The only thing i have that i seen that would truly replace floppies are the 'memory cards' or flash-based USB Mass Storage devices, but there really needs to be a method to boot off these things.
Imagine, your next linux distro comes with a cute little 'tux' figure with a USB connector poking out his ass.
Plug this in to your machine, and reboot, the little LEDs in tux's eyes flash to indicate activity, and the installer runs (Tux has 8-256MB of flash on board, giving you all the modules to support your hardware, along with everything you need to rescue/recover/setup your new Linux box.
My 8MB USB key has saved me several times, since it allows me to transfer files from Windows to my Mac to my Linux boxes without the need for a network or any common hardware (except working USB) among them. The drivers are supported by the Linux kernel, WinME/2K/XP and OS X natively, so no drivers to load.
These things are still a little expensive (my 8MB cost me $NZ100 about a year ago), but i imagine these devices would be dirt-cheap in volume.
I would be rather surprised if those screenshots represented actual, realtime-rendered scenes.
They look like they have been lifted directly off the ExLuna BMRT (kudos to Larry Gritz for a great renderer) gallery page.
It may be that these are NV30 realtime scenes, with the BMRT Renderman shaders used in the BMRT renders ported to Cg, but it is also possible they are simply the BMRT-rendered examples, given to show what is possible using a shader-based rendering architecture.
Anybody have any more info on whether these examples are actual realtime DirectX/OpenGL scenes?
Why did you ever think HP would let you 'get away with this', Bruce?
Its quite clear that your masters will never allow you to take such anti-establishment actions while in their employ.
Its quite clear that corporate america and Open Source software / personal freedom just don't mix, and I think your credibility as an advocate of either principle just took a big nosedive.
How long before you'll be rolled out on stage to espouse the benefits to the consumer of the closed-source DRM/DMCA-enforcement kernel modules in HP-Linux?
One of my biggest irritations with Blender has been the uselessness of the Python API for interactive modelling tools.
I want to write my own modelling plugins to make specific tasks in blender (enhanced bevel, 'smooth shift') more like how they work in Lightwave, but have been held back by lack of API.
Open Sourcing Blender would quite likely see projects like Cal3D (realtime skeleltal animation) more able to take advantage of a 'real' GUI 3D modeller/animation toolkit. Similarly, projects like Crystal Space, WorldForge and other large game/engine projects will get a huge boost by being able to standardise on a single modelling/animation environment without having to reinvent the wheel.
And who knows, open sourcing blender might even get 'Undo' added to it's feature set.
I think you would be completely within your rights to create accesories etc. to fit these meshes.
Take, for example, manufacturers of body-kits for cars.
They take a legally obtained example of hondas latest and gayest civic, and manufacture bits of plastic that 'enhance' the cars styling to new levels of obnoxious ugliness for the riceboy crowd.
They don't need permission from honda to do this, their work does not include any honda IP, and they are free to sell these body kits to all and sundry.
I suppose there is no EULA attached to a honda, but the analogy, i think, is reasonable.
Another one might be someone making bags to fit, say a Sony PS2 console. A PS2 was used to determine dimensions for the bag, but Sony cannot claim copyright on every bag that securely holds a PS2.
In your case, imagine holding up the two items in front of a jury. One looks like a person, one looks like a sweater.
There is no easy way i can see to determine any kind of derivation here, and i doubt the court would either.
I do the same thing, but with rdesktop on MacOS X.
Works just fine to access all my 2K Server machines, and since i hacked rdesktop to use multiple ports, i can directly access multiple RDP servers behind my firewall. (different ports on the firewall forwarded to each servers' port 3389)
The Windows TS Client can seemingly only use port 3389, which limits its usefulness in this particular scenario. You can TS to one machine, then TS to another, but that can be a bit of a pain in the ass.
Certainly, the Open Source solution makes life much easier for me.
I have run IBM OpenDX many months ago on Cygwin/XFree86, and at that stage there was no GLX support. The program ran great, and worked just fine in software rendering mode.
However, i believe that since i was doing this, great strides have been made by the Cygwin guys in the area of GLX etc. and it's very likely that 3D does work.
I have long since switched to Linux/OS X for any 'real' work i do, so couldn't say for sure.
