Wow. I'm surprised at all these stories of hard drives going south. I've never had a hard drive die, in many years of use. I still have a badly abused 10 year old 210MB harddrive that still works great. Ditto for the slightly younger, but still badly abused 1GB drive. That said, I don't worry about data loss anymore. Data is far too important to keep on your working machines. Thus, I've got a Linux server where I keep all my data. I've gotten into the habit of putting everything under subversion (it's alpha software, but remarkably stable) so I get everything version controlled for free. Throw in the occasional backup, and not only is my data (all versions of it) acessible anywhere I've got an internet connection, but it should stay accessible in the event that I kill my main machine by abusing it like I do.
There you go again, reducing things to a simple conflict between pure capitalism and pure communism, and pigeon-holing circles of thought into one group or another. Perhaps the biggest weakness of the prevailing thought pattern in the US is it's tendency to simplify all concepts to the point of absurdity. There is not a single school of that that believes unadultered capitalism is a bad thing. There is a wide range of people that don't believe in pure capitalism, and their ideals take the form of everything from slightly tempered capitalism to pure communism. The course of history indicates that those near the middle are most nearly right. Communism largely failed the world over, while pure capitalism failed as well - even in the United States. The current US is most nearly socialist, according to traditional (rather than modern) definitions of the word.
Automobiles are a big problem, especially here in Land O' Disposable Cars(TM). We had a 1990 Toyota that will probably last another couple of decades with various successive owners, while our 1997 Dodge started showing its age years ago. It's especially important given the less friendly materials being used these days in car construction (metals are pretty easy to recycle compared to some of the stuff that's going into cars these days).
Whoever said that was wrong? You seem to imply that it's morally wrong for a company to want to make money. >>>>>>>>> There are a lot of intellectual circles that believe that this is wrong. Not so much existing to make money but existing *only* to make money. Before spouting off, you should realize that not everyone shares the same (in my opinion bleak and simplistic) worldview.
The problem is that Joe consumer doesn't know about (or care about) hard scientific data. All they care about is whatever is easiest for them. Without outside constraints,t hey will not recycle. Making the manufacturer recycle has the correct effect: it drives up prices and makes Joe consumer bear the cost of cleaning up his own shit.
Um, the metric system was adopted in France in 1795 How much longer could it possibly take? It's not exactly a fine line between 'gradual' and 'never happening!' And I thought ISA and DOS were bad because they took decades to die. But centuries!
And it's all a crapshot anyway when you go to Home Depot and try to get a piece of wood cut to 12". You'll get anything from 11" to 13", occasionally 10"
Do you mean Bjarne? And lot's of people have mastered C++. It takes awhile, C++ with the STL is far more compact than any GUI API, for example. While it's often helpful that C++ has a gradual learning curve (you can learn pieces of it at a time and still use them successfully) it's really useful to know the whole thing. The whole point of a multi-paradigm language is using constructs that are appropriate to the task at hand, and doing that requires knowing what constructs are available.
Well, on the desktop, memory bandwidth is extremely important. Thanks to SIMD, current P4's can chew through tens of GB of data per second. In an intensive program like a game of media application, even the 3.2 GB/sec of memory bandwidth of a P4 can get pegged. Intel is moving to dual channel DDR in all of its chipsets, and the KT400A will also be a dual channel platform. Starting in Q2-2003, Intel's SpringDale-PE chipset will have 6.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth, and people buying DDR-433 memory will probably be able to push the KT400A to 7 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. All for less than $500 on PriceWatch:)
Re:32-bit compatible = a temporary half-solution
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2
It'll benifet Linux users like me right off the bat. Most Linux software is already 64-bit clean. The Alpha port of Gentoo was done in *two* days! I'm a recompile away from enjoying the fastest processors out there, regardless of architecture. Suck it Gates!
Re:What desktop users want to know..
on
AMD's 64-bit Plot
·
· Score: 2
Actually, the original Pentium bus was 64 bit, and that has been the widest one until dual-channel DDR became all the rage. A 64-bit chip doesn't necessarily have any more bandwidth than a 32-bit chip, especially since main memory is accessed in cachelines of 32-64 bytes regardless of the width of the chip.
