of course your 286 won't outperform your G4.. But if you spent the same amount of money on an x86 system as you did on a Mac system, you'd almost certainly have a faster computer with the x86.
I did say x86 which includes AMD, and i'm afraid you'd be hard pressed to get that 500 MHz G4 to outperform a 1+ GHz P3/TBird at anything at all.
The 1 Ghz x86 machine would certainly come in cheaper too.
Clock-for-clock, the G4 probably is faster in most areas, but when its a case of dollar-for-dollar, then it's a very different story.
Obviously macs have other advantages, but in terms of price/performance, IMHO, Macs simply aren't competitive.
Apple and Motorola simply don't sell enough computers/desktop CPUs to be able to compete on price with x86 vendors.
If anything it's the other way around - by making their OS compatible with *NIX apps, it means that if the *NIX apps gain enough popularity on MacOS X, theres nothing to tie the user to the Mac platform, except for the excellence of Apple's hardware and OS.
This is exactly as it should be, and the availability of Linux on the Mac hasn't exactly hampered it's growth in the x86 market
I fail to see how the availability of another OS/hardware platform threatens Linux's existence one iota.
Arguably better OSes/hardware have been available for years, in the form of systems from SGI, Sun, Compaq, Microsoft, Apple, Amiga, Be and the rest.
MacOS X looks like a hundred bucks, and it should perform well on the expensive Apple systems that it will ship with. However, all that eye candy and custom engineering comes at the cost of performance and hefty support requirements for Apple.
Volume constraints mean that you can buy an x86 workstation that will wipe the floor in almost every performance category (excepting Altivec-optimised routines since SSE2 isn't widely supported) with the fastest Mac system available for the same price or less.
However, not everyone wants a huge, ugly beige space heater with a spaghetti tangle of wire hanging out the back that sounds like a 747 taking off every time its fired up on their desktop.
MacOS X is simply consumer NeXT, and time will tell if it will achieve any better success than the old-skool developer version.
And frankly, if its a better system in every way then Linux deserves to lose market share in favour of MacOS X, until it can compete effectively with it.
Lets face it, the number of people who both know *NIX, and are actively interested in web development and are also talented and skilled is pretty small.
I was very lucky to get work at a web development company way back in the day (1994 i think), and from there went on to work at ISPs, which were the only places that i was able to really figure out the web programming/internet server systems that i now rely on.
For the lone developer, becoming proficient in *NIX-based web development means doing everything from installing linux for the first time, to getiing web servers up and going, to figuring out
IP addressing, firewalls, DNS issues, web servers, HTML, Javascript, page layout tools, image editing tools, HTTP, web programming languages, *NIX sys admin, and many other incidental skills you need along the way to tie it all together.
Its really not the easiest thing to do, and not many people i know have got the broad understanding of the internet and its systems that are required to do this job properly.
For most of the time i have spent working in the industry, I was underpaid, overworked and generally dicked around, and I'm not keen to repeat those experiences.
So if youre finding web developers scarce its probably because we're all too jaded from the crap we've had to deal with from 90% of the companies that have anything to do with the internet.
Open-Source web hackers, if you find a good job, stick with it, there are precious few out there.
Its pretty obvious to me youve never tried to publish vector-based multimedia presentations to a large proportion of the public.
If you had, you would have realised by now that Flash is really your only choice.
SVG sounds nice, but wheres the support for it? A proprietary Windows-only plugin? Mozilla won't supoprt SVG properly for months, and your only other option is a Java-based viewer that requires a 7MB Java Plugin to run.
So saying 'don't use Flash' is like saying 'don't publish vector-based multimedia presentations on the web'
And thats just about the dumbest thing i've heard on Slashdot for a while.
JSPs, more than ASP, PHP or any of the other tag-based languages encourage you to shift the processing to servlets/java classes and simply use the JSP as a container for the HTML that frames your content.
Just invoke methods in your classes/servlets from your JSPs, instead fo writing any actual functional code in the JSP at all.
And considering that JSPs are compiled to servlets at run time, it seems odd to recommend using servlets over JSPs, since theyre both really the same thing.
Java introspection gives JSPs the cleanest way to handle form elements i have yet seen from a web-oriented language.
One line of code in your JSP invokes setter methods for all your elements on receipt of a form. Magic!
Servlets are far worse because you end up embedding chunks of HTML in your methods.
