I think though, that the unix vendors couldn't have done it - putting a multi-user OS on a PC (in those days) was a tremendous overhead. DOS was better as it was more suitable for the tasks you'd want the PC to do... and so, we end up with computing as it is today. I do think there was anything that could have been done without the benefit of hindsight.
I think we roughly agree on what happened: Microsoft and Apple were determined to put out affordable systems in the early 1980's no matter what, so they cut a lot of corners and put out two operating systems with absolutely awful architectures. And by the time hardware had become sufficiently powerful to run UNIX, it was already too late: businesses and home users were buying Microsoft and Apple products and developers were developing for them.
But that doesn't invalidate my assertion that Microsoft has held back the industry (Apple was too small to matter). Only a few years after the initial release of DOS, in the mid-to-late 1980's, 32bit UNIX-like systems were cost-effective for regular businesses. One can't expect Microsoft to commit corporate suicide at that point, but that doesn't absolve them from their responsibility either.
Also, there is nothing unique Microsoft contributed: the explosion in personal computing would have happened without Microsoft--some other company would have drive it. And it is hard to imagine that they could have done as poor a job as Microsoft did. In fact, even just in terms of timing, in the long run, it would have been good if personal computing had started a couple of years later.
Incidentally, we have been reliving this with Palm: Palm worked very hard to deliver an affordable handheld and get to market quickly, but the software architecture they had to build to do that was awful and we are still paying the price. Now they are shipping 200MHz RISC machines, but they are still running software that's barely better than DOS.
The big point to bear in mind there is *if*. They didn't, or they couldn't.
They did and they could, that is the point: Sun already delivered better hardware and software for a lower price than Wintel, and that was despite not having anywhere near the volume. So, your argument that it took Microsoft and Intel to drive down prices just doesn't hold.
how many years do we need to give them before they started to deliver?
They *did* deliver. As did numerous other companies (Apple, Amiga, Atari, Acorn, to name just a few). Furthermore, the market was there. But better marketing and sales by Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, and Intel meant that the developers and customers went to Wintel, even though they had the worst technology in the business.
The unix vendors have held back the industry, not MS.
Oh? How? By delivering superior technology at a lower cost?
The technology may be worse, but I don't see you using even a 5 year Sun workstation. why not if it is so much better?!?!
How do you know what I use? As a matter of fact, I'm not usually using either Windows or Intel, and when I do, it is certainly not by choice. And, in any case, just because Sun was highly competitive in the early 1990's doesn't mean they still are. I just gave them as a counterexample to the assertion that it took Microsoft and Intel to drive technology.
Frankly, technological excellence aside, if it wasn't for DOS and those IBM PCs that IBM didn't care about, we wouldn't be using these computers we sit at today
Yes, indeed. There is a good chance that without Microsoft or Intel, the computers we sit at today would have better processors, better programming environments, better usability, and better end-user software. Microsoft and Windows have held back the industry and technology by at least a decade.
the wintel alliance has brought us a revolution in computing power, that those 20 years of unix failed to deliver even slightly.
That is clearly completely false. Even without anywhere near the sales volume of Wintel machines, in the early 1990's, Sun was selling $2000 SPARC workstations, including high resolution monitors, without any Wintel components at all. That included a full 32bit operating system, a decent window system, and full networking. The only thing that was missing was desktop application software. Imagine how much more the non-Microsoft vendors would have been able to do if they could
have gotten their volumes up.
Microsoft clearly has their act together on the business side, but in terms of technology, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the technology industry.
Windows 9x is still DOS with a quick switch over to the graphical shell.
That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.
Neither DOS nor Windows 9x were ever "the right thing". We are talking mid-90's here. UNIX was more than 20 years old, people were using 3D user interfaces on SGIs, you could get Sun workstations for $2000, Smalltalk was nearly two decades old. You could even get better open source 16bit operating systems at the time.
Windows 9x was purely a way of squeezing lots of money out of a pathetic architecture that was obsolete before it even shipped.
Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.
I think calling Windows 95 "small" represents a seriously distorted world view. You could run UNIX and X11 in less memory and with less CPU power than Windows 95. Except relative to other Windows versions, Windows 95 was a dog, and a seriously ill one at that.
Alan Cox has said many times that he does not like ACPI, and has often explained why,
I don't "like" ACPI either, but the fact is that a lot of hardware ships with it, that it's documented, and that Intel has given out a reference implementation. As far as I'm concerned, one of the primary functions of an OS is to give me a reasonably nice interface to otherwise messy hardware. If the Linux kernel philosophy becomes that Linux only supports features and software that its developers "like", then Linux ceases to be a practical OS.
I would like, however, to see one day an x86 hardware/software combination which leads to a situation like with SGIs and Macs where pressing the power button gives you a graceful shutdown.
That is the one part of ACPI that actually works on Linux, even on 2.4.
Again, I'm not trying to put down Linux: I'm using it for pretty much everything I do. I'm just observing, as a user, I see the beginnings of a problem here: I think it's taking longer and longer for drivers and functionality to get integrated, and it's getting harder to configure and make the kernel. If that gets worse, it may eventually force me (and presumably others) to switch to a different kernel or kernel+hardware platform, which I would very much regret. And I don't even know what I could do to help fix the problem.
2.5 is the development tree, don't run it unless you plan on debugging something.
Maybe you haven't been using Linux that long, but that's not the way it used to be: development kernels used to be usable with much less hassle than the 2.5 series.
Anything that makes big changes or changes to other systems in 2.4 has a much lower chance of getting included because it has a higher chance of breaking something else.
Which brings us back to the original question: why does a pretty traditional operating system kernel like Linux have an architecture that, 10 years after its inception, still requires "big changes" all over the place for things like new devices, file systems, power management, etc.?
I'm not trying to put down Linux (many other systems have similar or worse problems), I'm just saying: I think there is a problem here.
There's a lot of encoding/decoding solutions for Linux, but their doesn't seem be be any filtering/video processing software for Linux. You know cleaning up video. Correcting defects, etc.
For interactive stuff, there is CinePaint (Film Gimp). For batch processing, cleanup, filtering, and other video manipulation, there is transcode. Is there any functionality you need that that doesn't cover?
Re:The problem of rewriting/forking XFree
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It enforces a certain kind of Look and Feel (granted, that's because there's only one "ToolKit").
No, it doesn't. In addition to Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa (as others have pointed out), there is Java, MFC-ports, "appliance" look (silvery apps), Qt, and wx, to name just a few.
[MacOS] can support way more features of modern graphics cards than X (OpenGL).
It would be trivial to write an X11 server that uses OpenGL for its back-end rendering. But there are good technical reasons not to at this point. And, in fact, Apple doesn't use OpenGL (or 3D hardware acceleration) for most of their back-end either.
[Fresco] Consistent look and feel,
Fresco can't enforce that either. You'll get the same mix of toolkits as on other desktops. It's just that the server will be burdened with a particular toolkit, whether I want to use it or not, and the non-preferred toolkits will run less efficiently on Fresco and it will be a lot of work to port them.
A much better architecture for achieving what Fresco is trying to achieve would be a framebuffer-based Java implementation, kind of the next generation of DisplayPostscript. But that kind of server-side intelligence has just generally turned out to be overkill in the past. X11 is a compromise, but apparently a very practical one.
And how is X11 not "configurable", "device independent", and "language transparent"? With XRENDER, X11 also supports resolution independent vector graphics.
I'm not even starting on things like the option to support new hardware like autostereoskopic displays and VR/AR devices in a way that's consistent for 2D and 3D applications. Just saw some of those displays at the CeBit... they will hit the shelves soon. How is X prepared for such hardware?
