The internet is not about fault-tolerance and ability to 'survive nuclear attack' for anybody who isn't an ISP, large corporation or government department.
That idea went out the window with the introduction of CIDR.
There were good reasons for this, primarily the unmanageable growth of route-tables.
IPV6 will never see the light of day because if IPV4 can't be routed economically out to the edge of the network, then increasing the address space by a large factor will not help matters.
There is no way around this except by removing CIDR for a decent proportion of the internet, but route-tables will of course baloon hugely.
So, while 'the people' want to be able to multihome etc. 'the backbones' don't want to have to scale up their routing capacity by a large factor.
Which all boils down to the conclusion that the powers-that-be on the internet have decreed 'thou shalt not multihome unless thy pockets are extremely deep and thou has at least a/16'
This is unfortunately the way it is, and won't change under the current 'internet regime'.
Those tinted windows that can be dialed from transparent to black depending on light level or user preference.
Cellphones that can dynamically change the colour of their LCD screens depending on user preference or caller identity.
I'm sure there are an assload of art installations e.g. lighted fountains that dynamically change colour in response to external stimuli.
There have been t-shirts and toys available for years that change colour when heated/cooled.
Stick-on LCD fishtank thermometers dynamically change colour depending on the temperature of the water.
'Electronic Ink' where small bicoloured spheres embedded in a matrix are rotated by application of a charge to dynamically change the appearance of a surface.
OELD (Organic Electroluminescent Displays) where light-emitting organic compounds in a matrix are used to dynamically change colour on a surface.
I remember reading an article about auto-manufacturers using 'smart paint' that would enable you to dynamically change the colour of your car at will.
In short, there are many different methods for dynamically changing the colour of a surface, used for years in many different industries, and as such, this patent is rubbish.
Since everyone seems to see a desparate lack of usability in OSS applications, start doing something about it.
Write down your issues, post them on the web, submit them to the project developers at the very least.
Write a paper on how you think a computing environment should work.
Write an article to educate developers on the issues you consider most lacking in current software.
Find the packages you consider hard to use and fix the bugs.
Write your own application that works 'correctly' according to your concepts of usability and show the world how it's done.
If you won't/can't do any of that, then you've got no business complaining about usability issues - the developers are just supposed to read your mind to figure out what you want?
Linux/OSS will hit the desktop when the work (usability work included) required to satisfy a good percentage of desktop users is done, and whining on slashdot about how much work there is to do isn't going to get it done any faster.
Obviously there is an itch here, but most of the posters are just too stupid, ignorant and/or lazy to even try and scratch it.
Obviously there were good reasons to introduce CIDR (Classless Inter Domain Routing) and concentrate the ability to route around problems to the 'core' of the internet, but this is the price you pay.
The only way real redundancy and fault-tolerance will be restored is to introduce IPV6 - or some other means to widen the availablity of routable IPV4 space, and remove the barriers currently in place for people to partipate in the 'routable' internet.
Of course with this comes lack of control for MPAA/RIAA/Governments, increased freedom for independent operators, and also increased complexity and route-table storage requirements for all.
However, if the internet is to withstand prolonged and/or distributed attack, then the ability to route effectively will have to be extended further toward the edge of the net than it currently is.
Ah, that would be because Apples 'supercomputer on the desktop' marketing drivel was just that.
Hell, the Sony Playstation 2 was subject to export restrictions because it was 'too powerful', which was driven by/followed with the requisite marketing drivel, but you don't see and PS2 clusters in the 'Worlds fastest supercomputer' list either.
It has been a long time since Apple PPC was competitive in terms of price/performance with x86s. Of course thats not the only reason to buy a computer, i don't want to get the apple-zealots panties in a bunch.
It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier, since that happened way back with the P3/Athlon 600-800, hardly cutting edge chips.
Hell, a 600Mhz Alpha had GFLOP performance years before either the G4 or the x86s.
The PPC has a nice vector processing unit (Altivec), which could make it a good choice in some situations, but given the premium you pay for Beowulf nodes (Xserves?) from Apple, you will, in general, get a lot more bang for the buck from x86.
To me, OpenGL lacks really good object-picking algorithms, has problems with coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons, for example), and poor typography support.
Personally, i would like to see OpenGL move towards being more suitable for general purpose displays, which would allow easier implementation of things like Apple's OpenGL accelerated windowing system.
I know that programmable pixel shaders etc. are useful, but why does OpenGL not specify things like raytraced and radiosity lighting models, along with voxel primitives, and features for window and page oriented output of arbitary geometry (including support for true curves/surfaces etc.) ala Postscript
Many of these things can be implemented at a low level by pixelshaders, but whats the point of a high-level API that simply exposes a lower-level API?
Even though these things can't easily be accelerated by current consumer hardware, neither could gouraud-shaded polygons a few years back.
OpenGL does not seem to be moving forward in defining new and easy ways to define computer imagery, and is chasing the tail of DirectX, seemingly to avoid losing relevance as a gaming platform.
This, to me, is not the right approach - I don't want to see OpenGL discarded by games programmers, but I also want to see OpenGL become a more powerful API across-the-board that makes my life as graphics programmer easier, not harder.
I have seen way more of that spinning beachball than i ever want to, find it difficult to use the finder because it's so slow with folders that contain more than 100 items, and am generally unimpressed with the the sluggish way the GUI behaves.
Practically any Pentium 2+ class Linux or Windows machine with 128MB of RAM or more would run circles around this machine for surfing the web/managing files/folders etc.
Mozilla is so slow under OS X that i find it a much nicer experience browsing the web via mozilla running on an x86 machine under X-Windows.
