Try here. The patches were updated within a day of the official driver release. They were in Gentoo's ebuilds before I woke yesterday. The initial problems with DevFS kernels was resolved by this morning. God I love Linux...
and really, who on/. isn't >>>>>>> Me. As a result, I hate pretty much every PC RPG out there. I keep trying the occasional one, and I still hate them. Call me a lamer, but I like console RPGs a lot more. If I wanted to crunch mind numbing stats all day, I'd get into sports:) That said, I still found NWN pretty amusing. That says a lot about how Bioware was able to reach out to a broader audience with NWN than your traditional D&D fan.
Actually, it's not an NVIDIA problem. I'm using the same 41.x drivers in both, and in kernel 2.4 (which I'm running as I type this) the drawing of the window contents in Konqueror lags behind the drawing of the window frame (which is smooth). It leaves a big grey area between the contents and the frame while resizing. In 2.5, the window contents don't draw any faster, bu tthe window-frame lags (jerky motion) as well, so there is no jerky motion. Note, this doesn't happen with most KDE apps, just some like Konq.
1) Opaque. The RPM db is binary, easy to trash. The Portage DB is a directory tree of plain-text files. RPMs are binary. Ebuilds are plain-text files.
2) Complex. RPM is a complex format. It pretty much takes a programmer to write an RPM. EBuilds are easy enough for just someone with a knowledge of the UNIX shell to write. As a result, the Gentoo forums are filled with user ebuilds, and the ebuild library for Gentoo is huge, despite the much smaller Gentoo userbase.
3) Power. RPM, by itself, is pretty dumb. RPM and RedHat are the reasons why people like to bitch about the complexity of software installation on Linux. In RedHat, if you want to install a program, you have to manually recurse the dependency tree of the packages. In Portage, you just request the installation of one package, and everything else is handled automatically.
4) Flexibility. First, compiling each package to a specific machine does gain you some performance benifets. It's on the order of 10% or less depending on the package, but that's basically a two-bin improvement for most CPUs, so it's nothing to sneeze at. The most important part is that, since everything is compiled on your system, the user can tailor optional features for their system. For example, I use ALSA, so I have a setting in Portage that automatically compiles all my packages with ALSA support. Since ALSA support is optional in many packages, a particular set of RPMs may or may not be compiled with ALSA enabled. This concept is applicable to lots of things, like X support (Vim, for example, can be compiled with or without X support), SSE (mplayer), etc.
You're not really missing out on much using RPM, exept for ease of use. If RPM serves you well enough, then by all means keep using it. However, you really should look into apt4rpm, which is a tool that extends the APT package management system to handle RPM packages. This way, you can just do "apt-get install mplayer" on your RedHat box, and all the dependencies of mplayer will automatically be installed first.
people with bad eyes (read "anybody remotely aged") would rather sit at 1280x1024. >>>>>>>>>> For god sakes! startx -- -dpi XXX. Or, for you MS losers, Display Properties ->Settings->Advanced->General->"DPI Setting" drop-down.
I'd like to second this. I've got one of these displays in my Inspiron, and I love it. Text looks so good, that after I posted some screenshots, somebody accused me of jacking up the font-sizes to make things look better:) Still, 15" is 15", and I'd like a second one so I can fit more code on-screen:)
For about $1500, you can get a cheap P4 laptop with a 15" UXGA screen. Sure, the laptop itself is huge, bulky, and hot, but the screen itself is wonderful. There are only two companies that make 15" UXGA displays, Hitachi and Sharp. Both screens are excellent quality. They're sold under the brand-name "UltraSharp" (Dell) and "Flexview" (IBM) in mainstream laptops.