I've had cygwin running for a long time now, and consider it an indispensible tool when sitting in front of a Windows box.
In fact, its made me less keen to trash the Windows install on the only Windows machine left in my house, since it is now quite functional with Cygwin/XFree86.
Now, how do i replace Windows explorer etc. with XFree86 as the only available interface to my Windows machine?
I have an old 29" Mitsi monitor that takes VGA input, it will scale 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 - though 640x480 is it's native resolution. Also takes S-Video and composite.Great for watching DVDs off the TiBook's VGA out on (S-Video out on tibook normally doesn't work to play DVDs for some stupid reason).
I also have a old 27" Sony PVM monitor that takes RGB SCART input and is great for the PS2 and normal TV, but it also has a digital TTL input, which apparently only does 640x200, i guess you'd use a CGA card or something to drive it. Wierd.
Both of them weigh over 60kgs apiece, but the Sony has a great, high dynamic range picture which puts most TVs, even fancy new digital 100hz models to shame.
The Mitsi has an annoying ground loop or something which makes it's built-in amp put a lot of noise out to it's speakers, but otherwise it's a sweet monitor too.
First up, MacOS hasn't needed any Apple hardware i.e. Apple ROMs for a long time, probably since 8.x
MOL runs OS 9.2 directly on the hardware, using the PPC's virtualisation features, something the x86 lacks completely, i believe, so PPC apps that do not rely on proprietary Apple hardware (not OS X, obviously) will run at full-speed in the MOL environment, unlike x86-oriented solutions like VMware, where the software has to jump through hoops to give the hosted apps access to the CPU.
And, don't kid yourself. On anything but a top-of-the-line G4 machine, OS X is sluggish. I have a G4 TiBook and also used a 700Mhz G4 Tower, and neither of these machines provided acceptable GUI speed for me. A 600Mhz G3 Ibook is a joke (granted this was the 'from the factory' config, so more RAM would be necessary).
I hear people say they find performance acceptable on these machines.. well, you must enjoy your web browsers not being able to scroll smoothly and waiting minutes for apps to start up, but i sure don't.
Shit, my IIfx running AU/X offers the same level of integration between MacOS and UNIX as OS/X, Apple have been sitting round with their thumb up their ass for the last ten or fifteen years.
Maybe it's just a pointless, overengineered GUI layer, but it still feels damn slow watching that little spinning beachball spin all the time.
Fire up OS 9.2 on the same machine and the speed difference is amazing.
Things happen in 'realtime' instead of at some point in the future after the annoying 'animation effect' has run.
What is really frustrating is that you can't turn the extraneous shit off. Even with TinkerTool, you can't disable all the eye-candy, and even when you do turn everything TinkerTool controls off, the GUI isn't much faster.
My TiBook is pretty much an expensive X-Terminal that continues to run an Apple OS only to support Photoshop.
One day, Adobe will port Photoshop to UNIX, or someone else will step up to the plate with a decent Linux image editor, and my days running OS X will be over.
Obviously, some people like OS X and think it is really neat, but for me it just gets in the way and i'm hanging out for a viable alternative to it.
I have used the 2 above systems to stream video under Linux, with mostly good results.
MPEG4IP works great on Linux, but there doesn't seem to be a player for any other OS, which doesn't bother me much but rules is out for most people.
RealProducer works well on most platforms, but there is a minimum 30 second delay between the live action and what appears on the video feed. This is OK for many purposes, but annoying for others.
Currently, i am investigating the possibility of using FAME and a custom-written server to simply steam MPEG-1 out over the LAN. I figure all that is required is some code that acccepts a connection from FAME (which supports sending MPEG-1 directly to a TCP socket 'out of the box') and then simply accepts connections from clients running some MPEG viewer capable of streaming support (many do support this, on severla platforms) and copies the buffer from the encoder connection to the listening clients' connections.
Is there some special magic behind how 'Streaming Servers' work, since it seems a pretty easy thing to do?
Personally, I get by just fine without Windows. I don't don't run any version on Windows on my machines, or any Microsoft applications, with the exception of IE 5 which came bundled with MacOS X, and has long since been dumped in favour of Mozilla.
I don't understand why people are so upset over this. It's a free country where i live, and MS should be free to implement whatever stupid scheme they feel like.
