BeOS programmers format their code mostly according to K&R style. And BeOS has nothing to do with DirectX. As for the formatting, I don't know HTML that well, so I stick to preformatted text. And in this blasted little box, formatting is difficult.
I was talking about Linux. Suddenly you think Linux stands for UNIX in general? Even with DRI, IRIX is still better at 3D than Linux is. Still, IRIX is a hack. It is fairly fat, and 3D make X have to jump through hoops. Of course, on SGIs, they can afford it, they have huge machines. But on commodity hardware (read low power) hacks like DRI and media on UNIX really sap too much speed.
The Savage chips barely support OpenGL under Windows! The Savage 2000 has a geometry engine but the drivers under Windows don't support geometry acceleration! S3 cards are beyond hope!
I assume that you are not referring to professional animators when you make that statement. I'm certainly not a professional animator, but I've read plenty of articles about software shops pushing them towards Windows boxes and the backlash that occured as a result. It's my understanding that professional animators and CAD/CAM engineers overwhelmingly prefer Unix platforms to Windows. >>>>>>>>> I was talking from an architecture point of view. Sure animators prefer UNIX, but that because it fits much better in a network environment and is much more stable under high load. Also, UNIX machines usually have pretty hefty hardware. From the architecture side, however, media on both UNIX and Windows is somewhat of an ugly hack. (Especially X.)
Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade. Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila, you're running a new version.
Nope, with Windows this is more like an upgrade from Windows95 to Windows2000 Professional. No, the upgrade to XFree does not change as many underlying OS level pieces as a 95 => 2000 upgrade would, but it does change the basic architecture of the windowing system and would not be a simple "click the EXE file" upgrade. This is not equivalent to upgrading a display driver in Windows! Now, Windows "beats" Linux as far as that is topic is concerned, but that's not what XFree86 4.0 is compared to 3.x. >>>>>>> I was talking XFree86 4.0 --> 4.01. 3.x-> 4.0 is MUCH more trumatic. It's also not similar to the upgrade between Win95 -> Win2k (considering that they're different OSs entirely.) The upgrade between 3.x and 4.0 would be like installing service pack 6 on NT. This pack (when installed on a clean 4.0 pack 1 machine) upgraded the GDI (akin to X) Internet Explorer (which functions as the window manager) and introduced stuff like fibers (a lighter kind of thread, akin to upgrading Pthreads.) It also introduced bug fixes to the kernel. All it was was a 30 meg download and a clicking on an EXE. To get the same effect under Linux you'd have to upgrade X from 3.x to 4.0, recompile the kernel, and upgrade the C libraries (new threading support.) An even more accurate comparison would be upgrading Windows 3.11 to Windows95. The underlying OS architecture was, and still is, basically the same, but the graphics architecture changes so drastically that it was often easier to reinstall the whole box than attempt an upgrade. At least with Linux the windowing system is not tied so tightly to the core OS that screwing an upgrade of the windowing system up basically screws your box up beyond repair (or fubar for those that prefer that term). >>>>> You have no clue about Window architecture, do you? Win95 is vastly different from Win3.1. It is certainly more than a change in the graphics system. (Actually, the GDI was relativly unchanged from 3.1 to 95.) I don't even feel like explaining, but read BYTE magazine around 1993. They go into the details behind the architecture changes.
S3 hardware is not being dropped. It is simply a lower priority than getting DRI finished. As for people who "play" with their computers, define "play." Is it playing to develop OpenGL apps. Is it playing to do 3D animation. Is it playing to do desktop publishing. (Oh I forgot, on/. anything not related to server or database programming is "playing!") I don't buy a new graphics card every 3 months, but at least I have something more modern than an S3 (virge, etc) card. X4 is meant to imporve graphics performance. If you are a sysadmin, or a programmer that simply uses Vi or Emacs, then guess what, you probably don't need improved graphics performance!
