This is what bothers me most about the ToS.. I think its difficult to define a 'single PC' at all any more.
I run 5 machines at home, all of which are used, by me, to do various things. This situation arose simply because i haven't thrown any computers away since i started buying them a few years ago.
Now, i consider all these machines to be my 'personal computer' - I'll usually have an X desktop on my LinuxPPC iMac running X apps and terminals off 2 of the others, some 3D game or a DVD movie playing off the drive in another of the boxes and a 3D animation project i'm working on running on another of the CPU/monitor combos.
I have X terminals and MIDI synths hooked up to the same pool of computing resources too.
All these machines are composed of a variety of networks, including serial lines, IDE interfaces, SCSI interfaces, ethernet, PCI busses, MIDI interfaces, analog audio lines and digital audio connections too. There are CPUs on my ehternet card - surely its a breach to attach anything else to that card over a PCI bus, if you follow the terms of this agreement.
Sure, you could say 'but an ethernet card isn't a personal computer', but how do you come to this conclusion - surely it is possible to use the logic on an ethernet card to do useful computation?
The telco has no right to tell me how to organise my computing resources into a functional machine, and the idea that my 'Personal Computer' is a discrete component is ridiculous.
I can understand a condition like 'you may not resell this service', but i reject the notion that a 'Personal Computer' can be categorized as a single Macintosh or x86 machine, since that is apparently what these (and every other cable provider with a similar service agreement) people are claiming.
I'd really like to see it stand up in court - especially when every major computing institution is quite happy to define a cluster or massively parallel multi-CPU machine as a 'single computer'
You state that they *ask* you to do this. That doesn't mean you have to, and the i seriously doubt the consequences of 'lying' in this matter could be any worse than the consequences of telling the truth.
In this day and age, people, companies and especially corporations will screw you over for a dollar any way they can, as long as it appears legal - or if the risk of your winning any lawsuit against them is either a remote or manageable risk.
Tell them you're not willing to hand over IP rights to your existing inventions without a separate licensing agreement, and if they refuse, then theres plenty of other jobs out there.
Ask them to list their inventions, and insist that if you do any work on them in your own time, you gain rights to them.
5 seconds to open a a window with only one hundred items???
Thats terrible performance.. I would expect, on a P2-class machine, to be able to open a window with a hundred items near-instantaneously.
How long does it really take to do a 'ls -l', parse the result, determine which icon to display for each file, do a visibility check to see which icons need to be shown, render the visible icons/text with antialiasing and bitblt the result into a buffer?
Consider a game like Quake 3 - Q3 needs to do a similar operation - determine where you are in a large indexed structure, manage caching and loading texture images - analogous to icon images, perform visibility detection - i.e. mark what you can't see in your window so time isn't wasted displaying it, render the resulting image using various compositing aids - texture interpolation, perpective correction etc. and bitblt the result to a framebuffer.
Except Q3 can do this at least 30 times a second, and can go much, much faster than that with better hardware.
Of course Q3 uses accelerated graphics, but if software-rendered Quake 2 had a framerate of.2 fps on a Cele-466, i doubt they would have sold many copies.
The number of instructions per second a C-466 can perform is astounding, how do they manage to misuse so many of them?
>Yeah, I'm going to spend 50% more on a laptop b/c it looks cool and runs a POS non-multithreaded OS? Sure..
Uh, how is LinuxPPC a POS non-multithreading OS?
>I bet it really screams at Q3 and compiling the kernel. I hope you still like your 350Mhz imac in 2 years, when everyone else has 2Ghz machines. At least you can say it looks cool!
Performance is good compared to x86 machines of equivalent spec - outfit a P2-450 with a crappy Rage Pro or whatever the rev. B iMacs have and watch it crawl with Q3.
I don't dispute the fact that your 1GHz machine is fast, sorry to make you feel like less of a man.
I just think your notion that dropping support for every platform except x86 because its the cheapest is laughable, stupid and obviously the wrong thing to do.
Maybe its a limitation of the extremely pipelined graphics architecture prevalent today, but why not use some kind of thresholding algorithm to determine when a pixel needs to be antialiased?
i.e. for each scan line, check the (color or z)value of the current pixel, and only perform the antialiasing step if the difference between them exceeds some value.