Interactive performance - Pretty sharp. I/O background load really doesn't put much of a burden on foreground stuff, but then, 2.4 + preempt patches didn't either. Resizing is weird. Resize slowly, and the effect is like kernel 2.4 (canvas lags behind window frame). Resize fast, and the effect is like OS X, the window frame lags while the canvas catches up. Both kinda suck. CPU background load (MP3 compression) causes the machine to feel like an XP machine -- big 10-15 pauses. CD drivers - They suck. Certain CDs (Evanescence's Fallen) will cause the CD drive to go into spasms. This doesn't happen under 2.4. I/O scheduler - Gimpy. Under heavy CPU load (the aformentioned MP3 compression) starting an app that isn't in cache will take tens of seconds. Compile performance - awesome. I use Gentoo, and I've noticed big improvements. Power management - Mediocre. APM is alright. ACPI sucks. Causes weird beeping noises when I try to load the "processor" module. It's probably a fault of my Inspiron 8200's fsck'ed DSDT, so I won't bitch, but WinXP has no problem with it. Stability - Surprisingly good, for development code. A far cry from 2.4, crashes maybe once a week, but much better than the 2.5.20-something releases, which once hosed my entire partition when I burned a bad CD...
Scanning the bus for PCI-IDs, and checking them against a "cached" list is really cheap. You load one tiny file, and do a decently fast bus scan. Wandering all over the hard drive (or in Knoppix's case, the CD-ROM) looking for the appropriate driver is the slow part.
Let me clarify this. I'm running at 1600x1200 on a 15" screen. That works out to 133 dpi. I have X set to scale fonts exactly for 133 DPI. So all my fonts are exactly the size indicated -- 12 point is 12/72 = 1/6 of an inch high. I know this may be hard for Windows (96 DPI is the only resolution that exists) but in *real* OSs, fonts sizes are resolution independent.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft gets to leave tons of configuration info cached on the hard drive. Knoppix has to detect it all on the fly. For both to boot at about the same speed says tons about Knoppix. Of course, BeOS would boot in something like 10 seconds flat, but not every OS can BeOS.
From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?
This is total bullshit. The guy knows nothing about Xft, Stsf, or FreeType.
1) FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer. On a high-res LCD, any version of FreeType with the improved autohinters is also extremely good. I personally prefer it to ClearType's rendering, for two reasons: it doesn't require sub-pixel AA (which still causes visible color fringing in Cleartype) to look sharp, and letter shapes look more natural (less hinted, but still sharp). If you don't believe me, look at screenshots of my desktop: this and this.
2) Rendering quality has nothing to do with Xft vs Stsf. Neither of these font services do the actual rendering; that is still handled by FreeType. These services are for font finding and font matching.
Read my post again, and get your mind out of the tiny shell of pop-philosophy. Specifically, think about all the sucessful civilizations that have existed over thousands of years, and how different they all were from each other, and from our own. Think about how long it took our culture to become what it is, and the fact that there are many other cultures out there, each very different, each with the same centuries or even millenia of development.
Nice red herring. Stay on topic. >>>>>>>> My point was that our civilization, as a whole, can't keep children from dying of hunger. Read this. Then tell me how wonderful, great, powerful our civilization is.
To say that somehow only we rich, industrialized nations can handle freedom is a bit elitist, don't you think? >>>>>>> A bit elitist? Maybe. But think about this: a good democracy depends on literate, educated citizens. Many developing nations have less than a 50% literacy rate. For them to move towards democracy, they need to adapt their culture first. It is that step that takes time.
All humans desire the right to self determination. >>>>>>>>> Really? Until 300 years ago, all humans desired salvation in heaven, and society was structured appropriatly. Before that, humans wanted to be led by a representitive of God - their King. This whole "self determination" thing is a new concept. As I live in a time period that has conditioned me to it, I'll buy it, but I don't pretend it's anything more than just another rise and fall in the tide of history.
