Surely you must realise that any manufacturer who releases their video drivers as Open Source is enabling this kind of cheating to occur, and potentially many other kinds of cheating we haven't yet seen.
ASUS isn't open sourcing the drivers, but they are doing the next best thing - giving users the ability to control their hardware at a lower level than before. A consequence of this is the ability to cheat.
Would you all bash NVidia if, because they released the source to their GeForce drivers someone hacked the driver to enable transparent walls etc.?
So, do you want closed-source, proprietary drivers, or drivers that are free to be modified in any way shape or form, which may, as a consequence, enable cheating.?
Had a thought the other day - Why not get a cheap MP3 player that takes CF cards, and attach an IDE HDD to it instead.
Since CF cards look like ATA devices, there shouldn't be any major modifications necessary, should there?
Since there are CF-to-IDE converters why not the other way around?
ANyone got any clues?
Try the Video Toaster NT in your PC, then say the same thing.
Its not particularly fair comparing dedicated video hardware with a general purpose CPU.
If youre going to compare old hardware to new hardware, at least compare old apples with new apples.
That being said, the original Video Toaster is certainly a useful piece of equipment, which changed the world of broadcast video.
Newtek we salute you.
I took a part time job with a web design company, thinking that i'd just hang out, drink the coffee, keep the macs running and support the designers with a bit of javascript/CGI work.
It wasn't long before i was a critical part of every job they took on, database-driven websites were the order of the day and i was the only one there who could do that stuff.
So pretty soon they were asking me to work fulltime, and i said 'nah, i don't want to', and then i decided to leave because i was expected to put in too much time - i.e. they were yelling at me for not coming in 5 days a week when i was only hired (and paid) to work 3, and they got all pissed off about it.
So don't be surprised if 'half-time, half salary' actually ends up being 'full-time, half-salary', which is no fun at all.
Maybe it's just me, but i thought Nautilus was an extremely poor example of a desktop app.
It was slow on my P3-500/256MB of RAM, and excruciatingly slow on my Dual P-Pro 200/96MB RAM machine.
It was unusable as a web browser because it took so long a) to render the page and the b) to render the buttons which gave you the option to view the page in other browsers.
It took too long to bring up a folder listing, even in list view, and even with few files in the folder.
It makes a worse file manager than gmc - at least gmc seems fairly fast, and doesn't hog resource, nor go into 'D' uninterruptible sleep on the 2.4.3 kernel.
It was plain ugly - this 'the web browser is the OS' paradigm is wasteful of screen real-estate and looks stupid. the giant 'Eazel' throbber was unnecessary, and pointless.
Its root window integration is abysmally poor - shutting out all other apps which also use the root window.
It had yet another theme layer, meaning it can't use GTK, KDE or Mozilla themes, instead providing its own themes.
Font antialiasing was bad. Text was just blurry, not 'antialiased' - whatd they do, run a gaussian blur filter over each of the glyphs in the font?
Frankly, there was nothing good about Eazel accept the ability to thumbnail images, which isn't a capability i'd choose to label a 'revolution in desktop functionality'
Does it really surprise anyone that a company shipping a half-assed product like Nautilus goes straight down the drain? If i tried to sell a similar product for Windows or the MacOS, i doubt i'd make a dollar either.
Since practically all of the software they ship has been licensed to them under the GPL, LGPL, BSD or similar free licensing, they can't really help but support the GPL.
It's not like they write their own kernel, windowing system, office apps, development platform, GUI toolkit or.. well.. anything i'm aware of.
What software do Caldera produce?
Maybe the GPL-hardcore need a new un-american, anti-business, communist pinko wife-beating child-porno drug-dealing gun-toting high-school-shooting super-mega-GPL that includes the clause that it is a violation of the license to distribute this product with any other product that does not also conform to the GPL.
Theres nothing to stop you changing the way fonts are handled i.e. with a central server, but a reasonable default for a desktop workstation/small server should be adopted, i think.
Whether TrueType is 'better' than Type1 is not the central issue, as i see it.
I just want to see a simple default font handling system that gives good output on screen and print.
If i want to tweak my font handling to use Type1 fonts to give perfect printed output, then thats fine, but it is extremely painful to fire up some program like Konqueror and see absolutely hideous looking fonts.
