"China has a long history of being run by idiots. A long series of emperors squandered China's treasures and people to build stupid things for themselves, like stone armies, terraced mountains, and The Great Wall."
As opposed to pyramids, emperal yards, and who-knows-what the Egyptians/Greeks/Romans/Europeans/Whatever made.
Hello? That was several thousands of years ago! People's thinking were VERY different from now! Almost no ruler in the past wasn't an "idiot" (by your definition).
They are both already turned on but everything is STILL unresponsive under heavy disk load.
Re:You are not taking the long view
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 2
"So why did anyone upgrade, if the new one does the same thing as the old one?"
The new one doesn't do "the same thing as the old one". Let's see... better performance, better hardware support, better filesystems, new features, and because it's included in distributions by default. Newer kernels are better, but that doesn't mean all the current apps suddenly cease to work with older kernels. People didn't upgrade because apps will cease to work on 2.2, it's because 2.4 is better.
"In a similar vein, it's nice that you can still get i386 rpms, but if I can get better performance out of my kit with i686 rpms, I'm going to do so."
For most desktop software you probably won't notice a thing, especially on modern CPUs.
Re:You are not taking the long view
on
More on Longhorn
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it?"
Because Windows is not modular and not open source. You cannot upgrade individual components. You cannot fix a problem yourself. You must PAY for bugfixes (new versions of Windows), which means you'll probably have to buy new hardware too.
"If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed, and rightly so."
Upgrading from Emacs 1 to Emacs 21 doesn't require you to pay for anything (ok, except bandwidth costs) or upgrade your hardware. Upgrading from Win95 to XP does. You're comparing an application upgrade to an operating system upgrade.
What about Linux kernel 2.0? Still being maintained. Or even 0.0.3! Still being maintained.
"Is all the open source stuff released this year compatible with the original Linux kernel? Or even with the pre-version 2.4 kernel?"
The original (0.0.3)? Not likely. Pre-2.4? Definitely! If you recompile OpenOffice/Mozilla/Gnome2/KDE3/whatever under RedHat 6.2 (with a 2.2 kernel), everything will work just fine.
"Should it be? Would this make any sense whatsoever?"
The software work under 2.2, so I guess it does make sense.
Actually, IE isn't so free at all. Yes, I know it can be downloaded for free, but when you bought Windows, you have actually paid for IE too.
Windows Longhorn is a true usability nightmare
on
"Longhorn" Alpha Preview
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I don't understand why people call Windows XP or Longhorn or whatever new version of Windows "userfriendly". Look at the screenshots! There's now some kind of sidebar which duplicates the functions of the Start menu ---> confusing to new users. If you open Windows Explorer and check My Computer, you get a complex screen with buttons, icons and progress bars. If you go to My Documents you get overloaded with options! Any new user will get confused by that! Not to mention all the eyecandy. Sure, it looks nice, but all those gradients and icons do is overload the user with information. New users will get confused and will have a hard time recognizing standard controls. The entire UI is extremely cluttered.
The Longhorn GUI is good for advanced users, but will confuse new users! If GNOME or KDE do this, the Windows people will flame us down for creating a "hacker desktop" that's "not consistent" and "overloads the user with too much information". But if Windows does this, it's suddenly allright and called "huge improvements" or "innovation". I just don't get it...
The last Star Trek movie, Resurrection, was released in 1998! That's a 4-years gap! All the previous movies were released every 1 or 2 years. Why the huge time gap?
"Yeah, but if your box is running hot enough to crash an any OS, you have A HARDWARE PROBLEM!"
So? If software can workaround the hardware problem, then that's a good thing. A good operating system shouldn't crash immediately and should be fault tolerant. Besides, consumers don't care if it's the hardware's fault or not, they just don't want the OS to crash. If the OS can workaround the hardware problem and save consumers money, then that's good. From a consumer's point of view, Windows's Dunno-What-To-Do-So-I-Crash-policy is unacceptable.
"My real motivation to do this is to save money and to teach my children that sometimes the best isn't always the most expensive."
*Gasp*! It can't be! Humanity has finally realized this fact!!
The default AIML set is rather dumb
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I host a modified Alicebot with a modified AIML set. The default AIML set is not that smart and only answers 60% of all questions correctly (just an estimate, based on my own experience). Apart from that, it also contains lots of redundant French and German categories. (My modified AIML set is much better, and answers about 75-90% of all questions correctly, I think.)
