Huh? ATI is famous for crappy drivers, both in Windows and in X. As for me, I've never had any problem's with NVIDIA's drivers (Windows 95 -> Linux 2.5*), and I've only used NVIDIA cards in all my machines since my PII-300.
Theoretically, you don't need source to port to BSD. The kernel driver has an abstraction layer (which comes in source form) and is fully portable. The XFree86 module (by design of the XFree86 driver model) is platform independent and can be loaded on any x86 OS. As it stands, it is not in NVIDIA's best interest to release the driver code. First, parts of it are copyrighted by other parties. Second, you can bet that ATI and Matrox would love to get their hands on it. Remember, an OpenGL ICD is an entire OpenGL implementation, not just a hardware banger. That makes the situation rather unique. ATI has some hardware that could be seriously compatitive with NVIDIA's if it had proper drivers. Why should NVIDIA jepordize their company to placate 0.01% of its users?
There aren't many features of Java that couldn't be implemented in C++. Runtime introspection, for example, *has* been implemented in C++, as has object serialization, all without putting a VM under it.
Re:Sadly Intel has the upper hand here
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 2
Unreal ran comfortably on 128MB. Unreal 2003 requies 512 to run comfortably. At this rate, we'll hit 4GB in no time.
Overclocking vs underclocking is something far out of the range of this discussion. These probes use chips specially designed for the purpose (like those radiation hardened Pentiums you heard about a while back). At that level, there is no underclocking or overclocking. You run it a the clock frequency it was designed to go, not questions.
A 32-bit CPU isn't limited to 4GB; >>>>>>>> I will shoot myself if we ever go back to bank switching. I'm not kidding. Maybe I'll go postal first and knock off the guys at Microsoft who wrote the memory windowing extensions. Then I'll kill myself...
Actually, if you divy up a 2^64 addresss space among each person in the world, each person only gets about 3 gigs. Certainly not a lot, eh? Not enough for serveral tasks (like globally distributed persistant objects in a single-address space operating system).
Re:Software Compatability is the key, not OS
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
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· Score: 2
Think about the thousands of small 32 bit programs out on debian.org (or gentoo.com or redhat.com) right now. I can just recompile any of them on whatever proc I want!
Re:Sadly Intel has the upper hand here
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 2
Basically, a CPU will inherently run slower if it is backwards compatible with a completely different architecture. >>>>>>>> You do realize that most of the major RISC chips are backwards compatible with older archs. UltraSPARC (64-bit) is backwards compatible with SPARC (32-bit). There are several MIPS ISAs as well.
Ah. You sound like the people who made Java. They confronted every potential problem with C++ and solved it by removing the offending feature. Multiple inheritence can be dangerous? Just remove it. Pointers can be dangerous? Just remove them. I like Java well and all, but I'd really like to see an extension to C++ that adds some of Java's new feature (like introspection and dynamic classes). Anyway, back to the topic at hand, what do you do when you need to program some device on the serial port? Or when somebody hands you a floppy disk because they aren't hooked into the net? Or your USB keyboard craps out and all you have is a modly PS/2 one lying around? All of these have happened to me recently, and boy did kick myself when I had to copy something to a floppy in the next 2 minutes before heading out the door and I realized I had disabled my floppy drive in the BIOS. Most of the legacy stuff these days hangs off the Super-I/O chip and stays out of the way of the rest of the system. They're not hurting anything and don't cost anything, so why get rid of them?
Its not a no-restrictions service. The TOS says their are restrictions! And if you really trust the advertisements, then you're one of those people that are responsible for all the "talk & walk Barbie does not actually talk or walk"-type adds I see all the time.
What's left to legally justify broadband? Nothing at all. P2P is the only thing that justifies broadband. If you're not using p2p then you can probably get everything you need from a 56K modem and save yourself some money. >>>>>>>. Have you used dialup lately? Even just surfing the internet is a pain. Not to mention the fact that it limits your access to stuff like CNN Newfeeds, video conferencing, internet long distance phone calls, etc. All of these are things the average home user wants to use. Also, I doubt that the average home user even knows about p2p. Maybe kids, but not adults.
Second, I do think we should get rid of speed limits. I'm sick of the government protecting people from their own stupidity. Instead, make the consequences for stuff like manslaughter much tougher than the ridiculous "community service" crap they have now.
As for the ACLU, they're the ones protecting your freedom. The fight is never over, because the government is always out to get you. No, people should not live peacefully, but always be alert. This is perhaps the one biggest thing that annoys me about the "public." Always wanting to get on with their own sedentary existance without giving a single thought to the larger issues in the world. I'm not saying we should spend every moment worrying about the global ethical consequences of our behavior, we'd go insane. But staying alert of them wouldn't kill us, and would make the world a whole lot better.
