I'd say pervasive AA-text will be reality in 6 months time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Monkeys or not, BeOS users have had this "new" feature for the last year and a half. Hell, even those poor, opressed Windows users have had AA text for over half a decade now. Besides, the monkey comment was directed at those people who think that its perfectly okay that to get the best Linux DE experience, one has to use one single DE. (Otherwise it is slower, more memory intensive, and less consistant.)
As for your rundown of toolkits, what about Athena? Not everyone wants a bloated DE on their desktop, and while you may get by fine on Qt and GTK+, some of us (me) still use apps like XPlayMidi that we are perfectly happy with (and ones that have no good KDE or GNOME replacement with as good support for my AWE64) and we won't get AA in these apps. Also, if we now need a DE to get all the features of X, why bother with X compatibility anymore? We could just port KDE or GNOME to a new windowing system and have the same application base (with some tweeks.) All in all, stuff like this *really* should be done at the lowest levels.
For the uncultured among you, The Social Contract was a book written in the 16th century by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.
PS> This really shouldn't be necessary, but some/. people! I have nothing against Debian. I just thought the naming of the document was funny. No flames, please!
That wasn't my point. My point was that everyone is so caught up with the political aspects (license, etc) that nobody is apying attention to the technology in the distro.
Also, I think X had a dumb design to begin with. X is *very* low-level. While this had the benifet of allow modifyable user interfaces, it also meant that apps get stuck with tons of low-level dependencies. Funny thing, though, the Windows GUI has changed a bunch since Windows 1.0, and MS never had any X-like low-level layer.
You don't even need X for remote display anymore. QNX's Photon does remote display at a much higher level than X (where it belongs) and is fast AND network transparent.
But the sad thing is that there are actually limitations in X that you don't get with "lower end devices." Yea, I know XRender does AA these days, but it will be a while before AA-text is pervasive. (Unless you're a monkey and only use the apps specific to a particular DE!)
When half the entire board, reading high-scores down, is about political issues. Licenses, use of the Debian name, free vs. non-free OSS vs the world. Since I seem the be the only *real* geek here, I have a question. Is there any technological basis at ALL for Progeny Debian, or is it simply a cop-out to project managers who can't stand the idea of using a product from a non-commerical entity?
That's just a legal cop out. The fact is, that if you use "Debian" in the name, than 99% of users are going to assume that the two distributions are simply different aspects of the same thing. Using Debian in the name, legal or not, still invokes the "Official Debian" distro to sell your software. I'm not saying this is good or bad, its just the consequences of calling it Progeny Debian.
Re:A nice article about SMT on the Alpha
on
Emergence of SMT
·
· Score: 2
Yikes. The EV8 will dissipate 250watts! That's more than my monitor! Of course, watts are good;) I want one (or four, this does SMP right?)
Q3 at 16x12 is unplayable on everything except the Ultra, but the GTS2 still wins.
MDK 1024x768 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 105.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 86.8fps
Again, about 18 more fps at this res.
MDK 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB 43.3fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 38.2fps
Only 5fps faster, but that's around 12% faster.
Unreal Tournament 1024x768 @32bpp (avg)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 84.5fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 87.8fps.
Here the DDR wins, but only by 3fps.
Unreal Tournament 1600x1200 @32bpp (min)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 34.3fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 18.8fps
Ouch. What were you saying about high resolutions?
The GTS is playable, the Radeon is not.
Unreal Tournament 1600x1200 @32bpp (avg)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 68.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 56.9fps
The GTS is 12fps faster here.
Serious Sam 1024x768 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 47.2fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 50.1fps
The Radeon wins, but its only 3fps faster.
Serious Sam 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 22.5fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 24.7fps
A hair over 2fps faster.
Mercedes-Benz 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 20.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 24.2fps
The only decisive victory for the Radeon. Still, at the only playable resolution (640x480) the GTS wins 64.7 to 57.8.