That's arguable. Voodoo2 SLI was such a huge leap over anything else on the market, I don't think you could consider it in the same league as say a GeForce4 today. That said, take a look at the original prices of the Voodoo-1 cards, or even the Riva TNT2 or original GeForce cards. They were a whole lot less than the $400 a GeForce4 Ti 4600 cost at launch.
It's weird though. Back around 1997-1998, a high end graphics card cost about $200 (ex. Voodoo 2 at its release). These days, it's closer to $400. Meanwhile, CPUs have reveresed. They used to cost close to $600, now it's more like $300
Chrono Trigger was the coolest game ever. I hope we see more stuff like that as a result of this merger. I might just have to get into gaming again...
Re:Kde3 better than OSX? What are you smoking?
on
Fresco M1 Released
·
· Score: 2
OSX is not bitmaps, its vectors. >>>>>> Quartz deals with both bitmaps and vectors. Unfortunately, nearly all the chrome (scrollbars and whatnot) are just bitmaps. That was my point. Aqua has the potential to be totally vector based, but it isn't.
OSX does realtime scaling this means you can scale a movie down in realtime while its playing and see it playing while its happening, >>>>>>>> Everything since Win98 has done this! This is so trivial, it's expected behavior.
it also allows you to scale icons in realtime, this is mainly due to the PDF based API and the design but it manages to do it. >>>>>>> Both KDE and GNOME have the infrastructure necessary to do this (see the GNOME SVG icons). In fact, unlike OS X, GNOME can even draw it's widgets as SVG graphics.
Xrender is not powerful enough is my point. >>>>>> The only thing XRender is missing is the vector API, which is being worked on as we speak.
OSX jaguar uses Quartz extreme which does everything in hardware >>>>>>>> Common misconception. "Quartz Extreme" is actually an enhancement for Quartz Compositor not Quartz 2D. It allows the compositing of windows and stuff like the genie effect to be hardware accelerated, nothing else. The Quartz 2D software renderer draws windows to textured quads, and these quads are draw via OpenGL onto the screen. Thus, the only thing being accelerated are window-level special effects (drop shadows, etc) not actual drawing.
Linux on the desktop dead by Rasterman [linuxandmain.com] >>>>> Rasterman isn't exactly the only person who can do this. EVAS will live on, or something like it. It's just too good not to. Take a look at E17's evas_test program. It's unbelievable. Even at this early stage, it can draw complex alpha-blended vector graphics at 100 fps, *fully* OpenGL accelerated.
Longhorn looks just like XP, Microsoft is working on it, but if you honestly believe Microsoft is innovative enough to actually be the future of the desktop, you must have been blind for the past 5-6 years. >>>>>>>> Microsoft did DirectX, and DirectX, in its modern iterations is one hell of a great API. It seems to be that the DirectX guys have a hand in Longhorn (desktop accelerated via Direct3D, for example) and I don't doubt that Longhorn's hardware accelerated desktop will kick ass. Who cares what it looks like (OS X people, sigh...)? The technology underneath is amazing. It's not innovative (it is kind of a no brainer at this point that the desktop should be accelerated via 3D hardware) but the idea is solid.
OSX has its flaws but Display PDF works very well, Its working better than Longhorn, and better than Linux, >>>>>>>>> Display PDF works fine, but it really was not the right rendering model to use. It would've been smart of Apple not to tie itself to something that really couldn't be accelerated in hardware easily. As for working better than Longhorn, Longhorn isn't due out for several years. Or are you judging by those leaked screenshots of an alpha build?
By the way I've checked out the mailing lists, a Vector API takes longer than months to develop, its going to take them at least a year to fully develop it considering its only 2 guys writing it. Thats why I said 2-3 years Linux will catch up, because it will take about a year for the Vector API to be complete, then another year for KDE to actually use it, then another year before all the themes are actually made to take advantage of it, so 2-3 years is a good estimate. >>>>>>>> Welcome to OSS time scales! A lot of the core infrastructure is already in place (thank's to XRender), and they have a good base (Postscript) to cue the design off of. If the speed of development of XRender, Xft, and FontConfig are any indication, those X guys will speed through implementing the vector API. If XRender and XRandR are any indication, KDE will support the vector API before it even becomes available in a stable X release!