Not at all. XRender is a new rendering extension, that uses color information (1 red, 255 blue, 0 green, 128 alpha) rather than pixel data. XAA is the X Acceleration Architecture, and has nothing to do with XRender.
"Is there a central repository of all of these extensions, and to what degree they've been accepted/supported by different tk's?"
XRender is included in XFree86 4.x by default, and is not available for XFree86 3.x. Other (commercial) X servers can make their own implementation.
"Why are we still depending on Microsoft for our font needs?"
Creating good fonts is *hard* and cost tons of money. I heard that it takes an experienced font designer about a year to create a good looking English font. Imagine how much time it would take to create a full unicode font! Some companies have contributed fonts. But from what I've seen, they look terrible at low resolutions (and some even at relatively high screen resolutions, like size 72). Some bitmap fonts do look good, but since they're bitmap fonts they don't scale well. There are several free font creation projects, but they're either creating bitmap fonts or are getting nowhere. There is a free font editor: pfaedit. But it takes more than a font editor to create good-looking fonts. Good-looking fonts are not something amateurs can create.
The main problem is money and the complexity of font creation. If someone is willing to give us a few milions to license good-looking TrueType from some experienced font design company...
"According to the article, the clipboard one allows for the cut/paste of ASCII data. What about image or audio data?"
It can be done. The architecture allows different types of data, including audio/video/images/foobar. But for some reason, nobody use it for anything other than text. Dunno why, from what I've seen it should be fairly simple.
"if you dont like something then FUCK OFF. Criticism is a good thing you know, it helps make things better."
Wrong. Constructive critism may help things become better. That is just bitching, nothing more, and helps XFree86 in no way whatsoever. Constructive critism is good. Bitching and whining is bad!
"it always uses at least 75MB of RAM on any machine I've seen it running on"
1. It doesn't take 75 MB of RAM. XFree86 mmap() your video card's memory. The *real* memory usage is probably reported memory -minus- video RAM -minus- shared memory.
2. You say it's slow and bloated because top/ps reports a high memory usage. That's psychological: you *think* it's slow, therebefore it *feels* slow.
"Perhaps you could tell me what I'm not getting here. It seems obvious that
1. drawing something,
2. abstracting it for networking,
3. pushing it down the tcp/ip stack,
4. immediately pulling it BACK UP through the tcp/ip stack,
5. de-abstracting it,
6. writing it to the video card,
is more work than
1. drawing something
2. writing it to the video card
or am I missing something?"
Yes. 1. XFree86 uses shared memory for local pixmaps. *Huge* speed improvement. 2. XFree86 uses Unix domain sockets locally. *Much* faster than a network socket. 3. The most important point. Modern CPUs can handle those operations easily. We don't live in the 486 era anymore.
"Instead of text selection requiring a repaint of the entire text, with a different background colour, why not send just one transparent tinted box over the network instead?"
"# make it so I don't have to run DRI programs as root."
You run DRI apps as root?! *gasp* Why can I run Tuxracer as normal user?
"* standard widget set, and a standard 3rd party widget registry, so GNOME and KDE widgets can co-exist in the same application, or at least access eachother through a standard communications channel. (you laugh..)"
XEmbed. Work in progress. BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik provide a consistent look for both toolkits.
If you don't contribute then stop bitching about it and go use the "ooh so ultra-slick and userfriendly Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP(c)", which you DO like.
You know, it is because of the small number of people like you that most Windows user see the Linux community (as a whole) as a bunch of anti-Microsoft elitists!!
Slashdot Mirror
"China has a long history of being run by idiots. A long series of emperors squandered China's treasures and people to build stupid things for themselves, like stone armies, terraced mountains, and The Great Wall."
As opposed to pyramids, emperal yards, and who-knows-what the Egyptians/Greeks/Romans/Europeans/Whatever made.
Hello? That was several thousands of years ago! People's thinking were VERY different from now! Almost no ruler in the past wasn't an "idiot" (by your definition).
"Microsoft hired marketers"
That should be "Microsoft hired more marketers"
They are both already turned on but everything is STILL unresponsive under heavy disk load.
"So why did anyone upgrade, if the new one does the same thing as the old one?"
The new one doesn't do "the same thing as the old one". Let's see... better performance, better hardware support, better filesystems, new features, and because it's included in distributions by default.