You can get around this in various ways, but there aren't many moe elegant ways to get around this than simply using JSPs.
To a large degree, 'multiresolution editing' can be achieved by specifying the resolution of everything - brushes, filter parameters, selections etc. in some kind of global coordinate system, instead of being pixel-based.
So, when applied to a 100x100 pixel image, a blur filter with a radius of '2' has an effective radius of 2 pixels, but on a 1000x1000 image, has an effective radius of 20 pixels. This may or may not be the effect you desire, but a toggle between pixel and global coordinates shouldn't be a major.
However, since bitmaps are necessarily pixel-based, you run into problems when you try and duplicate the effect of a 16x16 pixel brush to a 32x32 pixel image on a 3200x3200 pixel image.
You either end up with an extremely pixelated brush, or you specify the brush in terms of a clipping path and a fill-pattern.. Nasty.
You could also simply scale up the brush and apply a vector clipping path, but youd end up with a hopelessly pixellated brush with perfectly smooth edges.
Either way, you might as well use a vector drawing program, or create your images at the largest possible size and invest in a supercomputer to render your edits in close-to-real-time.
Image pyramids and wavelet/progessively encoded images have their uses, but i think most professional designers would rather stick with the tried-and-true Photoshop, working on fat machines with lots of RAM than work with these unconventional technologies.
Thats not to say I don't think it will happen, but rather that these things take a lot of time to mature.
This is Macrovision. Surely you read the licensing conditions on your DVDs/DVD player before you bought them???
Your DVD player *does not allow* you to play your Macrovision-protected purchased discs on anything but a TV set, which are engineered loosely enough (as opposed to VCRs/TV tuners etc.) to 'ignore' the Macrovision signal.
The MPAA have forced DVD player manufacturers to build in this sort of mostly-ineffectual copy protection to stop pirates like you (hey, youre probably not a pirate, but try telling the MPAA that)from ripping off their IP.
Still feel like you got a good deal with that $500 piece of crippleware?
Me, i play my DVDs through a region-hacked, Macrovision-disabled, Samsung SD612 DVD drive/Hollywood+ card. Gives me a perfect picture, AC3 digital out, and the ability to rip, copy and playback my DVDs anywhere i like.
Laserdiscs are encoded like CDs - pits and flats on an optically sensitive substrate. pit for 0, flat for 1 (it may be the other way around).
With CDs (essentially analog recodings digitized at 44.1khHz), to obtain the the best quality copy, you ideally want to rip the digital data direct from the CD, instead of playing it through your soundcard - With a high quality soundcard, distortion is minimal, but present, just as it is with the D/A converters in a Laserdisc player.
Unfortunately, i know of no laserdisc players with an IDE, SCSI or IEEE 1394 interface so recorind from component video out is your best option.
Trivially compressed full-frame PAL/NTSC video uses over 10MB (thats MegaBytes) per second.
There are very few single drives that can handle a sustained 10MB/s of data being written to them, hence the need for RAID arrays.
Most broadcast houses use expensive Discreet/SGI equipment with big, fast RAID arrays to handle uncompressed footage.
You might think you can do the same job with a BT848 card and a US$200 ATA-100 drive, but if you need to to work, work properly, and keep working for more than a few minutes at a time, you quickly learn you need to spend the cash to get quality results.
Sure, the cost-of-entry for high quality desktop video is dropping like a stone, but ripping uncompressed video to hard disks is not something you can do without additional hardware and very fast disk subsystems.
Since you'll have to re-encode to MPEG-2 to put the contents of a laserdisc onto DVD, it probably won't make a huge difference if you just capture from a component out on an LD player, rather than attempting to scan the contents of the LD bit-by-bit.
Then its no more difficult to put the contents of an LD on a DVD than it is to put the contents of any other video/film medium.
Ideally, you'd either want to take the component out of an LD player and put it straight into a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, or capture at full-res, uncompressed with audio to a big RAID array before software encoding the resulting frames to MPEG-2.
Either way, its going to cost you a lot of money, so unless youve got an extensive library of laserdiscs you really badly need on DVD, i just plain wouldn't bother.
Why not just lay out the cash for one of those? that will give you more than enough raw DSP power to do pretty much whatever you want, since you can simply slot extra 4-DSP-chip cards into available PCI slots.
Why try and do this kind of thing with x86 machines hooked up with ethernet?? for low-latency stuff like audio, i'd guess its way more trouble than it's worth.