True, it is technically their private property. But if you look at it from a broader perspective, we have to realize that the internet is becoming public property. A virtual world just like the one you can go outside in. You're allowed to say what you want in the real world, so why not in the virutal world of the internet? There is significant precedence for this, btw. Even though restaurants and hotels are private property, the government realized that they had many of the characteristics of public places, and thus imposed regulations that limited what rights the property owners had. This was done so property owners could not invoke property rights to deny certain people (namely blacks) of their rights. All of this goes back to the fundemental idea that you have certain rights and can act on them, but only so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others. No, this is not in the Constitution in that exact form, but I dare you to try to disprove this idea as accepted precedent.
No, that's perfectly fine. Time Warner is not snooping around our internet connection and teling you what you can and cannot use your bandwidth for. It still makes sense for them to not allow you to run a server or take you to task when you use too much bandwidth. Bandwidth is a shared resource, and one person using too much hurts everyone else. It limits *their* right to use their bandwidth how they choose.
I think that companies have to get one thing into their head. The internet is not the next big place to make money. The internet is the equivilent of a phone, paper mail, and a library, all of which are extremely personal and non-commercial. I really don't think that people want corporate interests to pervade every aspect of their lives. At some point, people's interest in keeping a vital economy and strong commercial sector have to come to a balance with people's interest in maintaining perspective and sanity. The current situation on the Internet is ridiculous. It is so overly commercialized that what once had the promise to become a powerful medium of information exchange has increasingly become a method for corporations to make money, just like T.V. and mass-market clothing and movies. I'm not saying we should all be communist and kill those evil corporations. All I'm asking for is for people to realize that maybe the current value of the NASDAQ isn't the most important thing in the world, and that keeping corporate America in a constant state of growth does not take precedence to maintaining peoples' quality of life.
How if breaking regional lock-ins a violation of intellectual property? If patents can make customers do whatever the manufacturer wants, I think I'll patent something and require all to get body-tattoos in order to use it.
Methinks its all just overkill, given that 9/11 seems to have been caused by some very basic oversights* rather than high-level terrorist subtlety.
* BTW, I doubt any amount of reshuffling is going to fix this. Methinks the FBI and CIA should be run more like the millitary. Leaders need to be held accountable. If anything bad happens on their watch, or if any over their subordinates screw up, they should be punished.
Death is preferable to moral bankruptcy. The minute we decide that security is preferable to ethical behavior, we lose the right to say we are the greatest democracy in the world.
I think the main issue that's preventing most people from switching is that it isn't worth it. Linux, on the desktop, is not that much better than Windows XP on the desktop. Its not noticibly more stable, its not noticibly faster, but there are noticible downsides (application support and ease-of-use) to using it. I've been running Linux on a desktop machine for years now, and have recently settled in pretty well with KDE 3.0 and Gentoo. I use it not because it really gains me any technical merit I don't get in Windows XP, but because I hate Microsoft, the windows-style command line interface, and that blasted tooltip that keeps popping up in the corner of my screen in XP. Still, whenever I boot back into XP (to run Photoshop or the occasional game) I have to admit that Linux really isn't technically superior anymore, at least not in ways that a desktop user would notice. XP is reasonably fast, reasonably stable, and reasonably easy to use. For those less rabid then me, then, its an easy choice. They can endure the pain of switching to Linux, for a dubious set of benifets, or they can stay with Windows. This has been the situation forever. Why did MacOS never manage to take back its market share from Windows? Its been superior (from an average desktop user's point of view) for a very long time. Simply because people didn't percieve enough benifet from doing it. Windows was *good enough* compared to what MacOS was at the time. Now, if the timing had been different, had a Linux 2.4/KDE 3.0-style desktop been available around the introduction of Windows 95, would Linux have taken off? Hell ya. People would have seen a significant benifet in moving to Linux. Thus, if Linux ever wants to beat Microsoft on the desktop, it can't settle for being a "better Windows." It has to be *more*. Not just different, but a generation ahead technically. Now, this is what Microsoft does best. When they're not designing stuff like Palladium, MS engineers come up with genuinely cool stuff. A lot of it may be ripped of from other sources, and the first implementations may be less than perfect, but overall, they keep advancing the desktop. If Linux wants to be the next Windows, it has to beat Microsoft at its own game. It has to think up the next generation of user inteface and implement it before Microsoft can.
Re:They used �Intel-like� approach to design?!? HA
on
ATI R300 and R250V
·
· Score: 2
If you had a clue you'd realize that nobody buys graphics cards based on clock speed. They're not advertised on the box! The only people who know the clock speed are geeks who read up on it, and those people depend on benchmarks anyway!
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Huh? ATI is famous for crappy drivers, both in Windows and in X. As for me, I've never had any problem's with NVIDIA's drivers (Windows 95 -> Linux 2.5*), and I've only used NVIDIA cards in all my machines since my PII-300.