Really, the Aqua GUI is not very attractive after the first 2 'woo gee whiz' days, and quickly becomes just plain annoying.
I hate the animated window effects, and the general sluggishness of the whole desktop, along with the way that i tend to accumulate about 20 seemingly identical whitish scaled-down window icons in the dock, which makes it hard to identify which window i want to switch to.
I thought Apple would have preserved the kind of slickness and usability i had come to expect from my (admittedly minimal) use of OS9, but I was wrong. I won't be buying another Mac, at least not to run OS X on.
OS X has it's good points, but it has (in my opinion) an unacceptably slow GUI, and deserves all the bashing it gets for it.
please, what we want is a 350bhp (stock) 3 or 4 rotor engine that has potential for a reliable 600bhp with bolt-on modifications to exhaust, intake and turbos, that comes stock with a programmable ECU and can be easily mounted in any RX sports car from the RX-2 to the 2001 RX-7.
So what if the combustion chamber is not optimally shaped for low-RPM running and that it burns gas at a frightening rate, as long as it pulls 11 second quarters stock, breaks every exhaust-noise regulation in the book and spews flames out it's tailpipes every time you let off the gas.
In fact, all our web-based energy visualisation products were developed and run on Linux, and the 3D energy visualisation work I do on this in my spare time:
The devices we use to interface ethernet with meters are too lightweight to run linux, they simply provide a TCP-IP -> serial connection for the meter's RS-232/422 interface and an ethernet port for connection to a LAN.
Many meters only support pulse-output, which does require a device such as this to count pulses, convert them to kWh or other relevant measurement, buffer these readings for some period and provide a interface for this data to be extracted, which is what this device is.
It is nice to see multiple inputs for temperature etc, as energy consumption data alone often does not provide enough of a picture to make decisions that can really cut your energy peaks or identify areas of inefficiency.
Linux already has good tools for modelling, rendering, and reasonable tools for output.
Also, trying to reinvent the wheel is a waste of time, there are a jillion different frameworks, engines, modellers, renderers out there for Linux, none of them complete enough to produce professional, day to day 3D animation work.
Blender is the most complete of the free packages, and it really is an extremely good piece of software, despite the annoying lack of 'Undo'.
Blender has some good animation facilities, but I really think it would be worthwhile to write a separate module that specialises in character animation. This would be a godsend to people who are trying to do complex animation with Linux, without paying for Maya etc.
I suggest, you take Blender and build a module into/around Blender's workflow to bring professional-level character animation tools to Linux. Use Blender as a modeller, as a 3D format, and a scene-integration tool, and build us a set of professional non-linear character animation tools, that integrates well with the best (soon-to-be) open-source 3D package in the world.
Look at Project:Messiah, a character-animation addon for Lightwave3D for a good example of how a great character animation tool works, and also at Hash's Animation Master, as those tools are really, really good too.
This would fill an existing hole in the toolset available on Linux, reuse work already done by the community, stand a better chance of getting to a usable stage quickly, and probably give you a chance to think about doing a 'ground-up-rebuild' from the perpspective of the most 'demanding' end users of your software - the character animators.
With Blender, you also have a huge community of artists who will thoroughly test your package, and provide suggestions and help to make it the best it can be.
I have monitors capable of dealing with S-Video, RGB and composite at home, and i can say that my PS2 using RGB (through a cheapo PS1 SCART cable) gives me a picture so good people literally don't believe it is a console generating it.
The PS1 of course also looks great through RGB.
S-Video is a minor improvement over composite video, but it still doesn't hold up when compared to RGB input.
However, most people are stuck with composite, and a major improvement in signal quality can be had simply by using a good quality 75 ohm video cable to run composite video across.
I had the good fortune to buy an Iomega Buz card some years ago, and found it came with a short high-quality 75ohm coax video cable. Simply using this interconnect instead of the skinny little video cable provided by most consumer video equipment suppliers gives a major (and i do mean major) increase in visual quality. this was an eye-opener for me, and ever since then I have made my own composite video cables out of cheap 75 ohm coax (NZ$2 per meter retail), with excellent results.
Especially improved is the composite output of one of my cheap scan converters for displaying VGA on a TV.
Unfortunately, this is not really an option on the PS2/later PS1s/Dreamcast - though my old 1000-series PS1 has 'standard' RCA connectors on the back (dunno about the X-Box, i don't own one) since they use a proprietary connector on the end of crappy, low-quality composite cables.
W/regard to the superiority of 'Monster' or similar 'branded' cables, I believe this is a total crock, and anyone who would try and claim 'higher quality' on things like digital interconnects, or claim there is some benefit in 'directional' speaker cables etc. is clearly a liar, and those hi-fi magazine reviewer clowns who claim they can hear a 'day and night difference' between various cables and digital (digital!) interconnects are liars too.
Using a cable with a signal-loss and power-handling rating that matches your application will always give you an improvement in quality over a cable that doesn't, however you don't need to pay a massive premium for the privilege of using such a cable.
These card use up to about 4MB - more like 2MB or less for 16-bit modes, for the framebuffer, and the rest is used solely for storing textures.
If you do not use OpenGL/Direct3D, then any RAM above, say 8MB (you may be doing dual or triple-head at 1600x1200 32bit or more), is completely useless.
The extra bandwith on the cards is also useless, as only 3D operations are accelerated across the super-fast busses built into these cards.
Everything else, including 2D blits in the majority of available OpenGL/Direct3D drivers are handled by the host CPU and involve reading from system RAM and passing that data across the AGP bus.
I am not aware of many (any?) games that can take advantage of more than 64MB of texture RAM, and while games that *may* take advantage of >64MB are on the horizon, the big news for games is vertex/pixel shaders, rather than the ability to texture map hundreds of megabytes of pixel data per frame.