DirectX is great, once you learn the programming technique. (Not that hard really, once you get used to it.) And it is, in the words of Andre LaMothe, essentially a miracle. As for not being on Linux, neither are 90% of the good games. Does that mean you shouldn't play them? As for your comparison to OpenGL, there is none. Maybe you think DirectX==Direct3D? Cross platform is not even an issue, because even under OpenGL, Windows still kicks the ass of Linux, BSD, and BeOS (until this fall that is!) Plus, DirectX (even D3D) is much better. Let me iterate: 1) DirectX has an integrated programming interface. Once you learn it and can get past the hungarian notation, you'll find it is pretty easy to use. Not only that, but in the time it takes you to learn all the native media APIs on Linux, and also learn OpenGL, you could have learned DirectX a lot sooner, because there is only one mindset to learn. 2) It is a higher quality API. DirectDraw gives you direct access to graphics hardware. It is really, really fast, and gives you a lot of control over what you're doing. (Want to quadruple buffer, no problem!) DirectInput is hard to use, but hideously flexible. (Just like... UNIX!) It supports any kind of device on the market, even ones that haven't been invented yet, due to the generalized API. DirectMusic has MIDI composition unmatched by any other mainstream (hardware accelerated of course) API. DirectSound is a lot better than OSS or even ALSA in terms of compatibility and speed. The only mediocre API is DirectSound3D, but with extensions like EAX, even that is pretty good. (Especially considering that the other option is the propriotory A3D.) And now, Direct3D. It used to be a slow, hard to program, feature barren POS API. Now, it is a fast, hard to program, feature filled API. First, it has much closer access to hardware than OpenGL does, via DirectDraw, and as such, can do some really nifty things. It can render into secondary surfaces ACCELERATED. OpenGL can do that too, but only in software mode. The core API supports a LOT more features than the OpenGL core API plus standard extensions. Only when you add in propriotary extensions does OpenGL become feature competitive. Seriously, extensions suck. They aren't standardized in the beginning, so you end up with the ATI version of an extension, the NVIDIA version, and the S3 version. Also, the ARB slows progress of stanard extensions. I was looking at the meeting notes of the recent OpenGL conferance, and right now they are deciding on a standardized extension for texture compression! D3D has had that for a long time, and now has an array of new features that OpenGL can't touch such as vertex blending and per pixel lighting. Sure nVidia promised to expose all of them as propriatory extensions, but will developers use them until a standard comes out? These days, D3D is just as fast as OpenGL on the same hardware, and can do tricks that GL just can't do. Sure it is limited to one platform, but that's the price you pay for DirectX. In short, DirectX is a great API for anybody developing for media applications. Sure it is MS only, but you have to give it credit for being great. You don't even have to use it (I don't use D3D because I like programming on BeOS) but you have to acknowledge its power. If I were SGI, I would light a fire under the asses of the ARB, write an OpenGL version 2.0 that could compete with D3D in terms of features (rendering to auxilliary buffers, etc) and then heavily fund the Kronos project to take on the rest of DirectX. That is the only hope *NIX has of getting a hold on the desktop market. PS> Yes you need IE. Why would you use netscape? It is a bloated, buggy piece of shit. (Even Mozilla isn't looking good.) Sure you can use Opera, but can you live without CSS and DHTML?
XFree hasn't released any release notes about this. Any clue as to what the DRI code merge is about? And what stuff was patched. As for 4.01, I wouldn't hope for much in terms of performance or stability. Usually,.01 releases are bug fixes (aside fromt his mysterious DRI code merge) and if you're 4.0 already runs fast and stable (a relative term for X) than I don't see the value in upgrading.
OpenDOC was released to developers a few months after OLE applications were already on shelves. Unless there was another OpenDOC before the Apple on, I'm pretty sure that OLE came first. (Though IBM's SOM predated COM.)