Be should keep the rest of it's OS commercial, since it gives it a definte edge over the competition in a number of areas.
But many people are sick to death of X, and what Linux needs for widespread acceptance on the desktop is a GUI that competes with NT and MacOS in terms of slickness.
Many of us are crying out for such simple stuff as antialiased fonts, integrated support for alpha blending, colour correction and high-speed, which X just totally fails to provide - in fact, it's whole architecture makes it difficult for a 3rd party to add this stuff.
If Be released a GTK-level library and windowing system that enabled Linux developers to maintain a consistent look n feel across Linux and the BeOS, for both embedded and desktop applications, we'd have something.
The BeOS could maintain most of its advantages, independently, while remaining superficially compatible with Linux and other *NIXes.
As long as X could coexist with this windowing system (in much the same way as a 3rd party X-server runs under windows) we'd get the best of both worlds.
Yes it works, they don't check that the name is *valid*, just that a name is given, and the expiry date isn't in the past or more than 2 years in the future.
Regardless of whether the transaction gets through the credit card company without being flagged as fraudulent, you've still charged the cost to that card number, and received the benefits of that service.
When you can, with a pencil and paper, and one minute to spare, make up a valid(most likely belonging to *someone*, *somewhere*) credit card number and charge arbitary values using, for example, phone sex lines, prepay cellphone cards, or porn sites to these cards with about zero possibility of being caught, you come to the conclusion that the cost of rolling out a secure credit card system far outweighs the sheer profit to be made charging interest to the fools who so blindly put their trust in a system that is so obviously prone to failure.
If you're leaving the window of your car rolled down on a busy street and someone keeps on stealing your stereo, do you think your insurance company will keep paying out forever?
Both VNC-TE (Tight Encoder) and TridiaVNC enhance a standard VNC with better compression..
I haven't been able to try either of these two out, since Tridia's huge 10MB download and obnoxious website put me right off, and the links to VNC-TE were broken last time i looked.
However, highly-compressed VNC is probably the way to go, since X is a total dog compared to, dare i say it, MS Windown Terminal Server's RDP protocol.
There is some strangeness with GNOME-Canvas event handling, and also shaped mask handling or something, but the author knows about these and is working on it. There are also a couple of redraw problems i noticed.
All in all, it runs pretty well for monitoring stuff from a windows machine, but i wouldn't want to work in it all the time.
I haven't seen any linux distro that can boot and run out of a an HFS partition, but the LinuxPPC install i have on my girlfriend's iMac runs pretty sweet (though i had to fight tooth and nail to install it, but thats another story).
I would just back up my files (never a bad idea), bite the bullet, and repartition. This isn't what you want to hear, but i'm afraid there probably aren't enough mac/linux developers who would want to do what you want badly enough to write the required software, unless you're prepared to do the work yourself.
For at least 99% of the desktop PC market, right now, it's completely pointless.
for the other 0.1 - 1% ( of desktop users, 64 bit CPUs might give a performance boost, but those people should probably be using Alphas since they still whup ass on anything Intel can produce.
This kind of comment is just stupid. Of course Troll Tech want to make money. Of course they want to dominate the handheld market. They're a *company* they have to pay their staff, and they want to fulfil their obligations to their shareholders.
Yes they are 'using' the open source community, but the open source community want to be 'used'.
If nobody 'used' the open source community, the open source community wouldn't exist.
If you don't want a PDA running QTe, don't f**king buy one, and if you don't like Trolltech's corporate ethics, then don't f**king use their products, but theyre a lot less evil than other software companies, and have done so much to boost the popularity, usability, portability and consistency of linux software that their contribution should not be ignored, much less denigrated by people like you.
You probably think that xterm+twm+non-integrated handwriting recognition is the 'right' way to develop a Palm-based environment. All that stuff is really 'free', right?
The fact that it's just shit for real world usage is completely unimportant, right? Its open source, and thats all that matters.. If open source was the 'one true path' to successful software development, then why is the only currently useful Linux-based PDA environment from Trolltech?
You don't like it? You do better. Thats what open source is all about, isn't it?
I had to fight tooth and nail to get LinuxPPC on my gf's iMac.
The bootable CD image supplied simply didn't work as they said it would. It turned out that the reason for this was that i had obtained (off a magazine cover-disk, no less) an iso image that was broken, known broken, but still distributed by LinuxPPC.
