Not only does Matrox do the open source thing, but their cards are have *better* driver support.
I'm happily using the mga_vid x11 interface to mplayer decoding right into video memory. Faster than the xv driver, even. Divxes at full frame rate on my old computer. Mmm...
Carmack was one of the people working on the Matrox GLX driver for XFree86 3.:-)
Re:Marketing Hype = More $$$
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Web Services
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This functionality would be very difficult to provide if it had to be created from scratch.
Firewall admins -- loosen up
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Oh, really?
Nothing's more idiotic than administrators who "secure" their systems by allowing nothing but http and mail through. Everyone who wants to do anything remotely starts tunneling it. SSH is a nice, secure way to do most things, but every firewall in the world blocks it. All the files that would have been scped from my machine end up being sent in plain text via mail or http. Total pain in the ass.
Firewalls seem too often to be less about security and more about (a) covering one's ass ("The break in? But we had a firewall up! The vendor must be at fault...we'll switch immediately!") (b) providing job security ("Well, sir, I'd have a hard time training that new H1B to operate this system here...why, the firewall alone has quite a collection of rules of my own devising that are automatically generated..."), and (c) Making the admin's life easier ("Well, looks like there's some security hole out there...I'm sure that no one's been able to drill through our firewall, so I'll just install the appropriate patches on the workstations during our next upgrade process rather than immediately").
Seriously, the job of the network admin is to *let the people who are directly making money for the company make money*. You may not like the sales guy down the hall, he may not be able to set up that firewall or know how to fix a sendmail installation. Fine. But your job is to make his computing experience as easy as possible and let him get his work done. Sure, security is also an issue, but it really seems to me that if you can't be bothered to open a port in your firewall for a user that needs to go in or out, something's wrong. ("..as long as you don't bug me".) Christ. If they *do* hack it up to the point where it can squeeze through a proxy, they've just moved the weakness to http.
I'd almost say that you're a troll, but I'm not quite sure...
Linux distros have the most impressive version number bloat I've ever seen. Having a high version number looks better because your product looks more mature to new users.
I used to think that SuSE and Mandrake did it to stay one step ahead of RH. RH's numbering scheme is fairly sane these days, although I'm not so sure about the move from 6 to 7....
Perhaps because QT is ass-slow and RAM-hungry compared to gtk, wasn't free for a long time, and is a freaking bloated single library (unlike gtk...if I want just glib, I just use glib...no reimplementation of the STL here).
SuSE doesn't have anything particularly wrong with them (aside from being the only distro I know of not to actually allow downloading ISOs, and having a lower degree of compatibility with most third party packaged software from their lower market share), so as long as they stay in business, I could see people that started out with them sticking with them through inertia. SuSE isn't my favorite distro, but it isn't "bad". Qt is "bad".
The whole neat thing about Linux is that you aren't constrained to use a distro as a black box in the way it was packaged -- season to taste. I think it's quite rational to want to remove Qt from SuSE.
The problem is that frequently, oft-changing tools abstracted by a *thick* (yes, you can have thin GUI frontends) GUI layer from the actual config files can be confusing to the people who really *do* know what they want to do, but have to put up with figuring out what exactly a graphical util is doing.
Be nice to have a standard for listing all the changes a config file front end has made...
The truth is that Intel wanted to buy the lab and was on the brink of closing a deal. Although nobody in AT&T will talk openly about it, the word on the street is that negotiations foundered because the lawyers on both sides couldn't agree about intellectual property issues
You know, I actually don't know that this is false, but I have a very hard time believing that NORAD is dumb enough to jack radar power so high that it's capable of detecting missiles halfway to the moon at the wrong angle. Furthermore, I strongly imagine that they'd have multiple stations and triangulate possible radar hits...and the moon would kind of be obviously not a missile.
Plus, Doppler radar and even interpolation across multiple regular radar pulses would definitely not show the moon following the path of a missile. And the delay in returns from the moon would be insanely high...and NORAD *would* be using timing data to figure out how long until missiles hit.
The moon wouldn't even have gotten to image processing or recognition systems or anything like that...it shouldn't have entered the computation system at all.
I think you're pulling this from sci-fi or out of your ass.
Maybe a mugger generally spends the entire evening standing around at three different street corners, and tends to avoid police movement patterns.