You also won't get the non-pimple faced 3D animators onto your platform. As a person who does both graphics and plays games, you wouldn't believe how much stuff there is in UNIX that offends me. As for capturing the desktop market, Linux will only do that when they scrap it and start over. At this point, Linux is simply a bundle of libraries a kernel, and some bloated graphics interfaces. That's what UNIX is supposed to be! (And that's why it is so powerful for those you know how to work it.) However, in the desktop market, none of that matters. Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade. Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila, you're running a new version. (Under BeOS, you hit the button, and then while you're still surfing the web tracker reboots with the newer version and you get a message box telling you that you've been upgraded.) Under Linux Mandrake, one has to download an obscene number of RPMS (like 4 or 5) the go into the command line, type in RPM -Uvh X*.rpm, then run xf86config to configure it. With upgrades like that it is going to take a lot more than a new version of X to let Linux capture the desktop market.
XF86 is essentially a vastly better X. There is no need in such an architecture of antiquated chips (a lot of S3 stuff was left out). There is also no reason to weigh down the developers making all these old drivers when the could be doing something important (working on DRI!) As for 3DFx, those drivers are developed by 3DFx themselves, and it is widely acknowledged that they spent way to much effort on their 3.3.x drivers and let their 4.0 effort slide. (As such, performance on Voodoo boards is much better under 3.3.x)
Apache is a webserver, as such, it imitates other web servers already in the market. Also, Apache is very very good at what it does, but doesn't really have any features that haven't been done before. My point about OpenSource sofware being derivative still stands. I was talking more about features than the genere of the software. Stuff like document embedding which was introduced (to the masses) via OLE and later OpenDOC, or the nifty media node features of BeOS, or the array of cool features like Intellisense in VisualC++, the great integration of desktop publishing and word processing in Word Perfect, the web integration of fireworks. All these things are new, innovative, and genuinely usefull features in products that are otherwise just an image editor, or just a word processor. The problem is, that there is very little open source software that brings these kinds of new features to the table. There are very few OSS projects (maybe with the exception of KLyx) that really revolutionize their market segment.
I'm under the impression that the allegations concern distribution makers distruting KDE along with Qt, which (supposedly) is illegal according to the GPL.
For those of you who didn't know, the Cyrix III was originally supposed to be based on the Joshua core. It was supposed to be a highly integrated chip. It had a two way superscaler core, and was very RISC-like. It was supposed to debut at 600+MHz at a cost of only about $60. Additionally, it was to have integrated Voodoo-2 level graphics and a memory bus capable of transferring 3.2GB/sec using multiple channels of RDRAM. For more info, you can look to issues of MaximumPC where Tom Halfhill wrote an article about he proc.
Actually you forgot something else. Companies tend to produce two other good things. A) Best in class software. If I have the jingle for it, I am usually much better off buying commercial software because they tend to be superior products. Photoshop vs. GIMP, 3D Studio vs. Blender, Solaris vs. Linux (for my quad proc SPARC box:), Visual Studio vs. KDevelop, MSVC or Intel C/C++ vs. GCC, etc. Actually, about the only best in class Open Source software that is widely used is Apache, and maybe Samba. B) They tend to innovate more. I've yet to see Open Source software that really redifines a market segment or brings something new to the table. All the high profile stuff is essentially a free implementation of stuff that's been done before. KDE is a CDE-workalike. Even though its better, its still nothing new. Same thing for GIMP, Apache, KDevelop, Blender, Gnumeric, Bonobo, KParts, Konqueror. None of these things really have any new features that make you step back and go, "wow, I never expected software could do that!" Even MS induced those feelings the first time you embedded an OLE object into Word. Even something like Berlin, which is pretty nifty, doesn't have anything that's been done before.
Why are you guys harping on TrollTech? Aren't the KDE guys the ones who are doing the illegal action by incorporating non-GPL compatible code? It's like sueing Sun if Linus incorporated non-GPL Solaris code into Linux.
SGI is still an acronym. I forget what its stands for, but read/. circa the logo change. Also, IBM stands for International Business Machines and I'm pretty sure that MCI is an acronym too.