There was nothing on LinuxPPC's site to say 'Hey guys, if you have this version of our distro, better get another one because it will refuse to install' Personally, i'd consider the front page of the site a good place for this sort of thing.
The disk got all the way through booting, but then dropped you into the text-mode RedHat installer, which promptly failed in a very unamusing way.
After trawling the newsgroup archives, i found out that the image i had was completely fscked, and had to download a new image.
That was just the start of my problems - the disk i burnt (it could have been my CD-Writer, but, as a 4x SCSI unit it's been 100% reliable with other disks i've burnt, all of which have been happily read by the same iMac's drive) seemed to cause the CD-ROM drive in the iMac some major headaches, i kept getting IDE timeouts etc. on some of the files and theyd refuse to install with rpm.
So i had to manually patch together all the packages in the distro using some files from the original (broken) distro, the working files from the new distro, and download some others that had conflicting versions between the two distro images (both LinuxPPC 2000).
Then the USB mouse problems started ( USB mouse just doesn't work sometimes.. needs to be unplugged, and plugged into a different USB port to start working again, and i still haven't been able to get 3-button emulation working with the hockey-puck (not that i use it any more after swapping it for the new mouse (that keeps failing).
There is no documentation to tell you that you need to use 15 bit color to get anything better than 8bit on an older (rev B i think) iMac, youre just supposed to know this i guess.. Again, trawling the newsgroups is the only way to find this sort of thing out.
So, after spending several the best part of the weekend freaking out in fury at the incredible (sometimes seemingly insurmountable) problems installing this distro on the iMac, i finally have a working system.
It hasn't failed me since, and my gf is very impressed with it's stability and speed compared to MacOS 9 which was a constant frustration for her.
Would she, a mac-user, be able to install it by herself? Not a chance in hell. I've been tinkering with Linux for years now, and admin several linux boxen here at work, but this distro just plain sucks.
Would i recommend LinuxPPC to my friends? Sicne none of my friends would be comfortable doing the necessary massaging to get a working LinuxPPC system together, no way.
Please Mandrake, make us a PPC distro.
Then why not trot on down to Microway and get yourself a smoking, 64 bit quad 667/750MHz Alpha 21264 system.
Sure, it's not a cheap way to go, but the Itanium isn't going to be a budget chip either, and the Alphas are already available, have been 64 bit for years, run Linux/Tru64 UNIX and a pokey version of NT4, and use standard PCI expansion cards.
Itanium will have to be a monster to compete with the 21264's FP performance, and the 21364 should kick sand in Itaniums face all the way down the beach.
You can play with some beasty Alpha systems on Compaq's TestDrive program. I used BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools) to do an informal radiosiy render test and a quad 667-MHz Alpha with 2G of RAM certainly pumps the pixels.
Is there any reason, apart from the difficulty of establishing a pervasive presence, why an alternative to the current DNS system couldn't be produced?
i.e is the reason we only have.com,.co,.org etc at the moment purely because BIND is hardcoded to only use the ICANN's root servers?
I know there are organisations like AlterNIC.. why have these services not gained more use?
I'm probably just clueless about how DNS works at a global level, but it seems to me, since BIND is so widely used, that it could be easily modified, or a BIND clone produced, to provide a multitude of TLDs...
It will be interesting so see how this affects recruitment in the military.
Imagine a situation where the current crop of US fighter pilots can be outflown outgunned by a bunch of kids who've spent way too much time playing Wing Commander or something running a UCAV.
Why not use these twitchy-fingered kids to inflict maximum damage on enemy forces? YOU can get em young enough so they'll never question their orders, tell them theyre just flying another simulated battle and watch them lay waste to the 'enemy' with no moral issues whatsoever.
I realise that RAM and disk is cheap these days, but theres no way in hell i'm going to bother with a 60MB file manager - 500MB for all components??
That makes MS Office look slim and trim.
Personally, i run linux on several machines, none of them on the cutting edge of technology. It sounds like Eazel will run like a dog on pretty much all of them.
I do a bit of coding myself, and i have to wonder just how you manage to write a piece of software that occupies 60-100MB of disk space, when all it does is show you a view of the files that are on your machine.
Am i the only one who doesn't run linux on a 600Mhz+ PC with half a gig of RAM and a 40+ GB Hard disk?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you even *read* my post???
of course your 286 won't outperform your G4.. But if you spent the same amount of money on an x86 system as you did on a Mac system, you'd almost certainly have a faster computer with the x86.
