system that isn't Windows. We've gotten dependent on DirectX for 3D, and even old OpenGL stalwarts are finally caving in. What we need is is a new 3D API that's designed for what we now know about 3D hardware capabilities; one that is much simpler than current incarnations of OpenGL and DirectX. But with 3D hardware being the number one compatibility problem on modern PCs, I don't see how we're going to get into a better situation.
I work for a game developer. We have a lot of fans, and the general consensus, among our fans, is that we make games "for the fans." That seems reasonable enough. But "fan" is a loose term. Some--many--are raving, frothing idiots who want us to bend to their every whim. Others say they love our games, but then they have personal agendas that they want us to follow, and they go ballistic when we don't. The simple truth is that we can't listen to them all, and it's arguably better if we have minimal contact with them.
Open source projects are similar, in that potential contributors come from widely varying backgrounds of experience, sanity, and understanding of how large software projects need to be managed. Would most contributions be ignored? I would think so, as they're either (A) too hacky; (B) too messy and complex; or (C) not in the best interests of the project as a whole.
This was obvious even before the term "Open Source" became a buzzword, and I'm surprised that ESR, et al, never addressed it. Perhaps they were thinking of the "good ole days" when there was a more closed circle of UNIX hackers and not the current state of zealotry as we know it.
Big stories like this now are covered two ways -- online and off. The former draws millions to websites like CNN's and USA Today's, and new kind of sites like this one. Bloggers and others put up sites so that people could describe what was happening in their own words. People in apartment complexes and news sites posted accounts, and looked for relatives and housing.
In all honesty, I think making a distinction between big media coverage and blog-type coverage is a mistake. They both ran the same info for the most part. And usually the blog items, with a few exceptions, were postings of things heard on TV or radio. Were the blogs immune to the misinformation and hype thrown around on TV? No. They repeated the same false information (there's a fifth plane, state deparment car bomb, etc). Metafilter.com even ran a scare headline about a "Small, unidentified plane circling Manhattan," which turned out to be a FEMA plane. Dave Winer at scripting.com started banging on the war drum right away.
Yes, I appreciated the weblog coverage, but it was more because other news sites were unreachable. I found out most of my information from slashdot and scripting.com, but that does not mean I find those sources to be better than others.
Most people these days think they need complexity in there life. Most of the time there are simple solutions that will solve our problems
"Complexity" and "simple" need to be clarified here. For example, you could write text file filters in a subset of pure C. But it is much, much easier to just use Perl or Python or TCL. There is much, much more complexity under the hood in this case, but you can ignore that and just write a script. On the one hand, you have a tool that makes things easy, but actually has 18 megabytes of code hidden away. Or you could have 2K of code, but the user is expected to do more for himself. Is that really simpler?
What is it about DirectX's reliance on COM that causes a problem?
A. It pointlessly complicates the interface by bringing COM into the picture.
B. It makes it difficult to access DirectX from the language of your choice. Not all languages have COM support.
Until there is some sort of Linux-DX package I really don't see gamers/coders switching over to Linux.
Windows programmers, in general, dislike DirectX. It is standard, and it is well-supported, and it has the features that are needed, but it is poorly designed. It has improved over the years, but even using DirectX for 2D graphics is significantly more painful than it should be. SDL, even under Windows, is much preferable. The mistakes of DirectX, especially its reliance on COM, should not be propagated to other operating systems,
Correct, this is not like Pearl Harbor in that is an attack on the US by a particular country. But the size of these attacks is absolutely huge. Bombs in London and the west bank have never, caused devastation of this magnitude. When the death tolls are in, they are going to be scary. Likely they will be larger than every other terrorist attack of the last twenty years combined.
Good grief, that Brian Kernighan article is probably older than you are. It applies to Wirth's original definition of Pascal in the 1970s, not successors to the language. Heck, who would listen to C or C++ criticism from twenty years ago? (Note than C wasn't even standardized twenty years ago!)
Slashdot Mirror
The existence of subtleties in a movie does not make it a good movie - it just means you might gain some enjoyment from noticing them.