So overall, the Radeon is a good card, but NVIDIA still has a significant speed advantage, and for only a little bit more, is worth it, in my opinion. (Not the mention the fact that they have better drivers and pro-caliber OpenGL!)
3dfx (not the 3DFX we loved, but 3dfx) never used tile-rendering. They didn't support T&L because they were an opportunistic crappy company that screwed its users, tried to maintain a monopoly on Glide games (and used tricks such that if MS had used them,/. would be collectively frothing at the mouth) and deserved the pissing on that it got from NVIDIA. Ever since the Voodoo2 didn't make the jump to 32bit color (and the TNT did) 3dfx was on the way down for not being a leader in technology.
Let's see 17million transistors. 4 of them would be around 68million transistors. Given that a GeForce 3 has 57 million transistors, and there would probably be some overlap between the chips, it seems that this would be quite doable. Of course, at that point you'd probably need DDR memery to feed the 4 chips, but hey, RAM is cheap! (As in 1 GB (4DIMMS) for $180 at pricewatch!)
Actually, NVIDIA's cards are significantly faster at only $40 or so price margin. The price/performance should actually be better for a 64MB GTS than a 64MB Radeon, but it depends on the benchmark and resolution.
Actually, Videologic (I believe they were independant at this time. NEC invested in them first, then bought them outright) was going to implement a multi-way architecture using these things, but due to the DreamCast thing, never really made. As I remember it, the article said that it would have been VERY easy to do multiple chips for this, and they chastised 3DFx for taking such an inelegant approach when designing their own multichip solution (Voodoo2)
Well, BeOS R5 still runs fine on the BeBox. Besides, its not a primary machine kind of purchase. You'd buy a BeBox for the same reason you'd buy on old Amiga. It really was a beautiful machine. (Besides, it had a "GeekPort" how could you NOT like it?)
Funny you should mention UVM, I just printed out the thesis of the guy who invented it. He used UVM to get his doctorate, and after reading about half of the 170-odd pages, I must say that its pretty cool. Some things are a little too BSD-ish for me (such as wasting perfectly good efficiency opportunities in order to keep pagetables throw-away-able) but hopefully, this will get implemented into Free/OpenBSD soon. If it works, then maybe the Linux guys will make a copy of it;)
It's a f*cking conspiracy;) Actually, I'm kinda surprised that there is a NetBSD port for the BeBox. Less than 2000 of them were made (and they sell for thousands even though they are only dual 133's at most). These people *do* have nothing better to do than port the OS. The BeBox was great hardware though. A little before my time, but one can appreciate the design.
The Windows version of Qt that Trolltech sells may contain GPL incompatible code licensed from other
entities; it costs money to develop GPL compatible code. This is part of why Mozilla took so long to replace
some of the features of older Netscape releases. But Qt Free Edition is under GPL; you are free to start a
project to port it to whatever platform you choose. According to QT's README, "If you want to port Qt to a
new platform, please read the PORTING file.
>>>>>>>>
You're hedging. I can understand Qt's position, but in general, is it morally right to charge OSS Windows developers for toolkits that *NIX guys get for free?
There are two types of libraries that can be linked into a GPL'd program: (a) GPL compatible libraries and (b) libraries that are included with the operating system distribution and are distributed separately from the program. BeOS programs use the latter, but the MS Visual Basic runtime is neither.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In that case, a lot of WIndows could be considered not part of the OS. Thus, on Windows 95, a GPL program could not link to DirectX (which isn't a part of the OS proper). I just think some of the symantics of the GPL are ridiculous. For example, is it wrong to port an OSS driver to a close source OS? Stallman discourages it. Plus, how does the license of the language one uses in any way related to the license of the software? It just seems that some parts of the GPL change from being a "good for the whole community" license to "let's screw closed source developers, even if it hurts the user community."
This seems to imply that a "critical mass" of free software will be achieved much faster on free operating systems.
>>>>>>>>
Does this mean that it isn't morally wrong to make a developer pay for a toolkit just because the OSS community doesn't like his preferred OS? Does a GPL program on Windows count any less than a GPL program on Linux?