Newer kernels are better, but that doesn't mean all the current apps suddenly cease to work with older kernels. People didn't upgrade because apps will cease to work on 2.2, it's because 2.4 is better.
"In a similar vein, it's nice that you can still get i386 rpms, but if I can get better performance out of my kit with i686 rpms, I'm going to do so."
For most desktop software you probably won't notice a thing, especially on modern CPUs.
"It's a seven year-old product: why should they keep fixing it?"
Because Windows is not modular and not open source. You cannot upgrade individual components. You cannot fix a problem yourself. You must PAY for bugfixes (new versions of Windows), which means you'll probably have to buy new hardware too.
"If I post a bug in a seven year-old version of emacs to a newsgroup, I'm going to get flamed, and rightly so."
Upgrading from Emacs 1 to Emacs 21 doesn't require you to pay for anything (ok, except bandwidth costs) or upgrade your hardware. Upgrading from Win95 to XP does.
You're comparing an application upgrade to an operating system upgrade.
What about Linux kernel 2.0? Still being maintained. Or even 0.0.3! Still being maintained.
"Is all the open source stuff released this year compatible with the original Linux kernel? Or even with the pre-version 2.4 kernel?"
The original (0.0.3)? Not likely. Pre-2.4? Definitely! If you recompile OpenOffice/Mozilla/Gnome2/KDE3/whatever under RedHat 6.2 (with a 2.2 kernel), everything will work just fine.
"Should it be? Would this make any sense whatsoever?"
The software work under 2.2, so I guess it does make sense.
Uhm... BeOS is already dead...
Actually, IE isn't so free at all. Yes, I know it can be downloaded for free, but when you bought Windows, you have actually paid for IE too.
I don't understand why people call Windows XP or Longhorn or whatever new version of Windows "userfriendly". Look at the screenshots!
There's now some kind of sidebar which duplicates the functions of the Start menu ---> confusing to new users.
If you open Windows Explorer and check My Computer, you get a complex screen with buttons, icons and progress bars.
If you go to My Documents you get overloaded with options! Any new user will get confused by that!
Not to mention all the eyecandy. Sure, it looks nice, but all those gradients and icons do is overload the user with information. New users will get confused and will have a hard time recognizing standard controls.
The entire UI is extremely cluttered.
The Longhorn GUI is good for advanced users, but will confuse new users! If GNOME or KDE do this, the Windows people will flame us down for creating a "hacker desktop" that's "not consistent" and "overloads the user with too much information". But if Windows does this, it's suddenly allright and called "huge improvements" or "innovation".
I just don't get it...
The last Star Trek movie, Resurrection, was released in 1998! That's a 4-years gap! All the previous movies were released every 1 or 2 years.
Why the huge time gap?
"Yeah, but if your box is running hot enough to crash an any OS, you have A HARDWARE PROBLEM!"
So? If software can workaround the hardware problem, then that's a good thing. A good operating system shouldn't crash immediately and should be fault tolerant.
Besides, consumers don't care if it's the hardware's fault or not, they just don't want the OS to crash. If the OS can workaround the hardware problem and save consumers money, then that's good. From a consumer's point of view, Windows's Dunno-What-To-Do-So-I-Crash-policy is unacceptable.
"My real motivation to do this is to save money and to teach my children that sometimes the best isn't always the most expensive."
*Gasp*! It can't be! Humanity has finally realized this fact!!
I host a modified Alicebot with a modified AIML set. The default AIML set is not that smart and only answers 60% of all questions correctly (just an estimate, based on my own experience). Apart from that, it also contains lots of redundant French and German categories.
(My modified AIML set is much better, and answers about 75-90% of all questions correctly, I think.)
"- How closely related are XRender and XAA?"
Not at all. XRender is a new rendering extension, that uses color information (1 red, 255 blue, 0 green, 128 alpha) rather than pixel data.
XAA is the X Acceleration Architecture, and has nothing to do with XRender.
"Is there a central repository of all of these extensions, and to what degree they've been accepted/supported by different tk's?"
XRender is included in XFree86 4.x by default, and is not available for XFree86 3.x. Other (commercial) X servers can make their own implementation.
"Why are we still depending on Microsoft for our font needs?"