I strongly suspect that the cameras send back images to a central system which reduces all the data to the path that a person takes over a day, dropping all other data. *Then* you analyze the path data.
Apple, at least, is generally pretty good about putting out bugfixes for old products -- they make most of their money on hardware, and don't have a huge incentive to force people to buy a new OS to get their computer to work properly. OTOH, I don't think they ever fixed all the TCP/IP exploits in the latest version of Open Transport that the System 7.5.5 line could run.:-(
Microsoft has been even less good about putting out free fixes for their old products. There are too many known problems that aren't going to get fixed in Win 95 and NT. They also don't usually backport libraries -- I fondly remember someone hacking up the binaries of Win2k's DirectX 5 implementation to work on WinNT. It let me run several DX 5 games that wouldn't otherwise work on NT 4. MS, however, never released DirectX 5 for WinNT. Why would they? It was a big incentive to get peopel to buy Win2k.
MS uses compatibility issues and a lack of bugfixes, not features alone, to drive upgrades of their software.:-(
Unfortunately, X grabs full control of the keyboard and DGA software grab full control of that, so if the software you're using sucks (i.e. isn't SDL-based, where it's *freaking* easy to support full screen toggle), you're probably best off with a joystick and joyd...bind a combination of keys to shut down X or whatever if X crashes.
Of course, if you're on a network you can just ssh in to your box...
I suppose that your sig is a joke, but aside from the cygwin approach, there's a quite nice mingw release of gcc for windows which is good for general-purpose development.
...in a desktop...you don't have to worry about power consumption
Yes you do.
I like a quiet system, without a noisy-as-hell fan running. I like a cool environment for my hard drives. I like not tracking tons of dust through my case. I like not adding to the heat the monitor already builds up in my non-AC room -- you can *feel* the difference when the monitor is off.
Besides, Intel scales clock speeds based on temperature. If you let unused parts of the chip cool down, you can run the parts you *are* using faster.
Some of us like not having the sound of a vacuum cleaner in our ears all day long. Some of us live in dorms without AC and have to endure each heat-emitting device in an already-sweltering room.
Booting my Windows system is as fast or faster than booting Linux/X
So don't have five zillion daemons start up at boot in Linux. mv unimportant/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S* stuff to/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K* stuff. Linux itself boots within a few seconds. Even X doesn't take that long. Starting up KDE/GNOME and starting daemons is where all the time goes.
widgets automatically line up properly
I find this rather amusing. Windows (and at least classic MacOS) does almost nothing in terms of positioning at the widget level for you. It *does* use non-pixel based units in dialogs, so that changing the system font will also change the dialog size automatically. GTK+ has quite fast and powerful positioning and resizing built into the widget system.
I've yet to find a completely stable GUI e-mail program in X
I dunno what programs other people are using, but mutt and dillo+galeon is a pretty sweet combination for me. They aren't unstable. Once I started using a console email program, I couldn't switch back. I can manipulate it with just my keyboard and use it from anywhere I am (most people have ssh or telnet, but few people have an X server sitting around on their Windows box).
Also, I can't figure out why people like Outlook so much. Have you ever used any other email clients? Of all the GUI email clients I've ever used, I have to say that Outlook is my least favorite (though I don't use the workgroup features, which I suppose might be a big draw if you needed them). Have you ever used Eudora?
Much as I like IP, it's a really bad protocol for stuff that requires real time delivery for proper quality.
OTOH, while IP may not be the *best* protocol for distributed apps, how many people use it directly? You work with something that sits on top of it, some communications layer designed for distributed work...say ACE and similar things. Generally distributed apps don't require real-time response, so it's not the end of the world if something takes a bit to go across the pipe.
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Not only does Matrox do the open source thing, but their cards are have *better* driver support.
:-)
I'm happily using the mga_vid x11 interface to mplayer decoding right into video memory. Faster than the xv driver, even. Divxes at full frame rate on my old computer. Mmm...
Carmack was one of the people working on the Matrox GLX driver for XFree86 3.
This functionality would be very difficult to provide if it had to be created from scratch.
You ever use aspell?
Oh, really?