Go spread the word about Wine (a free clone of Windows that runs on top of POSIX+X11).
>>>>>>>>>>
Why would I do that? I like Windows (NT4) better!
But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license.
>>>>>>>>>>>
So, according to your logic, I couldn't license a Perl program under the BSD license, since it would conflict with the GPL? I doubt it.
And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.
>>>>>>>>>
There wasn't a large library of free software on UNIX either, until GNU came along. Don't tell me the same can't be done on Windows.
Your arguement doesn't hold water. OSS software can be written perfectly well on a non-OSS system. BeOS is proprietory, and I use OSS software all the time. It might be true that OSS developers are more inclined to support an OSSOS, but that's not exactly a hard and fast limitation.
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I didn't mean anything bad by it. I admire all the people who have worked so hard on the OSS movement. I just find it funny some of the things Linux users get excited about. (And yes, I get excited too. I'm excited about KDE 2.1, the upcoming accelerated NVIDIA XRender drivers, KDevelop, and an i686-optimized version of Gentoo Linux.)
Hey, who said that all OSs aren't in the dumps? Linux's core is very sound, but all of the GUI stuff is in its toddler stages (and slow, very very slow). BeOS's GUI is sound, but the core is quirky. Nothing in Windows is sound, but DirectX saves it, as does hardware support. QNX has the neatest networking, but its filesystem is trash. The OS market these days is just one big comprimise, there IS no certifiably best OS out there, even if you constrain your market to something small like video or audio workstations. BeOS has the MediaKit, Linux has the insanely fast filesytem (XFS).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say pervasive AA-text will be reality in 6 months time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Monkeys or not, BeOS users have had this "new" feature for the last year and a half. Hell, even those poor, opressed Windows users have had AA text for over half a decade now. Besides, the monkey comment was directed at those people who think that its perfectly okay that to get the best Linux DE experience, one has to use one single DE. (Otherwise it is slower, more memory intensive, and less consistant.)
As for your rundown of toolkits, what about Athena? Not everyone wants a bloated DE on their desktop, and while you may get by fine on Qt and GTK+, some of us (me) still use apps like XPlayMidi that we are perfectly happy with (and ones that have no good KDE or GNOME replacement with as good support for my AWE64) and we won't get AA in these apps. Also, if we now need a DE to get all the features of X, why bother with X compatibility anymore? We could just port KDE or GNOME to a new windowing system and have the same application base (with some tweeks.) All in all, stuff like this *really* should be done at the lowest levels.
Wow! I didn't know Debain was THAT out of date!
/. people! I have nothing against Debian. I just thought the naming of the document was funny. No flames, please!
For the uncultured among you, The Social Contract was a book written in the 16th century by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.
PS> This really shouldn't be necessary, but some
If all I cared that much about pervasiveness, I'd still be using Windows ;)
That wasn't my point. My point was that everyone is so caught up with the political aspects (license, etc) that nobody is apying attention to the technology in the distro.
Also, I think X had a dumb design to begin with. X is *very* low-level. While this had the benifet of allow modifyable user interfaces, it also meant that apps get stuck with tons of low-level dependencies. Funny thing, though, the Windows GUI has changed a bunch since Windows 1.0, and MS never had any X-like low-level layer.
You don't even need X for remote display anymore. QNX's Photon does remote display at a much higher level than X (where it belongs) and is fast AND network transparent.
But the sad thing is that there are actually limitations in X that you don't get with "lower end devices." Yea, I know XRender does AA these days, but it will be a while before AA-text is pervasive. (Unless you're a monkey and only use the apps specific to a particular DE!)
You don't know what your talking about. RedHat is a commerical distribution too, but you can still download it for free.
When half the entire board, reading high-scores down, is about political issues. Licenses, use of the Debian name, free vs. non-free OSS vs the world. Since I seem the be the only *real* geek here, I have a question. Is there any technological basis at ALL for Progeny Debian, or is it simply a cop-out to project managers who can't stand the idea of using a product from a non-commerical entity?