sit-and-wait handwringer's strategy. >>>>>>> As opposed to a gung-ho cowboy "get shit done" strategy? Take a look at how long it took democracy to take root in the Western world. Centuries of philosophers and scholars crafted a culture that was ready for democracy. In places like Iraq, the end result of the millenia of cultural change is a culture very receptive to top-down control. Chaning the culture is a slow, painfull process. But its better than going Lenin on democracy (rushing something that takes time) and leaving the country with decades of strife during which *no progress is made.*
Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations). Percentage of that dedicated to military aid to allies: ~50% Percentage of total aid that comes directly back to US companies: ~70% Percentage of people polled that think we spend too much on foreign aid: 75% Average response to the question, "how much should we spend on foreign aid?": 8.4%
If I here this "right/wrong" bullshit anymore I'm going to scream. I can understand people who say this war is necessary: but right?
1) The US is amoral (note to the clueless: this is different from 'immoral') . So is pretty much every other country out there. Our actions are decided not by "right" and "wrong" but by our interests. In the '70s, the US fought a war against a country when their people chose a government the US did not agree with. Throughout the late 20th century, the US propped up oppressive dictatorships because it benifeted them. US sanctions on Iraq have not only resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis (not counting the 75,000 that died as a result of the Gulf War) but made Saddam into a hero in many Arab circles. Were any of these actions "right?" Hell no. Were they good for the US? Certainly.
2) Money is not a big issue for the US. We have tons of it, and if we need more, we can always make the deficit a little larger. What he don't have is a stable energy supply, something which Iraq does. And anyone who says oil isn't the issue here is flat out misinformed. Even several ministers within Great Britain agree that a stable energy supply is the #1 reason for a way. Look at it this way: Iraq is a country with only about 25 million people. The US plans to spend over a hundred billion dollars on it. In comparison, the total population of the developing countries is in the billions. To relieve the entire developing world of their foreign debt would cost only $65 billion (much less if you don't count Indonesia). Developing countries suffer heavily under the interest payments due to foreign debt. In some countries, up to 25% of the budget could be freed up with debt relief. Now, what makes more sense: taking a country of 25 million people, that already has well-established infrastructure, blowing everything up, and rebuilding it at a cost of over a hundred billion dollars, or allowing a much larger number of countries to get their budget on track by relieving their debt? If "right" and "wrong" were our only concerns, we would certainly be doing the latter.
3) The whole "democracy for everyone!" idea is bunk. What makes you think that a system of government that works well for a rich, industrialized nation will work equally well for a decentralized nomad country (Afghanistan) and a very conservative religious society (Iran). Take Iran as a test case. The current government was put into place by a revolution of the people. That's the government they chose. If given the option, right now, they'd choose it again. Is it "right" to remake their country in our own image?
All this has no bearing on whether the war is necessary. I have my own opinions about that, but I won't try to convince you of them. But the truth of the matter is that the US is going to war to protect its own interests. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, one can make a strong arguement that the purpose of a government (much like a lawyer) is not to necessarly do what's morally right, but what's in the best interest of its people. It also doesn't mean that democracy is wrong. I'm very fond of the idea myself. I strongly believe that the ultimate direction of all governments should be towards democracy, and the international community should pressure all governments in that direction. But I also realize that history works at a scale much larger than the 4-year term of a President, and further, I believe that prostelyzing our system of government is against our fundemental values.
A parting thought: In the 10 minutes it took me to write this post, 240 children died of hunger. What did you do about it? What did I do about it? Everytime anyone starts to get to full of themselves, or too proud of their accomplishments, think about that. Realize that while our country may very well be the greatest in the world, that's not saying much, and it's nothing to be proud of. Humility is a part of every religion. There is a fundemental reason for this...
Look. I wouldn't post these things if I hadn't done anything more than read a marketing blurb off Apple's website. Check out the PDF Apple submitted to Siggraph. Look at the data-flow diagrams on page 10. Look at the line that says "Quartz2D." Note the color: orange. Now, look at the legend in the top right hand corner. Lookup the meaning of the color orange: "software," as in "software-rendered." Quartz Extreme is a misnomer. It should actually be Quartz _Compositor_ Extreme. OpenGL is only used to accelerate window compositing, not to actually draw stuff inside the window. In EVAS, the little line for Quartz2D would be red, as in "Hardware accelerated."