There are applications that will benefit from the availablity of 128MB or more texture RAM, but these are typically custom-written scientific visualisation apps, or conceivably you could use 128MB of textures to do realtime previews in your lightwave/3DS Max/Maya/Blender scenes.
However, the actual utility of this RAM for most desktop users and even gamers is rather questionable. I don't doubt that the Radeon 9700 and the NVidia Ti4600 are fast cards, but they still rely heavily on the host CPU to achieve their stellar performance, as opposed to some of the professional cards which provide much more capable geometry engines and accelerate practically all of the openGL pipeline, as opposed to the consumer cards which are focussed mostly on texturing and fillrate optimization, ideal form games but not necessarily optimal for other forms of 3D activity.
That being said, the pace of development from Intel and AMD have made it more difficult to justify using dedicated hardware for these seteps, as a 2GHz Athlon will probably out-light-and-transform dedicated OpenGL hardware, which is much more costly and low-volume to produce.
The SGI O2 is a good axample of a machine that simply uses system memory to store textures, and while the SGI's graphics system is not in the same class as some of the more modern 3D boards from NVidia and 3DLabs, it is certainly sufficient to do impressive texture-mapping demos. This is really not an option on the current x86 architectures, but is a useful example of the 'other' way to handle texture memory, as it allows the user of the system to make maximum use of the resources available - i.e. when 3D graphics are not used, the 'texture memory' is available to the apps, and vice-versa.
I think it is amazing that we now have consumer cards that contain more texture memory than was typically available as system RAM in a mid-range 3D workstation a few years ago, but the unfortunate thing is that very, very few people are able to put those capabilities to real use with the current crop of system architectures, applications and games available
Well, it would be like someone finding a Linux distro 2500 years from now - and wondering how such an advanced piece of technology could exist when every other OS 'artifact' unearthed until that date had been a buggy, crash-prone piece of shit with a 'Windows' label on it. 'Why, this technology shouldn't have existed until Microsoft released the service pack that finally secured Windows 4000 in 4005!'
Hell, the greek government of the time probably discovered these guys were sailing to the capital with a piece of technology so advanced it boggled the mind - so they rammed the ship and sent it to the bottom of the ocean because it threatened the establishment and their inaccurate, but cheap and labour-intensive methods of calculating planetary motions for the purposes of tax calculations.
My 'TV' is a 27" Sony PVM video monitor, and while it is not a truly top-end display, it produces a much better image than any consumer TV i have seen, and it shows up the inadequacy of the picture transmitted through the cable here in NZ rather obviously. The snow is extremely obvious on practically all the channels they carry.
My other big screen, a 29" Mitsubishi VGA monitor (also has composite/S-Video input) has major problems syncing properly to the signal produced by the cable box, (has no trouble with Playstation/VCR/DVD signal)which makes me wonder just how bad the signal these clowns are broadcasting is.
Connecting my PS2 to the Sony via the RGB SCART connector shows me what a sharp, beautiful picture my 'low-tech, analog' display is capable of, but if the cable companies apply the same production quality to their HDTV signals that they do to their current 'low-fi' broadcasts, theres just no point in wasting the money on an HDTV-capable set.
The phone companies have found that, despite SMS using no actual bandwidth on their networks, that it is a popular service, and is hence worth a lot of money.
Might as well forget 'free', the days of free SMS via MTN etc. are pretty much over.
Here in New Zealand, we pay 10-20c per SMS message, typically 20c per message unless you have some volume deal with a telco.
I use a Siemens M20 modem to handle sending and receiving SMS messages as part of my system monitoring, and it is not very expensive, due to the low volume. I use the excellent SMS-Tools package (a search on freshmeat will find this) and the system invokes a perl script upon sending or receipt of an SMS, making it extremely easy to do just about anything I want - i.e. SMS-to-email/web gateway is trivial.
Open it up to the 'public' though, and costs would start to climb hugely. A volume of 1000 messages per day would cost me from $3000-$6000 a month here, which, for the actual bandwidth supplied is rather extortionate.
If Apple will never ship X11 with their machines, why does my IIfx happily run X11 apps on the Apple-supplied X Server integrated into A/UX?
Actually, i find it rather humorous that my IIfx circa 1990 features UNIX/Mac integration pretty-much on par with what is shipped with OS X.
In fact, the IIfx (40 Mhz 68030) boots about as fast and opens terminal windows and other apps way faster than my 550 Mhz TiBook (550 Mhz G4).
Obviously the machines are in different classes and the G4 is doing much more than the IIfx, but it constantly amazes me how much slower doing even the simple things (opening a terminal window with a bash prompt in it) has become.
In fact, i use the IIfx quite a lot as it provides a cheap and usable X-Terminal with more character and a much quieter fan than my assortment of x86 boxes.
Sure, A/UX was never a mainstream OS for Apple, but I wonder what might have been had Apple not abandoned the 'UNIX way' all those years ago.
If all it takes to make the practice of running apps via emulation or other workaround is a statement in the EULA saying 'This software is only for use with ', then won't this have dire effects for VMWare, WINE, Win4Lin, console emulators, etc. etc. ?
If it was that easy 'This software is only for use with a computer not more than 1 year old', 'This software is only for use with Intel CPUs' 'This software is only for use by people with yearly income over $60,000' 'This software is only for use by people we don't currently dislike', then the 'tech' world would be a very different place.
DVD region-coding is a similar issue - This disc is only for use in ,
However, you paid for the disc, you own it, and you should be able to play it anywhere you like. In many countries, DVD region coding is illegal and constitutes an illegal barrier to trade.