X11 has supported stereoscopic displays, virtual reality input gloves, and display hardware you probably haven't even thought of for more than a decade. If you manage to come up with something really new, it's easy to write an extension. A lot of the research on those devices was carried out there. And X11's architecture achieves precisely what you want to achieve: those new features can be dropped in easily and toolkits and applications don't have to go out of their way to support them in special ways.
What's wrong with [CORBA]? It gives network transparency and language transparency basically for free.
It's far from "free": for the generality it offers, you pay a heavy price in terms of complexity and overhead.
You as a user can influence the Look and Feel of a application in way more ways then in X today.
That claim doesn't make sense because X11 doesn't have a "look and feel" to influence. X11 is a network transparent graphics and windowing protocol. You can make any kinds of graphics appear with it on the screen. The look and feel is determined by the desktop environment and toolkit you run. It can be as consistent and rigid as you like (CDE+Motif apps), or as flexible and diverse as you like (a wild mix of applications).
Re:The problem of rewriting/forking XFree
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I do think we need something to replace X
What is "X" supposed to be? X11 or XFree86? What does "replacing X" have to do with forking XFree86?
I think we should look more at what Apple does then on what happens to be at hand right now.
And how is that better? Apple's system is still client/server, just like X11, it only replaces the X11 protocol with PDF, making it both slower and more resource hungry. OS X has server-side stored vector graphics, but it's not clear that that buys you much that really matters in practice, and, in any case, it would be easy to add to X11 if anybody really wanted it.
Please help us getting projects like Fresco,
And, again, what is supposed to be better about that? I can't frankly think of a protocol that would be worse for client/server communication in a window system than CORBA. And I certainly don't want a window system that forces a particular GUI paradigm on me. Not even Windows is as rigid and regimented as Fresco aspires to being.
The IEEE1394/SBP2 stuff in 2.4 (empirically) has problems talking to some drives that XP can talk to (and that I believe 2.5 can handle as well).
Should I be running 2.4-ac? Can I expect somewhat better support for things like ACPI without the incompatibilities with user-mode tools and compile problems of 2.5?
Get yourself a DV-Bridge like this one. It will convert your analog video into digital video just like from a camcorder. That's probably a much better solution than mucking around with PCI boards.
If you want control and easy scripting, get Linux and capture with something like "dvgrab" and compress it with "ffmpeg" or "transcode" (search on Google, they pop right up). You can view with "xine" or "mplayer", and there are a bunch of editing solutions for Linux as well (although probably not as good as the commercial stuff).
If you want a no-frills, no-thoughts solutions, just get a Mac and use iMovie. It lets you capture, do some edits, then compress and burn to disk. Very easy to use (but nowhere near as flexible as the Linux solution).
Again, there's nothing stopping anybody from releasing these drivers indipendantly of Linus' releases.
Sure there is: the hooks just aren't in the kernel. And that's the point: the kernel is not designed as a set of software components that people can assemble into a system, it's a monolithic piece of software that often needs to be patched in order to support some new piece of hardware or functionality.
And how many of them have ACPI or FireWire?
Most of the new ones have ACPI. In fact, my two year old desktop has ACPI. I suspect the majority of new laptops being shipped can't be suspended under Linux, even though the code has been donated by Intel a long time ago and works.
Linux is so much more stable than Windows because Linus is so picky and doesn't just cobble stuff into the kernel before it's ready.
This isn't about Windows vs. Linux. The Windows kernel seems to suffer from the same problem, although for Windows, they at least have figured out how to make third party drivers work a bit better. But just because everybody suffers doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.
Linus is doing a great job at what he is doing. But there is only so much any group of developers can do with a software system that is millions of lines of code and for which new components are often distributed as patches. We will have to move to a different architecture at some point; the only question is when and how.
the windowing standard is X11, not XFree86
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XFree86 is not the windowing standard for Linux and never has been; XFree86 is just one of many server implementations of the X11 protocol. People run Linux desktop software on non-XFree86 implementations all the time.