It doesn't matter to me because I have chosen to invest the time and effort into finding myself a workable alternative precisely because i don't like the way MS operates.
That doesn't mean they don't have the right to operate, within the boundarys set be law and common decency, as they see fit.
The majority of the posts i see on this topic are bleating about how terrible this is and how motherboard manufacturers will only sell palladium-equipped motherboards, making it impossible to do certain things.
Well, This reminds me of Slot-1 from Intel, widely hailed as the death of AMD, when really it was the move that saved AMD, forcing their adoption of a different architecture, and bringing a real alternative to Intel on the desktop.
Or Rambus, which was widely hailed as the death-knell for the SD-RAM industry, when RDRAM was basically expensive, proprietary rubbish that put a huge dent in Intel's P4 strategy, again allowing AMD a big window leading to further inroads into Intel's desktop CPU domination.
Plus, there is the ridiculous irony that the only reason Microsoft is so successful is because of the minimal-to-non-existant anti-piracy measures implemented in all versions of windows up till XP.
People use Windows because they can happily warez the copy of Office their friend bought with ease and impunity. Take that away, and Windows is not nearly so attractive to Joe User.
In fact, it will likely drastically lower the gap between PC and Mac prices, making the Mac's higher hardware cost insignificant in comparison to the huge wad of dough you have to spend on apps anyway.. And since the Mac doesn't have palladium, well, you get the picture.
Linux exists in it's own little world of free/open source software, has got this far despite M$ and Apple, and doesn't seem to being going away any time soon due to soaring, unprecedented popularity never before seen from a non-commercial OS, and I really don't see how this affects it. You want GPL apps, and you can't get them on Windows - What do you do?
From the posts i've been reading, it seems that most people just go 'waaaaaaahhhhhh bad, bad M$', instead of taking a step off the slippery M$ slope , using one of the several capable alternative OSes, and ignoring this latest floating turd 'Palladium' in the constant stream of raw sewage that has been flowing out of Redmond for over ten years now.
About what they are ACTUALLY PROVIDING for your $50-$100 per month.
rather than say 'heres a 1.5Mbit/s connection with a 3GB cap', they should say that 3GB over 30 days is really a ~70kbps connection with a 1.5Mbit/s burst speed (which you will be charged extra for using, assuming constant usage of your 70kbps bandwidth)
Personally, i am not averse to paying for pipe. But if i pay for the pipe, then i expect to be able to use the pipe i was sold for the purpose it was sold to me without being branded a 'problem user', a 'criminal' or a 'bandwidth hog'
Why don't the cable comanies just be honest about it and sell me a 70kbps pipe for $50/month, a 150 kbps pipe for $100 a month and a 1.5Mbps pipe for $1000/month?
Maybe because it doesn't sound like a very good deal at all?
In reality, the cable/ADSL companies are simply trying to limit aggregate bandwith usage to exactly what they used to have when the majority of their customers were on dialup.
Its quite likely you would be much better off with 2 channel-bonded 56k dialups if you are a heavy bandwidth user, while it is the light users who want small amounts of high-speed net access that benefit most from 'broadband'
And then they wonder why there is so much dark fiber laying around because of 'lack of demand'
Re:SGI's engineering team had nothing to do with i
on
The Age of Nvidia
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What do you think i'm talking about?
Try looking at the histroy of NVidia and SGI before you post silly flames which make you look like an ass.
SGI were once the pioneers and undisputed leader of the 3D graphics field. They invented lots of stuff, including, as you say, the popular OpenGL API.
What I am saying is at the time of NVidia's formation, SGI was an extremely suckful place to work if you were a hardware engineer - Knowing exactly how to build 3D hardware that would rock the world, but being unable to do it because of, among many factors, SGIs management strategy.
These guys' talents were being wasted, and they saw that with NVidia they could put them to good use.
I'm certainly not trying to belittle SGI's accomplishments in the field of 3D graphics, however i do feel it is unfortunate that SGI-as-we-know-it wasn't able to capitalize on its engineering assets as well as NVidia has to realise some of the vision of Jim Clark etc. w/regard to bringing the benefits of 3D graphics technology to the public.
SGI's engineering team had nothing to do with it?
on
The Age of Nvidia
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· Score: 5, Informative
Come on,
NVIDIA was able to make the fastest GPUs on the planet because of the engineers they have.