Re:Kde3 better than OSX? What are you smoking?
on
Fresco M1 Released
·
· Score: 2
it cannot do image transformations such as genie effect >>>>>>>> Not to windows it can't, but it can do them inside windows, which is far more important.
it cannot do realtime scaling >>>>> What's that? If you mean scaling the graphics because the drawing API is vector based, nothing else can either. If you didn't notice, most OS X widgets are bitmaps.
it doesnt fully anti alias everything on screen >>>>> This is legitimate.
it doesnt use your video card to do this in hardware if you do find some software hacks to do this, so X is extremely slow. >>>>>> Actually, certain X driver (Matrox, NVIDIA) *do* accelerate XRender in hardware. Quartz, right now, does everything in software, and can't even theoretically do stuff in hardware (blame Display PDF) without a lot of overhead in translating the format.
KDE better than OSX? hell no, check back in 2-3 years and maybe you'll be right. >>>>>> It's already better from a features point of view, and in terms of locks, it's a wash. OS X has window shadows and smooth icon-zooming, which KDE doesn't have, but the fact that it's actively hostile to theming give KDE an advantage. The only thing missing is a vector API , which will arrive in months rather than years (check the XRender mailing lists). The future, however, is outside both KDE and OS X. The future is stuff like EVAS and Longhorn, and OS X has the disadvantage that it's display model is so closely tied to DisplayPDF it will need some significant reworking to compete with those.
What bugs me is not so much the pop-up issue, but the fact that the "access denied" page is one of those irritating Javascript jobs that you can't Back-button out of.
Slashdot Mirror
Direct Connect is a p2p protocol. If you go to you can find out all about it.
Most people don't have enough movies to fill two of these things.
>>>>>>>>
You've obviously never seen a college campus network...
You've obviously never seen those DirectConnect servers that require you to share 100GB before they even let you in...
Wow. I'm surprised at all these stories of hard drives going south. I've never had a hard drive die, in many years of use. I still have a badly abused 10 year old 210MB harddrive that still works great. Ditto for the slightly younger, but still badly abused 1GB drive. That said, I don't worry about data loss anymore. Data is far too important to keep on your working machines. Thus, I've got a Linux server where I keep all my data. I've gotten into the habit of putting everything under subversion (it's alpha software, but remarkably stable) so I get everything version controlled for free. Throw in the occasional backup, and not only is my data (all versions of it) acessible anywhere I've got an internet connection, but it should stay accessible in the event that I kill my main machine by abusing it like I do.
There you go again, reducing things to a simple conflict between pure capitalism and pure communism, and pigeon-holing circles of thought into one group or another. Perhaps the biggest weakness of the prevailing thought pattern in the US is it's tendency to simplify all concepts to the point of absurdity. There is not a single school of that that believes unadultered capitalism is a bad thing. There is a wide range of people that don't believe in pure capitalism, and their ideals take the form of everything from slightly tempered capitalism to pure communism. The course of history indicates that those near the middle are most nearly right. Communism largely failed the world over, while pure capitalism failed as well - even in the United States. The current US is most nearly socialist, according to traditional (rather than modern) definitions of the word.
Automobiles are a big problem, especially here in Land O' Disposable Cars(TM). We had a 1990 Toyota that will probably last another couple of decades with various successive owners, while our 1997 Dodge started showing its age years ago. It's especially important given the less friendly materials being used these days in car construction (metals are pretty easy to recycle compared to some of the stuff that's going into cars these days).
Whoever said that was wrong? You seem to imply that it's morally wrong for a company to want to make money.
>>>>>>>>>
There are a lot of intellectual circles that believe that this is wrong. Not so much existing to make money but existing *only* to make money. Before spouting off, you should realize that not everyone shares the same (in my opinion bleak and simplistic) worldview.