Why do they look hideous? I don't know.. Mozilla's fonts look fine, all my other programs are OK.. Reading the X deuglification FAQ is no help, since it doesn't cover xfs-based setups etc. DrakFont (i use Mandrake) seems good, but its an application, not a standard.
Windows and MacOS make this stuff so simple, yet font handling in X seems incredibly involved and tricky.
Simple, reasonable defaults would be a big step for usability on the desktop.
Can i take my hard drive/computer/video camera back to the manufacturer and demand they refund my money or replace it with something that complies with US law?
Since they sold me a product that opens me to the possibility of a lawsuit, aren't they responsible for that?
This is like Ford selling me a car with an engine that didn't pass emissions laws in Califrnia or something.
Would there be a potential case for a class-action suit against manufacturers/importers of these products?
How about standardizing on TrueType fonts. Plain and simple.
some basic free TT fonts would have to be found for distribution with Linux systems, of course. it would be enough (for me) to ship with a Times clone, a Helvetica clone, a Courier clone and a symbol/icon font.
Support for Adobe Type1 scalable fonts should be optionally included, but most of the bitmap, BitStream and other crappy fonts just plain suck.
Theres no reason you couldn't also have support for these fonts, but a single font folder which doesn't require creating fonts.alias and fonts.dir files would be good.
Does anyone think Linux's font handling is in any way better than that of Windows or the Mac?
You can write something like this in javascript/DHTML, since you have access to the current selection, and can rewrite parts of the document on the fly.
NS 4.x wil never work this way, however. You can't modify anything in a rendered document except image sources in NS 4.x
There are, as far as i know, no free Java components to do this easily.
There may be commercial ones, and it probably wouldn't take much to write something simple yourself, but Java just sucks on most browsers other than IE (a sad state of affairs), and if youre going IE, then you might as well just use DHTML/Javascript.
You then get the benefit of being able to use Mozilla as well, if it ever attains 'good, fast browser' status, but you should be very careful to write your javascript with this in mind.
Netscape have given up on providing a decent browser, or even supporting their own browser with the DHTML content on their site, and the few people (i'm one of them) who use a Linux-only desktop probably prefer hacking HTML by hand anyway, so it most likely wouldn't surprise anyone if you went IE-only with this project.
If you want to be a game designer, go out and design a game. Nobody is stopping you.
If your question is 'How do i get paid to be a game designer?', then the answer to that is that you need to have designed games without being paid before you have a chance to get paid to do it.
You're not going to get hired to design a website that someone's business depends on without even knowing HTML.
The key is to be able to demonstrate and communicate your skill and talent to a potential employer.
There are millions of people in this world who can talk shit about designing games all day long, and only a tiny percentage on them that can actually deliver.
Most employers want people who fall into the second category.
I run LinuxPPC on an iMac at home, and while it has some way to go with regard to X-Windows performance, (The Rage Pro display drivers are dog-slow, even the allegedly 'accelerated' ones, causing excessive CPU-thrash when redrawing windows etc.) otherwise it runs really well.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a Mac running LinuxPPC as a server or for running apps remotely.
LinuxPPC does a great job supplying PPC-compiled packages, and while i have had issues with installing and upgrading systems, overall my impression is good.
Once display drivers are available that work as well as the drivers on my x86 machines, it will make a pretty sweet little desktop workstation too.
The people who create and maintain perl are smart enough to realise that no tool is universally useful.
Mixes of C and perl simply require the appropriate compiled.pm to be put in one of Perl's library folders. Just put the files in the right directories and run.
You can precompile a binary.pm for each of your platforms and distribute it if you like, or you can just not use the C modules. Of course, you pay a price in speed for using only perl, but you can't have it all.
If ease of distribution is paramount, write the parser in C, embed a perl interpreter in it and code the perl portion appropriately.
I doubt you'll ever be able to do this properly with an x86 machine.
Theres just no way that you fit all the consumer PCI cards you need to do this in a box and have it work properly under Linux (and theres no way in hell it will work properly under Windows).
Hardware conflicts, crappy drivers and OS issues will conspire to screw you up royally at every turn.