Actually, EVAS is much cooler than Quartz. Wheras Quartz (even Quartz Extreme) renders all those beautiful graphics via the CPU, EVAS is a high-level display manager that can take full advantage of OpenGL acceleration if its available. Since it's basically a scene graph (retained mode for you DirectX people), it takes care of all the display optimization for you, so you don't have to worry about writing efficient update code. EVAS is good step away from Quartz, and more in line with Microsoft's Longhorn.
By absolutely refusing to budge on your position and to say "I will not even read their proposal?" That is your idea of diplomacy? >>>>>>>>> No, by respecting the UN and allowing the process to work.
By selling outlawed weapons to an evil dictator? >>>>>>>>>> What country do you think propped up dictators (included Saddam) all through the Cold War? Hint: it wasn't France. Who do you think trained the people who would eventually become the Taliban? Again, not France. It was the US.
By interceding(sic) in the Ivory Coast when no one asked them to? I don't recall UN approval of that action. Where is the diplomacy there? >>>>>>> France sent peacekeeping troops to the Ivory coast because there are a whole bunch of French citizens living there.
Look, the point isn't whether France is great (it isn't, every country pretty much sucks donkey balls) or whether you even agree with what France's stance on the war is. The point is whether you can relate to their decision in a mature way without doing stupid stuff like renaming fast food.
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Try here. The patches were updated within a day of the official driver release. They were in Gentoo's ebuilds before I woke yesterday. The initial problems with DevFS kernels was resolved by this morning. God I love Linux...
and really, who on /. isn't :) That said, I still found NWN pretty amusing. That says a lot about how Bioware was able to reach out to a broader audience with NWN than your traditional D&D fan.
>>>>>>>
Me. As a result, I hate pretty much every PC RPG out there. I keep trying the occasional one, and I still hate them. Call me a lamer, but I like console RPGs a lot more. If I wanted to crunch mind numbing stats all day, I'd get into sports
Fox is a hideous Republican-biased POS news station. Watch BBC.
Actually, it's not an NVIDIA problem. I'm using the same 41.x drivers in both, and in kernel 2.4 (which I'm running as I type this) the drawing of the window contents in Konqueror lags behind the drawing of the window frame (which is smooth). It leaves a big grey area between the contents and the frame while resizing. In 2.5, the window contents don't draw any faster, bu tthe window-frame lags (jerky motion) as well, so there is no jerky motion. Note, this doesn't happen with most KDE apps, just some like Konq.
Reasons why people don't like RPM --
1) Opaque. The RPM db is binary, easy to trash. The Portage DB is a directory tree of plain-text files. RPMs are binary. Ebuilds are plain-text files.
2) Complex. RPM is a complex format. It pretty much takes a programmer to write an RPM. EBuilds are easy enough for just someone with a knowledge of the UNIX shell to write. As a result, the Gentoo forums are filled with user ebuilds, and the ebuild library for Gentoo is huge, despite the much smaller Gentoo userbase.
3) Power. RPM, by itself, is pretty dumb. RPM and RedHat are the reasons why people like to bitch about the complexity of software installation on Linux. In RedHat, if you want to install a program, you have to manually recurse the dependency tree of the packages. In Portage, you just request the installation of one package, and everything else is handled automatically.
4) Flexibility. First, compiling each package to a specific machine does gain you some performance benifets. It's on the order of 10% or less depending on the package, but that's basically a two-bin improvement for most CPUs, so it's nothing to sneeze at. The most important part is that, since everything is compiled on your system, the user can tailor optional features for their system. For example, I use ALSA, so I have a setting in Portage that automatically compiles all my packages with ALSA support. Since ALSA support is optional in many packages, a particular set of RPMs may or may not be compiled with ALSA enabled. This concept is applicable to lots of things, like X support (Vim, for example, can be compiled with or without X support), SSE (mplayer), etc.
