You're not alone, I assure you. I remember having issues trying to figure out what JRE I needed to download some time ago thanks to the wonderful Java2 1.x naming scheme.
(Also, if my post sounded a little harsh, I didn't mean it toward you; the harshness came from this very reason of being frustrated with Sun's naming scheme...)
Which is why the website says "Sun Microsystems, Inc.... today introduced Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0"? What's the 2 doing in there if it's just a simple versioning scheme?
When Java SDK went from 1.1.x to 1.2.0 they decided that they had made lots of big changes (IIRC Swing and Collection.. possibly Inner classes *shrug*) so they called it Java 2.
Then why not Java 2.0? Why Java 2 1.2? I ask because I've been confused by this before, though got it worked out.
I had a power supply sorta explode on me. Fortunately it didn't kill any other components.
But I had just sat down to sign onto AOL (this is many years ago, okay?:-p) when there was this pzzzch type noise, and the wall behind the computer was briefly illuminated with sparks. I turned off the power immediately, then back on hoping it was just a transient problem (in retrospect, probably a bad decision though no harm came about), but the PS fan didn't turn back on so i turned the computer right back off. We replaced it with the PS from a 386 we had that had recently died (another harmless mistake), which is still in there and working. Though the computer (a P-100) hasn't really been used in quite some time.
But anyway, I took the dead power supply and took it apart (what was, I later realized when I read about the very large amounts of power stored in the capacitors was another harmless mistake). One of the corners of the inside of the case was charred, and a resister nearby was also quite black. The fuse had gone too.
You'd think that this'd clue me into the fact that it was completely dead, but no. I decided I wanted to see if replacing the fuse would be enough to make it work. But, as I didn't happen to have another fuse handy, I took an inch and a half of stranded wire, stripped maybe 1/3" off each end, and bent the strands outward so the piece looked like a capital I. I put this down onto the fuse clips, plugged in the PS, got a pair of safety goggles (I'm not completely stupid), stood as far away from the actual PS as the switch cord could reach, and hit the power button. The makeshift "fuse" flew about 3 feet up into the air. After unplugging the PS, I took another look and saw that the current had actually melted the wire and fuse clips some. The clips were deformed, and there was a coating of copper from the wire covering them.
I half-killed a Logitech wireless keyboard after spilling a about a cup of water into it. I pulled the batteries out immediately and took it apart to put a hairdryer on it, but it didn't work after that. Until I, on a whim, decided to try to plug the reciever in using the PS/2 connections it has instead of the USB, and it worked. Not sure how that came about...
It's since died from old age or complications from the near-drowning or something else.
The latter is I think default behavior with multiple mice. I'm asking if there's any way to get another cursor... probably not, but it'd be cool if someone could do so.
At least between different NTFS folders and partitions. I don't know about zipping it, or emailing it, or moving it to FAT and back to NTFS. The'd be good experiments, but I don't feel like it at the moment.
(Just to point out: hidden.txt doesn't actually show in the filesystem anywhere. You can name it whatever you want too.)
I too have wanted to do something like this. Is anyone aware of a tool or filesystem that would do this? It's sorta in the back of my mind as an idea for a thesis, but I dunno how appropriate it'd be.
Ehem, but emacs requires multiple keyboards to work
I'm not sure what you mean by this, if it's just a joking jab at emacs or what, but I use emacs just fine with one keyboard.
Also what's the point of using the a window manager if multiple windows have the focus at once? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of "focus"?
Each person using the computer would have exactly one window with focus. Thus more than one person could use the computer at once, completely independently. Joe could be working in The Gimp while Jane is coding in KDevelop. If Joe sees a typo Jane made, rather than point it out, he can just use his keyboard and mouse to go over and fix it while Jane continues on where she was.
Perhaps I wasn't clear before, but does it make sense now?
The article is talking about having four separate cursors. So you have your wireless mouse, but it controls a different cursor on another screen.
Related question: anyone know if it's possible to set up something where you could have those mice be associated with different cursors (by color or shape) so more than one person can work at the same computer? I'm not talking about the article's described system, but between it and a typical computer. One display, multiple cursors.
(Each cursor can keep a separate window in focus, or you can have two or more people working in, say, emacs on different lines.)
5) It makes support more uniform. NVidia's support lines I'm sure don't want to deal with having 3 different forks of the driver code, nor do they want to have to deal with figuring out if problems people are reporting are due to the hardware, their part of the driver, or some third party's driver. Sure, they could say they only offer support for the official version or something, but then the lines still have to deal with people who don't have it but call anyway, lie and say they have it but don't, etc.
