You seem to be considering the position of existing code; while I was talking about that, I was talking also (perhaps moreso) about existing applications.
Consider, for example, Joe User. Joe runs Linux. Joe wants to use a program, but it's for windows. Joe has heard that Mono can run.NET applications, since they're compiled into CLI, which Mono can interpret (I believe so at least, let me know if I'm wrong). Joe tries to run the EXE on his linux machine, only to find that Mono refuses to do so because Windows.Forms is not well supported.
I would think this would be the dominant position. I suppose that you could run such an application under WINE, but on the other hand, can you install the.NET framework under WINE? I don't know.
Ah, but you said the magic word, "Serial Console". Anaconda's text-mode installer wouldn't work well with a teletype because a teletype can't go back and modify what's already been printed, making it impossible to display a text-based GUI.
However, a serial console has no such limitations. You could have used Anaconda's text-based mode for your installation without trouble, assuming it had been ported to your platform (MIPS).
I was semi-serious when I suggested an output filter in a previous comment. If a filter was written that took as input the Anaconda text-based output, and turned it into linear questions-and-answers, then Anaconda would work on a teletype just fine.
Microsoft may be abandonning it, but that is not going to happen until 2006 or 2007. Certainly 2-3 years of continued exclusive Windows.Forms use warrants a working implementation.
Last I heard, Mono's implementation of Windows.Forms used WINE. So there really is an (almost) complete implementation of the Win32 API behind Mono's Windows.Forms support. I just want them to finish it, as I think it's a priority.
Gtk# doesn't help at all for existing code (would require a port to GTK#), nor does it help for already compiled commercial applications (Which I understand Mono can interpret).
I'm quite impressed with Mono, but I'm still waiting for Windows.Forms. Until support for them is reasonably complete, Mono will remain unable to run a large number of programs written in C# or other managed languages.
There is theming on the download manager. 0.9RC broke this, and PinStripe ditched the background.
0.9 fixed the theming problem (Theming is not the right word, the graphics were just missing), and putting Qute on 0.9 put back the background image on the download manager.
Going from 0.9RC+Pinstripe to 0.9+Qute was a big improvement.
1) 0.9 RC trashed my profile. Yeah, 0.9 final migrates, but hey, now that my profile is ALREADY gone, it's too late, now isn't it? 0.9 RC should have at least offered to back up my profile for future use.
2) Pinstripe is quite ugly. I much prefer Qute, and think the Mozilla folks must be stoned to ditch Qute for Pinstripe. I will certainly be reverting back to Qute.
3) They removed the theme on the download manager. It used to be nice and themed, now it is all solid colours. This may be Pinstripes fault, however, if the theme affects the download manager too.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Firefox supporter, and have converted numerous people. However, I simply think that several crucial mistakes were made in 0.9.
How many people run Linux with a printer/teletype as their primary output device? Not enough to care about. A few odd people shouldn't hold back a distribution from getting a usable installer.
Besides, Anaconda has a text installer... I'm sure if one of the three people who need teletype support was desperate, they could create some sort of an output filter to make the text installer support teletype compatible output.
Anaconda is written mostly in python. It should be easily portable to any arch. Somebody just has to take the effort to do it. And a major distribution (should) have the resources to pull that off.
Turns out there's already a port of Anaconda for Debian, though it's i386 only:
I grabbed a copy of WMP 10 beta, and it's not doing any acceleration on my Radeon 9700 Pro.
In the "Advanced" section of the "Performance" tab in the options, there's one section that says "Preferred decoder: Software/Hardware" (where software/hardware are radio buttons), but they are both grayed out and software is selected.
What, if anything, special are we required to get the hardware decoding support? I'm only running Catalyst 4.4, is the newest version (4.6) required?
I never understood why Debian doesn't simply use Anaconda. It's opensource, portable to Debian, and everybody who uses it seems generally pleased with it.
Yahoo has HORRIBLE spam filtering. It's about 85% accurate, which means that when I logged into my inbox today, 320 messages had made it past their spam filter.
If they'd just use a bayesian filter, this wouldn't be an issue.