That's just a legal cop out. The fact is, that if you use "Debian" in the name, than 99% of users are going to assume that the two distributions are simply different aspects of the same thing. Using Debian in the name, legal or not, still invokes the "Official Debian" distro to sell your software. I'm not saying this is good or bad, its just the consequences of calling it Progeny Debian.
Yikes. The EV8 will dissipate 250watts! That's more than my monitor! Of course, watts are good ;) I want one (or four, this does SMP right?)
According to the anandtech benchmarks:
QIII Arena 1024x768 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 95.6fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 80.6fps
That's a quite significant 15fps.
Q3 at 16x12 is unplayable on everything except the Ultra, but the GTS2 still wins.
MDK 1024x768 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 105.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 86.8fps
Again, about 18 more fps at this res.
MDK 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB 43.3fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 38.2fps
Only 5fps faster, but that's around 12% faster.
Unreal Tournament 1024x768 @32bpp (avg)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 84.5fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 87.8fps.
Here the DDR wins, but only by 3fps.
Unreal Tournament 1600x1200 @32bpp (min)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 34.3fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 18.8fps
Ouch. What were you saying about high resolutions?
The GTS is playable, the Radeon is not.
Unreal Tournament 1600x1200 @32bpp (avg)
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 68.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 56.9fps
The GTS is 12fps faster here.
Serious Sam 1024x768 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 47.2fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 50.1fps
The Radeon wins, but its only 3fps faster.
Serious Sam 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 22.5fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 24.7fps
A hair over 2fps faster.
Mercedes-Benz 1600x1200 @32bpp
GeForce2 GTS 64MB: 20.9fps
Radeon DDR 64MB: 24.2fps
The only decisive victory for the Radeon. Still, at the only playable resolution (640x480) the GTS wins 64.7 to 57.8.
So overall, the Radeon is a good card, but NVIDIA still has a significant speed advantage, and for only a little bit more, is worth it, in my opinion. (Not the mention the fact that they have better drivers and pro-caliber OpenGL!)
3dfx (not the 3DFX we loved, but 3dfx) never used tile-rendering. They didn't support T&L because they were an opportunistic crappy company that screwed its users, tried to maintain a monopoly on Glide games (and used tricks such that if MS had used them, /. would be collectively frothing at the mouth) and deserved the pissing on that it got from NVIDIA. Ever since the Voodoo2 didn't make the jump to 32bit color (and the TNT did) 3dfx was on the way down for not being a leader in technology.
Let's see 17million transistors. 4 of them would be around 68million transistors. Given that a GeForce 3 has 57 million transistors, and there would probably be some overlap between the chips, it seems that this would be quite doable. Of course, at that point you'd probably need DDR memery to feed the 4 chips, but hey, RAM is cheap! (As in 1 GB (4DIMMS) for $180 at pricewatch!)
Actually, NVIDIA's cards are significantly faster at only $40 or so price margin. The price/performance should actually be better for a 64MB GTS than a 64MB Radeon, but it depends on the benchmark and resolution.
Actually, Videologic (I believe they were independant at this time. NEC invested in them first, then bought them outright) was going to implement a multi-way architecture using these things, but due to the DreamCast thing, never really made. As I remember it, the article said that it would have been VERY easy to do multiple chips for this, and they chastised 3DFx for taking such an inelegant approach when designing their own multichip solution (Voodoo2)
Well, BeOS R5 still runs fine on the BeBox. Besides, its not a primary machine kind of purchase. You'd buy a BeBox for the same reason you'd buy on old Amiga. It really was a beautiful machine. (Besides, it had a "GeekPort" how could you NOT like it?)