Presumably, after a fork, both XFree86 and Keith's X11 implementation will continue speaking the X11 protocol, and both will support common extensions. Keith may add more experimental extensions, but that shouldn't be a problem for anyone.
The Linux kernel is a good example of a piece of software which is ultimately controlled by Linus' inner circle, but which is really driven by the hundreds (thousands?) of other people who hack on it and release their own trees, etc.
But from the user's point of view, the problems are quite similar. For example, you still can't get a 2.4 Linux kernel with decent ACPI support, reasonably complete FireWire support, or lots of other features that have been out individually for months or years. And the 2.5 kernels do not even come close to compiling cleanly in most configurations (at least the half dozen I have tried).
Both the Linux kernel and XFree86 suffer from similar problems: they are very well-written and well-tuned C programs, but there is only so much magic even the best C wizard using the best tools can work on huge C source trees.
Sounds good to me. Either the two will co-exist, or the better project will win.
The message posted by "Moulinneuf" actually suggests to me that Keith probably is well-justified in doing this. It makes sense to kick people off an open source project if they don't contribute or do technically the wrong thing, but that's clearly not the case with Keith. OTOH, if a project member wants to test the waters for a fork privately, so what? Moulinneuf's message sounds like Keith was part of the secret service and spying for the enemy. Sounds like wounded pride and politics to me.
Another question one might want to ask, though, is whether it isn't worth starting an X11 server from scratch. X11 isn't as complicated as the XFree86 server makes it appear to be. And the priorities have shifted, too: stuff that used to be really important in X11 could perhaps now be shifted to simple generic implementations.
Let's first jail some politicians for several years that have violated campaign financing laws or misused political funds for political purposes. Yes, this includes politicians that only violate them on "technicalities" or can't fully account for where the money went. Why don't we start by auditing Carter himself?
In the grand scheme of things, cleaning out corrupt politicians is a whole lot more important than cracking down in file trading by people with no money. I'm sure jailing people like Carter for a few years would have a wonderfully deterrent effect on other politicians. What about it?
The new Dell laptops can do 1600x1200! what's the point of 1600x1200 on a 15 inch screen?
The point is that scalable fonts finally end up looking halfway decent. Displaying scalable fonts on a 75dpi or 100dpi screen, with hinting and everything else, is at best a mediocre compromise.
Isn't that a bit like saying. It isn't your car - the money used to buy it was given to you by your employer.
No, it isn't. My employer legally has no say in what I do with my car. But I very much have a say in the affairs of my government, through the democratic process, and it is the government that owns the hardware.
I rather like to idea of getting a bunch of people together - going round to military HQ and saying - "can we have our bomb back?"
You should, because that's what we can do every two years when we go to the polls.
Let's just hope that you actually will get together with other people and say "can we have our bomb back?". You might ask for it in the form of tax cuts, or better schools, or lots of other things.
The cost to our economy? The stock market and the oil prices have been waiting for the war to get over with (good or bad) in order to start recovering. Getting the war over will help the economy.
The markets aren't the economy. The labor and resources that go into building the stuff that's blown up in Iraq are labor and resources that aren't being used for creating new factories, consumer goods, spacecraft, research results, medical care, etc.
Even if the markets were as important as you think, the economy was down before Iraq even became an issue; Iraq was an issue that was added on top of that. If the markets "have been waiting", then Iraq was overall a big minus, delaying the recovery of the markets by many months.
We'll recite the usual toast, perhaps even clicking our heels together in the traditional manner:
Unless one is wearing ruby slippers, that is considered a rather menacing gesture by many, in particular when accompanied by unintelligible toasts and an extended arm (holding a glass softens the effect, I suppose).
Not for what we use it for. Linux is great for smaller servers and development, but we have machines with terabytes and terabytes of data running on super stable hardware that has features the Linux people are just talking about.
Your problem with Linux isn't really that Linux isn't up to the task, it's that you have designed your entire system around a very specific feature set. HP may port many of those features to Linux and then migrate you over, but that doesn't make those features intrinsically useful to anybody else. In fact, Linux, unfortunately, keeps accreting more and more useless crap ported to it for the benefit of people like you; IBM has done something similar for their customers.