And should I point out that they only stopped counting bulkmail towards your quota recently? Up until they did this, I would hit 7MB (They let me exceed my 6MB quota by 1MB) within 1-2 days from my bulkmail folder filling up with hundreds of messages.
I guess when you have an email address for 11 years with Yahoo, it becomes useless due to their poor spam filtering.
You might want to look into nVidia Gelato. It's a 3D renderer that uses Quadro FX cards as secondary FPUs, supposedly doubling or more the speed of rendering. They claim it's two to six times faster than the leading renderer. There's a demo, so you can verify those claims for your uses.
It runs under Linux, and "will function with whatever [render farm] management system you currently use.".
To reiterate, it's a SOFTWARE renderer, that is hardware accelerated by using the video card as a co-processor.
Isn't this precicely what Microsoft's Caller-ID for email technology is supposed to solve? Did nobody contact Microsoft to ask them about licencing the technology for a national do-not-email registry?
Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, nobody can deny that they are serious about taking on spam.
One small advantage my crappy program has, it runs under Win9x, unlike PriadoBlender:p
Regardless, portable PHP applications seem to be making progress since I first started messing with it. Soon I might switch over all my Windows development from C# to PHP. All I code is personal projects anyhow.
Pretty much, yeah, it's a glorified self-extracting archive. Of course, you can't acheive the same functionality with WinZIP or WinRAR, as they can't hide the PHP console for GUI apps, or pass command line parameters to the PHP script.
I'm sure all those programs are vastly superior to mine; Mine was only a kludge designed to fill a specific need to which I could not find a usable solution.
I should point out that my program, EncPHP, which was released under the LGPL, predates PriadoBlender by over a month; the oldest version in SourceForges archives, the second release, was timestamped "2003-08-07 21:00", with the first release having been finished several days/weeks before then:p
Anyhow, PriadroBlender looks very promising (Certainly superior to my kludge!), and I'll be interested to see how it turns out.
This is probably a good time to mention EncPHP, a program I wrote that encapsulates a PHP script along with most of what it needs to run inside an EXE. Both console and GUI PHP apps are supported, though for GUI apps, if you choose to embed all of GTK inside the app, it's going to be huge.
It hasn't been updated in ages, but you can check out the latest version here: EncPHP on SourceForge
The sourcecode is included... it uses a free BASIC compiler to dynamically compile a dependance-free EXE with the PHP script, PHP interpreter, and required DLLs, inside an EXE. When the EXE is run, it extracts it all and runs the PHP script with the parameters passed on the command line. There are some simple options you can add to the start of your PHP script to tell it to include other files, and if it is a console or GUI app (to show or hide a console).
Anybody following their products, as I assume a LAN center operator surely must, would certainly know about VALVe's CyberCafe licencing program; it's been mentioned many times on sites like PlanetHalfLife, and over and over again on the official Steam website (Steam being the online component to modern Half-Life), steampowered.com.
Even I have heard much about the licence, and I'm just a gamer. There's even a whole section on steampowered.com about it.
And I'm talking about the angular velocity, the speed the disc is actually spinning at. This drive only spins the disc at 7x, which gets 16x at the outside track due to the greater circumferance. There's plenty of room to spin faster, from 7x.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding all this. I assume that the listed angular velocity is the speed the actual disc is spinning, and therefore can ramp up to 16x. Is this not true? Can angular velocity not be used to measure the speed a disc spins at?
Regardless, we KNOW that the disc can spin faster, because the benchmarks for the 8x drive show the angular velocity starting at 8x and ramping down, whereas this drive is at 7x. So regardless if I'm totally wrong in the previous paragraph, we know the drive can at LEAST spin 1x faster.
According to the article, this 16x CAV drive is spinning the disc at a more or less constant ~7x... If the theoretical max speed a disc can be spun at is 16x, then why are we stuck at spinning it at 7x? There seems to be a lot of overhead for a different method to get a 16x average write speed.
THEY DID. There have been products out there that do this for ages. Off the top of my head, the Antec Notebook Cooler which has built in fans to handle heat, which means the laptop truely does run significantly cooler. There are a slew of similar products that have been on the market for ages.