Nothing's more idiotic than administrators who "secure" their systems by allowing nothing but http and mail through. Everyone who wants to do anything remotely starts tunneling it. SSH is a nice, secure way to do most things, but every firewall in the world blocks it. All the files that would have been scped from my machine end up being sent in plain text via mail or http. Total pain in the ass.
Firewalls seem too often to be less about security and more about (a) covering one's ass ("The break in? But we had a firewall up! The vendor must be at fault...we'll switch immediately!") (b) providing job security ("Well, sir, I'd have a hard time training that new H1B to operate this system here...why, the firewall alone has quite a collection of rules of my own devising that are automatically generated..."), and (c) Making the admin's life easier ("Well, looks like there's some security hole out there...I'm sure that no one's been able to drill through our firewall, so I'll just install the appropriate patches on the workstations during our next upgrade process rather than immediately").
Seriously, the job of the network admin is to *let the people who are directly making money for the company make money*. You may not like the sales guy down the hall, he may not be able to set up that firewall or know how to fix a sendmail installation. Fine. But your job is to make his computing experience as easy as possible and let him get his work done. Sure, security is also an issue, but it really seems to me that if you can't be bothered to open a port in your firewall for a user that needs to go in or out, something's wrong. ("..as long as you don't bug me".) Christ. If they *do* hack it up to the point where it can squeeze through a proxy, they've just moved the weakness to http.
I'd almost say that you're a troll, but I'm not quite sure...
Linux distros have the most impressive version number bloat I've ever seen. Having a high version number looks better because your product looks more mature to new users.
I used to think that SuSE and Mandrake did it to stay one step ahead of RH. RH's numbering scheme is fairly sane these days, although I'm not so sure about the move from 6 to 7....
Perhaps because QT is ass-slow and RAM-hungry compared to gtk, wasn't free for a long time, and is a freaking bloated single library (unlike gtk...if I want just glib, I just use glib...no reimplementation of the STL here).
SuSE doesn't have anything particularly wrong with them (aside from being the only distro I know of not to actually allow downloading ISOs, and having a lower degree of compatibility with most third party packaged software from their lower market share), so as long as they stay in business, I could see people that started out with them sticking with them through inertia. SuSE isn't my favorite distro, but it isn't "bad". Qt is "bad".
The whole neat thing about Linux is that you aren't constrained to use a distro as a black box in the way it was packaged -- season to taste. I think it's quite rational to want to remove Qt from SuSE.
I use autoupdate, which uses ftp and is (obviously) free for unlimited users.
I can't figure out why so many people piss on RH. Too many people that have never used anything but Debian run out and call RH a "newbie" distro.
The problem is that frequently, oft-changing tools abstracted by a *thick* (yes, you can have thin GUI frontends) GUI layer from the actual config files can be confusing to the people who really *do* know what they want to do, but have to put up with figuring out what exactly a graphical util is doing.
Be nice to have a standard for listing all the changes a config file front end has made...
Why? It'd help no one but MS customers...we already know that there are legal boundaries on EULAs.
I'm more concerned about what happens when I'm using gpg and ogle on my Linux box and someone says that I can't have/use them.
Is Coda pure research? Seems pretty useful to me...
We have X11, and XFree86 is a free implementation. X is more advanced than VNC, anyway...
The truth is that Intel wanted to buy the lab and was on the brink of closing a deal. Although nobody in AT&T will talk openly about it, the word on the street is that negotiations foundered because the lawyers on both sides couldn't agree about intellectual property issues
Slashdot readers should love this paragraph.
Not a raster painting app?
"radar reflecting off the moon"
You know, I actually don't know that this is false, but I have a very hard time believing that NORAD is dumb enough to jack radar power so high that it's capable of detecting missiles halfway to the moon at the wrong angle. Furthermore, I strongly imagine that they'd have multiple stations and triangulate possible radar hits...and the moon would kind of be obviously not a missile.
Plus, Doppler radar and even interpolation across multiple regular radar pulses would definitely not show the moon following the path of a missile. And the delay in returns from the moon would be insanely high...and NORAD *would* be using timing data to figure out how long until missiles hit.
The moon wouldn't even have gotten to image processing or recognition systems or anything like that...it shouldn't have entered the computation system at all.
I think you're pulling this from sci-fi or out of your ass.
Behavior patterns, silly.
They don't mean individual actions.