The problem is that Joe consumer doesn't know about (or care about) hard scientific data. All they care about is whatever is easiest for them. Without outside constraints,t hey will not recycle. Making the manufacturer recycle has the correct effect: it drives up prices and makes Joe consumer bear the cost of cleaning up his own shit.
Um, the metric system was adopted in France in 1795 How much longer could it possibly take? It's not exactly a fine line between 'gradual' and 'never happening!' And I thought ISA and DOS were bad because they took decades to die. But centuries!
I've only got 10 knuckles, one for each finger. Am I missing something, literally or figuratively?
And it's all a crapshot anyway when you go to Home Depot and try to get a piece of wood cut to 12". You'll get anything from 11" to 13", occasionally 10"
Except performance! Seriously, though, who gives a flying f* how 'clean' the board is?
Do you mean Bjarne? And lot's of people have mastered C++. It takes awhile, C++ with the STL is far more compact than any GUI API, for example. While it's often helpful that C++ has a gradual learning curve (you can learn pieces of it at a time and still use them successfully) it's really useful to know the whole thing. The whole point of a multi-paradigm language is using constructs that are appropriate to the task at hand, and doing that requires knowing what constructs are available.
You mean comparably? It's note quite than/then, but it's pretty unidiomatic.
It's RAX, RBX, etc. Don't know what the 'r' stands for, but it makes for the funny RIP instruction pointer :)
Well, on the desktop, memory bandwidth is extremely important. Thanks to SIMD, current P4's can chew through tens of GB of data per second. In an intensive program like a game of media application, even the 3.2 GB/sec of memory bandwidth of a P4 can get pegged. Intel is moving to dual channel DDR in all of its chipsets, and the KT400A will also be a dual channel platform. Starting in Q2-2003, Intel's SpringDale-PE chipset will have 6.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth, and people buying DDR-433 memory will probably be able to push the KT400A to 7 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. All for less than $500 on PriceWatch :)
It'll benifet Linux users like me right off the bat. Most Linux software is already 64-bit clean. The Alpha port of Gentoo was done in *two* days! I'm a recompile away from enjoying the fastest processors out there, regardless of architecture. Suck it Gates!
Actually, the original Pentium bus was 64 bit, and that has been the widest one until dual-channel DDR became all the rage. A 64-bit chip doesn't necessarily have any more bandwidth than a 32-bit chip, especially since main memory is accessed in cachelines of 32-64 bytes regardless of the width of the chip.
It's a secret plot to sneak knowledge into the households of America. The evil bastards!
That's arguable. Voodoo2 SLI was such a huge leap over anything else on the market, I don't think you could consider it in the same league as say a GeForce4 today. That said, take a look at the original prices of the Voodoo-1 cards, or even the Riva TNT2 or original GeForce cards. They were a whole lot less than the $400 a GeForce4 Ti 4600 cost at launch.
It's weird though. Back around 1997-1998, a high end graphics card cost about $200 (ex. Voodoo 2 at its release). These days, it's closer to $400. Meanwhile, CPUs have reveresed. They used to cost close to $600, now it's more like $300
Chrono Trigger was the coolest game ever. I hope we see more stuff like that as a result of this merger. I might just have to get into gaming again...
OSX is not bitmaps, its vectors.
>>>>>>
Quartz deals with both bitmaps and vectors. Unfortunately, nearly all the chrome (scrollbars and whatnot) are just bitmaps. That was my point. Aqua has the potential to be totally vector based, but it isn't.
OSX does realtime scaling this means you can scale a movie down in realtime while its playing and see it playing while its happening,
>>>>>>>>
Everything since Win98 has done this! This is so trivial, it's expected behavior.
it also allows you to scale icons in realtime, this is mainly due to the PDF based API and the design but it manages to do it.
>>>>>>>
Both KDE and GNOME have the infrastructure necessary to do this (see the GNOME SVG icons). In fact, unlike OS X, GNOME can even draw it's widgets as SVG graphics.
Xrender is not powerful enough is my point.
>>>>>>
The only thing XRender is missing is the vector API, which is being worked on as we speak.