What would be necessary is a hulking great video card - possibly based on the NewTek Video Toaster NT, that integrated realtime multi-stream full duplex playback and recording of MPEG-2 and uncompressed (for subsequent software MPEG-4 compression for the DVD ripping) video. You get MPEG-1 hardware acceleration for free with this setup, so MP3 encoding/decoding would all be in hardware too.
A Tuner module would be easy enough to add, and could happily incorporate both FM and TV tuning - just route the output to one of the VT's ins.
Preferably everything would be synced with a global timer, and the OS used would feature minimal latency for these time-critical applications.
The UI for this system might not go out a VGA card at all, and could be sent out through the Toaster as a realtime video overlay.
If you opted for a the 'games module', you could get a GeForce card and use that, it's TV out routed to one of the Toaster's uncompressed inputs.
Ogg Vorbis? I want to be able to download my tracks to my portable player too, so unless space is at a premium, then MP3 is good enuff for me.
However, there would be the option to bypass the hardware compression and get the 'uncompressed' audio for software compression, so you could use OggVorbis, or even WMA if you wanted.
Combine this with a RAID array of 10000 RPM hard drives which come in a separate case for deployment in the closet, rather than next to the TV, and hook it up to the front-end unit with fibre channel.
Then you'd have convergence. I think I'd get a standard PAL/NTSC/SECAM version working before i attempted HDTV though.
No software/consumer-component solution will be up to handling the demands of doing this kind of stuff 24x7 without breaking.
We can't even write a decent, crash-free web browser in a reasonable amount of time, and a project like this is way more complex than that.
I'll check back in 5 years when the Sony PS3 and Apple iHub are getting on with the job of doing this type of stuff, making Apple and Sony rich beyond belief and everyone is still fighting over whether to base their 'Convergent Solution' around KDE or GNOME.
One of the things we want to do here where i work is to connect our network to multiple ISPs, so that if one of our ISPs goes down, our customers can still reach our servers.
It seems like there is just not much solid information out there about exactly how to configure such a setup. We have wireless links, ADSL, and a 10Mbps fibre-optic connection, each to a different ISP here, but actually using them in either a simultaneous or failover fashion seems difficult.
Presumably, this would require us to publish routes (BGP?) to our IP address-space to multiple ISPs, but obtaining our 'own' block of IP addresses, that we are truly responsible for - i.e. not allocated by some specific ISP seems horribly expensive, at least here in New Zealand.
Does anyone have any links to good documentation on setting up multipath routing - prefereably on a Linux/BSD-based router?
Sure i've tried WindowMaker, but it kind of sucks compared to GNOME/Sawfish.
I actually do use Windowmaker on my server, since i haven't bothered to install GNOME on it, and it is fast.
What is annoying are the little things, like not being able to resize windows by dragging out their corners - i.e you can only resize horizontally or vertically
No easy way to get a 'taskbar' - most of my apps appear as the default WM icon, which is extremely unhelpful I suppose i could go and assign a bitmap to each app, but i'd rather just have a taskbar, not some giant square brick with an unrecognisable glyph on it.
I do like the 'slide-up' menus, but you can't fix the menu in place, which makes it too easy to shift it around, and the 'sliding' behaviour seems erratic when run remotely, even with animations turned off.
There seems to be 2 icons produced for each app - whats up with that?
I used to use enlightenment (which was, arguably, the project that got linux noticed on the desktop) till i found sawfish, and now i wouldn't use anything else on my workstations.
I would like to see a hybrid between the GNUStep style of 'dock' and GNOME desktop functionality.. i.e. get rid of the 'panel' and replace it with a WindowMaker 'dock'.
Wmaker sliding, tearable menus are neat, and a great idea, but they need to be dockable, and you should be free to use a window manager that doesn't limit you like the WM default one does.
Thats just my 2c. I certainly agree that a full GNOME/KDE setup is pretty slow and bloated, and i'd like to see more of Window Makers good ideas adopted into a stripped-down GNOME subset for those of us who don't run linux on 1GHz monsters.
Maybe i just need to hack about with this stuff some more....
If you can't devote the 10 hours a day to make good progress on the project, then go pay M$ to do it for you. All that hardware is well supported under Windows, so whats the problem?
RedHat doesn't have any obligation to make *your* hardware work for you, the hardware manufacturer has that responsibility.