Funny you should mention UVM, I just printed out the thesis of the guy who invented it. He used UVM to get his doctorate, and after reading about half of the 170-odd pages, I must say that its pretty cool. Some things are a little too BSD-ish for me (such as wasting perfectly good efficiency opportunities in order to keep pagetables throw-away-able) but hopefully, this will get implemented into Free/OpenBSD soon. If it works, then maybe the Linux guys will make a copy of it ;)
It's a f*cking conspiracy ;) Actually, I'm kinda surprised that there is a NetBSD port for the BeBox. Less than 2000 of them were made (and they sell for thousands even though they are only dual 133's at most). These people *do* have nothing better to do than port the OS. The BeBox was great hardware though. A little before my time, but one can appreciate the design.
The Windows version of Qt that Trolltech sells may contain GPL incompatible code licensed from other
entities; it costs money to develop GPL compatible code. This is part of why Mozilla took so long to replace
some of the features of older Netscape releases. But Qt Free Edition is under GPL; you are free to start a
project to port it to whatever platform you choose. According to QT's README, "If you want to port Qt to a
new platform, please read the PORTING file.
>>>>>>>>
You're hedging. I can understand Qt's position, but in general, is it morally right to charge OSS Windows developers for toolkits that *NIX guys get for free?
There are two types of libraries that can be linked into a GPL'd program: (a) GPL compatible libraries and (b) libraries that are included with the operating system distribution and are distributed separately from the program. BeOS programs use the latter, but the MS Visual Basic runtime is neither.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In that case, a lot of WIndows could be considered not part of the OS. Thus, on Windows 95, a GPL program could not link to DirectX (which isn't a part of the OS proper). I just think some of the symantics of the GPL are ridiculous. For example, is it wrong to port an OSS driver to a close source OS? Stallman discourages it. Plus, how does the license of the language one uses in any way related to the license of the software? It just seems that some parts of the GPL change from being a "good for the whole community" license to "let's screw closed source developers, even if it hurts the user community."
This seems to imply that a "critical mass" of free software will be achieved much faster on free operating systems.
>>>>>>>>
Does this mean that it isn't morally wrong to make a developer pay for a toolkit just because the OSS community doesn't like his preferred OS? Does a GPL program on Windows count any less than a GPL program on Linux?
Go spread the word about Wine (a free clone of Windows that runs on top of POSIX+X11).
>>>>>>>>>>
Why would I do that? I like Windows (NT4) better!
But copylefted free software can never be written in Visual Basic, as that would require providing the source code of the MS Visual Basic runtime and releasing it under a compatible license.
>>>>>>>>>>>
So, according to your logic, I couldn't license a Perl program under the BSD license, since it would conflict with the GPL? I doubt it.
And there isn't that large of a library of GPL'd Windows software to infect Windows programs with GPL either.
>>>>>>>>>
There wasn't a large library of free software on UNIX either, until GNU came along. Don't tell me the same can't be done on Windows.
Your arguement doesn't hold water. OSS software can be written perfectly well on a non-OSS system. BeOS is proprietory, and I use OSS software all the time. It might be true that OSS developers are more inclined to support an OSSOS, but that's not exactly a hard and fast limitation.
BeOS uses a BitStream renderer, but an older one. FontFusion looks a little bit better and (more importantly) has more support for foreign languages.
Don't get me wrong, as I said, I didn't mean anything bad by it. I admire all the people who have worked so hard on the OSS movement. I just find it funny some of the things Linux users get excited about. (And yes, I get excited too. I'm excited about KDE 2.1, the upcoming accelerated NVIDIA XRender drivers, KDevelop, and an i686-optimized version of Gentoo Linux.)
Hey, who said that all OSs aren't in the dumps? Linux's core is very sound, but all of the GUI stuff is in its toddler stages (and slow, very very slow). BeOS's GUI is sound, but the core is quirky. Nothing in Windows is sound, but DirectX saves it, as does hardware support. QNX has the neatest networking, but its filesystem is trash. The OS market these days is just one big comprimise, there IS no certifiably best OS out there, even if you constrain your market to something small like video or audio workstations. BeOS has the MediaKit, Linux has the insanely fast filesytem (XFS).