I did say x86 which includes AMD, and i'm afraid you'd be hard pressed to get that 500 MHz G4 to outperform a 1+ GHz P3/TBird at anything at all.
The 1 Ghz x86 machine would certainly come in cheaper too.
Clock-for-clock, the G4 probably is faster in most areas, but when its a case of dollar-for-dollar, then it's a very different story.
Obviously macs have other advantages, but in terms of price/performance, IMHO, Macs simply aren't competitive.
Apple and Motorola simply don't sell enough computers/desktop CPUs to be able to compete on price with x86 vendors.
If anything it's the other way around - by making their OS compatible with *NIX apps, it means that if the *NIX apps gain enough popularity on MacOS X, theres nothing to tie the user to the Mac platform, except for the excellence of Apple's hardware and OS.
This is exactly as it should be, and the availability of Linux on the Mac hasn't exactly hampered it's growth in the x86 market
I fail to see how the availability of another OS/hardware platform threatens Linux's existence one iota.
Arguably better OSes/hardware have been available for years, in the form of systems from SGI, Sun, Compaq, Microsoft, Apple, Amiga, Be and the rest.
MacOS X looks like a hundred bucks, and it should perform well on the expensive Apple systems that it will ship with. However, all that eye candy and custom engineering comes at the cost of performance and hefty support requirements for Apple.
Volume constraints mean that you can buy an x86 workstation that will wipe the floor in almost every performance category (excepting Altivec-optimised routines since SSE2 isn't widely supported) with the fastest Mac system available for the same price or less.
However, not everyone wants a huge, ugly beige space heater with a spaghetti tangle of wire hanging out the back that sounds like a 747 taking off every time its fired up on their desktop.
MacOS X is simply consumer NeXT, and time will tell if it will achieve any better success than the old-skool developer version.
And frankly, if its a better system in every way then Linux deserves to lose market share in favour of MacOS X, until it can compete effectively with it.
Lets face it, the number of people who both know *NIX, and are actively interested in web development and are also talented and skilled is pretty small.
I was very lucky to get work at a web development company way back in the day (1994 i think), and from there went on to work at ISPs, which were the only places that i was able to really figure out the web programming/internet server systems that i now rely on.
For the lone developer, becoming proficient in *NIX-based web development means doing everything from installing linux for the first time, to getiing web servers up and going, to figuring out
IP addressing, firewalls, DNS issues, web servers, HTML, Javascript, page layout tools, image editing tools, HTTP, web programming languages, *NIX sys admin, and many other incidental skills you need along the way to tie it all together.
Its really not the easiest thing to do, and not many people i know have got the broad understanding of the internet and its systems that are required to do this job properly.
For most of the time i have spent working in the industry, I was underpaid, overworked and generally dicked around, and I'm not keen to repeat those experiences.
So if youre finding web developers scarce its probably because we're all too jaded from the crap we've had to deal with from 90% of the companies that have anything to do with the internet.
Open-Source web hackers, if you find a good job, stick with it, there are precious few out there.
Its pretty obvious to me youve never tried to publish vector-based multimedia presentations to a large proportion of the public.
If you had, you would have realised by now that Flash is really your only choice.
SVG sounds nice, but wheres the support for it? A proprietary Windows-only plugin? Mozilla won't supoprt SVG properly for months, and your only other option is a Java-based viewer that requires a 7MB Java Plugin to run.
So saying 'don't use Flash' is like saying 'don't publish vector-based multimedia presentations on the web'
And thats just about the dumbest thing i've heard on Slashdot for a while.
Have you ever *used* JSP???
JSPs, more than ASP, PHP or any of the other tag-based languages encourage you to shift the processing to servlets/java classes and simply use the JSP as a container for the HTML that frames your content.
Just invoke methods in your classes/servlets from your JSPs, instead fo writing any actual functional code in the JSP at all.
And considering that JSPs are compiled to servlets at run time, it seems odd to recommend using servlets over JSPs, since theyre both really the same thing.
Java introspection gives JSPs the cleanest way to handle form elements i have yet seen from a web-oriented language.
One line of code in your JSP invokes setter methods for all your elements on receipt of a form. Magic!
Servlets are far worse because you end up embedding chunks of HTML in your methods.
You can get around this in various ways, but there aren't many moe elegant ways to get around this than simply using JSPs.