You don't think Minolta, 3dfx and whoever makes the Neo45 should be responsible for providing drivers for their products?
You either bought peripherals that were unsupported by your OS, or installed an OS that didn't support your peripherals.
Go whine at Minolta, 3dfx/NVidia and whoever makes the Neo45, not the Slashdotters, because it's your own stupidity and unrealistic expectations that got you into this mess.
Why is it that everyone these days is ranting about how XML will change the world, when SGML, despite being around for god-knows-how-long, has quietly done its job yet not attracted any of the hoopla it's XML cousin has, nor become some kind of Grand Unified File Format that the XML-advocates promise?
Without a set of standard schemas, XML will be just as difficult to index as free-form ASCII documents, since i might write:
15 My Street, My Town
while someone else might write
My Street
and someone else might write
15My Street
or any other variant, none of which are directly comparable with each other without some translation layer which is as much of a pain in the ass to write with the uber-ugly XSLT as it is with Perl.
I guess i just fail to see what XML gives you over
ASCII with regard to a 'standard' file format.
XML doesn't specify anything useful, as opposed to HTML which (mostly) specifies the meaning of it's tags.
i.e. When i save an HTML document with a tag, the meaning of the content within that tag can be inferred, based on the HTML 4.0 spec, to be the title of the document.
You can infer precisely nothing about the meaning of an XML document's tag.
Of course, XML has the ability to use *any* schema, from which the meaning of content can be inferred, but since the schemas follow no standard, youre back to square one.
This device is in the middle ground between the expensive, colour CE devices like the Casio-thing/IPAQ and the low-spec Palm.
The fact that it competes directly with the PalmPilot on price, and offers a much higher spec, along with a readily customisable, open source OS sells it for me.
Colour is a feature i just don't need in a PDA, and the ability to program this device with familiar tools makes it very attractive to me.
The company i work for currently does CE development, but the high price of these devices limit the number of cutomers we can get. i.e. they like the software, but balk at the price of the hardware to run it.
If our (NZ) dollar wasn't so far down the toilet i'd have bought one already.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you must realise that any manufacturer who releases their video drivers as Open Source is enabling this kind of cheating to occur, and potentially many other kinds of cheating we haven't yet seen. ASUS isn't open sourcing the drivers, but they are doing the next best thing - giving users the ability to control their hardware at a lower level than before. A consequence of this is the ability to cheat. Would you all bash NVidia if, because they released the source to their GeForce drivers someone hacked the driver to enable transparent walls etc.? So, do you want closed-source, proprietary drivers, or drivers that are free to be modified in any way shape or form, which may, as a consequence, enable cheating.?
Had a thought the other day - Why not get a cheap MP3 player that takes CF cards, and attach an IDE HDD to it instead. Since CF cards look like ATA devices, there shouldn't be any major modifications necessary, should there? Since there are CF-to-IDE converters why not the other way around? ANyone got any clues?
Try the Video Toaster NT in your PC, then say the same thing. Its not particularly fair comparing dedicated video hardware with a general purpose CPU. If youre going to compare old hardware to new hardware, at least compare old apples with new apples. That being said, the original Video Toaster is certainly a useful piece of equipment, which changed the world of broadcast video. Newtek we salute you.
It wasn't long before i was a critical part of every job they took on, database-driven websites were the order of the day and i was the only one there who could do that stuff.
So pretty soon they were asking me to work fulltime, and i said 'nah, i don't want to', and then i decided to leave because i was expected to put in too much time - i.e. they were yelling at me for not coming in 5 days a week when i was only hired (and paid) to work 3, and they got all pissed off about it.
So don't be surprised if 'half-time, half salary' actually ends up being 'full-time, half-salary', which is no fun at all.