If you don't want to use IE you don't have to. Sure it's on your harddrive, but in that state, it is simply a COM HTML rendering engine. Kind of like the KParts based HTML renderer that Konqueror is. Actually, exactly like the KParts based HTML renderer that Conqueror is. The point is, that this is an unfair business practice from an ethical point of view. If MS decided to make Office free for Windows, but not for Mac, then/. and Janet Reno would be up in arms. In this case, however, its the "good guy" being unfair, thus everything is hunky dory.
True, but consider this. How demanding is the average corporate/consumer of his file system? In these systems (even higher end stuff like the Wintel workstations) have much bigger I/O problems than the 32bitedness of the file system. True, doing a 64 bit file system on only a 32bit processor is sort of a hack, but for the level of system AMD is targeting, the actual speed of the I/O interface and the disk array (or lack thereof!) is a much bigger problem.
A) Java and Smalltalk aren't really mainstream. Sure Java is catching on, but mostly in its interpreted form, and thus performance isn't the highest concern. Smalltalk is non-existant in consumer space. B) As for mapping large files, the biggest files that will be used in the near future are video projects, and consumer video projects get nowhere near 4 GB. Remember, I'm talking consumer space. 64bit CPUs will be a tremendous help in server and much higher end space. Take Java for example. It is catching in back end server processing, and thus a 64bit CPU will help a lot. However, AMD is aiming this at the consumer/corporate, (kind of like Intel's higher end chips) and for those tasks, 64bit is kind of overkill.
Talk about unfair business practices to promote an OS. MS gave away a program to promote Windows (IE) that would cost maybe $50 retail. Here is Corel, giving away something that cost $495 retail! And if you didn't notice, only the Linux version is free. This point, that the Windows version is not-free, points to Corel's business plan. They are using this as a leg up in the emerging Linux market. By keeping the Windows version for pay, they protect a cash cow, while getting the Linux crowd (who don't want to pay for anything:) to jump on their bandwagon. I can assure you, that if Linux comes to even a fraction of the market (say when 25% of Photo-Paint users are Linux users) they will pull out this free thing to protect their money. There will already be an installed base of users, and most will pony up the $495 than bother to switch to another program for their work. This also gives them a leg-up in the market because they're here first. The Linux community seems intensely loyal, and it seems that many will continue to use Photo-Paint, simply because Corel has supported the Linux movement, and even if better products come along. This is demonstrated vivedly in the whole nVidia/3DFx fiasco, people still use 3DFx, even though nVidia is better, just because nVidia doesn't give a damn about OSS.
As for you people bitching about this not being OpenSource, get over yourselves. Corel is releasing a product to further their business. That's what companies do. You can bet that RedHat would close up Linux in an instant (if they were allowed to.) The contingent that won't use PhotoPaint just because it is not OSS is relativly small, and frankly, I doubt Corel cares about you. There is an art of managing consumers. Only cater to those you know can affect your business. The hardcore OSS community is a very small contingent, and thus Corel can piss you off all they want and not affect their business...
Corel (to Stalinite): Ha ha, this isn't Open Source!
Stalinite:No! (Goes over and talks to another user.) Look, they're not releasing this open source. Boycott them. Burn their products!
Normal Consumer:Get away from me! I'll use this product all I want... It's FREE. As in no moolah.
You do realize that the Linux source tarball that contained every thing that the Win2K tarball contained (Kernel, Web server, file and print servers, GUI, window manager, desktop environment, advanced media APIs (a la ALSA)) would clock in at a LOT more than Window's 30 million lines?
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If you'd like to give me a point by point overview of where I'm wrong, I'll be glad to listen to you.
BeOS programmers format their code mostly according to K&R style. And BeOS has nothing to do with DirectX. As for the formatting, I don't know HTML that well, so I stick to preformatted text. And in this blasted little box, formatting is difficult.