SGI was really not a very good place to be if you were interested in pushing the envelope w/regard to 3D hardware, so a new company was formed, and many extremely talented people from SGI went to work for it. That company was NVidia.
Its sad to see SGI in it's current state, but it is also good to see that SGI's technology, with the proper focus, marketing and pricing, is capable of breaking into almost every segment of the computing market.
Obviously, kudos to the NVidia management team, but lets not forget either the engineers and the company that built the foundatation of 3D graphics on the desktop.
Both of these are crossplatform solutions for doing the kind of thing you require.
Java2D is easier to develop with, especially if you are not a C/C++ person, and comes with a full set of widgets for supporting UI purposes.
I might suggest you prototype your application in Java2D, and if you cannot extract useful speed out of it, to port to SDL or OpenGL, if you require interactive framerates.
OpenGL is most often used as a 3D API, but using textured polygons (or compiled display-lists of lines/polygons for better zooming/resolution independence) for your elements in orthographic projection will provide optimum performance on a plaform with hardware 3D acceleration.
However, properly written, there is no reason why Java will not provide you with adequate-to-good speed.
There is also no reason why you couldn't do this with GTK, Qt, etc.
Really, you should be looking at this from the point of view of 'which language do i feel most comfortable with, and is there a mature 2D graphics libabry for this language?' If so, use it.
This stuff is pretty trivial under linux with even the most budget hardware.
Take a bt848 card and a camera and you have good quality video in, easily accessible via Video4Linux with a large base of existing video manipulation tools that let you pipe the video data around, manipulate it in realtime, compress/decompress in realtime etc. etc.
OSS/ALSA make it easy to record sound, and again there is a huge range of open source projects that should be either directly applicable or easily modifiable for your purposes.
There is some specialised hardware for hardware compression, though depending on your needs an Iomega Buz or similar can be had for very few dollars and provides hardware MJPEG compression, and is well supported under Linux.
Its not hard to do this stuff under Windows either, but for the sort of project you have, Linux is ideal. You should be able to get something up and working in a couple of days.
Linux is faster, cheaper, and if you're writing the bulk of your own software (CGI houses fall into this category) in anything but Objective C, better than MacOS X.
Just because it looks pretty doesn't automatically mean it works well.
I use MacOS X. Every day on my G4 Powerbook. And the reason i am typing this on the linux box sitting under my desk is that Linux is a hell of a lot more responsive and easier to work with than OS X, which just doesn't perform well.
YMMV, but i find using OS X is ugly. really ugly. I won't go into a point-by-point bitch session about everything i dislike about OS X, since lack of speed is the one overriding problem i have.
It's rubbish. Even GNOME Nautilus (and Nautilus is no speed demon) is faster on a P3-500 than OSX's Finder is on a 550MHz G4 (384MB RAM).
Apple have relied on the initial, great design for OS9 for so long that when they attempt to build something 'better', they just end up with a slow, bloated pile of crap.
Seriously, OS9, Windows 2000/XP and Linux/Xfree86 beat the crap out of MacOS X for performance and functionality.
They don't look as nicely-put-together in some respects, but neither do they force you to wait watching a spinning beach-ball for anything like as long. It just feels clumsy, every action requiring a small delay due to abysmal redraw speed. Not direct and snappy like it should feel.
I've frozen my plans to purchase more Macs for the staff at my business because Apple can't even get it to run well on a G4 Powerbook. And this is just the OS! Attempt to actually run a couple of applications and performance drops still further.
Office on the Mac? Great, but don't think my users would appreciate the sluggishness of the Mac compared to a cheaper, faster x86 desktop.
First, i had to turn off all articles from John Katz because, well, he's a fucking putz.
Then, i had to turn off all articles from CmdrTaco becuase i was sick of hearing about lame anime. Especially CmdrTacos worthless opinions about lame anime.
Now Hemos is on the bandwagon too? I guess i won't be reading slashdot at all prety soon.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing i have that i seen that would truly replace floppies are the 'memory cards' or flash-based USB Mass Storage devices, but there really needs to be a method to boot off these things.
Imagine, your next linux distro comes with a cute little 'tux' figure with a USB connector poking out his ass.