Maybe it's just me, but i thought Nautilus was an extremely poor example of a desktop app. It was slow on my P3-500/256MB of RAM, and excruciatingly slow on my Dual P-Pro 200/96MB RAM machine. It was unusable as a web browser because it took so long a) to render the page and the b) to render the buttons which gave you the option to view the page in other browsers. It took too long to bring up a folder listing, even in list view, and even with few files in the folder. It makes a worse file manager than gmc - at least gmc seems fairly fast, and doesn't hog resource, nor go into 'D' uninterruptible sleep on the 2.4.3 kernel. It was plain ugly - this 'the web browser is the OS' paradigm is wasteful of screen real-estate and looks stupid. the giant 'Eazel' throbber was unnecessary, and pointless. Its root window integration is abysmally poor - shutting out all other apps which also use the root window. It had yet another theme layer, meaning it can't use GTK, KDE or Mozilla themes, instead providing its own themes. Font antialiasing was bad. Text was just blurry, not 'antialiased' - whatd they do, run a gaussian blur filter over each of the glyphs in the font? Frankly, there was nothing good about Eazel accept the ability to thumbnail images, which isn't a capability i'd choose to label a 'revolution in desktop functionality' Does it really surprise anyone that a company shipping a half-assed product like Nautilus goes straight down the drain? If i tried to sell a similar product for Windows or the MacOS, i doubt i'd make a dollar either.
Since practically all of the software they ship has been licensed to them under the GPL, LGPL, BSD or similar free licensing, they can't really help but support the GPL. It's not like they write their own kernel, windowing system, office apps, development platform, GUI toolkit or.. well.. anything i'm aware of. What software do Caldera produce? Maybe the GPL-hardcore need a new un-american, anti-business, communist pinko wife-beating child-porno drug-dealing gun-toting high-school-shooting super-mega-GPL that includes the clause that it is a violation of the license to distribute this product with any other product that does not also conform to the GPL.
Whether TrueType is 'better' than Type1 is not the central issue, as i see it.
I just want to see a simple default font handling system that gives good output on screen and print.
If i want to tweak my font handling to use Type1 fonts to give perfect printed output, then thats fine, but it is extremely painful to fire up some program like Konqueror and see absolutely hideous looking fonts.
Why do they look hideous? I don't know.. Mozilla's fonts look fine, all my other programs are OK.. Reading the X deuglification FAQ is no help, since it doesn't cover xfs-based setups etc. DrakFont (i use Mandrake) seems good, but its an application, not a standard.
Windows and MacOS make this stuff so simple, yet font handling in X seems incredibly involved and tricky.
Simple, reasonable defaults would be a big step for usability on the desktop.
Can i take my hard drive/computer/video camera back to the manufacturer and demand they refund my money or replace it with something that complies with US law? Since they sold me a product that opens me to the possibility of a lawsuit, aren't they responsible for that? This is like Ford selling me a car with an engine that didn't pass emissions laws in Califrnia or something. Would there be a potential case for a class-action suit against manufacturers/importers of these products?
How about standardizing on TrueType fonts. Plain and simple.
some basic free TT fonts would have to be found for distribution with Linux systems, of course. it would be enough (for me) to ship with a Times clone, a Helvetica clone, a Courier clone and a symbol/icon font.
Support for Adobe Type1 scalable fonts should be optionally included, but most of the bitmap, BitStream and other crappy fonts just plain suck.
Theres no reason you couldn't also have support for these fonts, but a single font folder which doesn't require creating fonts.alias and fonts.dir files would be good.
Does anyone think Linux's font handling is in any way better than that of Windows or the Mac?
You can write something like this in javascript/DHTML, since you have access to the current selection, and can rewrite parts of the document on the fly.
NS 4.x wil never work this way, however. You can't modify anything in a rendered document except image sources in NS 4.x
There are, as far as i know, no free Java components to do this easily.
There may be commercial ones, and it probably wouldn't take much to write something simple yourself, but Java just sucks on most browsers other than IE (a sad state of affairs), and if youre going IE, then you might as well just use DHTML/Javascript.
You then get the benefit of being able to use Mozilla as well, if it ever attains 'good, fast browser' status, but you should be very careful to write your javascript with this in mind.
Netscape have given up on providing a decent browser, or even supporting their own browser with the DHTML content on their site, and the few people (i'm one of them) who use a Linux-only desktop probably prefer hacking HTML by hand anyway, so it most likely wouldn't surprise anyone if you went IE-only with this project.
If you want to be a game designer, go out and design a game. Nobody is stopping you.
If your question is 'How do i get paid to be a game designer?', then the answer to that is that you need to have designed games without being paid before you have a chance to get paid to do it.
You're not going to get hired to design a website that someone's business depends on without even knowing HTML.