I was talking about Linux. Suddenly you think Linux stands for UNIX in general? Even with DRI, IRIX is still better at 3D than Linux is. Still, IRIX is a hack. It is fairly fat, and 3D make X have to jump through hoops. Of course, on SGIs, they can afford it, they have huge machines. But on commodity hardware (read low power) hacks like DRI and media on UNIX really sap too much speed.
The Savage chips barely support OpenGL under Windows! The Savage 2000 has a geometry engine but the drivers under Windows don't support geometry acceleration! S3 cards are beyond hope!
I assume that you are not referring to professional animators when you make that statement. I'm certainly not a professional animator, but I've read plenty of
articles about software shops pushing them towards Windows boxes and the backlash that occured as a result. It's my understanding that professional
animators and CAD/CAM engineers overwhelmingly prefer Unix platforms to Windows.
>>>>>>>>>
I was talking from an architecture point of view. Sure animators prefer UNIX, but that because it fits much better in a network environment and is much more stable under high load. Also, UNIX machines usually have pretty hefty hardware. From the architecture side, however, media on both UNIX and Windows is somewhat of an ugly hack. (Especially X.)
Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade.
Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila,
you're running a new version.
Nope, with Windows this is more like an upgrade from Windows95 to Windows2000 Professional. No, the upgrade to XFree does not change as many underlying
OS level pieces as a 95 => 2000 upgrade would, but it does change the basic architecture of the windowing system and would not be a simple "click the EXE
file" upgrade. This is not equivalent to upgrading a display driver in Windows! Now, Windows "beats" Linux as far as that is topic is concerned, but that's not
what XFree86 4.0 is compared to 3.x.
>>>>>>>
I was talking XFree86 4.0 --> 4.01. 3.x-> 4.0 is MUCH more trumatic. It's also not similar to the upgrade between Win95 -> Win2k (considering that they're different OSs entirely.) The upgrade between 3.x and 4.0 would be like installing service pack 6 on NT. This pack (when installed on a clean 4.0 pack 1 machine) upgraded the GDI (akin to X) Internet Explorer (which functions as the window manager) and introduced stuff like fibers (a lighter kind of thread, akin to upgrading Pthreads.) It also introduced bug fixes to the kernel. All it was was a 30 meg download and a clicking on an EXE. To get the same effect under Linux you'd have to upgrade X from 3.x to 4.0, recompile the kernel, and upgrade the C libraries (new threading support.)
An even more accurate comparison would be upgrading Windows 3.11 to Windows95. The underlying OS architecture was, and still is, basically the same, but
the graphics architecture changes so drastically that it was often easier to reinstall the whole box than attempt an upgrade. At least with Linux the windowing
system is not tied so tightly to the core OS that screwing an upgrade of the windowing system up basically screws your box up beyond repair (or fubar for those
that prefer that term).
>>>>>
You have no clue about Window architecture, do you? Win95 is vastly different from Win3.1. It is certainly more than a change in the graphics system. (Actually, the GDI was relativly unchanged from 3.1 to 95.) I don't even feel like explaining, but read BYTE magazine around 1993. They go into the details behind the architecture changes.
S3 hardware is not being dropped. It is simply a lower priority than getting DRI finished. As for people who "play" with their computers, define "play." Is it playing to develop OpenGL apps. Is it playing to do 3D animation. Is it playing to do desktop publishing. (Oh I forgot, on /. anything not related to server or database programming is "playing!") I don't buy a new graphics card every 3 months, but at least I have something more modern than an S3 (virge, etc) card. X4 is meant to imporve graphics performance. If you are a sysadmin, or a programmer that simply uses Vi or Emacs, then guess what, you probably don't need improved graphics performance!
Funny. That's why DirectX versions are free? (And only take one reboot?) If you're going to argue, at least have a point.