You're not really missing out on much using RPM, exept for ease of use. If RPM serves you well enough, then by all means keep using it. However, you really should look into apt4rpm, which is a tool that extends the APT package management system to handle RPM packages. This way, you can just do "apt-get install mplayer" on your RedHat box, and all the dependencies of mplayer will automatically be installed first.
You don't expect this type of shit at 1:00 am. That's what I get for browsing so late (apparently, so early :)
people with bad eyes (read "anybody remotely aged") would rather sit at 1280x1024.
>>>>>>>>>>
For god sakes! startx -- -dpi XXX. Or, for you MS losers, Display Properties ->Settings->Advanced->General->"DPI Setting" drop-down.
I'd like to second this. I've got one of these displays in my Inspiron, and I love it. Text looks so good, that after I posted some screenshots, somebody accused me of jacking up the font-sizes to make things look better :) Still, 15" is 15", and I'd like a second one so I can fit more code on-screen :)
For about $1500, you can get a cheap P4 laptop with a 15" UXGA screen. Sure, the laptop itself is huge, bulky, and hot, but the screen itself is wonderful. There are only two companies that make 15" UXGA displays, Hitachi and Sharp. Both screens are excellent quality. They're sold under the brand-name "UltraSharp" (Dell) and "Flexview" (IBM) in mainstream laptops.
Interactive performance - Pretty sharp. I/O background load really doesn't put much of a burden on foreground stuff, but then, 2.4 + preempt patches didn't either. Resizing is weird. Resize slowly, and the effect is like kernel 2.4 (canvas lags behind window frame). Resize fast, and the effect is like OS X, the window frame lags while the canvas catches up. Both kinda suck. CPU background load (MP3 compression) causes the machine to feel like an XP machine -- big 10-15 pauses.
CD drivers - They suck. Certain CDs (Evanescence's Fallen) will cause the CD drive to go into spasms. This doesn't happen under 2.4.
I/O scheduler - Gimpy. Under heavy CPU load (the aformentioned MP3 compression) starting an app that isn't in cache will take tens of seconds.
Compile performance - awesome. I use Gentoo, and I've noticed big improvements.
Power management - Mediocre. APM is alright. ACPI sucks. Causes weird beeping noises when I try to load the "processor" module. It's probably a fault of my Inspiron 8200's fsck'ed DSDT, so I won't bitch, but WinXP has no problem with it.
Stability - Surprisingly good, for development code. A far cry from 2.4, crashes maybe once a week, but much better than the 2.5.20-something releases, which once hosed my entire partition when I burned a bad CD...
Scanning the bus for PCI-IDs, and checking them against a "cached" list is really cheap. You load one tiny file, and do a decently fast bus scan. Wandering all over the hard drive (or in Knoppix's case, the CD-ROM) looking for the appropriate driver is the slow part.
Let me clarify this. I'm running at 1600x1200 on a 15" screen. That works out to 133 dpi. I have X set to scale fonts exactly for 133 DPI. So all my fonts are exactly the size indicated -- 12 point is 12/72 = 1/6 of an inch high. I know this may be hard for Windows (96 DPI is the only resolution that exists) but in *real* OSs, fonts sizes are resolution independent.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Microsoft gets to leave tons of configuration info cached on the hard drive. Knoppix has to detect it all on the fly. For both to boot at about the same speed says tons about Knoppix. Of course, BeOS would boot in something like 10 seconds flat, but not every OS can BeOS.
Real funny. The shots aren't rigged. I'm running 1600x1200!
.NET, the new one on KDE look. I'm using it with the sharp corners option (thanks Clee :)
From all indications, it appears that stsf uses FreeType as a backend renderer. FreeType, in recent versions (2.1.3, 2.1.4) is extremely good. Have you taken a look at it lately?