The key is to be able to demonstrate and communicate your skill and talent to a potential employer.
There are millions of people in this world who can talk shit about designing games all day long, and only a tiny percentage on them that can actually deliver.
Most employers want people who fall into the second category.
I run LinuxPPC on an iMac at home, and while it has some way to go with regard to X-Windows performance, (The Rage Pro display drivers are dog-slow, even the allegedly 'accelerated' ones, causing excessive CPU-thrash when redrawing windows etc.) otherwise it runs really well.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend a Mac running LinuxPPC as a server or for running apps remotely.
LinuxPPC does a great job supplying PPC-compiled packages, and while i have had issues with installing and upgrading systems, overall my impression is good.
Once display drivers are available that work as well as the drivers on my x86 machines, it will make a pretty sweet little desktop workstation too.
besides, you can probably hack a cellphone to be a passable FM synth.. and you wondered how they made that 'Dr. Who' soundtrack...
You too? Some bastard in my office has that 'Final Countdown' ringtone too...
Embarrassing? Nope.. C is used for speed.
.pm to be put in one of Perl's library folders. Just put the files in the right directories and run.
.pm for each of your platforms and distribute it if you like, or you can just not use the C modules. Of course, you pay a price in speed for using only perl, but you can't have it all.
The people who create and maintain perl are smart enough to realise that no tool is universally useful.
Mixes of C and perl simply require the appropriate compiled
You can precompile a binary
If ease of distribution is paramount, write the parser in C, embed a perl interpreter in it and code the perl portion appropriately.
I doubt you'll ever be able to do this properly with an x86 machine.
Theres just no way that you fit all the consumer PCI cards you need to do this in a box and have it work properly under Linux (and theres no way in hell it will work properly under Windows).
Hardware conflicts, crappy drivers and OS issues will conspire to screw you up royally at every turn.
What would be necessary is a hulking great video card - possibly based on the NewTek Video Toaster NT, that integrated realtime multi-stream full duplex playback and recording of MPEG-2 and uncompressed (for subsequent software MPEG-4 compression for the DVD ripping) video. You get MPEG-1 hardware acceleration for free with this setup, so MP3 encoding/decoding would all be in hardware too.
A Tuner module would be easy enough to add, and could happily incorporate both FM and TV tuning - just route the output to one of the VT's ins.
Preferably everything would be synced with a global timer, and the OS used would feature minimal latency for these time-critical applications.
The UI for this system might not go out a VGA card at all, and could be sent out through the Toaster as a realtime video overlay.
If you opted for a the 'games module', you could get a GeForce card and use that, it's TV out routed to one of the Toaster's uncompressed inputs.
Ogg Vorbis? I want to be able to download my tracks to my portable player too, so unless space is at a premium, then MP3 is good enuff for me.
However, there would be the option to bypass the hardware compression and get the 'uncompressed' audio for software compression, so you could use OggVorbis, or even WMA if you wanted.
Combine this with a RAID array of 10000 RPM hard drives which come in a separate case for deployment in the closet, rather than next to the TV, and hook it up to the front-end unit with fibre channel.
Then you'd have convergence. I think I'd get a standard PAL/NTSC/SECAM version working before i attempted HDTV though.
No software/consumer-component solution will be up to handling the demands of doing this kind of stuff 24x7 without breaking.
We can't even write a decent, crash-free web browser in a reasonable amount of time, and a project like this is way more complex than that.
I'll check back in 5 years when the Sony PS3 and Apple iHub are getting on with the job of doing this type of stuff, making Apple and Sony rich beyond belief and everyone is still fighting over whether to base their 'Convergent Solution' around KDE or GNOME.
One of the things we want to do here where i work is to connect our network to multiple ISPs, so that if one of our ISPs goes down, our customers can still reach our servers.
It seems like there is just not much solid information out there about exactly how to configure such a setup. We have wireless links, ADSL, and a 10Mbps fibre-optic connection, each to a different ISP here, but actually using them in either a simultaneous or failover fashion seems difficult.
Presumably, this would require us to publish routes (BGP?) to our IP address-space to multiple ISPs, but obtaining our 'own' block of IP addresses, that we are truly responsible for - i.e. not allocated by some specific ISP seems horribly expensive, at least here in New Zealand.