Creating good fonts is *hard* and cost tons of money. I heard that it takes an experienced font designer about a year to create a good looking English font. Imagine how much time it would take to create a full unicode font!
Some companies have contributed fonts. But from what I've seen, they look terrible at low resolutions (and some even at relatively high screen resolutions, like size 72). Some bitmap fonts do look good, but since they're bitmap fonts they don't scale well.
There are several free font creation projects, but they're either creating bitmap fonts or are getting nowhere.
There is a free font editor: pfaedit. But it takes more than a font editor to create good-looking fonts. Good-looking fonts are not something amateurs can create.
The main problem is money and the complexity of font creation.
If someone is willing to give us a few milions to license good-looking TrueType from some experienced font design company...
"According to the article, the clipboard one allows for the cut/paste of ASCII data. What about image or audio data?"
It can be done. The architecture allows different types of data, including audio/video/images/foobar. But for some reason, nobody use it for anything other than text. Dunno why, from what I've seen it should be fairly simple.
"Are you american."
Nope, I'm European.
"this is a typical yank meme"
I'm not American.
"if you dont like something then FUCK OFF. Criticism is a good thing you know, it helps make things better."
Wrong. Constructive critism may help things become better. That is just bitching, nothing more, and helps XFree86 in no way whatsoever.
Constructive critism is good. Bitching and whining is bad!
How does it compare to 2.4 with the low-latency, preemptive and O(1) patches?
"it always uses at least 75MB of RAM on any machine I've seen it running on"
1. It doesn't take 75 MB of RAM. XFree86 mmap() your video card's memory. The *real* memory usage is probably reported memory -minus- video RAM -minus- shared memory.
2. You say it's slow and bloated because top/ps reports a high memory usage. That's psychological: you *think* it's slow, therebefore it *feels* slow.
"Perhaps you could tell me what I'm not getting here. It seems obvious that
1. drawing something,
2. abstracting it for networking,
3. pushing it down the tcp/ip stack,
4. immediately pulling it BACK UP through the tcp/ip stack,
5. de-abstracting it,
6. writing it to the video card,
is more work than
1. drawing something
2. writing it to the video card
or am I missing something?"
Yes.
1. XFree86 uses shared memory for local pixmaps. *Huge* speed improvement.
2. XFree86 uses Unix domain sockets locally. *Much* faster than a network socket.
3. The most important point. Modern CPUs can handle those operations easily. We don't live in the 486 era anymore.
"Instead of text selection requiring a repaint of the entire text, with a different background colour, why not send just one transparent tinted box over the network instead?"
I think that's what XRender does.
"* decent fonts"
MS TrueType fonts and Xft.
"# better cut and paste, with a memory, and perhaps a history stack"
X clipboard mechanism standard (supported correctly by GTK+ 1.2/2.0, QT 3.0, Mozilla, Motif, and probably some other toolkits)
GNOME Clipboard Manager
"# make it so I don't have to run DRI programs as root."
You run DRI apps as root?! *gasp*
Why can I run Tuxracer as normal user?
"* standard widget set, and a standard 3rd party widget registry, so GNOME and KDE widgets can co-exist in the same application, or at least access eachother through a standard communications channel. (you laugh..)"
XEmbed. Work in progress.
BlueCurve and Keramik/Geramik provide a consistent look for both toolkits.
"X is a big dumb slow ram hog that's impossible to configure without a lot of help"
Funny, all I did was press "Next" while installing RedHat 7.2 and everything was automatically configured!
"with no consistant look and feel thanks to the proliferation of widget libraries"
*uche* Windows Media Player 7, ZoneAlarm, Norton AntiVirus, ApezBot, ICQ, McAfee *uche*
"Make it more low-level and very easy to setup and change the resolution."
XRandR. 'nuff said.
Where in the world have you been all this time??
If you don't contribute then stop bitching about it and go use the "ooh so ultra-slick and userfriendly Microsoft(r) Windows(tm) XP(c)", which you DO like.
Well, people seem to love Win98's speed even though it crashes a few times a day. Obviously average users don't care about stability.
You know, it is because of the small number of people like you that most Windows user see the Linux community (as a whole) as a bunch of anti-Microsoft elitists!!
What? You didn't know Japan is capitalist?! *gasp*!
"DirectX is better than X11 for direct access to the hardware buffer."
That's comparing apples to oranges.
Compare DirectX with SDL+OpenGL.