Linux, as is, is used with "terabytes and terabytes of data" with no problems, as well as with compute clusters having hundreds of CPUs. Your applications can almost certainly be solved more efficiently and more cost-effectively on a Linux cluster today.
Apple makes really sexy designs: they make devices that are attractive, both physically and in software.
But don't confuse design with innovation. Apple's hardware is mostly put together from off-the-shelf components. Sure, they choose nice components, but so do high-end PC vendors. Their software technology is mostly NeXSTStep, which is itself a combination of a Objective-C, open source Mach, and Adobe's graphics engine, none of which were developed either at NeXT or at Apple.
Apple used to try to innovate: they had research groups in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, human-computer interaction, multimedia, 3D graphics, and hardware. But none of that exists anymore. It is a real shame. But Apple didn't have the money to support it, and whatever they did, Microsoft essentially just cloned, if not in quality, at least in appearance.
And this does raise the question: where is Apple going? I selling nicely designed high-end machines running a homegrown OS enough in the long run?
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I think we roughly agree on what happened: Microsoft and Apple were determined to put out affordable systems in the early 1980's no matter what, so they cut a lot of corners and put out two operating systems with absolutely awful architectures. And by the time hardware had become sufficiently powerful to run UNIX, it was already too late: businesses and home users were buying Microsoft and Apple products and developers were developing for them.
But that doesn't invalidate my assertion that Microsoft has held back the industry (Apple was too small to matter). Only a few years after the initial release of DOS, in the mid-to-late 1980's, 32bit UNIX-like systems were cost-effective for regular businesses. One can't expect Microsoft to commit corporate suicide at that point, but that doesn't absolve them from their responsibility either.
Also, there is nothing unique Microsoft contributed: the explosion in personal computing would have happened without Microsoft--some other company would have drive it. And it is hard to imagine that they could have done as poor a job as Microsoft did. In fact, even just in terms of timing, in the long run, it would have been good if personal computing had started a couple of years later.
Incidentally, we have been reliving this with Palm: Palm worked very hard to deliver an affordable handheld and get to market quickly, but the software architecture they had to build to do that was awful and we are still paying the price. Now they are shipping 200MHz RISC machines, but they are still running software that's barely better than DOS.
I think MobileWise has a better solution.
They did and they could, that is the point: Sun already delivered better hardware and software for a lower price than Wintel, and that was despite not having anywhere near the volume. So, your argument that it took Microsoft and Intel to drive down prices just doesn't hold.
how many years do we need to give them before they started to deliver?
They *did* deliver. As did numerous other companies (Apple, Amiga, Atari, Acorn, to name just a few). Furthermore, the market was there. But better marketing and sales by Microsoft, IBM, Compaq, and Intel meant that the developers and customers went to Wintel, even though they had the worst technology in the business.
The unix vendors have held back the industry, not MS.
Oh? How? By delivering superior technology at a lower cost?
The technology may be worse, but I don't see you using even a 5 year Sun workstation. why not if it is so much better?!?!
How do you know what I use? As a matter of fact, I'm not usually using either Windows or Intel, and when I do, it is certainly not by choice. And, in any case, just because Sun was highly competitive in the early 1990's doesn't mean they still are. I just gave them as a counterexample to the assertion that it took Microsoft and Intel to drive technology.
Yes, indeed. There is a good chance that without Microsoft or Intel, the computers we sit at today would have better processors, better programming environments, better usability, and better end-user software. Microsoft and Windows have held back the industry and technology by at least a decade.
the wintel alliance has brought us a revolution in computing power, that those 20 years of unix failed to deliver even slightly.
That is clearly completely false. Even without anywhere near the sales volume of Wintel machines, in the early 1990's, Sun was selling $2000 SPARC workstations, including high resolution monitors, without any Wintel components at all. That included a full 32bit operating system, a decent window system, and full networking. The only thing that was missing was desktop application software. Imagine how much more the non-Microsoft vendors would have been able to do if they could have gotten their volumes up.