To a large degree, 'multiresolution editing' can be achieved by specifying the resolution of everything - brushes, filter parameters, selections etc. in some kind of global coordinate system, instead of being pixel-based.
So, when applied to a 100x100 pixel image, a blur filter with a radius of '2' has an effective radius of 2 pixels, but on a 1000x1000 image, has an effective radius of 20 pixels. This may or may not be the effect you desire, but a toggle between pixel and global coordinates shouldn't be a major.
However, since bitmaps are necessarily pixel-based, you run into problems when you try and duplicate the effect of a 16x16 pixel brush to a 32x32 pixel image on a 3200x3200 pixel image.
You either end up with an extremely pixelated brush, or you specify the brush in terms of a clipping path and a fill-pattern.. Nasty.
You could also simply scale up the brush and apply a vector clipping path, but youd end up with a hopelessly pixellated brush with perfectly smooth edges.
Either way, you might as well use a vector drawing program, or create your images at the largest possible size and invest in a supercomputer to render your edits in close-to-real-time.
Image pyramids and wavelet/progessively encoded images have their uses, but i think most professional designers would rather stick with the tried-and-true Photoshop, working on fat machines with lots of RAM than work with these unconventional technologies.
Thats not to say I don't think it will happen, but rather that these things take a lot of time to mature.
This is Macrovision. Surely you read the licensing conditions on your DVDs/DVD player before you bought them???
Your DVD player *does not allow* you to play your Macrovision-protected purchased discs on anything but a TV set, which are engineered loosely enough (as opposed to VCRs/TV tuners etc.) to 'ignore' the Macrovision signal.
The MPAA have forced DVD player manufacturers to build in this sort of mostly-ineffectual copy protection to stop pirates like you (hey, youre probably not a pirate, but try telling the MPAA that)from ripping off their IP.
Still feel like you got a good deal with that $500 piece of crippleware?
Me, i play my DVDs through a region-hacked, Macrovision-disabled, Samsung SD612 DVD drive/Hollywood+ card. Gives me a perfect picture, AC3 digital out, and the ability to rip, copy and playback my DVDs anywhere i like.
Laserdiscs are encoded like CDs - pits and flats on an optically sensitive substrate. pit for 0, flat for 1 (it may be the other way around).
With CDs (essentially analog recodings digitized at 44.1khHz), to obtain the the best quality copy, you ideally want to rip the digital data direct from the CD, instead of playing it through your soundcard - With a high quality soundcard, distortion is minimal, but present, just as it is with the D/A converters in a Laserdisc player.
Unfortunately, i know of no laserdisc players with an IDE, SCSI or IEEE 1394 interface so recorind from component video out is your best option.
Trivially compressed full-frame PAL/NTSC video uses over 10MB (thats MegaBytes) per second.
There are very few single drives that can handle a sustained 10MB/s of data being written to them, hence the need for RAID arrays.
Most broadcast houses use expensive Discreet/SGI equipment with big, fast RAID arrays to handle uncompressed footage.
You might think you can do the same job with a BT848 card and a US$200 ATA-100 drive, but if you need to to work, work properly, and keep working for more than a few minutes at a time, you quickly learn you need to spend the cash to get quality results.
Sure, the cost-of-entry for high quality desktop video is dropping like a stone, but ripping uncompressed video to hard disks is not something you can do without additional hardware and very fast disk subsystems.
Since you'll have to re-encode to MPEG-2 to put the contents of a laserdisc onto DVD, it probably won't make a huge difference if you just capture from a component out on an LD player, rather than attempting to scan the contents of the LD bit-by-bit.
Then its no more difficult to put the contents of an LD on a DVD than it is to put the contents of any other video/film medium.
Ideally, you'd either want to take the component out of an LD player and put it straight into a hardware MPEG-2 encoder, or capture at full-res, uncompressed with audio to a big RAID array before software encoding the resulting frames to MPEG-2.
Either way, its going to cost you a lot of money, so unless youve got an extensive library of laserdiscs you really badly need on DVD, i just plain wouldn't bother.
Why not just lay out the cash for one of those? that will give you more than enough raw DSP power to do pretty much whatever you want, since you can simply slot extra 4-DSP-chip cards into available PCI slots.
Why try and do this kind of thing with x86 machines hooked up with ethernet?? for low-latency stuff like audio, i'd guess its way more trouble than it's worth.