As i understand it, FSAA actually antialiases every single pixel.. Surely this is incredibly inefficient, since antialiasing the already bilinearly-interpolated texture of the interior of a polygon is somewhat pointless.
If this approach is unwieldy, i'd be interested to know why.
You think it's cheaper to throw it away and go out and buy a new 1GHz Athlon than to run LinuxPPC on your existing machine??
Try getting a laptop that looks anywhere near as cool at a Titanium Powerbook G4 from any x86 vendor.
'Oh forget it, those guys don't need another OS. If you buy a Mac, you don't deserve Linux. Linux should only be available for x86 because its the cheapest' - is that your line of reasoning?
Should we just deep-six the Alpha, PPC, MIPS, SHx, 68k ports of Linux because Athlons are cheap right now.
You better tell the NetBSD guys they've been wasting their time, and how bout you email the CEO of Lineo and all the other embedded Linux developers and break the news to them.
And while you're at it, why don't you have Linus ditch support for Intel chips. Athlons are, after all, cheaper.
My 350 MHz iMac makes a great Linux workstation. It doesn't take up too much room on my desk, is easily transportable - without making two trips (one for sys unit etc, one for monitor) every time i want to move it somewhere, and it runs extremely snappily.
I have been very happy with it, and you sir, are a f*cking idiot.
3D programs take many different approaches to representing objects and their interactions, from simple polygonal meshes to surfaces defined in terms of spline patches to volumetric representations to parametrically defined solids, to implicit surfaces (Meta-Blobs), with a plethora of texturing, partitioning and animation systems. You'd also have to include any physical and dynamical parameters - weight, mass etc. since this is very important in Engineering/FEA fields
X3D, VRML, DXF, IGES, OBJ, 3DS, OpenNURBs etc. only deal with a certain subset of these representations and you'd have a huge job to come up with a file format that could efficiently represent all of them.
The only way you could really do this would be to define a standard API for access to all this information, and let vendors simply implement the parts that their apps need.. i.e. we don't need a standard 'file format', we need a standard 3D codec system.
Just like any program n Windows can manipulate DivX or MPEG video on Windows without implementing it's own DivX loader/saver, as long as the necessary codec is available.
Still, 3D is changing fast, and the breadth of the field makes creating any kind of 'standard' very difficult.
I am a 'child of the internet' when it comes to programming - i.e everything i know about computers and programming i either learnt from the net, or from books I bought because i wanted to expand the knowldege i gained from the net.
If i had gone to university, maybe i would have been exposed to Motif, but since its a Windows world out there for most of the youth today, theyre going to look for something more immediately similar to the Win32 API.
When i look around the net for information, there just isn't anything obviously useful for Motif - You can get so much more done, so much faster, if you use the amazing open-source technologies like GTK+, GNOME, Qt, SDL etc.
Since Motif has been opened, we might see more, but from my point of view, Motif is a dead horse (an ugly dead horse at that), which i simply see no need to bother with. If you have a huge, existing application that uses Motif, then you probably want to persist with it, but if youre starting fresh, why would you use Motif?
The question really should be 'What does OpenMotif bring to the table for the open source developer compared to the existing standards like GTK+ and Qt?'
IGES is most certainly not the most common 3D standard, since most 3D tools don't even try to deal with parametrix 3D solids.In fact, only 3D solid-modelling packages do that, and this approach is almost never used in games, film, fx (all of which primarily use tesellated freeform surfaces like polygons, splines and subdivision surfaces), scientific visualisation (voxels and vector fields) or anywhere except the CAD industry.
Can you use IGES to import/export NURBs, subdivision surfaces, 3,4 and 5 point spline-patches, arbitary polygons, voxels, CSG trees, parametric solids, implicit surfaces, UV coordinates, shader parameters, animation paths, weight maps, texture maps etc. etc. etc.?
If not, then its no more a 'standard 3D format' than anything else available. There is currently no 'standard' because supporting every approach to the representation of 3D would be a nightmare, to say the least.