Plug this in to your machine, and reboot, the little LEDs in tux's eyes flash to indicate activity, and the installer runs (Tux has 8-256MB of flash on board, giving you all the modules to support your hardware, along with everything you need to rescue/recover/setup your new Linux box.
My 8MB USB key has saved me several times, since it allows me to transfer files from Windows to my Mac to my Linux boxes without the need for a network or any common hardware (except working USB) among them. The drivers are supported by the Linux kernel, WinME/2K/XP and OS X natively, so no drivers to load.
These things are still a little expensive (my 8MB cost me $NZ100 about a year ago), but i imagine these devices would be dirt-cheap in volume.
I would be rather surprised if those screenshots represented actual, realtime-rendered scenes.
They look like they have been lifted directly off the ExLuna BMRT (kudos to Larry Gritz for a great renderer) gallery page.
It may be that these are NV30 realtime scenes, with the BMRT Renderman shaders used in the BMRT renders ported to Cg, but it is also possible they are simply the BMRT-rendered examples, given to show what is possible using a shader-based rendering architecture.
Anybody have any more info on whether these examples are actual realtime DirectX/OpenGL scenes?
-Pete
Why did you ever think HP would let you 'get away with this', Bruce?
Its quite clear that your masters will never allow you to take such anti-establishment actions while in their employ.
Its quite clear that corporate america and Open Source software / personal freedom just don't mix, and I think your credibility as an advocate of either principle just took a big nosedive.
How long before you'll be rolled out on stage to espouse the benefits to the consumer of the closed-source DRM/DMCA-enforcement kernel modules in HP-Linux?
One of my biggest irritations with Blender has been the uselessness of the Python API for interactive modelling tools.
I want to write my own modelling plugins to make specific tasks in blender (enhanced bevel, 'smooth shift') more like how they work in Lightwave, but have been held back by lack of API.
Open Sourcing Blender would quite likely see projects like Cal3D (realtime skeleltal animation) more able to take advantage of a 'real' GUI 3D modeller/animation toolkit. Similarly, projects like Crystal Space, WorldForge and other large game/engine projects will get a huge boost by being able to standardise on a single modelling/animation environment without having to reinvent the wheel.
And who knows, open sourcing blender might even get 'Undo' added to it's feature set.
I think you would be completely within your rights to create accesories etc. to fit these meshes.
Take, for example, manufacturers of body-kits for cars.
They take a legally obtained example of hondas latest and gayest civic, and manufacture bits of plastic that 'enhance' the cars styling to new levels of obnoxious ugliness for the riceboy crowd.
They don't need permission from honda to do this, their work does not include any honda IP, and they are free to sell these body kits to all and sundry.
I suppose there is no EULA attached to a honda, but the analogy, i think, is reasonable.
Another one might be someone making bags to fit, say a Sony PS2 console. A PS2 was used to determine dimensions for the bag, but Sony cannot claim copyright on every bag that securely holds a PS2.
In your case, imagine holding up the two items in front of a jury. One looks like a person, one looks like a sweater.
There is no easy way i can see to determine any kind of derivation here, and i doubt the court would either.
I do the same thing, but with rdesktop on MacOS X.
Works just fine to access all my 2K Server machines, and since i hacked rdesktop to use multiple ports, i can directly access multiple RDP servers behind my firewall. (different ports on the firewall forwarded to each servers' port 3389)
The Windows TS Client can seemingly only use port 3389, which limits its usefulness in this particular scenario. You can TS to one machine, then TS to another, but that can be a bit of a pain in the ass.
Certainly, the Open Source solution makes life much easier for me.
I have run IBM OpenDX many months ago on Cygwin/XFree86, and at that stage there was no GLX support. The program ran great, and worked just fine in software rendering mode.
However, i believe that since i was doing this, great strides have been made by the Cygwin guys in the area of GLX etc. and it's very likely that 3D does work.
I have long since switched to Linux/OS X for any 'real' work i do, so couldn't say for sure.
I've had cygwin running for a long time now, and consider it an indispensible tool when sitting in front of a Windows box.
In fact, its made me less keen to trash the Windows install on the only Windows machine left in my house, since it is now quite functional with Cygwin/XFree86.
Now, how do i replace Windows explorer etc. with XFree86 as the only available interface to my Windows machine?