Theoretically, you don't need source to port to BSD. The kernel driver has an abstraction layer (which comes in source form) and is fully portable. The XFree86 module (by design of the XFree86 driver model) is platform independent and can be loaded on any x86 OS. As it stands, it is not in NVIDIA's best interest to release the driver code. First, parts of it are copyrighted by other parties. Second, you can bet that ATI and Matrox would love to get their hands on it. Remember, an OpenGL ICD is an entire OpenGL implementation, not just a hardware banger. That makes the situation rather unique. ATI has some hardware that could be seriously compatitive with NVIDIA's if it had proper drivers. Why should NVIDIA jepordize their company to placate 0.01% of its users?
There aren't many features of Java that couldn't be implemented in C++. Runtime introspection, for example, *has* been implemented in C++, as has object serialization, all without putting a VM under it.
Unreal ran comfortably on 128MB. Unreal 2003 requies 512 to run comfortably. At this rate, we'll hit 4GB in no time.
Overclocking vs underclocking is something far out of the range of this discussion. These probes use chips specially designed for the purpose (like those radiation hardened Pentiums you heard about a while back). At that level, there is no underclocking or overclocking. You run it a the clock frequency it was designed to go, not questions.
A 32-bit CPU isn't limited to 4GB;
>>>>>>>>
I will shoot myself if we ever go back to bank switching. I'm not kidding. Maybe I'll go postal first and knock off the guys at Microsoft who wrote the memory windowing extensions. Then I'll kill myself...
Actually, if you divy up a 2^64 addresss space among each person in the world, each person only gets about 3 gigs. Certainly not a lot, eh? Not enough for serveral tasks (like globally distributed persistant objects in a single-address space operating system).
Think about the thousands of small 32 bit programs out on debian.org (or gentoo.com or redhat.com) right now. I can just recompile any of them on whatever proc I want!
Basically, a CPU will inherently run slower if it is backwards compatible with a completely different architecture.
>>>>>>>>
You do realize that most of the major RISC chips are backwards compatible with older archs. UltraSPARC (64-bit) is backwards compatible with SPARC (32-bit). There are several MIPS ISAs as well.
Ah. You sound like the people who made Java. They confronted every potential problem with C++ and solved it by removing the offending feature. Multiple inheritence can be dangerous? Just remove it. Pointers can be dangerous? Just remove them. I like Java well and all, but I'd really like to see an extension to C++ that adds some of Java's new feature (like introspection and dynamic classes). Anyway, back to the topic at hand, what do you do when you need to program some device on the serial port? Or when somebody hands you a floppy disk because they aren't hooked into the net? Or your USB keyboard craps out and all you have is a modly PS/2 one lying around? All of these have happened to me recently, and boy did kick myself when I had to copy something to a floppy in the next 2 minutes before heading out the door and I realized I had disabled my floppy drive in the BIOS. Most of the legacy stuff these days hangs off the Super-I/O chip and stays out of the way of the rest of the system. They're not hurting anything and don't cost anything, so why get rid of them?
I am not aware of any problems on Linux which cannot be corrected without a reinstall of the OS
>>>>>
Well, filesystem corruption bugs come to mind.
Its not a no-restrictions service. The TOS says their are restrictions! And if you really trust the advertisements, then you're one of those people that are responsible for all the "talk & walk Barbie does not actually talk or walk"-type adds I see all the time.
What's left to legally justify broadband? Nothing at all. P2P is the only thing that justifies broadband. If you're not using p2p then you can probably get everything you need from a 56K modem and save yourself some money.
>>>>>>>.
Have you used dialup lately? Even just surfing the internet is a pain. Not to mention the fact that it limits your access to stuff like CNN Newfeeds, video conferencing, internet long distance phone calls, etc. All of these are things the average home user wants to use. Also, I doubt that the average home user even knows about p2p. Maybe kids, but not adults.
Second, I do think we should get rid of speed limits. I'm sick of the government protecting people from their own stupidity. Instead, make the consequences for stuff like manslaughter much tougher than the ridiculous "community service" crap they have now.
As for the ACLU, they're the ones protecting your freedom. The fight is never over, because the government is always out to get you. No, people should not live peacefully, but always be alert. This is perhaps the one biggest thing that annoys me about the "public." Always wanting to get on with their own sedentary existance without giving a single thought to the larger issues in the world. I'm not saying we should spend every moment worrying about the global ethical consequences of our behavior, we'd go insane. But staying alert of them wouldn't kill us, and would make the world a whole lot better.