And balancing out these subtleties were blatantly stupid parts, like the goofy attack robots that used war tactics from the 1700s--lining up in a big row so they could be mowed down--rather than being bent on actually killing things. Heck, humanoid robots weren't even needed.
dude you missed the point, I was just saying that Linux doesn't cater to idiots like MS does
Again, you are wrong. How do Windows Explorer or Microsoft Word cater to idiots as opposed to KDE or Star Office? They're both shooting for exactly the same markets. And if you want to be a Windows haxOr, then you can write Perl and Python scripts and be happy.
Nobody uses a computer in order to use an operating system. An operating system enables people to write other software, and that's the software that is important. Focusing on the OS above all else is a distraction.
The trouble with attempting to clone the Windows environment is that we're getting 80% of the way there in almost all cases. Star Office is 80% of Microsoft Office. KDE is 80% of the Windows desktop. Mozilla is 80% of Internet Explorer. The total result is that Linux environments feel unfinished and shabby compared to Windows.
Cloning, by definition, is doomed to fail because it is a game of catch-up. A better approach is to think "What exactly do people _need_ to do?" as opposed to providing big and bloated toolsets which do all sorts of irrelevant things (for example, people don't want or need to be able to design a custom GUI for each application). As the risk of being considered a troll (and I guess light criticism is always considered trolling at Slashdot), I think that many people developing for Linux are not looking to "scratch as itch," as ESR likes to say. Rather they're gung-ho about putting Microsoft out of business by attempting to reproduce a popular Windows application.
... is the computer litteracy gap. I know that I'm going to get flamed for saying this, but it's true. The average secretary or marketing person for that matter probably would have problems with Linux applications just because they aren't developed for complete idiots like MS apps are.
Your're going to get flamed for saying that because you're wrong. Knowing how to use a poorly designed application is not the same as "computer literacy." You're one notch away from having everyone write their own applications in C++ because everyone else is a moron.
That would be me :)
The main thing to expect from the PS2 is that you have minimal to no library support. If you want to get polygons or bitmaps on the screen, you have to manage video memory yourself, you have to talk to the graphics hardware directly, and so on. If you want to really get performance, then you have to write custom assembly code for the vector processors.
The bottom lines are: (A) the learning curve is very steep; and (B) expect to do very embedded-systems type of work, and not be able to rely on fancy C++, Java, or the like.
Ah, now these are the comments of a silly fanboy who hasn't been around:
The P4 has proven to be really good executing SSE2 float instructions - is a server likely to ever do a single SSE2 float instruction? Any floating point operations at all?
Every Intel CPU since the 386 has been tagged by both Intel and the press as for being used in servers only. It's simply a way of saying "the price is outrageous at the moment."
The P4 has also proven to have a really weak integer part.
If "really weak" means "faster than just about anything out there," then, yes, I will agree. You might mean "really weak" as a way of saying "not as good as it theoretically could be," but it's still damn fast.
Lucas's big mistake with TPM was creating a more sophisticated plot than the original trilogy. A plot that apparently went completely over the heads of all the Lucas bashers out there.
No, Lucas's big mistake with TPM was that he created a trite, predictable movie, which assumed that the viewer had the intelligence of a third grader.
I mean this in all honesty:
1. Phantom Menace was a poor to mediocre movie no matter what your point of view, unless you saw it when you were 7 without seeing the original movies. It does not deserve to be talked about any more that Waterworld does.
2. DVD extras cannot change #1.
Not surprisingly, this issue is not simply a choice between A and B. Most of the replies disagreeing with Katz seem to be from people who lean way toward one side of things and view the slightest move in the opposite direction as all hell breaking loose. We can't just treat this issue the same as the Python advocates trying their darndest to put down Perl users. I've never understood that kind of unflinching devotion to one idea at all costs. We're not playing the same goofy game as usual here, the one where people scream that their civil liberties have been taken away because they can't afford to buy a new CD and want to justify ripping it instead. This is real. Being a miltitant and out-of-context radical is not a worthy alternative to a huge future terrorist act that kills half the population of LA. This cannot be viewed in such a simpleminded manner as "If we crack down on security then the terrorists win."