Perhaps Slashdot's next post should be about a new invention by a small unknown company that they call a "rodent", that can be used to move a cursor around the screen! Except, there are no buttons on it, so you have to use your keyboard to click. Slashdot is just posting about an inferior version of an idea that has been in production for a while. This is not news.
Which is my point; another drive will eventually come out that has an EFFECTIVE write speed of (near) 16x becuase it will use a Z-CLV or P-CAV. To qualify this drive as 16x is false advertising; it may finish burning at 16x, but compared to the eventual TRUE 16x drives, this is a 12x drive.
They weren't raytracing engines, they were raycasting engines. Big difference there. Raycasting just calculates if a 2D ray would hit a wall, and how far away it is. It's just simple trig.
I'm not complaining about it, I think it's an interesting new technology with a lot of promise. I'm simply making an observation about the presentation.
I didn't watch it on TechTV either, as I don't get TechTV. I watched it on the net, and the quality wasn't that poor, and there was significantly more than 2 seconds available.
Who said anything about upgrades every 6 months? Up until now (with the release of the Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800), there hasn't been a single videocard that has dramatically improved on the Radeon 9700 Pro, a card that is what, 18, 20 months old now? It took nearly two YEARS before a significant improvement was made. In short, had this technology been availale prior to the 9700's release, somebody with a system with dual 9700s would still be in business today, indeed they'd have no large reason to upgrade to a dual-X800 system. Their two year old dual-9700 Pros would still keep up with today's fastest. Who knows how long the X800 will last as a decent card.
I'd be impressed if this thing had a GUI. After all, Apple themselves ported the Finder from the Mac to the Apple IIgs, as can be seen in this screenshot:
http://apple2history.org/museum/screenshots/a2gs fi nder.html
Of course, that was a IIgs, which is certainly faster. But still...
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You seem to be considering the position of existing code; while I was talking about that, I was talking also (perhaps moreso) about existing applications.
.NET applications, since they're compiled into CLI, which Mono can interpret (I believe so at least, let me know if I'm wrong). Joe tries to run the EXE on his linux machine, only to find that Mono refuses to do so because Windows.Forms is not well supported.
.NET framework under WINE? I don't know.
Consider, for example, Joe User. Joe runs Linux. Joe wants to use a program, but it's for windows. Joe has heard that Mono can run
I would think this would be the dominant position. I suppose that you could run such an application under WINE, but on the other hand, can you install the
Ah, but you said the magic word, "Serial Console". Anaconda's text-mode installer wouldn't work well with a teletype because a teletype can't go back and modify what's already been printed, making it impossible to display a text-based GUI.
However, a serial console has no such limitations. You could have used Anaconda's text-based mode for your installation without trouble, assuming it had been ported to your platform (MIPS).
I was semi-serious when I suggested an output filter in a previous comment. If a filter was written that took as input the Anaconda text-based output, and turned it into linear questions-and-answers, then Anaconda would work on a teletype just fine.
Microsoft may be abandonning it, but that is not going to happen until 2006 or 2007. Certainly 2-3 years of continued exclusive Windows.Forms use warrants a working implementation.
Last I heard, Mono's implementation of Windows.Forms used WINE. So there really is an (almost) complete implementation of the Win32 API behind Mono's Windows.Forms support. I just want them to finish it, as I think it's a priority.
Gtk# doesn't help at all for existing code (would require a port to GTK#), nor does it help for already compiled commercial applications (Which I understand Mono can interpret).
I'm quite impressed with Mono, but I'm still waiting for Windows.Forms. Until support for them is reasonably complete, Mono will remain unable to run a large number of programs written in C# or other managed languages.
There is theming on the download manager. 0.9RC broke this, and PinStripe ditched the background.
0.9 fixed the theming problem (Theming is not the right word, the graphics were just missing), and putting Qute on 0.9 put back the background image on the download manager.
Going from 0.9RC+Pinstripe to 0.9+Qute was a big improvement.