If I legally obtain a copy of iDVD, then i am within my rights to modify it, and use it in whatever way i see fit. Even if I break the law by doing this, it has nothing to do with Apple.
I am also well within my rights to reverse engineer and distribute a patch for iDVD, and as long as the patch itself, or the methods i used to create the patch infringes no copyright or patents.
I cannot distribute patched copies of iDVD, of course, but hacking iDVD to work with my own burner, and subsequently distributing a patch to allow others to do so with their iDVD is perfectly legal.
If Apple is not paying the license fees for software they are distributing that is capable of encoding DVDs, then they are the ones who are breaking the law, or quite obviously running the risk of breaking the law by doing this.
The idea that they can control who purchases or owns the software based on what hardware is currently in these peoples posession is laughable.
'You may not purchase this gasoline if you don't own ACME brand car'
'You may not own a DVD disc if you do not also own a licensed player'
4.0.4 is the only version I would really say is rock solid though, and we had puzzling cases where the CPU would go to 100% usage and stay there under earlier 4.0.x - this is under NT, so its probably bugs in the OS/Java implementation anyway. I never had this problem running Tomcat under Linux.
Overall, I have been very happy with Tomcat, whether integrated with Apache or standalone.
You might as well at least try Tomcat before a commercial Servlet engine, and you'll probably find there is simply no need to look anywhere else.
A law should be passed to allow active jamming of cellphone signals by property owners on their property, rather than outlawing the use of cellphones in certain areas.
Why? because then the law will not be twisted to new interpretations - i.e. carry a cellphone at a public protest, and be arrested for it.
Try and use a cellphone to call someone to report police brutality and get arrested for it.
Think facing a search when entering a public place to 'check for cellphones' is too far fetched? After the airport security measures introduced after 9/11, I don't think so.
Just carrying a cellphone could be grounds for detention or search.
Another option is for manufacturers to voluntarily support some type of audible-ring supression on receipt of a certain signal - this is, of course, a similar type of strategy to the RIAA/MPAA - control the rings by modifying the hardware, but in this case, I don't think too many people will be actively hacking such a system, especially since it does not preclude non-audible alerts.
However, I still think the blanket jamming approach is best all round, since the cellphone industry has not responded to the problem by now.
The only situation I could see where jamming would be undesirable is in some type of emergency situation where a cellphone call getting through might be important e.g. fire/earthquake etc.
All in all, I think if cellphones have become a significant enough annoyance, then the government should let the people take action if they so desire, instead of the police - This might result in the manufacturers coming up with a real solution to the problem instead of sweeping it under the rug and pretending that building deliberately obtrusive alert mechanisms is a good thing to do.
Now, this might lead to johnny/julie hacker building a mobile cellphone jammer to keep obnoxious cellphone users out of his/her personal space, so such a law would need to be written carefully - perhaps you would need to obtain a permit to jam cellphones in your area and pass inspections to ensure you weren't jamming too large an area. It could be part of the building codes etc.
However, I believe that giving people the right to supress transmissions on non-essential spectrum on their own property shouldn't be a big problem.
I belive up to 4 BT848s (maybe more) are supported in the bt848 drivers for linux out of the box.
Just put 4 capture cards in the machine, and grab from/dev/video0,/dev/video1,/dev/video2,/dev/video3.
This is probably the cheapest way to do it, as a simple BT848 capture card without tuner only costs about $NZ80 ($US30 or so)
Depending on the resolution at which you grab this will likely saturate your PCI bus and/or your disk controllers bus, so don't expect to be able to capture 4x full-PAL/NTSC to that old 2GB IDE drive.
However, 4x 320x240 should be easily manageable on a P2-class machine, I would think. If you want to compress th einput using something like FAME, then look at more CPU.
A 1GHz+ Athlon with 7200rpm/ATA-100+ IDE should work OK.
A 2GHz+ P4 with 10,000rpm SCSI RAID would handle more channels in realtime, possibly even uncompressed, though you better have a fat wallet to afford the disk drives.
When i tried to install SAP-DB (over a year ago, when it was first released), i got it installed, i think i had it running, but damnned if i could figure out how the hell to create a database on the thing.
So i threw it in the 'too-hard' basket, and went back to Postgres which i am quite happy with. I actually think it is still running on one of my boxes.
I'm sure progress has been made since then, but what would help out the most is a simple 'HOWTO' with instructions for setting up a database, from installation to database and table creation - to administration using CLI and GUI tools - to example setup with Perl/PHP/Java for access, as well as a set of guidelines for backing up, restoring and tuning the DB.
I think its great that SAP has made this step, and I think that SAP-DB looks great on paper, but, IMHO, deploying this database is a major struggle compared with MySQL or Postgres.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but since 1.1 was using native widgets as opposed to Java2D's 'lightweight' Java widgets, the 1.1 AWT is a lot faster than the Swing GUI, especially on 500Mhz machines.
Please don't bother telling me that everyone has a 1GHz machine now, as this is not true, and won't be for a good 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
The internet is not about fault-tolerance and ability to 'survive nuclear attack' for anybody who isn't an ISP, large corporation or government department.
/16'
That idea went out the window with the introduction of CIDR.
There were good reasons for this, primarily the unmanageable growth of route-tables.
IPV6 will never see the light of day because if IPV4 can't be routed economically out to the edge of the network, then increasing the address space by a large factor will not help matters.
There is no way around this except by removing CIDR for a decent proportion of the internet, but route-tables will of course baloon hugely.
So, while 'the people' want to be able to multihome etc. 'the backbones' don't want to have to scale up their routing capacity by a large factor.