This is total bullshit. The guy knows nothing about Xft, Stsf, or FreeType.
1) FreeType is *very* good. With TrueType hinting enabled, the output on a standard resolution LCD is *dead identical* with the output for the Windows rasterizer. On a high-res LCD, any version of FreeType with the improved autohinters is also extremely good. I personally prefer it to ClearType's rendering, for two reasons: it doesn't require sub-pixel AA (which still causes visible color fringing in Cleartype) to look sharp, and letter shapes look more natural (less hinted, but still sharp). If you don't believe me, look at screenshots of my desktop: this and this.
2) Rendering quality has nothing to do with Xft vs Stsf. Neither of these font services do the actual rendering; that is still handled by FreeType. These services are for font finding and font matching.
Read my post again, and get your mind out of the tiny shell of pop-philosophy. Specifically, think about all the sucessful civilizations that have existed over thousands of years, and how different they all were from each other, and from our own. Think about how long it took our culture to become what it is, and the fact that there are many other cultures out there, each very different, each with the same centuries or even millenia of development.
Nice red herring. Stay on topic.
>>>>>>>>
My point was that our civilization, as a whole, can't keep children from dying of hunger. Read this. Then tell me how wonderful, great, powerful our civilization is.
To say that somehow only we rich, industrialized nations can handle freedom is a bit elitist, don't you think?
>>>>>>>
A bit elitist? Maybe. But think about this: a good democracy depends on literate, educated citizens. Many developing nations have less than a 50% literacy rate. For them to move towards democracy, they need to adapt their culture first. It is that step that takes time.
All humans desire the right to self determination.
>>>>>>>>>
Really? Until 300 years ago, all humans desired salvation in heaven, and society was structured appropriatly. Before that, humans wanted to be led by a representitive of God - their King. This whole "self determination" thing is a new concept. As I live in a time period that has conditioned me to it, I'll buy it, but I don't pretend it's anything more than just another rise and fall in the tide of history.
sit-and-wait handwringer's strategy.
>>>>>>>
As opposed to a gung-ho cowboy "get shit done" strategy? Take a look at how long it took democracy to take root in the Western world. Centuries of philosophers and scholars crafted a culture that was ready for democracy. In places like Iraq, the end result of the millenia of cultural change is a culture very receptive to top-down control. Chaning the culture is a slow, painfull process. But its better than going Lenin on democracy (rushing something that takes time) and leaving the country with decades of strife during which *no progress is made.*
To back this up: some statistics
Percentage of budget of US foreign aid: 1.0% (dead last among western nations).
Percentage of that dedicated to military aid to allies: ~50%
Percentage of total aid that comes directly back to US companies: ~70%
Percentage of people polled that think we spend too much on foreign aid: 75%
Average response to the question, "how much should we spend on foreign aid?": 8.4%
If I here this "right/wrong" bullshit anymore I'm going to scream. I can understand people who say this war is necessary: but right?
1) The US is amoral (note to the clueless: this is different from 'immoral') . So is pretty much every other country out there. Our actions are decided not by "right" and "wrong" but by our interests. In the '70s, the US fought a war against a country when their people chose a government the US did not agree with. Throughout the late 20th century, the US propped up oppressive dictatorships because it benifeted them. US sanctions on Iraq have not only resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis (not counting the 75,000 that died as a result of the Gulf War) but made Saddam into a hero in many Arab circles. Were any of these actions "right?" Hell no. Were they good for the US? Certainly.