1) 0.9 RC trashed my profile. Yeah, 0.9 final migrates, but hey, now that my profile is ALREADY gone, it's too late, now isn't it? 0.9 RC should have at least offered to back up my profile for future use.
2) Pinstripe is quite ugly. I much prefer Qute, and think the Mozilla folks must be stoned to ditch Qute for Pinstripe. I will certainly be reverting back to Qute.
3) They removed the theme on the download manager. It used to be nice and themed, now it is all solid colours. This may be Pinstripes fault, however, if the theme affects the download manager too.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Firefox supporter, and have converted numerous people. However, I simply think that several crucial mistakes were made in 0.9.
How many people run Linux with a printer/teletype as their primary output device? Not enough to care about. A few odd people shouldn't hold back a distribution from getting a usable installer.
Besides, Anaconda has a text installer... I'm sure if one of the three people who need teletype support was desperate, they could create some sort of an output filter to make the text installer support teletype compatible output.
Anaconda is written mostly in python. It should be easily portable to any arch. Somebody just has to take the effort to do it. And a major distribution (should) have the resources to pull that off.
Turns out there's already a port of Anaconda for Debian, though it's i386 only:
http://platform.progeny.com/anaconda/index.html
Not working out over here.
I grabbed a copy of WMP 10 beta, and it's not doing any acceleration on my Radeon 9700 Pro.
In the "Advanced" section of the "Performance" tab in the options, there's one section that says "Preferred decoder: Software/Hardware" (where software/hardware are radio buttons), but they are both grayed out and software is selected.
What, if anything, special are we required to get the hardware decoding support? I'm only running Catalyst 4.4, is the newest version (4.6) required?
I never understood why Debian doesn't simply use Anaconda. It's opensource, portable to Debian, and everybody who uses it seems generally pleased with it.
Yahoo has HORRIBLE spam filtering. It's about 85% accurate, which means that when I logged into my inbox today, 320 messages had made it past their spam filter.
If they'd just use a bayesian filter, this wouldn't be an issue.
And should I point out that they only stopped counting bulkmail towards your quota recently? Up until they did this, I would hit 7MB (They let me exceed my 6MB quota by 1MB) within 1-2 days from my bulkmail folder filling up with hundreds of messages.
I guess when you have an email address for 11 years with Yahoo, it becomes useless due to their poor spam filtering.
You might want to look into nVidia Gelato. It's a 3D renderer that uses Quadro FX cards as secondary FPUs, supposedly doubling or more the speed of rendering. They claim it's two to six times faster than the leading renderer. There's a demo, so you can verify those claims for your uses.
It runs under Linux, and "will function with whatever [render farm] management system you currently use.".
To reiterate, it's a SOFTWARE renderer, that is hardware accelerated by using the video card as a co-processor.
Isn't this precicely what Microsoft's Caller-ID for email technology is supposed to solve? Did nobody contact Microsoft to ask them about licencing the technology for a national do-not-email registry?
Say what you will about Microsoft as a company, nobody can deny that they are serious about taking on spam.
Ideally such a project would be included in a fully-fledged IDE such as Zend Studio. That'd put PHP in line with other such languages.
One small advantage my crappy program has, it runs under Win9x, unlike PriadoBlender :p
Regardless, portable PHP applications seem to be making progress since I first started messing with it. Soon I might switch over all my Windows development from C# to PHP. All I code is personal projects anyhow.
Pretty much, yeah, it's a glorified self-extracting archive. Of course, you can't acheive the same functionality with WinZIP or WinRAR, as they can't hide the PHP console for GUI apps, or pass command line parameters to the PHP script.
:p
I'm sure all those programs are vastly superior to mine; Mine was only a kludge designed to fill a specific need to which I could not find a usable solution.
I should point out that my program, EncPHP, which was released under the LGPL, predates PriadoBlender by over a month; the oldest version in SourceForges archives, the second release, was timestamped "2003-08-07 21:00", with the first release having been finished several days/weeks before then
Anyhow, PriadroBlender looks very promising (Certainly superior to my kludge!), and I'll be interested to see how it turns out.