Microsoft clearly has their act together on the business side, but in terms of technology, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the technology industry.
That's true, but for the time it was the right thing.
Neither DOS nor Windows 9x were ever "the right thing". We are talking mid-90's here. UNIX was more than 20 years old, people were using 3D user interfaces on SGIs, you could get Sun workstations for $2000, Smalltalk was nearly two decades old. You could even get better open source 16bit operating systems at the time.
Windows 9x was purely a way of squeezing lots of money out of a pathetic architecture that was obsolete before it even shipped.
Also, Win95 had lots of 16-bit code inherited from Win 3.1, and it thunked into that a lot. Again, this contributed to the small size.
I think calling Windows 95 "small" represents a seriously distorted world view. You could run UNIX and X11 in less memory and with less CPU power than Windows 95. Except relative to other Windows versions, Windows 95 was a dog, and a seriously ill one at that.
I don't "like" ACPI either, but the fact is that a lot of hardware ships with it, that it's documented, and that Intel has given out a reference implementation. As far as I'm concerned, one of the primary functions of an OS is to give me a reasonably nice interface to otherwise messy hardware. If the Linux kernel philosophy becomes that Linux only supports features and software that its developers "like", then Linux ceases to be a practical OS.
I would like, however, to see one day an x86 hardware/software combination which leads to a situation like with SGIs and Macs where pressing the power button gives you a graceful shutdown.
That is the one part of ACPI that actually works on Linux, even on 2.4.
Again, I'm not trying to put down Linux: I'm using it for pretty much everything I do. I'm just observing, as a user, I see the beginnings of a problem here: I think it's taking longer and longer for drivers and functionality to get integrated, and it's getting harder to configure and make the kernel. If that gets worse, it may eventually force me (and presumably others) to switch to a different kernel or kernel+hardware platform, which I would very much regret. And I don't even know what I could do to help fix the problem.
Maybe you haven't been using Linux that long, but that's not the way it used to be: development kernels used to be usable with much less hassle than the 2.5 series.
Anything that makes big changes or changes to other systems in 2.4 has a much lower chance of getting included because it has a higher chance of breaking something else.
Which brings us back to the original question: why does a pretty traditional operating system kernel like Linux have an architecture that, 10 years after its inception, still requires "big changes" all over the place for things like new devices, file systems, power management, etc.?
I'm not trying to put down Linux (many other systems have similar or worse problems), I'm just saying: I think there is a problem here.
For interactive stuff, there is CinePaint (Film Gimp). For batch processing, cleanup, filtering, and other video manipulation, there is transcode. Is there any functionality you need that that doesn't cover?
No, it doesn't. In addition to Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa (as others have pointed out), there is Java, MFC-ports, "appliance" look (silvery apps), Qt, and wx, to name just a few.
[MacOS] can support way more features of modern graphics cards than X (OpenGL).
It would be trivial to write an X11 server that uses OpenGL for its back-end rendering. But there are good technical reasons not to at this point. And, in fact, Apple doesn't use OpenGL (or 3D hardware acceleration) for most of their back-end either.
[Fresco] Consistent look and feel,
Fresco can't enforce that either. You'll get the same mix of toolkits as on other desktops. It's just that the server will be burdened with a particular toolkit, whether I want to use it or not, and the non-preferred toolkits will run less efficiently on Fresco and it will be a lot of work to port them.
A much better architecture for achieving what Fresco is trying to achieve would be a framebuffer-based Java implementation, kind of the next generation of DisplayPostscript. But that kind of server-side intelligence has just generally turned out to be overkill in the past. X11 is a compromise, but apparently a very practical one.
configurable, vector based, device independent, langauge transparent, ...
And how is X11 not "configurable", "device independent", and "language transparent"? With XRENDER, X11 also supports resolution independent vector graphics.