DXF is a simple format that facilitates the transfer of tesselated 3D surfaces and lines. No more, no less. It can certainly represent 3D geometry, and can be used, just as IGES can, to represent 2D geometry.
What in god's name is a quadratic texture??? I can imagine 2D or 3D procedural textures defined in terms of quadratic equations, but i somehow doubt this is what michael is on about.
He's probably talking about these cards having hardware support for quadric surfaces.. but since its been fairly-much decided that its generally faster to decompose these kinds of surfaces to triangular meshes for rendering,especially in pipelined graphics architectures such as OpenGL, features like this don't get used much.
Raytracers like POV-Ray and others evaluate quadrics and other classes of curved surfaces on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and other renderers subdivide them down to sub-pixel sized triangles for rendering. However, this approach is seldom suitable for realtime application.
Most likely, this 'quadratic texture support' is just hardware implementation of OpenGL evaluator functions which simply assist in the decomposition of quadric surfaces to a triangle meshes.
Surely all those billions the american taxpayers have been funnelling into the NSA's black budget have resulted in a system that is less that totally useless against terrorists using freely available tools..
Surely the gigantic investment made in the ability to listen in on most of the radio transmissions made around the world is going to prevent the US ever being 'taken by surprise' again.
Doesn't everyone know that underneath the pentagon there is a giant underground lake of liquid nitrogen in which 12 billion tons of supercomputing nodes are submerged, just waiting to crack Osama Bin Laden's encrypted messages??
I mean come on, the US have much more to fear from their own angry citizens (who have exactly the same tools and far better equipment at their disposal) than some guys in the Middle East who really just want to be left alone to fight their own battles without the intervention of some 'global policeman' whose only real interest is in ensuring a constant supply of oil and getting rid of that pesky radioactive waste by firing thousands of tons of it all over the battlegrounds.
Its like the US government is making out that encryption hasn't been used routinely at all levels of political structure for thousands of years, that is somehow a new 'weapon of terrorism' that must be combatted at all costs.
Do they really assume that everyone is as dumb as George Bush looks?
My cheap-ass BT848 card has worked since the heady days of the 2.0 kernel, and never given any trouble. Its supported under 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.
Mostly i use mine for capturing frames for claymation from various video cameras. XawTV provides realtime preview and image capture, and i use a couple of little shell scripts and command line tools to turn a folder full of individual frames into an MPG or AVI file.
I also use XawTV to watch TV both on the root window and in smaller mini-windows.
Only mono audio, but you can use an external tuner - i.e. VCR and just use the capture card as a composite/SVideo input.
Be sure you have a main video card that supports external overlay (most modern PCI/AGP cards do, though there are some that are a pain in the ass)
The BT8x8 cards are not particularly suited to capturing video of any length, since they have no hardware compression, and reliable realtime software MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MJPEG compression is not viable, AFAIK under Linux (Maybe the Alpha's vector processor would make this possible?)
If youre looking for a card to capture video, look for something a little more pwerful with an onboard hardware compresion engine.
I also have an Iomega Buz which is now supported under Linux - this will MJPEG compress your video in realtime, enabling you to capture full-frame, 25/30fps PAL/NTSC video at a rate of around 3-5MB/second. The Miro DC10+ is also supported i believe, and there are other cards which are supported by the manufacturers - Someone help me out here.
Uncompressed capture will most likely use at least twice this much space, if your drives can handle that kind of sustained rate.
Re:Just tried to swap the ram and cpu in my nt box
on
Linux Is Going Down
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· Score: 2
Uhh, the point of enterprise-class hot-swappable storage and other componentry is that you *can* do just that with total confidence.
Can you really see a reason why computers can't have their parts swapped out on the fly, or is it a Pavlovian thing, caused by years of psychological abuse at the hands of Microsft and Intel?
obviously thats insanely inefficient and simplified, and probably just plain wrong from a systems engineering viewpoint, but if your hardware takes care of these kind of checks, you can just pull out bits, plug new ones in and the computer keeps running.
The x86 PC isn't actually the culmination of 50 years or so of continuous research into the production of robust, reliable and fast digital computers, and you certainly shouldn't assume that everyone engineers their computers so they need a reboot even to change their IP address.
I heard a while ago that one of the things Transmeta was actively pursuing was PowerPC emulation.
