Obviously old people who never saw Power Rangers as a kid modded this down. This might not be funny, but it's hardly off-topic. I mean, c'mon! They might as well rename the Mozilla Suite "Megazord," seeing as how it's what you get when you combine Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird!
It's not really a zealot thing. People were using Google Zeitgeist's 1% number for Linux to compare with actual studies done by research companies that suggested Linux desktop usage was close to 2-3%. A lot of people trust the Google name, and people aren't the brightest cookies in the world, so I think they realized it'd probably be best to remove something that was misleading people.
Try them on a good pair of headphones. Even on my Sony D66's, 128kbps AACs aren't that great. They sound like I'm listening to them through cloth, with a lot of the sharpness in the music removed. Certainly, they don't sound like the source CDs. For me, LAME's APS setting (~200kbps) is pretty much indistinguishable from the original CD.
You should really try Real 10. It's a whole lot nicer than previous versions, and not "in your face" at all. They even have a pretty good Linux client.
Now the (french?) trolls can bash me and call american's evil war mongers, but how much have other countries spent to help people in poor nations? More than Americans. In 2003, those French donated $7bn for foreign aid, compared to our $15bn. And this is a country that has 1/5 as many people as we do. That means, per person, the French donated 2.5x as much as we did. In 2000, Japan, a country that has half our population, donated $3bn more than we did. Today, their foreign AID is less than ours, but mostly because of the weakening of the yen and our post-9/11 bribes* (eg: $600m to Pakistan). Of course, you have to take into account that much of our aid is self-serving. 1/3 of our aid budget this year consists of credits allowing foreign militaries to buy US hardware. Additionally, 1/3 (overlapping somewhat with the previous third), of our aid budget goes to propping up Israel and Egypt. Lastly, 70% of our aid budget is tied to the recipients buying services and goods from American companies.
Ironically, Americans tend to think that the federal government spends too much on foreign aid! Polls show that people think that the government spends up to 20% of the budget on aid, and believe that a fairer number would be 5%. Most don't know that the real number is less than 1%, and that 70% of that money comes right back to American companies.
Now, don't get me wrong. USAid does lots of good things. They are definitely making a difference in the world. It's just that they do a lot less compared to the size of our economy than the other developed nations of the world.
No, he's not. The newest generation of 3D cards support floating-point precision color, with 16-bits of precision per color channel. For RGB, that means 48 bits of color, with another 16 bits usually used for alpha channel.
The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The DRI ATI drivers are less than half the speed of their Windows counterparts. The only specifications on those that aren't available is HyperZ, and that could hardly result in a 50% reduction in performance. Also, the DRI drivers aren't good enough to pass any sort of OpenGL conformance suite either. To date, there does not exist an open-source 3D driver that is good as NVIDIA's binary one.
NVIDIA is making money off the Linux drivers. NVIDIA is pretty much the only game in town for Linux graphics workstations, something which quite a few companies are using these days (eg: ILM). Since they have to write Quadro drivers for this market anyway, it's easy for them to support consumer-level NVIDIA cards too.
IBM hasn't announced that it has cut 15,000 jobs in the US. If you're accusing them of fuzzy math, please give some fucking real numbers you god damn pinko.
Too bad you didn't read the article. 1/3 of the 19,000 jobs will be created in North America. That means the US or Canada. So lot's of jobs will be coming our way.
Open GL doesn't support many of the newer features of GPU's. By newer I mean anything in pretty much the past 2-3 years isn't really supported by OpenGL. As an example there isn't yet a HLSL or even a platform independant shader language at all.
That's not true. This *was* true 2-3 years ago, but in that space, the OpenGL ARB has been very quick to keep OpenGL competitive with D3D. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 all came out about a year apart, and 2.0 should be coming wout this year. 1.5, which came out last year, supports pretty much everything out right now, including a full high-level shading language (GLSL).
No it's not. There are different engineering trade-offs that were made. P4 traded IPC for clock-speed. AMD traded clock-speed for IPC. All that matters is what performs the best at the retail clock-speed.