I have an old 29" Mitsi monitor that takes VGA input, it will scale 1024x768, 800x600 and 640x480 - though 640x480 is it's native resolution. Also takes S-Video and composite.Great for watching DVDs off the TiBook's VGA out on (S-Video out on tibook normally doesn't work to play DVDs for some stupid reason).
I also have a old 27" Sony PVM monitor that takes RGB SCART input and is great for the PS2 and normal TV, but it also has a digital TTL input, which apparently only does 640x200, i guess you'd use a CGA card or something to drive it. Wierd.
Both of them weigh over 60kgs apiece, but the Sony has a great, high dynamic range picture which puts most TVs, even fancy new digital 100hz models to shame.
The Mitsi has an annoying ground loop or something which makes it's built-in amp put a lot of noise out to it's speakers, but otherwise it's a sweet monitor too.
First up, MacOS hasn't needed any Apple hardware i.e. Apple ROMs for a long time, probably since 8.x
MOL runs OS 9.2 directly on the hardware, using the PPC's virtualisation features, something the x86 lacks completely, i believe, so PPC apps that do not rely on proprietary Apple hardware (not OS X, obviously) will run at full-speed in the MOL environment, unlike x86-oriented solutions like VMware, where the software has to jump through hoops to give the hosted apps access to the CPU.
And, don't kid yourself. On anything but a top-of-the-line G4 machine, OS X is sluggish. I have a G4 TiBook and also used a 700Mhz G4 Tower, and neither of these machines provided acceptable GUI speed for me. A 600Mhz G3 Ibook is a joke (granted this was the 'from the factory' config, so more RAM would be necessary).
I hear people say they find performance acceptable on these machines.. well, you must enjoy your web browsers not being able to scroll smoothly and waiting minutes for apps to start up, but i sure don't.
Shit, my IIfx running AU/X offers the same level of integration between MacOS and UNIX as OS/X, Apple have been sitting round with their thumb up their ass for the last ten or fifteen years.
Maybe it's just a pointless, overengineered GUI layer, but it still feels damn slow watching that little spinning beachball spin all the time.
Fire up OS 9.2 on the same machine and the speed difference is amazing.
Things happen in 'realtime' instead of at some point in the future after the annoying 'animation effect' has run.
What is really frustrating is that you can't turn the extraneous shit off. Even with TinkerTool, you can't disable all the eye-candy, and even when you do turn everything TinkerTool controls off, the GUI isn't much faster.
My TiBook is pretty much an expensive X-Terminal that continues to run an Apple OS only to support Photoshop.
One day, Adobe will port Photoshop to UNIX, or someone else will step up to the plate with a decent Linux image editor, and my days running OS X will be over.
Obviously, some people like OS X and think it is really neat, but for me it just gets in the way and i'm hanging out for a viable alternative to it.
That is the most interesting thing i have seen on Slashdot for a long time.
I have used the 2 above systems to stream video under Linux, with mostly good results.
MPEG4IP works great on Linux, but there doesn't seem to be a player for any other OS, which doesn't bother me much but rules is out for most people.
RealProducer works well on most platforms, but there is a minimum 30 second delay between the live action and what appears on the video feed. This is OK for many purposes, but annoying for others.
Currently, i am investigating the possibility of using FAME and a custom-written server to simply steam MPEG-1 out over the LAN. I figure all that is required is some code that acccepts a connection from FAME (which supports sending MPEG-1 directly to a TCP socket 'out of the box') and then simply accepts connections from clients running some MPEG viewer capable of streaming support (many do support this, on severla platforms) and copies the buffer from the encoder connection to the listening clients' connections.
Is there some special magic behind how 'Streaming Servers' work, since it seems a pretty easy thing to do?
OSX runs like a snail on an iBook.
It's not fast, but usable on a TiBook, but i was shocked to see how poor performance was on a 600Mhz iBook.
Don't buy it unless you enjoy watching paint dry.
Personally, I get by just fine without Windows. I don't don't run any version on Windows on my machines, or any Microsoft applications, with the exception of IE 5 which came bundled with MacOS X, and has long since been dumped in favour of Mozilla.
I don't understand why people are so upset over this. It's a free country where i live, and MS should be free to implement whatever stupid scheme they feel like.