AMD's volume profits could comfortably absorb the cost of selling the chips at prices competitive with Motorola immediately, and even with the lower-than-average performance of the Transmeta chip, a 1.5-2GHz Code-Morphing Athlon would likely whup any Moto. G3/G4 in non-Altivec benchmarks.
If I were looking for the fastest way to support MacOS 9 (will be important for at least the next year) and MacOS X on the x86 platform, then something pretty similar to a Duron with a Transmeta PPC-emulation layer might just be the way.
Apple have proved they have the marketing department and design group from hell, and an OS (Mac OS X) that needs to pick up serious attention outside the existing Mac market to bring Apple profits up. That means selling lots of machines into the hands of people who have never before owned a Mac.
Not easy when your fastest model runs at 700MHz and costs US$5000 without a monitor.
I don't think i can buy an AMD or Intel chip less than 600MHz at the moment, and Motorola are not going to be able to double their clockspeed this year.
Apples biggest problem currently is MHz... even though it might only perform like a PPC of half the clockspeed, it would be good for Apple to be able to advertise '1.5 GHz Macs'.
Apple could continue to offer Altivec models to the scientific, creative and education industries
while targeting the G3-alike AMD chip at corporate/home users.
It might not encode MPEG-2 in realtime in software, but it'll run MS-Office like a raped ape.
And, sadly, thats all the computer buying public seem to give a shit about these days.
It also takes a whole lot less memory and time to parse than the DOM approach.
We process XML files that can be up to 10MB in size, and DOM parsing these files brings my 500MHz P3 to its knees (yes i have increased the JVM heap size)
Parsing with SAX, however, has proved simple, clean and easy with no performance problems at all.
If youre definitely wanting to use the DOM, try NanoXML.. its much smaller that Xerces and the like, and is perfect for parsing config files etc., as will as being small enough (6KB or so) for client-side and embedded use.
However, for an all-round, no compromise XML parsing solution, then Xerces is pretty good.
How is this concept new or interesting in any way?
Why not just go out and buy a big f*ck-off UNIX machine and run apps remotely over X?
Run Java apps remotely over X if you need a well designed OO authoring environment and GUI, and run JSP/Servlets or applets if you need web deployment. There are a plethora of other options, from elegant Python to the heavily bracketed LISP and most all of them cost you nothing, are proven and tested from years of abuse and most of them have been integrating XML since the day it was suggested by the W3C.
And you can do it today, not at some unspecified time in the future, after applying 6 service packs, paying for n client licenses and being told to pay for an upgrade to the next version to really see it work properly.
All the stuff that.Net offers is here, and has been for years. Like we don't have enough middleware?
The addition of XML-wrapped messages in proprietary binary format is going to revolutionize the industry??
I just don't get what problem they are trying to solve, unless it's 'What should we do to delay Microsoft from getting destroyed by Linux/BSD, Apache and Java in the server room?'.
I mean, you only have to look at the NetCraft server uptime statistics to see how well Win32 stacks up against the rest.
They must be smokin some pretty good crack up in Redmond
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This is what bothers me most about the ToS.. I think its difficult to define a 'single PC' at all any more.
I run 5 machines at home, all of which are used, by me, to do various things. This situation arose simply because i haven't thrown any computers away since i started buying them a few years ago.
Now, i consider all these machines to be my 'personal computer' - I'll usually have an X desktop on my LinuxPPC iMac running X apps and terminals off 2 of the others, some 3D game or a DVD movie playing off the drive in another of the boxes and a 3D animation project i'm working on running on another of the CPU/monitor combos.
I have X terminals and MIDI synths hooked up to the same pool of computing resources too.
All these machines are composed of a variety of networks, including serial lines, IDE interfaces, SCSI interfaces, ethernet, PCI busses, MIDI interfaces, analog audio lines and digital audio connections too. There are CPUs on my ehternet card - surely its a breach to attach anything else to that card over a PCI bus, if you follow the terms of this agreement.
Sure, you could say 'but an ethernet card isn't a personal computer', but how do you come to this conclusion - surely it is possible to use the logic on an ethernet card to do useful computation?