This is probably a good time to mention EncPHP, a program I wrote that encapsulates a PHP script along with most of what it needs to run inside an EXE. Both console and GUI PHP apps are supported, though for GUI apps, if you choose to embed all of GTK inside the app, it's going to be huge.
It hasn't been updated in ages, but you can check out the latest version here: EncPHP on SourceForge
The sourcecode is included... it uses a free BASIC compiler to dynamically compile a dependance-free EXE with the PHP script, PHP interpreter, and required DLLs, inside an EXE. When the EXE is run, it extracts it all and runs the PHP script with the parameters passed on the command line. There are some simple options you can add to the start of your PHP script to tell it to include other files, and if it is a console or GUI app (to show or hide a console).
Anybody following their products, as I assume a LAN center operator surely must, would certainly know about VALVe's CyberCafe licencing program; it's been mentioned many times on sites like PlanetHalfLife, and over and over again on the official Steam website (Steam being the online component to modern Half-Life), steampowered.com.
Even I have heard much about the licence, and I'm just a gamer. There's even a whole section on steampowered.com about it.
And I'm talking about the angular velocity, the speed the disc is actually spinning at. This drive only spins the disc at 7x, which gets 16x at the outside track due to the greater circumferance. There's plenty of room to spin faster, from 7x.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding all this. I assume that the listed angular velocity is the speed the actual disc is spinning, and therefore can ramp up to 16x. Is this not true? Can angular velocity not be used to measure the speed a disc spins at?
Regardless, we KNOW that the disc can spin faster, because the benchmarks for the 8x drive show the angular velocity starting at 8x and ramping down, whereas this drive is at 7x. So regardless if I'm totally wrong in the previous paragraph, we know the drive can at LEAST spin 1x faster.
According to the article, this 16x CAV drive is spinning the disc at a more or less constant ~7x... If the theoretical max speed a disc can be spun at is 16x, then why are we stuck at spinning it at 7x? There seems to be a lot of overhead for a different method to get a 16x average write speed.
"Why didn't someone think of this sooner?"
THEY DID. There have been products out there that do this for ages. Off the top of my head, the Antec Notebook Cooler which has built in fans to handle heat, which means the laptop truely does run significantly cooler. There are a slew of similar products that have been on the market for ages.
Perhaps Slashdot's next post should be about a new invention by a small unknown company that they call a "rodent", that can be used to move a cursor around the screen! Except, there are no buttons on it, so you have to use your keyboard to click. Slashdot is just posting about an inferior version of an idea that has been in production for a while. This is not news.
Which is my point; another drive will eventually come out that has an EFFECTIVE write speed of (near) 16x becuase it will use a Z-CLV or P-CAV. To qualify this drive as 16x is false advertising; it may finish burning at 16x, but compared to the eventual TRUE 16x drives, this is a 12x drive.
They weren't raytracing engines, they were raycasting engines. Big difference there. Raycasting just calculates if a 2D ray would hit a wall, and how far away it is. It's just simple trig.
I'm not complaining about it, I think it's an interesting new technology with a lot of promise. I'm simply making an observation about the presentation.
I didn't watch it on TechTV either, as I don't get TechTV. I watched it on the net, and the quality wasn't that poor, and there was significantly more than 2 seconds available.
Who said anything about upgrades every 6 months? Up until now (with the release of the Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800), there hasn't been a single videocard that has dramatically improved on the Radeon 9700 Pro, a card that is what, 18, 20 months old now? It took nearly two YEARS before a significant improvement was made. In short, had this technology been availale prior to the 9700's release, somebody with a system with dual 9700s would still be in business today, indeed they'd have no large reason to upgrade to a dual-X800 system. Their two year old dual-9700 Pros would still keep up with today's fastest. Who knows how long the X800 will last as a decent card.
I'd be impressed if this thing had a GUI. After all, Apple themselves ported the Finder from the Mac to the Apple IIgs, as can be seen in this screenshot:
s fi nder.html
http://apple2history.org/museum/screenshots/a2g
Of course, that was a IIgs, which is certainly faster. But still...