Be should keep the rest of it's OS commercial, since it gives it a definte edge over the competition in a number of areas.
But many people are sick to death of X, and what Linux needs for widespread acceptance on the desktop is a GUI that competes with NT and MacOS in terms of slickness.
Many of us are crying out for such simple stuff as antialiased fonts, integrated support for alpha blending, colour correction and high-speed, which X just totally fails to provide - in fact, it's whole architecture makes it difficult for a 3rd party to add this stuff.
If Be released a GTK-level library and windowing system that enabled Linux developers to maintain a consistent look n feel across Linux and the BeOS, for both embedded and desktop applications, we'd have something.
The BeOS could maintain most of its advantages, independently, while remaining superficially compatible with Linux and other *NIXes.
As long as X could coexist with this windowing system (in much the same way as a 3rd party X-server runs under windows) we'd get the best of both worlds.
Yes it works, they don't check that the name is *valid*, just that a name is given, and the expiry date isn't in the past or more than 2 years in the future. Regardless of whether the transaction gets through the credit card company without being flagged as fraudulent, you've still charged the cost to that card number, and received the benefits of that service.
When you can, with a pencil and paper, and one minute to spare, make up a valid(most likely belonging to *someone*, *somewhere*) credit card number and charge arbitary values using, for example, phone sex lines, prepay cellphone cards, or porn sites to these cards with about zero possibility of being caught, you come to the conclusion that the cost of rolling out a secure credit card system far outweighs the sheer profit to be made charging interest to the fools who so blindly put their trust in a system that is so obviously prone to failure.
If you're leaving the window of your car rolled down on a busy street and someone keeps on stealing your stereo, do you think your insurance company will keep paying out forever?
This is in no way a mouse. Its not even a trackball.
The closest thing to this is an old-skool 2 button game pad.
Both VNC-TE (Tight Encoder) and TridiaVNC enhance a standard VNC with better compression..
I haven't been able to try either of these two out, since Tridia's huge 10MB download and obnoxious website put me right off, and the links to VNC-TE were broken last time i looked.
However, highly-compressed VNC is probably the way to go, since X is a total dog compared to, dare i say it, MS Windown Terminal Server's RDP protocol.
WierdX runs in truecolour for me.
There is some strangeness with GNOME-Canvas event handling, and also shaped mask handling or something, but the author knows about these and is working on it. There are also a couple of redraw problems i noticed.
All in all, it runs pretty well for monitoring stuff from a windows machine, but i wouldn't want to work in it all the time.
I haven't seen any linux distro that can boot and run out of a an HFS partition, but the LinuxPPC install i have on my girlfriend's iMac runs pretty sweet (though i had to fight tooth and nail to install it, but thats another story).
I would just back up my files (never a bad idea), bite the bullet, and repartition. This isn't what you want to hear, but i'm afraid there probably aren't enough mac/linux developers who would want to do what you want badly enough to write the required software, unless you're prepared to do the work yourself.
For at least 99% of the desktop PC market, right now, it's completely pointless.
for the other 0.1 - 1% ( of desktop users, 64 bit CPUs might give a performance boost, but those people should probably be using Alphas since they still whup ass on anything Intel can produce.
This kind of comment is just stupid. Of course Troll Tech want to make money. Of course they want to dominate the handheld market. They're a *company* they have to pay their staff, and they want to fulfil their obligations to their shareholders.
Yes they are 'using' the open source community, but the open source community want to be 'used'.
If nobody 'used' the open source community, the open source community wouldn't exist.
If you don't want a PDA running QTe, don't f**king buy one, and if you don't like Trolltech's corporate ethics, then don't f**king use their products, but theyre a lot less evil than other software companies, and have done so much to boost the popularity, usability, portability and consistency of linux software that their contribution should not be ignored, much less denigrated by people like you.
You probably think that xterm+twm+non-integrated handwriting recognition is the 'right' way to develop a Palm-based environment. All that stuff is really 'free', right?
The fact that it's just shit for real world usage is completely unimportant, right? Its open source, and thats all that matters.. If open source was the 'one true path' to successful software development, then why is the only currently useful Linux-based PDA environment from Trolltech?
You don't like it? You do better. Thats what open source is all about, isn't it?