The telco has no right to tell me how to organise my computing resources into a functional machine, and the idea that my 'Personal Computer' is a discrete component is ridiculous.
I can understand a condition like 'you may not resell this service', but i reject the notion that a 'Personal Computer' can be categorized as a single Macintosh or x86 machine, since that is apparently what these (and every other cable provider with a similar service agreement) people are claiming.
I'd really like to see it stand up in court - especially when every major computing institution is quite happy to define a cluster or massively parallel multi-CPU machine as a 'single computer'
Steve is going to FREAK!
:)
We're ugly-ing up his perty desktop with dirty old X apps
I can't wait to see if MacOS X will run reasonably fast on my LinuxPPC-running iMac.
You state that they *ask* you to do this. That doesn't mean you have to, and the i seriously doubt the consequences of 'lying' in this matter could be any worse than the consequences of telling the truth.
In this day and age, people, companies and especially corporations will screw you over for a dollar any way they can, as long as it appears legal - or if the risk of your winning any lawsuit against them is either a remote or manageable risk.
Tell them you're not willing to hand over IP rights to your existing inventions without a separate licensing agreement, and if they refuse, then theres plenty of other jobs out there.
Ask them to list their inventions, and insist that if you do any work on them in your own time, you gain rights to them.
See how they like those apples.
If human beings have 'rights' then surely we are all to be incarcerated for the murder of countless billions of animals.
The cat only kills to keep itself alive.
We kill because we're so bored with our shitty lives we can't think of anything better to do.
5 seconds to open a a window with only one hundred items???
.2 fps on a Cele-466, i doubt they would have sold many copies.
Thats terrible performance.. I would expect, on a P2-class machine, to be able to open a window with a hundred items near-instantaneously.
How long does it really take to do a 'ls -l', parse the result, determine which icon to display for each file, do a visibility check to see which icons need to be shown, render the visible icons/text with antialiasing and bitblt the result into a buffer?
Consider a game like Quake 3 - Q3 needs to do a similar operation - determine where you are in a large indexed structure, manage caching and loading texture images - analogous to icon images, perform visibility detection - i.e. mark what you can't see in your window so time isn't wasted displaying it, render the resulting image using various compositing aids - texture interpolation, perpective correction etc. and bitblt the result to a framebuffer.
Except Q3 can do this at least 30 times a second, and can go much, much faster than that with better hardware.
Of course Q3 uses accelerated graphics, but if software-rendered Quake 2 had a framerate of
The number of instructions per second a C-466 can perform is astounding, how do they manage to misuse so many of them?
>Yeah, I'm going to spend 50% more on a laptop b/c it looks cool and runs a POS non-multithreaded OS? Sure..
Uh, how is LinuxPPC a POS non-multithreading OS?
>I bet it really screams at Q3 and compiling the kernel. I hope you still like your 350Mhz imac in 2 years, when everyone else has 2Ghz machines. At least you can say it looks cool!
Performance is good compared to x86 machines of equivalent spec - outfit a P2-450 with a crappy Rage Pro or whatever the rev. B iMacs have and watch it crawl with Q3.
I don't dispute the fact that your 1GHz machine is fast, sorry to make you feel like less of a man.
I just think your notion that dropping support for every platform except x86 because its the cheapest is laughable, stupid and obviously the wrong thing to do.
Maybe its a limitation of the extremely pipelined graphics architecture prevalent today, but why not use some kind of thresholding algorithm to determine when a pixel needs to be antialiased?
i.e. for each scan line, check the (color or z)value of the current pixel, and only perform the antialiasing step if the difference between them exceeds some value.
As i understand it, FSAA actually antialiases every single pixel.. Surely this is incredibly inefficient, since antialiasing the already bilinearly-interpolated texture of the interior of a polygon is somewhat pointless.
If this approach is unwieldy, i'd be interested to know why.
What if you already have a Mac on your desk?
You think it's cheaper to throw it away and go out and buy a new 1GHz Athlon than to run LinuxPPC on your existing machine??
Try getting a laptop that looks anywhere near as cool at a Titanium Powerbook G4 from any x86 vendor.