Security and freedom are inversely related.
Quite frankly, you just made that up.
only when an open source OS states these things in their press release will the general public listen.
Or will _anyone_ listen. Who is going to do something as major as upgrade an OS if there is no easily explainable benefit.
The problem is that mac os x uses display technology that is not easily accelerated by current graphics cards. A lot of screen drawing is done with vectors and bezier curves that are closer to the type of acceleration that a 3d card provides and not a 2d card.
The above comment may have been modded up to 4 ("Insightful"), but it is wrong.
Bezier curves and vectors are just lines. The former breaks down into discrete line segments. Both of these can make use of 2D line drawing acceleration.
Second of all, we're not talking about a 66 MHz 486 here. We're talking about a 300+ MHz superscalar processor. Breaking down some curves and such is not a huge load on such a CPU. I am routinely astounded at how slow people think processors are ("Oh, that package has context sensitive help? It must need a 1.2 GHz Athlon!").
Bottom line: This is bad coding, plain and simple.
The possibility of Linux becoming more widely used in schools and colleges scares Microsoft witless I'm sure.
Now wait a minute. This is not a war with Linux on one side and Windows on the other. It never has been There is only the issue of getting a desktop OS that is reliable and generally works well for what people want and need to do. Windows does that right now. Linux does it too, for the most part. Linux is better in some ways, but the differences are fairly small and technical, and no one really cares, so people use the one that has the software they want. It sure would be nice to have an operating system that provided significant benefits over what Windows does, but Linux isn't it. It's more or less the same thing. Now something that provided significant, tangible benefits to the user...now that would be something worth positioning as an alternative.
It is sad, but that does not mean that Linux will disapear or become weak because there are
people who read slashdot and actualy enjoy thinking.
This sentence invokes a couple of favorite fallacies:
1. Ease-of-use is something that only morons want.
2. Only people who are technologically uninformed and uneducated use Windows.
3. The technologically elite *like* things to be difficult to use, because "difficult" translates into "more powerful."
They're handy to trot out if you want to get moderated up, I guess.
I love the PowerPC, I really do. Very, very nice from a programmer's point of view, and very low power consumption--a major win--compared to anything from Intel (and AMD, of course, as AMD is higher power than Intel). But G4-based machines are still outrageously priced. The cheapest G4, with the lowest clock speed, is $1700. Bump up the clock speed a bit and we're at $2500. That's _crazy_, considering that you can get a roughly equivalent Pentium III or Athlon system for under $800. (The G4 is a better CPU than the Pentium III or Athlon, but not _that_ much better, and the better memory systems on the PC balance out the difference in most cases.)
The question is _Why_? Apple's machines require much less cooling hardware, plus the PowerPC chips have fewer transistors and should be easier to produce in quantity. Most likely this is where Apple is making most of its money.
But _why_ should window transparency be an issue? That's all taken care of by the video card. Sure, it makes a blit slower, but we're still talking "insanely fast" here. Bits of interface fluff should not be hogging up significant portions of the CPU.
Now, now, now, that's not a troll. Let's look at this realistically.
All the fancy new video card features, especially vertex shaders, are not supported in the only widespread open graphics library out there: OpenGL. Sure, you can use vendor-specific extensions, but that's not much of a solution. No one wants to have to write for specific makes of video card. Under Windows, DirectX just keeps advancing and, though it is still clunky and bloated, is at least keeping up--for the most part--with new developments in hardware. Under Linux, all of these features are irrelevant, as are features from the previous generation of video cards, like compressed textures (finally added to OpenGL 1.3 in the last several months). We're hopelessly behind.
It's not just Linux that's behind, it's any system that isn't Windows. We've gotten dependent on DirectX for 3D, and even old OpenGL stalwarts are finally caving in. What we need is is a new 3D API that's designed for what we now know about 3D hardware capabilities; one that is much simpler than current incarnations of OpenGL and DirectX. But with 3D hardware being the number one compatibility problem on modern PCs, I don't see how we're going to get into a better situation.