Which all boils down to the conclusion that the powers-that-be on the internet have decreed 'thou shalt not multihome unless thy pockets are extremely deep and thou has at least a
This is unfortunately the way it is, and won't change under the current 'internet regime'.
Those tinted windows that can be dialed from transparent to black depending on light level or user preference.
Cellphones that can dynamically change the colour of their LCD screens depending on user preference or caller identity.
I'm sure there are an assload of art installations e.g. lighted fountains that dynamically change colour in response to external stimuli.
There have been t-shirts and toys available for years that change colour when heated/cooled.
Stick-on LCD fishtank thermometers dynamically change colour depending on the temperature of the water.
'Electronic Ink' where small bicoloured spheres embedded in a matrix are rotated by application of a charge to dynamically change the appearance of a surface.
OELD (Organic Electroluminescent Displays) where light-emitting organic compounds in a matrix are used to dynamically change colour on a surface.
I remember reading an article about auto-manufacturers using 'smart paint' that would enable you to dynamically change the colour of your car at will.
In short, there are many different methods for dynamically changing the colour of a surface, used for years in many different industries, and as such, this patent is rubbish.
Since everyone seems to see a desparate lack of usability in OSS applications, start doing something about it.
Write down your issues, post them on the web, submit them to the project developers at the very least.
Write a paper on how you think a computing environment should work.
Write an article to educate developers on the issues you consider most lacking in current software.
Find the packages you consider hard to use and fix the bugs.
Write your own application that works 'correctly' according to your concepts of usability and show the world how it's done.
If you won't/can't do any of that, then you've got no business complaining about usability issues - the developers are just supposed to read your mind to figure out what you want?
Linux/OSS will hit the desktop when the work (usability work included) required to satisfy a good percentage of desktop users is done, and whining on slashdot about how much work there is to do isn't going to get it done any faster.
Obviously there is an itch here, but most of the posters are just too stupid, ignorant and/or lazy to even try and scratch it.
Obviously there were good reasons to introduce CIDR (Classless Inter Domain Routing) and concentrate the ability to route around problems to the 'core' of the internet, but this is the price you pay.
The only way real redundancy and fault-tolerance will be restored is to introduce IPV6 - or some other means to widen the availablity of routable IPV4 space, and remove the barriers currently in place for people to partipate in the 'routable' internet.
Of course with this comes lack of control for MPAA/RIAA/Governments, increased freedom for independent operators, and also increased complexity and route-table storage requirements for all.
However, if the internet is to withstand prolonged and/or distributed attack, then the ability to route effectively will have to be extended further toward the edge of the net than it currently is.
Ah, that would be because Apples 'supercomputer on the desktop' marketing drivel was just that.
Hell, the Sony Playstation 2 was subject to export restrictions because it was 'too powerful', which was driven by/followed with the requisite marketing drivel, but you don't see and PS2 clusters in the 'Worlds fastest supercomputer' list either.
It has been a long time since Apple PPC was competitive in terms of price/performance with x86s. Of course thats not the only reason to buy a computer, i don't want to get the apple-zealots panties in a bunch.
It's just that Intel/AMD didn't make a song and dance about breaking the GFLOP barrier, since that happened way back with the P3/Athlon 600-800, hardly cutting edge chips.
Hell, a 600Mhz Alpha had GFLOP performance years before either the G4 or the x86s.
The PPC has a nice vector processing unit (Altivec), which could make it a good choice in some situations, but given the premium you pay for Beowulf nodes (Xserves?) from Apple, you will, in general, get a lot more bang for the buck from x86.
Where are the new 'Pro' features.
To me, OpenGL lacks really good object-picking algorithms, has problems with coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons, for example), and poor typography support.
Personally, i would like to see OpenGL move towards being more suitable for general purpose displays, which would allow easier implementation of things like Apple's OpenGL accelerated windowing system.
I know that programmable pixel shaders etc. are useful, but why does OpenGL not specify things like raytraced and radiosity lighting models, along with voxel primitives, and features for window and page oriented output of arbitary geometry (including support for true curves/surfaces etc.) ala Postscript
Many of these things can be implemented at a low level by pixelshaders, but whats the point of a high-level API that simply exposes a lower-level API?
Even though these things can't easily be accelerated by current consumer hardware, neither could gouraud-shaded polygons a few years back.
OpenGL does not seem to be moving forward in defining new and easy ways to define computer imagery, and is chasing the tail of DirectX, seemingly to avoid losing relevance as a gaming platform.
This, to me, is not the right approach - I don't want to see OpenGL discarded by games programmers, but I also want to see OpenGL become a more powerful API across-the-board that makes my life as graphics programmer easier, not harder.
Yes, OS 10.1.5 on a PB550MHz w/384MB RAM is slow.
I have seen way more of that spinning beachball than i ever want to, find it difficult to use the finder because it's so slow with folders that contain more than 100 items, and am generally unimpressed with the the sluggish way the GUI behaves.
Practically any Pentium 2+ class Linux or Windows machine with 128MB of RAM or more would run circles around this machine for surfing the web/managing files/folders etc.
Mozilla is so slow under OS X that i find it a much nicer experience browsing the web via mozilla running on an x86 machine under X-Windows.
Really, the Aqua GUI is not very attractive after the first 2 'woo gee whiz' days, and quickly becomes just plain annoying.
I hate the animated window effects, and the general sluggishness of the whole desktop, along with the way that i tend to accumulate about 20 seemingly identical whitish scaled-down window icons in the dock, which makes it hard to identify which window i want to switch to.
I thought Apple would have preserved the kind of slickness and usability i had come to expect from my (admittedly minimal) use of OS9, but I was wrong. I won't be buying another Mac, at least not to run OS X on.