'Oh forget it, those guys don't need another OS. If you buy a Mac, you don't deserve Linux. Linux should only be available for x86 because its the cheapest' - is that your line of reasoning?
Should we just deep-six the Alpha, PPC, MIPS, SHx, 68k ports of Linux because Athlons are cheap right now.
You better tell the NetBSD guys they've been wasting their time, and how bout you email the CEO of Lineo and all the other embedded Linux developers and break the news to them.
And while you're at it, why don't you have Linus ditch support for Intel chips. Athlons are, after all, cheaper.
My 350 MHz iMac makes a great Linux workstation. It doesn't take up too much room on my desk, is easily transportable - without making two trips (one for sys unit etc, one for monitor) every time i want to move it somewhere, and it runs extremely snappily.
I have been very happy with it, and you sir, are a f*cking idiot.
Forget it, it doesn't exist.
3D programs take many different approaches to representing objects and their interactions, from simple polygonal meshes to surfaces defined in terms of spline patches to volumetric representations to parametrically defined solids, to implicit surfaces (Meta-Blobs), with a plethora of texturing, partitioning and animation systems. You'd also have to include any physical and dynamical parameters - weight, mass etc. since this is very important in Engineering/FEA fields
X3D, VRML, DXF, IGES, OBJ, 3DS, OpenNURBs etc. only deal with a certain subset of these representations and you'd have a huge job to come up with a file format that could efficiently represent all of them.
The only way you could really do this would be to define a standard API for access to all this information, and let vendors simply implement the parts that their apps need.. i.e. we don't need a standard 'file format', we need a standard 3D codec system.
Just like any program n Windows can manipulate DivX or MPEG video on Windows without implementing it's own DivX loader/saver, as long as the necessary codec is available.
Still, 3D is changing fast, and the breadth of the field makes creating any kind of 'standard' very difficult.
I dabble with C, Java, Perl and other languages.
I am a 'child of the internet' when it comes to programming - i.e everything i know about computers and programming i either learnt from the net, or from books I bought because i wanted to expand the knowldege i gained from the net.
If i had gone to university, maybe i would have been exposed to Motif, but since its a Windows world out there for most of the youth today, theyre going to look for something more immediately similar to the Win32 API.
When i look around the net for information, there just isn't anything obviously useful for Motif - You can get so much more done, so much faster, if you use the amazing open-source technologies like GTK+, GNOME, Qt, SDL etc.
Since Motif has been opened, we might see more, but from my point of view, Motif is a dead horse (an ugly dead horse at that), which i simply see no need to bother with. If you have a huge, existing application that uses Motif, then you probably want to persist with it, but if youre starting fresh, why would you use Motif?
The question really should be 'What does OpenMotif bring to the table for the open source developer compared to the existing standards like GTK+ and Qt?'
How is DXF a 2D standard?
IGES is most certainly not the most common 3D standard, since most 3D tools don't even try to deal with parametrix 3D solids.In fact, only 3D solid-modelling packages do that, and this approach is almost never used in games, film, fx (all of which primarily use tesellated freeform surfaces like polygons, splines and subdivision surfaces), scientific visualisation (voxels and vector fields) or anywhere except the CAD industry.
Can you use IGES to import/export NURBs, subdivision surfaces, 3,4 and 5 point spline-patches, arbitary polygons, voxels, CSG trees, parametric solids, implicit surfaces, UV coordinates, shader parameters, animation paths, weight maps, texture maps etc. etc. etc.?
If not, then its no more a 'standard 3D format' than anything else available. There is currently no 'standard' because supporting every approach to the representation of 3D would be a nightmare, to say the least.
DXF is a simple format that facilitates the transfer of tesselated 3D surfaces and lines. No more, no less. It can certainly represent 3D geometry, and can be used, just as IGES can, to represent 2D geometry.
What in god's name is a quadratic texture??? I can imagine 2D or 3D procedural textures defined in terms of quadratic equations, but i somehow doubt this is what michael is on about.
He's probably talking about these cards having hardware support for quadric surfaces.. but since its been fairly-much decided that its generally faster to decompose these kinds of surfaces to triangular meshes for rendering,especially in pipelined graphics architectures such as OpenGL, features like this don't get used much.