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
Which makes it easier to figure out: said trace of the driver's activity, or (hopefully) reasonably documented C code? Right.
As for the next point, about driver quality, you bring up an interesting point. But I would find it hard to believe if NVidia's software engineers are that much better than ATI's, unless there was a significant pay disparity. The only thing that I could think of is that perhaps NVidia just has *more* of them, so they are not as hurried and susceptable to the deadline syndrome. If this were the case, the engineers could still learn a few tricks.
Your point in the first paragraph is well taken. Second paragraph too, but I really don't think there'd be that much of a difference.;-)
But:
You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started.
The nv driver is not the official release from NVidia. It's a part of XFree86 (and now X.org), and is available under the MIT license or whatever they call it.
The typical pejorative labeling of anyone who disagrees as 'socialist' or 'communist', by far the majority of the world incidentally, I can only hope is a sign of the end days of this world view.
I don't consider the above terms pejorative in the least. I'm a big government person. I'd like to see a universal healthcare plan. I'd like to see companies that abuse monopoly status drawn and quartered. (Or drawn and halved, or thirded, or whatever...) I think welfare, social security, etc. are very worthy causes.
But, I think that finding fault with trying to make your company do better, even at the expense of some universal progress, in the context of this discussion makes one's opinions so far away from unrestricted capitalism that it ceases to be able to be called capitalism at all.
I have no crystal ball, but I think IBM would have done quite a bit better than it has now. There would still have been competition, from Apple and other companies, but there wouldn't have been companies springing out of the woodwork trying to capitalize on the open XT standard. Other companies would have been forced to spend presumably a fairly substantial amount of R&D money before starting to actually produce a product.
I would have expected to see maybe one more company rise up with a personal computer, but that's still far less competition than the 20 zillion companies we have now. But it would still be enough to ensure that progress was made and prices weren't outrageous.
For instance, Apple is still doing quite well, even in the face of the said 20 zillion PC manufacturers and a near monopolistic OS company.
(I want to see the number of units shipped by IBM and Apple, but can't find numbers...)
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
I'll give you two more:
3) Hardware manufacturers want the hardware to be as much of a black box as possible. Handing out driver source, thus exposing the hardware interface and not just the driver interface, provides more intformation about the hardware, and would make it easier to guess how it works. [You touched on this in your last pgh.]
4) NVidia has, historically, had pretty good drivers. Other companies, *cough* ATI *cough*, have not such a good track record. Despite what are probably enormous differences in hardware, NVidia source could still probably give ATI useful information about how to improve their own drivers. I've seen posts here lamenting that if only ATI's drivers were better, the posters would have gotten a card from them. So NVidia would probably lose people here.
Because there was also Apple. Also planned obselescence, etc.
Why do you think MS software sucks?
Interesting choice of company; it goes a fair distance to demonstrating my point. Would Windows be more secure today if competition had forced it to be throughout it's life? Sure. Would OSes be better in general? Almost certainly. Would MS have the market share it does today? No way.
Are you really implying the world and the state of computer technology would both be better had IBM retained monopoly control of hardware? I'll wager most historians of technology will disagree.
OTOH, I would argue that IBM would likely have a better market share and sell more products had they retained monopoly control.
IBM isn't concerned about the world and state of computer technology; IBM is concerned about $REVENUE - $COSTS.
Similarily, NVidia wants to make the most money it can, and it thinks closed source drivers will further that goal better than open source drivers. I agree with the grandparent that this is likely.
If you find fault with the above, I put to you that you are finding fault with the bedrock of capitalism. Which is, of course, fine, but you should consider voting for the communist or socialist parties come your next election.
Or go out and revise the nv drivers. Nothing (I would assume) prevents you from doing so. Nothing prevents you from getting a video card from another company. And by the same token, nothing should prevent NVidia from releasing closed-source drivers.
Besides, what would 99.9% of linux people do even if it was open source? Download source, not even look at it, type make install clean, and be done with it. (Or make setup or whatever the build sequence is; point being that most users wouldn't care.) And for the 0.1% of people who do mess with it, unless they discovered some great tweak that would provide a significant feature or speed advantage over the NVidia drivers, I'd just go with them, since I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes sense in a sorta twisted, deranged kinda way...
Thanks for the explanation
You're not alone, I assure you. I remember having issues trying to figure out what JRE I needed to download some time ago thanks to the wonderful Java2 1.x naming scheme.
(Also, if my post sounded a little harsh, I didn't mean it toward you; the harshness came from this very reason of being frustrated with Sun's naming scheme...)