It doesn't matter to me because I have chosen to invest the time and effort into finding myself a workable alternative precisely because i don't like the way MS operates.
That doesn't mean they don't have the right to operate, within the boundarys set be law and common decency, as they see fit.
The majority of the posts i see on this topic are bleating about how terrible this is and how motherboard manufacturers will only sell palladium-equipped motherboards, making it impossible to do certain things.
Well, This reminds me of Slot-1 from Intel, widely hailed as the death of AMD, when really it was the move that saved AMD, forcing their adoption of a different architecture, and bringing a real alternative to Intel on the desktop.
Or Rambus, which was widely hailed as the death-knell for the SD-RAM industry, when RDRAM was basically expensive, proprietary rubbish that put a huge dent in Intel's P4 strategy, again allowing AMD a big window leading to further inroads into Intel's desktop CPU domination.
Plus, there is the ridiculous irony that the only reason Microsoft is so successful is because of the minimal-to-non-existant anti-piracy measures implemented in all versions of windows up till XP.
People use Windows because they can happily warez the copy of Office their friend bought with ease and impunity. Take that away, and Windows is not nearly so attractive to Joe User.
In fact, it will likely drastically lower the gap between PC and Mac prices, making the Mac's higher hardware cost insignificant in comparison to the huge wad of dough you have to spend on apps anyway.. And since the Mac doesn't have palladium, well, you get the picture.
Linux exists in it's own little world of free/open source software, has got this far despite M$ and Apple, and doesn't seem to being going away any time soon due to soaring, unprecedented popularity never before seen from a non-commercial OS, and I really don't see how this affects it. You want GPL apps, and you can't get them on Windows - What do you do?
From the posts i've been reading, it seems that most people just go 'waaaaaaahhhhhh bad, bad M$', instead of taking a step off the slippery M$ slope , using one of the several capable alternative OSes, and ignoring this latest floating turd 'Palladium' in the constant stream of raw sewage that has been flowing out of Redmond for over ten years now.
About what they are ACTUALLY PROVIDING for your $50-$100 per month.
rather than say 'heres a 1.5Mbit/s connection with a 3GB cap', they should say that 3GB over 30 days is really a ~70kbps connection with a 1.5Mbit/s burst speed (which you will be charged extra for using, assuming constant usage of your 70kbps bandwidth)
Personally, i am not averse to paying for pipe. But if i pay for the pipe, then i expect to be able to use the pipe i was sold for the purpose it was sold to me without being branded a 'problem user', a 'criminal' or a 'bandwidth hog'
Why don't the cable comanies just be honest about it and sell me a 70kbps pipe for $50/month, a 150 kbps pipe for $100 a month and a 1.5Mbps pipe for $1000/month?
Maybe because it doesn't sound like a very good deal at all?
In reality, the cable/ADSL companies are simply trying to limit aggregate bandwith usage to exactly what they used to have when the majority of their customers were on dialup.
Its quite likely you would be much better off with 2 channel-bonded 56k dialups if you are a heavy bandwidth user, while it is the light users who want small amounts of high-speed net access that benefit most from 'broadband'
And then they wonder why there is so much dark fiber laying around because of 'lack of demand'
What do you think i'm talking about?
Try looking at the histroy of NVidia and SGI before you post silly flames which make you look like an ass.
SGI were once the pioneers and undisputed leader of the 3D graphics field. They invented lots of stuff, including, as you say, the popular OpenGL API.
What I am saying is at the time of NVidia's formation, SGI was an extremely suckful place to work if you were a hardware engineer - Knowing exactly how to build 3D hardware that would rock the world, but being unable to do it because of, among many factors, SGIs management strategy.
These guys' talents were being wasted, and they saw that with NVidia they could put them to good use.
I'm certainly not trying to belittle SGI's accomplishments in the field of 3D graphics, however i do feel it is unfortunate that SGI-as-we-know-it wasn't able to capitalize on its engineering assets as well as NVidia has to realise some of the vision of Jim Clark etc. w/regard to bringing the benefits of 3D graphics technology to the public.
Come on,
NVIDIA was able to make the fastest GPUs on the planet because of the engineers they have.