Raytracers like POV-Ray and others evaluate quadrics and other classes of curved surfaces on a pixel-by-pixel basis, and other renderers subdivide them down to sub-pixel sized triangles for rendering. However, this approach is seldom suitable for realtime application.
Most likely, this 'quadratic texture support' is just hardware implementation of OpenGL evaluator functions which simply assist in the decomposition of quadric surfaces to a triangle meshes.
Get a clue michael.
G4's video optimised for DVD & Broadcast?
3 10 20
Piss off. Neither the ATI Rage128, Radeon or Nvidia GF2MX cards are optimised for anything but low-end, consumer applications.
I don't see component or SDI ins or outs on any standard Apple machine.
Nor do i see integrated hardware MPEG-2 encoders/decoders.
Give me my Athlon/Hollywood+ over an overpriced G4 which can't play back DVDs without skipping any day of the week.
Check out Apple's own suggestions on how to improve the crapness of its DVD playback here:
http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n
Its fuckin pathetic.
Surely all those billions the american taxpayers have been funnelling into the NSA's black budget have resulted in a system that is less that totally useless against terrorists using freely available tools..
Surely the gigantic investment made in the ability to listen in on most of the radio transmissions made around the world is going to prevent the US ever being 'taken by surprise' again.
Doesn't everyone know that underneath the pentagon there is a giant underground lake of liquid nitrogen in which 12 billion tons of supercomputing nodes are submerged, just waiting to crack Osama Bin Laden's encrypted messages??
I mean come on, the US have much more to fear from their own angry citizens (who have exactly the same tools and far better equipment at their disposal) than some guys in the Middle East who really just want to be left alone to fight their own battles without the intervention of some 'global policeman' whose only real interest is in ensuring a constant supply of oil and getting rid of that pesky radioactive waste by firing thousands of tons of it all over the battlegrounds.
Its like the US government is making out that encryption hasn't been used routinely at all levels of political structure for thousands of years, that is somehow a new 'weapon of terrorism' that must be combatted at all costs.
Do they really assume that everyone is as dumb as George Bush looks?
Because, if you haven't noticed, the new SGI logo sucks.
Ask yourself where the CEO at the helm of SGI when they changed the logo now works.
My cheap-ass BT848 card has worked since the heady days of the 2.0 kernel, and never given any trouble. Its supported under 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.
Mostly i use mine for capturing frames for claymation from various video cameras. XawTV provides realtime preview and image capture, and i use a couple of little shell scripts and command line tools to turn a folder full of individual frames into an MPG or AVI file.
I also use XawTV to watch TV both on the root window and in smaller mini-windows.
Only mono audio, but you can use an external tuner - i.e. VCR and just use the capture card as a composite/SVideo input.
Be sure you have a main video card that supports external overlay (most modern PCI/AGP cards do, though there are some that are a pain in the ass)
The BT8x8 cards are not particularly suited to capturing video of any length, since they have no hardware compression, and reliable realtime software MPEG-1/MPEG-2/MJPEG compression is not viable, AFAIK under Linux (Maybe the Alpha's vector processor would make this possible?)
If youre looking for a card to capture video, look for something a little more pwerful with an onboard hardware compresion engine.
I also have an Iomega Buz which is now supported under Linux - this will MJPEG compress your video in realtime, enabling you to capture full-frame, 25/30fps PAL/NTSC video at a rate of around 3-5MB/second. The Miro DC10+ is also supported i believe, and there are other cards which are supported by the manufacturers - Someone help me out here.
Uncompressed capture will most likely use at least twice this much space, if your drives can handle that kind of sustained rate.
Uhh, the point of enterprise-class hot-swappable storage and other componentry is that you *can* do just that with total confidence.
Can you really see a reason why computers can't have their parts swapped out on the fly, or is it a Pavlovian thing, caused by years of psychological abuse at the hands of Microsft and Intel?
public void writetodisk(DiskArray d, byte[] mydata) {
try {
d.writeblock(mydata);
}
catch (DiskNotPresentException) {
sleep(100);
d.getAvailableDisk();
this.writetodisk(d,mydata);
}
}
obviously thats insanely inefficient and simplified, and probably just plain wrong from a systems engineering viewpoint, but if your hardware takes care of these kind of checks, you can just pull out bits, plug new ones in and the computer keeps running.