OS X has it's good points, but it has (in my opinion) an unacceptably slow GUI, and deserves all the bashing it gets for it.
100bhp high-efficiency wankel?
please, what we want is a 350bhp (stock) 3 or 4 rotor engine that has potential for a reliable 600bhp with bolt-on modifications to exhaust, intake and turbos, that comes stock with a programmable ECU and can be easily mounted in any RX sports car from the RX-2 to the 2001 RX-7.
So what if the combustion chamber is not optimally shaped for low-RPM running and that it burns gas at a frightening rate, as long as it pulls 11 second quarters stock, breaks every exhaust-noise regulation in the book and spews flames out it's tailpipes every time you let off the gas.
And I use Linux all the time.
In fact, all our web-based energy visualisation products were developed and run on Linux, and the 3D energy visualisation work I do on this in my spare time:
screenshot
is also developed and run on Linux.
The devices we use to interface ethernet with meters are too lightweight to run linux, they simply provide a TCP-IP -> serial connection for the meter's RS-232/422 interface and an ethernet port for connection to a LAN.
Many meters only support pulse-output, which does require a device such as this to count pulses, convert them to kWh or other relevant measurement, buffer these readings for some period and provide a interface for this data to be extracted, which is what this device is.
It is nice to see multiple inputs for temperature etc, as energy consumption data alone often does not provide enough of a picture to make decisions that can really cut your energy peaks or identify areas of inefficiency.
Linux already has good tools for modelling, rendering, and reasonable tools for output.
Also, trying to reinvent the wheel is a waste of time, there are a jillion different frameworks, engines, modellers, renderers out there for Linux, none of them complete enough to produce professional, day to day 3D animation work.
Blender is the most complete of the free packages, and it really is an extremely good piece of software, despite the annoying lack of 'Undo'.
Blender has some good animation facilities, but I really think it would be worthwhile to write a separate module that specialises in character animation. This would be a godsend to people who are trying to do complex animation with Linux, without paying for Maya etc.
I suggest, you take Blender and build a module into/around Blender's workflow to bring professional-level character animation tools to Linux. Use Blender as a modeller, as a 3D format, and a scene-integration tool, and build us a set of professional non-linear character animation tools, that integrates well with the best (soon-to-be) open-source 3D package in the world.
Look at Project:Messiah, a character-animation addon for Lightwave3D for a good example of how a great character animation tool works, and also at Hash's Animation Master, as those tools are really, really good too.
This would fill an existing hole in the toolset available on Linux, reuse work already done by the community, stand a better chance of getting to a usable stage quickly, and probably give you a chance to think about doing a 'ground-up-rebuild' from the perpspective of the most 'demanding' end users of your software - the character animators.
With Blender, you also have a huge community of artists who will thoroughly test your package, and provide suggestions and help to make it the best it can be.
I have monitors capable of dealing with S-Video, RGB and composite at home, and i can say that my PS2 using RGB (through a cheapo PS1 SCART cable) gives me a picture so good people literally don't believe it is a console generating it.
The PS1 of course also looks great through RGB.
S-Video is a minor improvement over composite video, but it still doesn't hold up when compared to RGB input.
However, most people are stuck with composite, and a major improvement in signal quality can be had simply by using a good quality 75 ohm video cable to run composite video across.
I had the good fortune to buy an Iomega Buz card some years ago, and found it came with a short high-quality 75ohm coax video cable. Simply using this interconnect instead of the skinny little video cable provided by most consumer video equipment suppliers gives a major (and i do mean major) increase in visual quality. this was an eye-opener for me, and ever since then I have made my own composite video cables out of cheap 75 ohm coax (NZ$2 per meter retail), with excellent results.
Especially improved is the composite output of one of my cheap scan converters for displaying VGA on a TV.
Unfortunately, this is not really an option on the PS2/later PS1s/Dreamcast - though my old 1000-series PS1 has 'standard' RCA connectors on the back (dunno about the X-Box, i don't own one) since they use a proprietary connector on the end of crappy, low-quality composite cables.
W/regard to the superiority of 'Monster' or similar 'branded' cables, I believe this is a total crock, and anyone who would try and claim 'higher quality' on things like digital interconnects, or claim there is some benefit in 'directional' speaker cables etc. is clearly a liar, and those hi-fi magazine reviewer clowns who claim they can hear a 'day and night difference' between various cables and digital (digital!) interconnects are liars too.
Using a cable with a signal-loss and power-handling rating that matches your application will always give you an improvement in quality over a cable that doesn't, however you don't need to pay a massive premium for the privilege of using such a cable.
I don't see how this can be true, as rdesktop (RDP client) works happily on Linux and MacOS X, neither of which implement any of the Win32 API.
So RDP must be bitmap-based, at least to a large degree. rdesktop runs just as fast, if not faster than the windows RDP clients.
VNC and X are slow by comparison to RDP, though X-to-X TightVNC runs at a comparable speed.
I don't really see why this is the case, and would be interested to know how RDP manages to outperform VNC so obviously.
These card use up to about 4MB - more like 2MB or less for 16-bit modes, for the framebuffer, and the rest is used solely for storing textures.
If you do not use OpenGL/Direct3D, then any RAM above, say 8MB (you may be doing dual or triple-head at 1600x1200 32bit or more), is completely useless.
The extra bandwith on the cards is also useless, as only 3D operations are accelerated across the super-fast busses built into these cards.
Everything else, including 2D blits in the majority of available OpenGL/Direct3D drivers are handled by the host CPU and involve reading from system RAM and passing that data across the AGP bus.
I am not aware of many (any?) games that can take advantage of more than 64MB of texture RAM, and while games that *may* take advantage of >64MB are on the horizon, the big news for games is vertex/pixel shaders, rather than the ability to texture map hundreds of megabytes of pixel data per frame.