I'm not even starting on things like the option to support new hardware like autostereoskopic displays and VR/AR devices in a way that's consistent for 2D and 3D applications. Just saw some of those displays at the CeBit... they will hit the shelves soon. How is X prepared for such hardware?
X11 has supported stereoscopic displays, virtual reality input gloves, and display hardware you probably haven't even thought of for more than a decade. If you manage to come up with something really new, it's easy to write an extension. A lot of the research on those devices was carried out there. And X11's architecture achieves precisely what you want to achieve: those new features can be dropped in easily and toolkits and applications don't have to go out of their way to support them in special ways.
What's wrong with [CORBA]? It gives network transparency and language transparency basically for free.
It's far from "free": for the generality it offers, you pay a heavy price in terms of complexity and overhead.
You as a user can influence the Look and Feel of a application in way more ways then in X today.
That claim doesn't make sense because X11 doesn't have a "look and feel" to influence. X11 is a network transparent graphics and windowing protocol. You can make any kinds of graphics appear with it on the screen. The look and feel is determined by the desktop environment and toolkit you run. It can be as consistent and rigid as you like (CDE+Motif apps), or as flexible and diverse as you like (a wild mix of applications).
What is "X" supposed to be? X11 or XFree86? What does "replacing X" have to do with forking XFree86?
I think we should look more at what Apple does then on what happens to be at hand right now.
And how is that better? Apple's system is still client/server, just like X11, it only replaces the X11 protocol with PDF, making it both slower and more resource hungry. OS X has server-side stored vector graphics, but it's not clear that that buys you much that really matters in practice, and, in any case, it would be easy to add to X11 if anybody really wanted it.
Please help us getting projects like Fresco,
And, again, what is supposed to be better about that? I can't frankly think of a protocol that would be worse for client/server communication in a window system than CORBA. And I certainly don't want a window system that forces a particular GUI paradigm on me. Not even Windows is as rigid and regimented as Fresco aspires to being.
Should I be running 2.4-ac? Can I expect somewhat better support for things like ACPI without the incompatibilities with user-mode tools and compile problems of 2.5?
Note that there are other manufacturers of analog-to-DV converters, so you can pick a different one if you don't like the Dazzle.
If you want control and easy scripting, get Linux and capture with something like "dvgrab" and compress it with "ffmpeg" or "transcode" (search on Google, they pop right up). You can view with "xine" or "mplayer", and there are a bunch of editing solutions for Linux as well (although probably not as good as the commercial stuff).
If you want a no-frills, no-thoughts solutions, just get a Mac and use iMovie. It lets you capture, do some edits, then compress and burn to disk. Very easy to use (but nowhere near as flexible as the Linux solution).
Sure there is: the hooks just aren't in the kernel. And that's the point: the kernel is not designed as a set of software components that people can assemble into a system, it's a monolithic piece of software that often needs to be patched in order to support some new piece of hardware or functionality.
And how many of them have ACPI or FireWire?
Most of the new ones have ACPI. In fact, my two year old desktop has ACPI. I suspect the majority of new laptops being shipped can't be suspended under Linux, even though the code has been donated by Intel a long time ago and works.
Linux is so much more stable than Windows because Linus is so picky and doesn't just cobble stuff into the kernel before it's ready.
This isn't about Windows vs. Linux. The Windows kernel seems to suffer from the same problem, although for Windows, they at least have figured out how to make third party drivers work a bit better. But just because everybody suffers doesn't mean that there isn't a problem.
Linus is doing a great job at what he is doing. But there is only so much any group of developers can do with a software system that is millions of lines of code and for which new components are often distributed as patches. We will have to move to a different architecture at some point; the only question is when and how.
Presumably, after a fork, both XFree86 and Keith's X11 implementation will continue speaking the X11 protocol, and both will support common extensions. Keith may add more experimental extensions, but that shouldn't be a problem for anyone.