DirectX is great, once you learn the programming technique. (Not that hard really, once you get used to it.) And it is, in the words of Andre LaMothe, essentially a miracle. As for not being on Linux, neither are 90% of the good games. Does that mean you shouldn't play them? As for your comparison to OpenGL, there is none. Maybe you think DirectX==Direct3D? Cross platform is not even an issue, because even under OpenGL, Windows still kicks the ass of Linux, BSD, and BeOS (until this fall that is!) Plus, DirectX (even D3D) is much better. Let me iterate:
1) DirectX has an integrated programming interface. Once you learn it and can get past the hungarian notation, you'll find it is pretty easy to use. Not only that, but in the time it takes you to learn all the native media APIs on Linux, and also learn OpenGL, you could have learned DirectX a lot sooner, because there is only one mindset to learn.
2) It is a higher quality API. DirectDraw gives you direct access to graphics hardware. It is really, really fast, and gives you a lot of control over what you're doing. (Want to quadruple buffer, no problem!) DirectInput is hard to use, but hideously flexible. (Just like... UNIX!) It supports any kind of device on the market, even ones that haven't been invented yet, due to the generalized API. DirectMusic has MIDI composition unmatched by any other mainstream (hardware accelerated of course) API. DirectSound is a lot better than OSS or even ALSA in terms of compatibility and speed. The only mediocre API is DirectSound3D, but with extensions like EAX, even that is pretty good. (Especially considering that the other option is the propriotory A3D.) And now, Direct3D. It used to be a slow, hard to program, feature barren POS API. Now, it is a fast, hard to program, feature filled API. First, it has much closer access to hardware than OpenGL does, via DirectDraw, and as such, can do some really nifty things. It can render into secondary surfaces ACCELERATED. OpenGL can do that too, but only in software mode. The core API supports a LOT more features than the OpenGL core API plus standard extensions. Only when you add in propriotary extensions does OpenGL become feature competitive. Seriously, extensions suck. They aren't standardized in the beginning, so you end up with the ATI version of an extension, the NVIDIA version, and the S3 version. Also, the ARB slows progress of stanard extensions. I was looking at the meeting notes of the recent OpenGL conferance, and right now they are deciding on a standardized extension for texture compression! D3D has had that for a long time, and now has an array of new features that OpenGL can't touch such as vertex blending and per pixel lighting. Sure nVidia promised to expose all of them as propriatory extensions, but will developers use them until a standard comes out? These days, D3D is just as fast as OpenGL on the same hardware, and can do tricks that GL just can't do. Sure it is limited to one platform, but that's the price you pay for DirectX.
In short, DirectX is a great API for anybody developing for media applications. Sure it is MS only, but you have to give it credit for being great. You don't even have to use it (I don't use D3D because I like programming on BeOS) but you have to acknowledge its power. If I were SGI, I would light a fire under the asses of the ARB, write an OpenGL version 2.0 that could compete with D3D in terms of features (rendering to auxilliary buffers, etc) and then heavily fund the Kronos project to take on the rest of DirectX. That is the only hope *NIX has of getting a hold on the desktop market.
PS> Yes you need IE. Why would you use netscape? It is a bloated, buggy piece of shit. (Even Mozilla isn't looking good.) Sure you can use Opera, but can you live without CSS and DHTML?
XFree hasn't released any release notes about this. Any clue as to what the DRI code merge is about? And what stuff was patched. As for 4.01, I wouldn't hope for much in terms of performance or stability. Usually, .01 releases are bug fixes (aside fromt his mysterious DRI code merge) and if you're 4.0 already runs fast and stable (a relative term for X) than I don't see the value in upgrading.
OpenDOC was released to developers a few months after OLE applications were already on shelves. Unless there was another OpenDOC before the Apple on, I'm pretty sure that OLE came first. (Though IBM's SOM predated COM.)
You're 3DFx support sucks because 3DFx spent too much time writing XF86 3.3.x drivers at the cost of the 4.0 drivers.