Which is why the website says "Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... today introduced Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0"? What's the 2 doing in there if it's just a simple versioning scheme?
No no... Java 5 is still Java2 5.0. From the website: "Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... today introduced Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0"
If anyone has contact with the people who came up with the Java versioning scheme, please ask them what they are smoking and where I can get some.
When Java SDK went from 1.1.x to 1.2.0 they decided that they had made lots of big changes (IIRC Swing and Collection.. possibly Inner classes *shrug*) so they called it Java 2.
Then why not Java 2.0? Why Java 2 1.2? I ask because I've been confused by this before, though got it worked out.
Because they need to install the corresponding JRE?
I had a power supply sorta explode on me. Fortunately it didn't kill any other components.
:-p) when there was this pzzzch type noise, and the wall behind the computer was briefly illuminated with sparks. I turned off the power immediately, then back on hoping it was just a transient problem (in retrospect, probably a bad decision though no harm came about), but the PS fan didn't turn back on so i turned the computer right back off. We replaced it with the PS from a 386 we had that had recently died (another harmless mistake), which is still in there and working. Though the computer (a P-100) hasn't really been used in quite some time.
But I had just sat down to sign onto AOL (this is many years ago, okay?
But anyway, I took the dead power supply and took it apart (what was, I later realized when I read about the very large amounts of power stored in the capacitors was another harmless mistake). One of the corners of the inside of the case was charred, and a resister nearby was also quite black. The fuse had gone too.
You'd think that this'd clue me into the fact that it was completely dead, but no. I decided I wanted to see if replacing the fuse would be enough to make it work. But, as I didn't happen to have another fuse handy, I took an inch and a half of stranded wire, stripped maybe 1/3" off each end, and bent the strands outward so the piece looked like a capital I. I put this down onto the fuse clips, plugged in the PS, got a pair of safety goggles (I'm not completely stupid), stood as far away from the actual PS as the switch cord could reach, and hit the power button. The makeshift "fuse" flew about 3 feet up into the air. After unplugging the PS, I took another look and saw that the current had actually melted the wire and fuse clips some. The clips were deformed, and there was a coating of copper from the wire covering them.
I half-killed a Logitech wireless keyboard after spilling a about a cup of water into it. I pulled the batteries out immediately and took it apart to put a hairdryer on it, but it didn't work after that. Until I, on a whim, decided to try to plug the reciever in using the PS/2 connections it has instead of the USB, and it worked. Not sure how that came about...
It's since died from old age or complications from the near-drowning or something else.
Poor email address, your going to be spanked with tins of spam now.
I can't tell if this is a typo of 'tons' or if it's a clever pun on the fact that Hormel Spam comes in tins...
But it's amusing either way.
The change of the "work for hire" definition was snuck in via a technical amendment to The Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999.
AFAIK, it has not been struck down.
The latter is I think default behavior with multiple mice. I'm asking if there's any way to get another cursor... probably not, but it'd be cool if someone could do so.
At least between different NTFS folders and partitions. I don't know about zipping it, or emailing it, or moving it to FAT and back to NTFS. The'd be good experiments, but I don't feel like it at the moment.
(Just to point out: hidden.txt doesn't actually show in the filesystem anywhere. You can name it whatever you want too.)
You misunderstand. I don't want separate screens; I want two people to be able to simultaneously work on one screen.
And an about box too... I think I'm in awe. Killer feature right there...
I too have wanted to do something like this. Is anyone aware of a tool or filesystem that would do this? It's sorta in the back of my mind as an idea for a thesis, but I dunno how appropriate it'd be.
Ehem, but emacs requires multiple keyboards to work
I'm not sure what you mean by this, if it's just a joking jab at emacs or what, but I use emacs just fine with one keyboard.
Also what's the point of using the a window manager if multiple windows have the focus at once? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of "focus"?
Each person using the computer would have exactly one window with focus. Thus more than one person could use the computer at once, completely independently. Joe could be working in The Gimp while Jane is coding in KDevelop. If Joe sees a typo Jane made, rather than point it out, he can just use his keyboard and mouse to go over and fix it while Jane continues on where she was.
Perhaps I wasn't clear before, but does it make sense now?
The article is talking about having four separate cursors. So you have your wireless mouse, but it controls a different cursor on another screen.
Related question: anyone know if it's possible to set up something where you could have those mice be associated with different cursors (by color or shape) so more than one person can work at the same computer? I'm not talking about the article's described system, but between it and a typical computer. One display, multiple cursors.
(Each cursor can keep a separate window in focus, or you can have two or more people working in, say, emacs on different lines.)