There are applications that will benefit from the availablity of 128MB or more texture RAM, but these are typically custom-written scientific visualisation apps, or conceivably you could use 128MB of textures to do realtime previews in your lightwave/3DS Max/Maya/Blender scenes.
However, the actual utility of this RAM for most desktop users and even gamers is rather questionable. I don't doubt that the Radeon 9700 and the NVidia Ti4600 are fast cards, but they still rely heavily on the host CPU to achieve their stellar performance, as opposed to some of the professional cards which provide much more capable geometry engines and accelerate practically all of the openGL pipeline, as opposed to the consumer cards which are focussed mostly on texturing and fillrate optimization, ideal form games but not necessarily optimal for other forms of 3D activity.
That being said, the pace of development from Intel and AMD have made it more difficult to justify using dedicated hardware for these seteps, as a 2GHz Athlon will probably out-light-and-transform dedicated OpenGL hardware, which is much more costly and low-volume to produce.
The SGI O2 is a good axample of a machine that simply uses system memory to store textures, and while the SGI's graphics system is not in the same class as some of the more modern 3D boards from NVidia and 3DLabs, it is certainly sufficient to do impressive texture-mapping demos. This is really not an option on the current x86 architectures, but is a useful example of the 'other' way to handle texture memory, as it allows the user of the system to make maximum use of the resources available - i.e. when 3D graphics are not used, the 'texture memory' is available to the apps, and vice-versa.
I think it is amazing that we now have consumer cards that contain more texture memory than was typically available as system RAM in a mid-range 3D workstation a few years ago, but the unfortunate thing is that very, very few people are able to put those capabilities to real use with the current crop of system architectures, applications and games available
Well, it would be like someone finding a Linux distro 2500 years from now - and wondering how such an advanced piece of technology could exist when every other OS 'artifact' unearthed until that date had been a buggy, crash-prone piece of shit with a 'Windows' label on it. 'Why, this technology shouldn't have existed until Microsoft released the service pack that finally secured Windows 4000 in 4005!'
Hell, the greek government of the time probably discovered these guys were sailing to the capital with a piece of technology so advanced it boggled the mind - so they rammed the ship and sent it to the bottom of the ocean because it threatened the establishment and their inaccurate, but cheap and labour-intensive methods of calculating planetary motions for the purposes of tax calculations.
My 'TV' is a 27" Sony PVM video monitor, and while it is not a truly top-end display, it produces a much better image than any consumer TV i have seen, and it shows up the inadequacy of the picture transmitted through the cable here in NZ rather obviously. The snow is extremely obvious on practically all the channels they carry.
My other big screen, a 29" Mitsubishi VGA monitor (also has composite/S-Video input) has major problems syncing properly to the signal produced by the cable box, (has no trouble with Playstation/VCR/DVD signal)which makes me wonder just how bad the signal these clowns are broadcasting is.
Connecting my PS2 to the Sony via the RGB SCART connector shows me what a sharp, beautiful picture my 'low-tech, analog' display is capable of, but if the cable companies apply the same production quality to their HDTV signals that they do to their current 'low-fi' broadcasts, theres just no point in wasting the money on an HDTV-capable set.
Bruce seems to be the kind of guy who is prepared to stand up for his principles, and the principles embodied in his work on the Open Source movement.
I'm sure many of us would not be prepared to quit our day-jobs because our employers were infringing on our ability to advocate our beliefs.
Many thanks Bruce, for not compromising your position and selling out to HP, and I hope Sincere Choice is well-recieved the world over.
The phone companies have found that, despite SMS using no actual bandwidth on their networks, that it is a popular service, and is hence worth a lot of money.
Might as well forget 'free', the days of free SMS via MTN etc. are pretty much over.
Here in New Zealand, we pay 10-20c per SMS message, typically 20c per message unless you have some volume deal with a telco.
I use a Siemens M20 modem to handle sending and receiving SMS messages as part of my system monitoring, and it is not very expensive, due to the low volume. I use the excellent SMS-Tools package (a search on freshmeat will find this) and the system invokes a perl script upon sending or receipt of an SMS, making it extremely easy to do just about anything I want - i.e. SMS-to-email/web gateway is trivial.
Open it up to the 'public' though, and costs would start to climb hugely. A volume of 1000 messages per day would cost me from $3000-$6000 a month here, which, for the actual bandwidth supplied is rather extortionate.
If Apple will never ship X11 with their machines, why does my IIfx happily run X11 apps on the Apple-supplied X Server integrated into A/UX?
Actually, i find it rather humorous that my IIfx circa 1990 features UNIX/Mac integration pretty-much on par with what is shipped with OS X.
In fact, the IIfx (40 Mhz 68030) boots about as fast and opens terminal windows and other apps way faster than my 550 Mhz TiBook (550 Mhz G4).
Obviously the machines are in different classes and the G4 is doing much more than the IIfx, but it constantly amazes me how much slower doing even the simple things (opening a terminal window with a bash prompt in it) has become.
In fact, i use the IIfx quite a lot as it provides a cheap and usable X-Terminal with more character and a much quieter fan than my assortment of x86 boxes.
Sure, A/UX was never a mainstream OS for Apple, but I wonder what might have been had Apple not abandoned the 'UNIX way' all those years ago.
If all it takes to make the practice of running apps via emulation or other workaround is a statement in the EULA saying 'This software is only for use with ', then won't this have dire effects for VMWare, WINE, Win4Lin, console emulators, etc. etc. ?