You also won't get the non-pimple faced 3D animators onto your platform. As a person who does both graphics and plays games, you wouldn't believe how much stuff there is in UNIX that offends me. As for capturing the desktop market, Linux will only do that when they scrap it and start over. At this point, Linux is simply a bundle of libraries a kernel, and some bloated graphics interfaces. That's what UNIX is supposed to be! (And that's why it is so powerful for those you know how to work it.) However, in the desktop market, none of that matters. Nobody wants to deal with installing all the libraries and keeping stuff up to date and all that. Take, for example, this latest XFree86 upgrade. Under windows, it would have been distributed as an EXE. You double click on it, it chugs, you hit OK when it asks you to reboot, and voila, you're running a new version. (Under BeOS, you hit the button, and then while you're still surfing the web tracker reboots with the newer version and you get a message box telling you that you've been upgraded.) Under Linux Mandrake, one has to download an obscene number of RPMS (like 4 or 5) the go into the command line, type in RPM -Uvh X*.rpm, then run xf86config to configure it. With upgrades like that it is going to take a lot more than a new version of X to let Linux capture the desktop market.
XF86 is essentially a vastly better X. There is no need in such an architecture of antiquated chips (a lot of S3 stuff was left out). There is also no reason to weigh down the developers making all these old drivers when the could be doing something important (working on DRI!) As for 3DFx, those drivers are developed by 3DFx themselves, and it is widely acknowledged that they spent way to much effort on their 3.3.x drivers and let their 4.0 effort slide. (As such, performance on Voodoo boards is much better under 3.3.x)
Apache is a webserver, as such, it imitates other web servers already in the market. Also, Apache is very very good at what it does, but doesn't really have any features that haven't been done before. My point about OpenSource sofware being derivative still stands. I was talking more about features than the genere of the software. Stuff like document embedding which was introduced (to the masses) via OLE and later OpenDOC, or the nifty media node features of BeOS, or the array of cool features like Intellisense in VisualC++, the great integration of desktop publishing and word processing in Word Perfect, the web integration of fireworks. All these things are new, innovative, and genuinely usefull features in products that are otherwise just an image editor, or just a word processor. The problem is, that there is very little open source software that brings these kinds of new features to the table. There are very few OSS projects (maybe with the exception of KLyx) that really revolutionize their market segment.
I'm under the impression that the allegations concern distribution makers distruting KDE along with Qt, which (supposedly) is illegal according to the GPL.
For those of you who didn't know, the Cyrix III was originally supposed to be based on the Joshua core. It was supposed to be a highly integrated chip. It had a two way superscaler core, and was very RISC-like. It was supposed to debut at 600+MHz at a cost of only about $60. Additionally, it was to have integrated Voodoo-2 level graphics and a memory bus capable of transferring 3.2GB/sec using multiple channels of RDRAM. For more info, you can look to issues of MaximumPC where Tom Halfhill wrote an article about he proc.
Actually you forgot something else. Companies tend to produce two other good things. :), Visual Studio vs. KDevelop, MSVC or Intel C/C++ vs. GCC, etc. Actually, about the only best in class Open Source software that is widely used is Apache, and maybe Samba.
A) Best in class software. If I have the jingle for it, I am usually much better off buying commercial software because they tend to be superior products. Photoshop vs. GIMP, 3D Studio vs. Blender, Solaris vs. Linux (for my quad proc SPARC box
B) They tend to innovate more. I've yet to see Open Source software that really redifines a market segment or brings something new to the table. All the high profile stuff is essentially a free implementation of stuff that's been done before. KDE is a CDE-workalike. Even though its better, its still nothing new. Same thing for GIMP, Apache, KDevelop, Blender, Gnumeric, Bonobo, KParts, Konqueror. None of these things really have any new features that make you step back and go, "wow, I never expected software could do that!" Even MS induced those feelings the first time you embedded an OLE object into Word. Even something like Berlin, which is pretty nifty, doesn't have anything that's been done before.