Maybe a mugger generally spends the entire evening standing around at three different street corners, and tends to avoid police movement patterns.
I strongly suspect that the cameras send back images to a central system which reduces all the data to the path that a person takes over a day, dropping all other data. *Then* you analyze the path data.
Yahoo uses a google engine, not database.
Frankly, I'd rather see the OS9 boxes fixed.
:-(
:-(
Apple, at least, is generally pretty good about putting out bugfixes for old products -- they make most of their money on hardware, and don't have a huge incentive to force people to buy a new OS to get their computer to work properly. OTOH, I don't think they ever fixed all the TCP/IP exploits in the latest version of Open Transport that the System 7.5.5 line could run.
Microsoft has been even less good about putting out free fixes for their old products. There are too many known problems that aren't going to get fixed in Win 95 and NT. They also don't usually backport libraries -- I fondly remember someone hacking up the binaries of Win2k's DirectX 5 implementation to work on WinNT. It let me run several DX 5 games that wouldn't otherwise work on NT 4. MS, however, never released DirectX 5 for WinNT. Why would they? It was a big incentive to get peopel to buy Win2k.
MS uses compatibility issues and a lack of bugfixes, not features alone, to drive upgrades of their software.
Unfortunately, X grabs full control of the keyboard and DGA software grab full control of that, so if the software you're using sucks (i.e. isn't SDL-based, where it's *freaking* easy to support full screen toggle), you're probably best off with a joystick and joyd...bind a combination of keys to shut down X or whatever if X crashes.
Of course, if you're on a network you can just ssh in to your box...
gpg based system == good. GPG-signed transaction receipts.
No one will develop an open e-cash system, though. Too much money in it. The credit card companies will take over, or a big bank.
Or paypal'd quash it and make it stillborn.
I suppose that your sig is a joke, but aside from the cygwin approach, there's a quite nice mingw release of gcc for windows which is good for general-purpose development.
...in a desktop...you don't have to worry about power consumption
Yes you do.
I like a quiet system, without a noisy-as-hell fan running. I like a cool environment for my hard drives. I like not tracking tons of dust through my case. I like not adding to the heat the monitor already builds up in my non-AC room -- you can *feel* the difference when the monitor is off.
Besides, Intel scales clock speeds based on temperature. If you let unused parts of the chip cool down, you can run the parts you *are* using faster.
Some of us like not having the sound of a vacuum cleaner in our ears all day long. Some of us live in dorms without AC and have to endure each heat-emitting device in an already-sweltering room.
Booting my Windows system is as fast or faster than booting Linux/X
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S* stuff to /etc/rc.d/rc5.d/K* stuff. Linux itself boots within a few seconds. Even X doesn't take that long. Starting up KDE/GNOME and starting daemons is where all the time goes.
So don't have five zillion daemons start up at boot in Linux. mv unimportant
widgets automatically line up properly
I find this rather amusing. Windows (and at least classic MacOS) does almost nothing in terms of positioning at the widget level for you. It *does* use non-pixel based units in dialogs, so that changing the system font will also change the dialog size automatically. GTK+ has quite fast and powerful positioning and resizing built into the widget system.
I've yet to find a completely stable GUI e-mail program in X
I dunno what programs other people are using, but mutt and dillo+galeon is a pretty sweet combination for me. They aren't unstable. Once I started using a console email program, I couldn't switch back. I can manipulate it with just my keyboard and use it from anywhere I am (most people have ssh or telnet, but few people have an X server sitting around on their Windows box).
Also, I can't figure out why people like Outlook so much. Have you ever used any other email clients? Of all the GUI email clients I've ever used, I have to say that Outlook is my least favorite (though I don't use the workgroup features, which I suppose might be a big draw if you needed them). Have you ever used Eudora?
Much as I like IP, it's a really bad protocol for stuff that requires real time delivery for proper quality.
OTOH, while IP may not be the *best* protocol for distributed apps, how many people use it directly? You work with something that sits on top of it, some communications layer designed for distributed work...say ACE and similar things. Generally distributed apps don't require real-time response, so it's not the end of the world if something takes a bit to go across the pipe.
Heh. One works at a telco, too. That's a pretty good endorsement of VoIP. :-)
If they go infinitely fast, I have a neat communications system/fast CPU technology for you. :-)