If it was that easy 'This software is only for use with a computer not more than 1 year old', 'This software is only for use with Intel CPUs' 'This software is only for use by people with yearly income over $60,000' 'This software is only for use by people we don't currently dislike', then the 'tech' world would be a very different place.
DVD region-coding is a similar issue - This disc is only for use in ,
However, you paid for the disc, you own it, and you should be able to play it anywhere you like. In many countries, DVD region coding is illegal and constitutes an illegal barrier to trade.
If I legally obtain a copy of iDVD, then i am within my rights to modify it, and use it in whatever way i see fit. Even if I break the law by doing this, it has nothing to do with Apple.
I am also well within my rights to reverse engineer and distribute a patch for iDVD, and as long as the patch itself, or the methods i used to create the patch infringes no copyright or patents.
I cannot distribute patched copies of iDVD, of course, but hacking iDVD to work with my own burner, and subsequently distributing a patch to allow others to do so with their iDVD is perfectly legal.
If Apple is not paying the license fees for software they are distributing that is capable of encoding DVDs, then they are the ones who are breaking the law, or quite obviously running the risk of breaking the law by doing this.
The idea that they can control who purchases or owns the software based on what hardware is currently in these peoples posession is laughable.
'You may not purchase this gasoline if you don't own ACME brand car'
'You may not own a DVD disc if you do not also own a licensed player'
We have used Tomcat in production since v. 3.2
4.0.4 is the only version I would really say is rock solid though, and we had puzzling cases where the CPU would go to 100% usage and stay there under earlier 4.0.x - this is under NT, so its probably bugs in the OS/Java implementation anyway. I never had this problem running Tomcat under Linux.
Overall, I have been very happy with Tomcat, whether integrated with Apache or standalone.
You might as well at least try Tomcat before a commercial Servlet engine, and you'll probably find there is simply no need to look anywhere else.
Jamming the cellphones while in the theatre is.
A law should be passed to allow active jamming of cellphone signals by property owners on their property, rather than outlawing the use of cellphones in certain areas.
Why? because then the law will not be twisted to new interpretations - i.e. carry a cellphone at a public protest, and be arrested for it.
Try and use a cellphone to call someone to report police brutality and get arrested for it.
Think facing a search when entering a public place to 'check for cellphones' is too far fetched? After the airport security measures introduced after 9/11, I don't think so.
Just carrying a cellphone could be grounds for detention or search.
Another option is for manufacturers to voluntarily support some type of audible-ring supression on receipt of a certain signal - this is, of course, a similar type of strategy to the RIAA/MPAA - control the rings by modifying the hardware, but in this case, I don't think too many people will be actively hacking such a system, especially since it does not preclude non-audible alerts.
However, I still think the blanket jamming approach is best all round, since the cellphone industry has not responded to the problem by now.
The only situation I could see where jamming would be undesirable is in some type of emergency situation where a cellphone call getting through might be important e.g. fire/earthquake etc.
All in all, I think if cellphones have become a significant enough annoyance, then the government should let the people take action if they so desire, instead of the police - This might result in the manufacturers coming up with a real solution to the problem instead of sweeping it under the rug and pretending that building deliberately obtrusive alert mechanisms is a good thing to do.
Now, this might lead to johnny/julie hacker building a mobile cellphone jammer to keep obnoxious cellphone users out of his/her personal space, so such a law would need to be written carefully - perhaps you would need to obtain a permit to jam cellphones in your area and pass inspections to ensure you weren't jamming too large an area. It could be part of the building codes etc.
However, I believe that giving people the right to supress transmissions on non-essential spectrum on their own property shouldn't be a big problem.
Anyone else think along these lines?
Since the Internet2's huge amount of available bandwidth is surely grounds for a contributory copyright infringment case.
Might as well nip these new developments in piracy-enabling technologies in the bud.
I belive up to 4 BT848s (maybe more) are supported in the bt848 drivers for linux out of the box.
/dev/video0, /dev/video1, /dev/video2,/dev/video3.
Just put 4 capture cards in the machine, and grab from
This is probably the cheapest way to do it, as a simple BT848 capture card without tuner only costs about $NZ80 ($US30 or so)
Depending on the resolution at which you grab this will likely saturate your PCI bus and/or your disk controllers bus, so don't expect to be able to capture 4x full-PAL/NTSC to that old 2GB IDE drive.
However, 4x 320x240 should be easily manageable on a P2-class machine, I would think. If you want to compress th einput using something like FAME, then look at more CPU.
A 1GHz+ Athlon with 7200rpm/ATA-100+ IDE should work OK.
A 2GHz+ P4 with 10,000rpm SCSI RAID would handle more channels in realtime, possibly even uncompressed, though you better have a fat wallet to afford the disk drives.
When i tried to install SAP-DB (over a year ago, when it was first released), i got it installed, i think i had it running, but damnned if i could figure out how the hell to create a database on the thing.
So i threw it in the 'too-hard' basket, and went back to Postgres which i am quite happy with. I actually think it is still running on one of my boxes.
I'm sure progress has been made since then, but what would help out the most is a simple 'HOWTO' with instructions for setting up a database, from installation to database and table creation - to administration using CLI and GUI tools - to example setup with Perl/PHP/Java for access, as well as a set of guidelines for backing up, restoring and tuning the DB.
I think its great that SAP has made this step, and I think that SAP-DB looks great on paper, but, IMHO, deploying this database is a major struggle compared with MySQL or Postgres.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but since 1.1 was using native widgets as opposed to Java2D's 'lightweight' Java widgets, the 1.1 AWT is a lot faster than the Swing GUI, especially on 500Mhz machines.
Please don't bother telling me that everyone has a 1GHz machine now, as this is not true, and won't be for a good 5 years.