Why are you guys harping on TrollTech? Aren't the KDE guys the ones who are doing the illegal action by incorporating non-GPL compatible code? It's like sueing Sun if Linus incorporated non-GPL Solaris code into Linux.
SGI is still an acronym. I forget what its stands for, but read /. circa the logo change. Also, IBM stands for International Business Machines and I'm pretty sure that MCI is an acronym too.
How'd you pull that off? As of this reading you've got a Score 3 Flamebait... Slashdot is weird today.
If you don't want to use IE you don't have to. Sure it's on your harddrive, but in that state, it is simply a COM HTML rendering engine. Kind of like the KParts based HTML renderer that Konqueror is. Actually, exactly like the KParts based HTML renderer that Conqueror is. The point is, that this is an unfair business practice from an ethical point of view. If MS decided to make Office free for Windows, but not for Mac, then /. and Janet Reno would be up in arms. In this case, however, its the "good guy" being unfair, thus everything is hunky dory.
True, but consider this. How demanding is the average corporate/consumer of his file system? In these systems (even higher end stuff like the Wintel workstations) have much bigger I/O problems than the 32bitedness of the file system. True, doing a 64 bit file system on only a 32bit processor is sort of a hack, but for the level of system AMD is targeting, the actual speed of the I/O interface and the disk array (or lack thereof!) is a much bigger problem.
A) Java and Smalltalk aren't really mainstream. Sure Java is catching on, but mostly in its interpreted form, and thus performance isn't the highest concern. Smalltalk is non-existant in consumer space.
B) As for mapping large files, the biggest files that will be used in the near future are video projects, and consumer video projects get nowhere near 4 GB.
Remember, I'm talking consumer space. 64bit CPUs will be a tremendous help in server and much higher end space. Take Java for example. It is catching in back end server processing, and thus a 64bit CPU will help a lot. However, AMD is aiming this at the consumer/corporate, (kind of like Intel's higher end chips) and for those tasks, 64bit is kind of overkill.
Talk about unfair business practices to promote an OS. MS gave away a program to promote Windows (IE) that would cost maybe $50 retail. Here is Corel, giving away something that cost $495 retail! And if you didn't notice, only the Linux version is free. This point, that the Windows version is not-free, points to Corel's business plan. They are using this as a leg up in the emerging Linux market. By keeping the Windows version for pay, they protect a cash cow, while getting the Linux crowd (who don't want to pay for anything :) to jump on their bandwagon. I can assure you, that if Linux comes to even a fraction of the market (say when 25% of Photo-Paint users are Linux users) they will pull out this free thing to protect their money. There will already be an installed base of users, and most will pony up the $495 than bother to switch to another program for their work. This also gives them a leg-up in the market because they're here first. The Linux community seems intensely loyal, and it seems that many will continue to use Photo-Paint, simply because Corel has supported the Linux movement, and even if better products come along. This is demonstrated vivedly in the whole nVidia/3DFx fiasco, people still use 3DFx, even though nVidia is better, just because nVidia doesn't give a damn about OSS.
As for you people bitching about this not being OpenSource, get over yourselves. Corel is releasing a product to further their business. That's what companies do. You can bet that RedHat would close up Linux in an instant (if they were allowed to.) The contingent that won't use PhotoPaint just because it is not OSS is relativly small, and frankly, I doubt Corel cares about you. There is an art of managing consumers. Only cater to those you know can affect your business. The hardcore OSS community is a very small contingent, and thus Corel can piss you off all they want and not affect their business...
Corel (to Stalinite): Ha ha, this isn't Open Source!
Stalinite:No! (Goes over and talks to another user.) Look, they're not releasing this open source. Boycott them. Burn their products!
Normal Consumer:Get away from me! I'll use this product all I want... It's FREE. As in no moolah.
You do realize that the Linux source tarball that contained every thing that the Win2K tarball contained (Kernel, Web server, file and print servers, GUI, window manager, desktop environment, advanced media APIs (a la ALSA)) would clock in at a LOT more than Window's 30 million lines?