SGI was really not a very good place to be if you were interested in pushing the envelope w/regard to 3D hardware, so a new company was formed, and many extremely talented people from SGI went to work for it. That company was NVidia.
Its sad to see SGI in it's current state, but it is also good to see that SGI's technology, with the proper focus, marketing and pricing, is capable of breaking into almost every segment of the computing market.
Obviously, kudos to the NVidia management team, but lets not forget either the engineers and the company that built the foundatation of 3D graphics on the desktop.
Both of these are crossplatform solutions for doing the kind of thing you require.
Java2D is easier to develop with, especially if you are not a C/C++ person, and comes with a full set of widgets for supporting UI purposes.
I might suggest you prototype your application in Java2D, and if you cannot extract useful speed out of it, to port to SDL or OpenGL, if you require interactive framerates.
OpenGL is most often used as a 3D API, but using textured polygons (or compiled display-lists of lines/polygons for better zooming/resolution independence) for your elements in orthographic projection will provide optimum performance on a plaform with hardware 3D acceleration.
However, properly written, there is no reason why Java will not provide you with adequate-to-good speed.
There is also no reason why you couldn't do this with GTK, Qt, etc.
Really, you should be looking at this from the point of view of 'which language do i feel most comfortable with, and is there a mature 2D graphics libabry for this language?' If so, use it.
at 13MB compared to the 4MB Linux version?
since Apple obviously aren't interested in supporting even basic accelerated video drivers for it.
I feel sorry for the poor people who paid good money for an iBook.
This thing might have a small keyboard, but i bet it is at least able to repaint it's screen in a reasonable timeframe.
Whats wrong with BTTV's grabbing facility?
I used it to great effect to produce high quality claymation.
This stuff is pretty trivial under linux with even the most budget hardware.
Take a bt848 card and a camera and you have good quality video in, easily accessible via Video4Linux with a large base of existing video manipulation tools that let you pipe the video data around, manipulate it in realtime, compress/decompress in realtime etc. etc.
OSS/ALSA make it easy to record sound, and again there is a huge range of open source projects that should be either directly applicable or easily modifiable for your purposes.
There is some specialised hardware for hardware compression, though depending on your needs an Iomega Buz or similar can be had for very few dollars and provides hardware MJPEG compression, and is well supported under Linux.
Its not hard to do this stuff under Windows either, but for the sort of project you have, Linux is ideal. You should be able to get something up and working in a couple of days.
Linux is faster, cheaper, and if you're writing the bulk of your own software (CGI houses fall into this category) in anything but Objective C, better than MacOS X.
Just because it looks pretty doesn't automatically mean it works well.
I use MacOS X. Every day on my G4 Powerbook. And the reason i am typing this on the linux box sitting under my desk is that Linux is a hell of a lot more responsive and easier to work with than OS X, which just doesn't perform well.
YMMV, but i find using OS X is ugly. really ugly. I won't go into a point-by-point bitch session about everything i dislike about OS X, since lack of speed is the one overriding problem i have.
It's rubbish. Even GNOME Nautilus (and Nautilus is no speed demon) is faster on a P3-500 than OSX's Finder is on a 550MHz G4 (384MB RAM).
Apple have relied on the initial, great design for OS9 for so long that when they attempt to build something 'better', they just end up with a slow, bloated pile of crap.
Seriously, OS9, Windows 2000/XP and Linux/Xfree86 beat the crap out of MacOS X for performance and functionality.
They don't look as nicely-put-together in some respects, but neither do they force you to wait watching a spinning beach-ball for anything like as long. It just feels clumsy, every action requiring a small delay due to abysmal redraw speed. Not direct and snappy like it should feel.
I've frozen my plans to purchase more Macs for the staff at my business because Apple can't even get it to run well on a G4 Powerbook. And this is just the OS! Attempt to actually run a couple of applications and performance drops still further.
Office on the Mac? Great, but don't think my users would appreciate the sluggishness of the Mac compared to a cheaper, faster x86 desktop.
First, i had to turn off all articles from John Katz because, well, he's a fucking putz.
Then, i had to turn off all articles from CmdrTaco becuase i was sick of hearing about lame anime. Especially CmdrTacos worthless opinions about lame anime.
Now Hemos is on the bandwagon too? I guess i won't be reading slashdot at all prety soon.