True, it is technically their private property. But if you look at it from a broader perspective, we have to realize that the internet is becoming public property. A virtual world just like the one you can go outside in. You're allowed to say what you want in the real world, so why not in the virutal world of the internet? There is significant precedence for this, btw. Even though restaurants and hotels are private property, the government realized that they had many of the characteristics of public places, and thus imposed regulations that limited what rights the property owners had. This was done so property owners could not invoke property rights to deny certain people (namely blacks) of their rights. All of this goes back to the fundemental idea that you have certain rights and can act on them, but only so long as you don't infringe on the rights of others. No, this is not in the Constitution in that exact form, but I dare you to try to disprove this idea as accepted precedent.
No, that's perfectly fine. Time Warner is not snooping around our internet connection and teling you what you can and cannot use your bandwidth for. It still makes sense for them to not allow you to run a server or take you to task when you use too much bandwidth. Bandwidth is a shared resource, and one person using too much hurts everyone else. It limits *their* right to use their bandwidth how they choose.
I think that companies have to get one thing into their head. The internet is not the next big place to make money. The internet is the equivilent of a phone, paper mail, and a library, all of which are extremely personal and non-commercial. I really don't think that people want corporate interests to pervade every aspect of their lives. At some point, people's interest in keeping a vital economy and strong commercial sector have to come to a balance with people's interest in maintaining perspective and sanity. The current situation on the Internet is ridiculous. It is so overly commercialized that what once had the promise to become a powerful medium of information exchange has increasingly become a method for corporations to make money, just like T.V. and mass-market clothing and movies. I'm not saying we should all be communist and kill those evil corporations. All I'm asking for is for people to realize that maybe the current value of the NASDAQ isn't the most important thing in the world, and that keeping corporate America in a constant state of growth does not take precedence to maintaining peoples' quality of life.
I'm not necessarily saying that the U.S. is the greatest. It's my country so I've got a bit of a bias. But at least right now we're in the running :)
The Euro symbol is a little box? Makes sense, given the cars you guys drive...
Unless where you're from CR-Rs are single-use disposable devices...
>>>>
CD-R's *are* single-used devices. You mean CD-R drives do you not?
How if breaking regional lock-ins a violation of intellectual property? If patents can make customers do whatever the manufacturer wants, I think I'll patent something and require all to get body-tattoos in order to use it.
Methinks its all just overkill, given that 9/11 seems to have been caused by some very basic oversights* rather than high-level terrorist subtlety.
* BTW, I doubt any amount of reshuffling is going to fix this. Methinks the FBI and CIA should be run more like the millitary. Leaders need to be held accountable. If anything bad happens on their watch, or if any over their subordinates screw up, they should be punished.
Death is preferable to moral bankruptcy. The minute we decide that security is preferable to ethical behavior, we lose the right to say we are the greatest democracy in the world.
I think the main issue that's preventing most people from switching is that it isn't worth it. Linux, on the desktop, is not that much better than Windows XP on the desktop. Its not noticibly more stable, its not noticibly faster, but there are noticible downsides (application support and ease-of-use) to using it. I've been running Linux on a desktop machine for years now, and have recently settled in pretty well with KDE 3.0 and Gentoo. I use it not because it really gains me any technical merit I don't get in Windows XP, but because I hate Microsoft, the windows-style command line interface, and that blasted tooltip that keeps popping up in the corner of my screen in XP. Still, whenever I boot back into XP (to run Photoshop or the occasional game) I have to admit that Linux really isn't technically superior anymore, at least not in ways that a desktop user would notice. XP is reasonably fast, reasonably stable, and reasonably easy to use. For those less rabid then me, then, its an easy choice. They can endure the pain of switching to Linux, for a dubious set of benifets, or they can stay with Windows. This has been the situation forever. Why did MacOS never manage to take back its market share from Windows? Its been superior (from an average desktop user's point of view) for a very long time. Simply because people didn't percieve enough benifet from doing it. Windows was *good enough* compared to what MacOS was at the time. Now, if the timing had been different, had a Linux 2.4/KDE 3.0-style desktop been available around the introduction of Windows 95, would Linux have taken off? Hell ya. People would have seen a significant benifet in moving to Linux. Thus, if Linux ever wants to beat Microsoft on the desktop, it can't settle for being a "better Windows." It has to be *more*. Not just different, but a generation ahead technically. Now, this is what Microsoft does best. When they're not designing stuff like Palladium, MS engineers come up with genuinely cool stuff. A lot of it may be ripped of from other sources, and the first implementations may be less than perfect, but overall, they keep advancing the desktop. If Linux wants to be the next Windows, it has to beat Microsoft at its own game. It has to think up the next generation of user inteface and implement it before Microsoft can.
Bullshit. D3 is being demoed on R300s.
If you had a clue you'd realize that nobody buys graphics cards based on clock speed. They're not advertised on the box! The only people who know the clock speed are geeks who read up on it, and those people depend on benchmarks anyway!