I work for a game developer. We have a lot of fans, and the general consensus, among our fans, is that we make games "for the fans." That seems reasonable enough. But "fan" is a loose term. Some--many--are raving, frothing idiots who want us to bend to their every whim. Others say they love our games, but then they have personal agendas that they want us to follow, and they go ballistic when we don't. The simple truth is that we can't listen to them all, and it's arguably better if we have minimal contact with them.
Open source projects are similar, in that potential contributors come from widely varying backgrounds of experience, sanity, and understanding of how large software projects need to be managed. Would most contributions be ignored? I would think so, as they're either (A) too hacky; (B) too messy and complex; or (C) not in the best interests of the project as a whole.
This was obvious even before the term "Open Source" became a buzzword, and I'm surprised that ESR, et al, never addressed it. Perhaps they were thinking of the "good ole days" when there was a more closed circle of UNIX hackers and not the current state of zealotry as we know it.
Big stories like this now are covered two ways -- online and off. The former draws millions to websites like CNN's and USA Today's, and new kind of sites like this one. Bloggers and others put up sites so that people could describe what was happening in their own words. People in apartment complexes and news sites posted accounts, and looked for relatives and housing.
In all honesty, I think making a distinction between big media coverage and blog-type coverage is a mistake. They both ran the same info for the most part. And usually the blog items, with a few exceptions, were postings of things heard on TV or radio. Were the blogs immune to the misinformation and hype thrown around on TV? No. They repeated the same false information (there's a fifth plane, state deparment car bomb, etc). Metafilter.com even ran a scare headline about a "Small, unidentified plane circling Manhattan," which turned out to be a FEMA plane. Dave Winer at scripting.com started banging on the war drum right away.
Yes, I appreciated the weblog coverage, but it was more because other news sites were unreachable. I found out most of my information from slashdot and scripting.com, but that does not mean I find those sources to be better than others.
Most people these days think they need complexity in there life. Most of the time there are simple solutions that will solve our problems
"Complexity" and "simple" need to be clarified here. For example, you could write text file filters in a subset of pure C. But it is much, much easier to just use Perl or Python or TCL. There is much, much more complexity under the hood in this case, but you can ignore that and just write a script. On the one hand, you have a tool that makes things easy, but actually has 18 megabytes of code hidden away. Or you could have 2K of code, but the user is expected to do more for himself. Is that really simpler?
What is it about DirectX's reliance on COM that causes a problem?
A. It pointlessly complicates the interface by bringing COM into the picture.
B. It makes it difficult to access DirectX from the language of your choice. Not all languages have COM support.
Until there is some sort of Linux-DX package I really don't see gamers/coders switching over to Linux.
Windows programmers, in general, dislike DirectX. It is standard, and it is well-supported, and it has the features that are needed, but it is poorly designed. It has improved over the years, but even using DirectX for 2D graphics is significantly more painful than it should be. SDL, even under Windows, is much preferable. The mistakes of DirectX, especially its reliance on COM, should not be propagated to other operating systems,
Correct, this is not like Pearl Harbor in that is an attack on the US by a particular country. But the size of these attacks is absolutely huge. Bombs in London and the west bank have never, caused devastation of this magnitude. When the death tolls are in, they are going to be scary. Likely they will be larger than every other terrorist attack of the last twenty years combined.
Good grief, that Brian Kernighan article is probably older than you are. It applies to Wirth's original definition of Pascal in the 1970s, not successors to the language. Heck, who would listen to C or C++ criticism from twenty years ago? (Note than C wasn't even standardized twenty years ago!)
The two primary objections I see here could both have been raised when Linus decided to write a UNIX clone in 1991:
1. "Nobody could possibly write his own UNIX kernel! It's too huge of a system!"
2. "UNIX has been dying since the mid 1980s. Who would want to start writing a system that will be dead on arrival?"