2) Money is not a big issue for the US. We have tons of it, and if we need more, we can always make the deficit a little larger. What he don't have is a stable energy supply, something which Iraq does. And anyone who says oil isn't the issue here is flat out misinformed. Even several ministers within Great Britain agree that a stable energy supply is the #1 reason for a way. Look at it this way: Iraq is a country with only about 25 million people. The US plans to spend over a hundred billion dollars on it. In comparison, the total population of the developing countries is in the billions. To relieve the entire developing world of their foreign debt would cost only $65 billion (much less if you don't count Indonesia). Developing countries suffer heavily under the interest payments due to foreign debt. In some countries, up to 25% of the budget could be freed up with debt relief. Now, what makes more sense: taking a country of 25 million people, that already has well-established infrastructure, blowing everything up, and rebuilding it at a cost of over a hundred billion dollars, or allowing a much larger number of countries to get their budget on track by relieving their debt? If "right" and "wrong" were our only concerns, we would certainly be doing the latter.
3) The whole "democracy for everyone!" idea is bunk. What makes you think that a system of government that works well for a rich, industrialized nation will work equally well for a decentralized nomad country (Afghanistan) and a very conservative religious society (Iran). Take Iran as a test case. The current government was put into place by a revolution of the people. That's the government they chose. If given the option, right now, they'd choose it again. Is it "right" to remake their country in our own image?
All this has no bearing on whether the war is necessary. I have my own opinions about that, but I won't try to convince you of them. But the truth of the matter is that the US is going to war to protect its own interests. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, one can make a strong arguement that the purpose of a government (much like a lawyer) is not to necessarly do what's morally right, but what's in the best interest of its people. It also doesn't mean that democracy is wrong. I'm very fond of the idea myself. I strongly believe that the ultimate direction of all governments should be towards democracy, and the international community should pressure all governments in that direction. But I also realize that history works at a scale much larger than the 4-year term of a President, and further, I believe that prostelyzing our system of government is against our fundemental values.
A parting thought: In the 10 minutes it took me to write this post, 240 children died of hunger. What did you do about it? What did I do about it? Everytime anyone starts to get to full of themselves, or too proud of their accomplishments, think about that. Realize that while our country may very well be the greatest in the world, that's not saying much, and it's nothing to be proud of. Humility is a part of every religion. There is a fundemental reason for this...
Look. I wouldn't post these things if I hadn't done anything more than read a marketing blurb off Apple's website. Check out the PDF Apple submitted to Siggraph. Look at the data-flow diagrams on page 10. Look at the line that says "Quartz2D." Note the color: orange. Now, look at the legend in the top right hand corner. Lookup the meaning of the color orange: "software," as in "software-rendered." Quartz Extreme is a misnomer. It should actually be Quartz _Compositor_ Extreme. OpenGL is only used to accelerate window compositing, not to actually draw stuff inside the window. In EVAS, the little line for Quartz2D would be red, as in "Hardware accelerated."
Actually, EVAS is much cooler than Quartz. Wheras Quartz (even Quartz Extreme) renders all those beautiful graphics via the CPU, EVAS is a high-level display manager that can take full advantage of OpenGL acceleration if its available. Since it's basically a scene graph (retained mode for you DirectX people), it takes care of all the display optimization for you, so you don't have to worry about writing efficient update code. EVAS is good step away from Quartz, and more in line with Microsoft's Longhorn.
By absolutely refusing to budge on your position and to say "I will not even read their proposal?" That is your idea of diplomacy?
>>>>>>>>>
No, by respecting the UN and allowing the process to work.
By selling outlawed weapons to an evil dictator?
>>>>>>>>>>
What country do you think propped up dictators (included Saddam) all through the Cold War? Hint: it wasn't France. Who do you think trained the people who would eventually become the Taliban? Again, not France. It was the US.
By interceding(sic) in the Ivory Coast when no one asked them to? I don't recall UN approval of that action. Where is the diplomacy there?
>>>>>>>
France sent peacekeeping troops to the Ivory coast because there are a whole bunch of French citizens living there.
Look, the point isn't whether France is great (it isn't, every country pretty much sucks donkey balls) or whether you even agree with what France's stance on the war is. The point is whether you can relate to their decision in a mature way without doing stupid stuff like renaming fast food.
Mandrake is a French product. To purchase it means to stand up for the international diplomacy, national sovereignty, and the rule of law.