But from the user's point of view, the problems are quite similar. For example, you still can't get a 2.4 Linux kernel with decent ACPI support, reasonably complete FireWire support, or lots of other features that have been out individually for months or years. And the 2.5 kernels do not even come close to compiling cleanly in most configurations (at least the half dozen I have tried).
Both the Linux kernel and XFree86 suffer from similar problems: they are very well-written and well-tuned C programs, but there is only so much magic even the best C wizard using the best tools can work on huge C source trees.
The message posted by "Moulinneuf" actually suggests to me that Keith probably is well-justified in doing this. It makes sense to kick people off an open source project if they don't contribute or do technically the wrong thing, but that's clearly not the case with Keith. OTOH, if a project member wants to test the waters for a fork privately, so what? Moulinneuf's message sounds like Keith was part of the secret service and spying for the enemy. Sounds like wounded pride and politics to me.
Another question one might want to ask, though, is whether it isn't worth starting an X11 server from scratch. X11 isn't as complicated as the XFree86 server makes it appear to be. And the priorities have shifted, too: stuff that used to be really important in X11 could perhaps now be shifted to simple generic implementations.
In the grand scheme of things, cleaning out corrupt politicians is a whole lot more important than cracking down in file trading by people with no money. I'm sure jailing people like Carter for a few years would have a wonderfully deterrent effect on other politicians. What about it?
The point is that scalable fonts finally end up looking halfway decent. Displaying scalable fonts on a 75dpi or 100dpi screen, with hinting and everything else, is at best a mediocre compromise.
No, it isn't. My employer legally has no say in what I do with my car. But I very much have a say in the affairs of my government, through the democratic process, and it is the government that owns the hardware.
I rather like to idea of getting a bunch of people together - going round to military HQ and saying - "can we have our bomb back?"
You should, because that's what we can do every two years when we go to the polls.
Let's just hope that you actually will get together with other people and say "can we have our bomb back?". You might ask for it in the form of tax cuts, or better schools, or lots of other things.
The markets aren't the economy. The labor and resources that go into building the stuff that's blown up in Iraq are labor and resources that aren't being used for creating new factories, consumer goods, spacecraft, research results, medical care, etc.
Even if the markets were as important as you think, the economy was down before Iraq even became an issue; Iraq was an issue that was added on top of that. If the markets "have been waiting", then Iraq was overall a big minus, delaying the recovery of the markets by many months.
Unless one is wearing ruby slippers, that is considered a rather menacing gesture by many, in particular when accompanied by unintelligible toasts and an extended arm (holding a glass softens the effect, I suppose).
Your problem with Linux isn't really that Linux isn't up to the task, it's that you have designed your entire system around a very specific feature set. HP may port many of those features to Linux and then migrate you over, but that doesn't make those features intrinsically useful to anybody else. In fact, Linux, unfortunately, keeps accreting more and more useless crap ported to it for the benefit of people like you; IBM has done something similar for their customers.
Linux, as is, is used with "terabytes and terabytes of data" with no problems, as well as with compute clusters having hundreds of CPUs. Your applications can almost certainly be solved more efficiently and more cost-effectively on a Linux cluster today.
Sure, we had the Spiro Agnu watch, but I wasn't aware that that had actually resulted in a redefinition of "counterclockwise".
But don't confuse design with innovation. Apple's hardware is mostly put together from off-the-shelf components. Sure, they choose nice components, but so do high-end PC vendors. Their software technology is mostly NeXSTStep, which is itself a combination of a Objective-C, open source Mach, and Adobe's graphics engine, none of which were developed either at NeXT or at Apple.
Apple used to try to innovate: they had research groups in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, human-computer interaction, multimedia, 3D graphics, and hardware. But none of that exists anymore. It is a real shame. But Apple didn't have the money to support it, and whatever they did, Microsoft essentially just cloned, if not in quality, at least in appearance.
And this does raise the question: where is Apple going? I selling nicely designed high-end machines running a homegrown OS enough in the long run?