OSX jaguar uses Quartz extreme which does everything in hardware
>>>>>>>>
Common misconception. "Quartz Extreme" is actually an enhancement for Quartz Compositor not Quartz 2D. It allows the compositing of windows and stuff like the genie effect to be hardware accelerated, nothing else. The Quartz 2D software renderer draws windows to textured quads, and these quads are draw via OpenGL onto the screen. Thus, the only thing being accelerated are window-level special effects (drop shadows, etc) not actual drawing.
Linux on the desktop dead by Rasterman [linuxandmain.com]
>>>>>
Rasterman isn't exactly the only person who can do this. EVAS will live on, or something like it. It's just too good not to. Take a look at E17's evas_test program. It's unbelievable. Even at this early stage, it can draw complex alpha-blended vector graphics at 100 fps, *fully* OpenGL accelerated.
Longhorn looks just like XP, Microsoft is working on it, but if you honestly believe Microsoft is innovative enough to actually be the future of the desktop, you must have been blind for the past 5-6 years.
>>>>>>>>
Microsoft did DirectX, and DirectX, in its modern iterations is one hell of a great API. It seems to be that the DirectX guys have a hand in Longhorn (desktop accelerated via Direct3D, for example) and I don't doubt that Longhorn's hardware accelerated desktop will kick ass. Who cares what it looks like (OS X people, sigh...)? The technology underneath is amazing. It's not innovative (it is kind of a no brainer at this point that the desktop should be accelerated via 3D hardware) but the idea is solid.
OSX has its flaws but Display PDF works very well, Its working better than Longhorn, and better than Linux,
>>>>>>>>>
Display PDF works fine, but it really was not the right rendering model to use. It would've been smart of Apple not to tie itself to something that really couldn't be accelerated in hardware easily. As for working better than Longhorn, Longhorn isn't due out for several years. Or are you judging by those leaked screenshots of an alpha build?
By the way I've checked out the mailing lists, a Vector API takes longer than months to develop, its going to take them at least a year to fully develop it considering its only 2 guys writing it. Thats why I said 2-3 years Linux will catch up, because it will take about a year for the Vector API to be complete, then another year for KDE to actually use it, then another year before all the themes are actually made to take advantage of it, so 2-3 years is a good estimate.
>>>>>>>>
Welcome to OSS time scales! A lot of the core infrastructure is already in place (thank's to XRender), and they have a good base (Postscript) to cue the design off of. If the speed of development of XRender, Xft, and FontConfig are any indication, those X guys will speed through implementing the vector API. If XRender and XRandR are any indication, KDE will support the vector API before it even becomes available in a stable X release!
it cannot do image transformations such as genie effect
>>>>>>>>
Not to windows it can't, but it can do them inside windows, which is far more important.
it cannot do realtime scaling
>>>>>
What's that? If you mean scaling the graphics because the drawing API is vector based, nothing else can either. If you didn't notice, most OS X widgets are bitmaps.
it doesnt fully anti alias everything on screen
>>>>>
This is legitimate.
it doesnt use your video card to do this in hardware if you do find some software hacks to do this, so X is extremely slow.
>>>>>>
Actually, certain X driver (Matrox, NVIDIA) *do* accelerate XRender in hardware. Quartz, right now, does everything in software, and can't even theoretically do stuff in hardware (blame Display PDF) without a lot of overhead in translating the format.
KDE better than OSX? hell no, check back in 2-3 years and maybe you'll be right.
>>>>>>
It's already better from a features point of view, and in terms of locks, it's a wash. OS X has window shadows and smooth icon-zooming, which KDE doesn't have, but the fact that it's actively hostile to theming give KDE an advantage. The only thing missing is a vector API , which will arrive in months rather than years (check the XRender mailing lists). The future, however, is outside both KDE and OS X. The future is stuff like EVAS and Longhorn, and OS X has the disadvantage that it's display model is so closely tied to DisplayPDF it will need some significant reworking to compete with those.
What bugs me is not so much the pop-up issue, but the fact that the "access denied" page is one of those irritating Javascript jobs that you can't Back-button out of.