The x86 PC isn't actually the culmination of 50 years or so of continuous research into the production of robust, reliable and fast digital computers, and you certainly shouldn't assume that everyone engineers their computers so they need a reboot even to change their IP address.
http://members.nbci.com/ikekrull/tux.gif
I heard a while ago that one of the things Transmeta was actively pursuing was PowerPC emulation.
AMD's volume profits could comfortably absorb the cost of selling the chips at prices competitive with Motorola immediately, and even with the lower-than-average performance of the Transmeta chip, a 1.5-2GHz Code-Morphing Athlon would likely whup any Moto. G3/G4 in non-Altivec benchmarks.
If I were looking for the fastest way to support MacOS 9 (will be important for at least the next year) and MacOS X on the x86 platform, then something pretty similar to a Duron with a Transmeta PPC-emulation layer might just be the way.
Apple have proved they have the marketing department and design group from hell, and an OS (Mac OS X) that needs to pick up serious attention outside the existing Mac market to bring Apple profits up. That means selling lots of machines into the hands of people who have never before owned a Mac.
Not easy when your fastest model runs at 700MHz and costs US$5000 without a monitor.
I don't think i can buy an AMD or Intel chip less than 600MHz at the moment, and Motorola are not going to be able to double their clockspeed this year.
Apples biggest problem currently is MHz... even though it might only perform like a PPC of half the clockspeed, it would be good for Apple to be able to advertise '1.5 GHz Macs'.
Apple could continue to offer Altivec models to the scientific, creative and education industries
while targeting the G3-alike AMD chip at corporate/home users.
It might not encode MPEG-2 in realtime in software, but it'll run MS-Office like a raped ape.
And, sadly, thats all the computer buying public seem to give a shit about these days.
Personally, i find SAX easier to use than DOM..
It also takes a whole lot less memory and time to parse than the DOM approach.
We process XML files that can be up to 10MB in size, and DOM parsing these files brings my 500MHz P3 to its knees (yes i have increased the JVM heap size)
Parsing with SAX, however, has proved simple, clean and easy with no performance problems at all.
If youre definitely wanting to use the DOM, try NanoXML.. its much smaller that Xerces and the like, and is perfect for parsing config files etc., as will as being small enough (6KB or so) for client-side and embedded use.
However, for an all-round, no compromise XML parsing solution, then Xerces is pretty good.
Given Java Servlets and Sun's JSP taglibs, who needs PHP?
PHP is a fossil, a relic of the late-90's
As is C++ (flamebait!!)
n/t
How is this concept new or interesting in any way?
.Net offers is here, and has been for years. Like we don't have enough middleware?
Why not just go out and buy a big f*ck-off UNIX machine and run apps remotely over X?
Run Java apps remotely over X if you need a well designed OO authoring environment and GUI, and run JSP/Servlets or applets if you need web deployment. There are a plethora of other options, from elegant Python to the heavily bracketed LISP and most all of them cost you nothing, are proven and tested from years of abuse and most of them have been integrating XML since the day it was suggested by the W3C.
And you can do it today, not at some unspecified time in the future, after applying 6 service packs, paying for n client licenses and being told to pay for an upgrade to the next version to really see it work properly.
All the stuff that
The addition of XML-wrapped messages in proprietary binary format is going to revolutionize the industry??
I just don't get what problem they are trying to solve, unless it's 'What should we do to delay Microsoft from getting destroyed by Linux/BSD, Apache and Java in the server room?'.
I mean, you only have to look at the NetCraft server uptime statistics to see how well Win32 stacks up against the rest.
They must be smokin some pretty good crack up in Redmond
Yeah, thats why the Sony Playstation was the miserable failure it is.
Come on, install a mod-chip, or have one installed, then rent game from video shop, copy to CD, add to personal library.
No lengthy downloads, no dependence on broadband connection, cheaper console, easier copying process.
There is the necessity to modify the hardware, but the proliferation of people offering to do this is quite amazing.
Just look at how badly piracy has hit Sony's bottom line.