I had to fight tooth and nail to get LinuxPPC on my gf's iMac. The bootable CD image supplied simply didn't work as they said it would. It turned out that the reason for this was that i had obtained (off a magazine cover-disk, no less) an iso image that was broken, known broken, but still distributed by LinuxPPC. There was nothing on LinuxPPC's site to say 'Hey guys, if you have this version of our distro, better get another one because it will refuse to install' Personally, i'd consider the front page of the site a good place for this sort of thing. The disk got all the way through booting, but then dropped you into the text-mode RedHat installer, which promptly failed in a very unamusing way. After trawling the newsgroup archives, i found out that the image i had was completely fscked, and had to download a new image. That was just the start of my problems - the disk i burnt (it could have been my CD-Writer, but, as a 4x SCSI unit it's been 100% reliable with other disks i've burnt, all of which have been happily read by the same iMac's drive) seemed to cause the CD-ROM drive in the iMac some major headaches, i kept getting IDE timeouts etc. on some of the files and theyd refuse to install with rpm. So i had to manually patch together all the packages in the distro using some files from the original (broken) distro, the working files from the new distro, and download some others that had conflicting versions between the two distro images (both LinuxPPC 2000). Then the USB mouse problems started ( USB mouse just doesn't work sometimes.. needs to be unplugged, and plugged into a different USB port to start working again, and i still haven't been able to get 3-button emulation working with the hockey-puck (not that i use it any more after swapping it for the new mouse (that keeps failing). There is no documentation to tell you that you need to use 15 bit color to get anything better than 8bit on an older (rev B i think) iMac, youre just supposed to know this i guess.. Again, trawling the newsgroups is the only way to find this sort of thing out. So, after spending several the best part of the weekend freaking out in fury at the incredible (sometimes seemingly insurmountable) problems installing this distro on the iMac, i finally have a working system. It hasn't failed me since, and my gf is very impressed with it's stability and speed compared to MacOS 9 which was a constant frustration for her. Would she, a mac-user, be able to install it by herself? Not a chance in hell. I've been tinkering with Linux for years now, and admin several linux boxen here at work, but this distro just plain sucks. Would i recommend LinuxPPC to my friends? Sicne none of my friends would be comfortable doing the necessary massaging to get a working LinuxPPC system together, no way. Please Mandrake, make us a PPC distro.
Then why not trot on down to Microway and get yourself a smoking, 64 bit quad 667/750MHz Alpha 21264 system.
Sure, it's not a cheap way to go, but the Itanium isn't going to be a budget chip either, and the Alphas are already available, have been 64 bit for years, run Linux/Tru64 UNIX and a pokey version of NT4, and use standard PCI expansion cards.
Itanium will have to be a monster to compete with the 21264's FP performance, and the 21364 should kick sand in Itaniums face all the way down the beach.
You can play with some beasty Alpha systems on Compaq's TestDrive program. I used BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools) to do an informal radiosiy render test and a quad 667-MHz Alpha with 2G of RAM certainly pumps the pixels.
Is there any reason, apart from the difficulty of establishing a pervasive presence, why an alternative to the current DNS system couldn't be produced?
.com, .co, .org etc at the moment purely because BIND is hardcoded to only use the ICANN's root servers?
i.e is the reason we only have
I know there are organisations like AlterNIC.. why have these services not gained more use?
I'm probably just clueless about how DNS works at a global level, but it seems to me, since BIND is so widely used, that it could be easily modified, or a BIND clone produced, to provide a multitude of TLDs...
It will be interesting so see how this affects recruitment in the military.
Imagine a situation where the current crop of US fighter pilots can be outflown outgunned by a bunch of kids who've spent way too much time playing Wing Commander or something running a UCAV.
Why not use these twitchy-fingered kids to inflict maximum damage on enemy forces? YOU can get em young enough so they'll never question their orders, tell them theyre just flying another simulated battle and watch them lay waste to the 'enemy' with no moral issues whatsoever.
I realise that RAM and disk is cheap these days, but theres no way in hell i'm going to bother with a 60MB file manager - 500MB for all components??
That makes MS Office look slim and trim.
Personally, i run linux on several machines, none of them on the cutting edge of technology. It sounds like Eazel will run like a dog on pretty much all of them.
I do a bit of coding myself, and i have to wonder just how you manage to write a piece of software that occupies 60-100MB of disk space, when all it does is show you a view of the files that are on your machine.
Am i the only one who doesn't run linux on a 600Mhz+ PC with half a gig of RAM and a 40+ GB Hard disk?