Here's another:
5) It makes support more uniform. NVidia's support lines I'm sure don't want to deal with having 3 different forks of the driver code, nor do they want to have to deal with figuring out if problems people are reporting are due to the hardware, their part of the driver, or some third party's driver. Sure, they could say they only offer support for the official version or something, but then the lines still have to deal with people who don't have it but call anyway, lie and say they have it but don't, etc.
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
Which makes it easier to figure out: said trace of the driver's activity, or (hopefully) reasonably documented C code? Right.
As for the next point, about driver quality, you bring up an interesting point. But I would find it hard to believe if NVidia's software engineers are that much better than ATI's, unless there was a significant pay disparity. The only thing that I could think of is that perhaps NVidia just has *more* of them, so they are not as hurried and susceptable to the deadline syndrome. If this were the case, the engineers could still learn a few tricks.
Your point in the first paragraph is well taken. Second paragraph too, but I really don't think there'd be that much of a difference. ;-)
But:
You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started.
The nv driver is not the official release from NVidia. It's a part of XFree86 (and now X.org), and is available under the MIT license or whatever they call it.
The typical pejorative labeling of anyone who disagrees as 'socialist' or 'communist', by far the majority of the world incidentally, I can only hope is a sign of the end days of this world view.
I don't consider the above terms pejorative in the least. I'm a big government person. I'd like to see a universal healthcare plan. I'd like to see companies that abuse monopoly status drawn and quartered. (Or drawn and halved, or thirded, or whatever...) I think welfare, social security, etc. are very worthy causes.
But, I think that finding fault with trying to make your company do better, even at the expense of some universal progress, in the context of this discussion makes one's opinions so far away from unrestricted capitalism that it ceases to be able to be called capitalism at all.
I have no crystal ball, but I think IBM would have done quite a bit better than it has now. There would still have been competition, from Apple and other companies, but there wouldn't have been companies springing out of the woodwork trying to capitalize on the open XT standard. Other companies would have been forced to spend presumably a fairly substantial amount of R&D money before starting to actually produce a product.
I would have expected to see maybe one more company rise up with a personal computer, but that's still far less competition than the 20 zillion companies we have now. But it would still be enough to ensure that progress was made and prices weren't outrageous.
For instance, Apple is still doing quite well, even in the face of the said 20 zillion PC manufacturers and a near monopolistic OS company.
(I want to see the number of units shipped by IBM and Apple, but can't find numbers...)
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
I'll give you two more:
3) Hardware manufacturers want the hardware to be as much of a black box as possible. Handing out driver source, thus exposing the hardware interface and not just the driver interface, provides more intformation about the hardware, and would make it easier to guess how it works. [You touched on this in your last pgh.]
4) NVidia has, historically, had pretty good drivers. Other companies, *cough* ATI *cough*, have not such a good track record. Despite what are probably enormous differences in hardware, NVidia source could still probably give ATI useful information about how to improve their own drivers. I've seen posts here lamenting that if only ATI's drivers were better, the posters would have gotten a card from them. So NVidia would probably lose people here.
Where was the insentive without the clones?
Because there was also Apple. Also planned obselescence, etc.
Why do you think MS software sucks?
Interesting choice of company; it goes a fair distance to demonstrating my point. Would Windows be more secure today if competition had forced it to be throughout it's life? Sure. Would OSes be better in general? Almost certainly. Would MS have the market share it does today? No way.
Are you really implying the world and the state of computer technology would both be better had IBM retained monopoly control of hardware? I'll wager most historians of technology will disagree.
OTOH, I would argue that IBM would likely have a better market share and sell more products had they retained monopoly control.
IBM isn't concerned about the world and state of computer technology; IBM is concerned about $REVENUE - $COSTS.
Similarily, NVidia wants to make the most money it can, and it thinks closed source drivers will further that goal better than open source drivers. I agree with the grandparent that this is likely.
If you find fault with the above, I put to you that you are finding fault with the bedrock of capitalism. Which is, of course, fine, but you should consider voting for the communist or socialist parties come your next election.
Or go out and revise the nv drivers. Nothing (I would assume) prevents you from doing so. Nothing prevents you from getting a video card from another company. And by the same token, nothing should prevent NVidia from releasing closed-source drivers.
Besides, what would 99.9% of linux people do even if it was open source? Download source, not even look at it, type make install clean, and be done with it. (Or make setup or whatever the build sequence is; point being that most users wouldn't care.) And for the 0.1% of people who do mess with it, unless they discovered some great tweak that would provide a significant feature or speed advantage over the NVidia drivers, I'd just go with them, since I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.