Does anyone have any links to good documentation on setting up multipath routing - prefereably on a Linux/BSD-based router?
kill two birds with one stone?
Sure i've tried WindowMaker, but it kind of sucks compared to GNOME/Sawfish.
I actually do use Windowmaker on my server, since i haven't bothered to install GNOME on it, and it is fast.
What is annoying are the little things, like not being able to resize windows by dragging out their corners - i.e you can only resize horizontally or vertically
No easy way to get a 'taskbar' - most of my apps appear as the default WM icon, which is extremely unhelpful I suppose i could go and assign a bitmap to each app, but i'd rather just have a taskbar, not some giant square brick with an unrecognisable glyph on it.
I do like the 'slide-up' menus, but you can't fix the menu in place, which makes it too easy to shift it around, and the 'sliding' behaviour seems erratic when run remotely, even with animations turned off.
There seems to be 2 icons produced for each app - whats up with that?
I used to use enlightenment (which was, arguably, the project that got linux noticed on the desktop) till i found sawfish, and now i wouldn't use anything else on my workstations.
I would like to see a hybrid between the GNUStep style of 'dock' and GNOME desktop functionality.. i.e. get rid of the 'panel' and replace it with a WindowMaker 'dock'.
Wmaker sliding, tearable menus are neat, and a great idea, but they need to be dockable, and you should be free to use a window manager that doesn't limit you like the WM default one does.
Thats just my 2c. I certainly agree that a full GNOME/KDE setup is pretty slow and bloated, and i'd like to see more of Window Makers good ideas adopted into a stripped-down GNOME subset for those of us who don't run linux on 1GHz monsters.
Maybe i just need to hack about with this stuff some more....
Stop talking and start coding.
If you can't devote the 10 hours a day to make good progress on the project, then go pay M$ to do it for you. All that hardware is well supported under Windows, so whats the problem?
RedHat doesn't have any obligation to make *your* hardware work for you, the hardware manufacturer has that responsibility.
You don't think Minolta, 3dfx and whoever makes the Neo45 should be responsible for providing drivers for their products?
You either bought peripherals that were unsupported by your OS, or installed an OS that didn't support your peripherals.
Go whine at Minolta, 3dfx/NVidia and whoever makes the Neo45, not the Slashdotters, because it's your own stupidity and unrealistic expectations that got you into this mess.
ah fuck the tags in my post got munged.
Why is it that everyone these days is ranting about how XML will change the world, when SGML, despite being around for god-knows-how-long, has quietly done its job yet not attracted any of the hoopla it's XML cousin has, nor become some kind of Grand Unified File Format that the XML-advocates promise?
Without a set of standard schemas, XML will be just as difficult to index as free-form ASCII documents, since i might write:
15 My Street, My Town
while someone else might write
My Street
and someone else might write
15My Street
or any other variant, none of which are directly comparable with each other without some translation layer which is as much of a pain in the ass to write with the uber-ugly XSLT as it is with Perl.
I guess i just fail to see what XML gives you over
ASCII with regard to a 'standard' file format.
XML doesn't specify anything useful, as opposed to HTML which (mostly) specifies the meaning of it's tags.
i.e. When i save an HTML document with a tag, the meaning of the content within that tag can be inferred, based on the HTML 4.0 spec, to be the title of the document.
You can infer precisely nothing about the meaning of an XML document's tag.
Of course, XML has the ability to use *any* schema, from which the meaning of content can be inferred, but since the schemas follow no standard, youre back to square one.
The 'American Balanced Purity' is some fat fuck stuffing a Big Mac in his greasy hole.
You obviously have zero knowledge of design, and you're also a fucking idiot.
another word: PowerBook.
This device is in the middle ground between the expensive, colour CE devices like the Casio-thing/IPAQ and the low-spec Palm.
The fact that it competes directly with the PalmPilot on price, and offers a much higher spec, along with a readily customisable, open source OS sells it for me.
Colour is a feature i just don't need in a PDA, and the ability to program this device with familiar tools makes it very attractive to me.
The company i work for currently does CE development, but the high price of these devices limit the number of cutomers we can get. i.e. they like the software, but balk at the price of the hardware to run it.
If our (NZ) dollar wasn't so far down the toilet i'd have bought one already.