In what illusion are you living? DirectX has long surpassed OpenGL in usability and usage. Its just easier to code for, it just works. Are you high? I've coded for both, and OpenGL is by *far* superior. DirectX forces you to deal with this pseudo object-oriented interfaces crap,a nd has the classic Windows API flaws: giant structures with lot's of deprecated fields passed as parameters, terrible naming conventions, and API calls that don't carry their weight. In contrast, OpenGL is a fairly elegant API, with nice minimal interfaces, a higher level of abstraction, and API calls that do one thing and do it well.
I just love coding for windows, You're definitely high. Tell me: have you ever used MFC? How can anybody still conscience coding for Windows after dealing with that steaming pile of shit?
Arcane makefiles my ass Yes, "arcane makefiles" are so much worse than project files that are totally opaque, easy to break, and only work in one fricking IDE!
I had to write a C++ device driver over the weekend, and string operations are just so tedious compared to C# - not even talking about memory managment etc. Did you use std::string and friends?
Correction: D3D is the de facto standard for "video game" graphics. Sheer volume isn't evrything --- $17,000 buys you a whole lot of copies of Quake! When Maya and XSI choose D3D as their primary API, then we can declare it the de facto standard.
Correction: Direct3D is the de facto standard for *video game* graphics. DirectX has the sheer numbers, but OpenGL competes very nicely in the "$'s being made" category. $18,000 (the price-tag of the OpenGL-based Houdini 3D suite), buys you a whole lot of copies of Quake! When XSI or Maya replace OpenGL with D3D as their primary API, then it can be called the de facto standard for graphics.
OpenGL is doing just fine. I had lot's of worries about it, back in the DirectX 7 era, when Microsoft was rushing ahead, and the ARB was dragging it's ass with the standard, but those fears have since faded. OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 came out in quick succession, with each release maintaining feature-parity with DirectX. Vendor support, from NVIDIA anyway, has been excellent, with new driver releases supporting new features being released within months of each updated standard.
OpenGL is about to get a big overhaul for 2.0 (due out this year at SIGGRAPH, I think), and should compete well with the DirectX updates in Longhorn.
Heh. "Unified windows OS" is a very funny concept. Let's review, shall we?
1) How many installers are there on Windows? MSI installers have only been standard since Win2k, there are still tons of InstallShield and Wise installers out there, not to mention custom nut-jobs like Sierra's. How many Windows apps have you seen that don't uninstall properly? (*cough* Sierra *cough*).
2) How many toolkits are there on Windows? You've got the XP common controls, used by IE. You've got the MS Office toolkit, used by Office. You've got the.NET toolkit, used by Visual Studio. Visio appears to have it's own toolkit (it's butt-ugly and looks totally different than the above three applications). I don't know if Encarta still has it's own toolkit, but it used to. There are a couple of Qt-based apps (Adobe Picture Album), as well as miscellaneous ones like Swing, etc. When Longhorn comes out, you'll just get to add WinFX on top of all that.
3) How many APIs are there on Windows? You've got straight Win32, MFC, WTL,.NET 1.1, OWL (Borland), among others, all of which are in common use.
So the whole concept of a "unified Windows OS" is positively silly!
Actually, the reason that having the menu-bar at the top rocks is that it's much faster to access the menu (Fitt's law). Measurements show that Mac users can get to the menu 5 times faster on average than Windows users.
When Adobe ports Photoshop to Linux how are they going to distribute it to anyone that wants to download it from their site? Set up an APT repository for it:) If there isn't already one, it would be pretty easy to create a program that would open "repository files" and automatically add them to your sources.list.
There is no simple, standard way to distribute an application for each version of Linux that will install. Windows DOES IT. Linux DOES NOT. Linux isn't an OS. Debian is an OS. There is a simple, standard way to distribute an application for Debian, just as in Windows.
Furthermore, it shouldn't be necessary to use a CLI, ever. It's really not necessary to use the CLI to do package installation. It's just easier to describe on the web. A GUI like Synaptic let's you do everything from finding packages to installing them, all from one interface. Much easier than doing the same thing under Windows.
vaporware is something that is promised but never relased. Longhorn has had several beta releases, including a major PDC build. The projects I'm talking about already have releases. Go to freedesktop.org and download them yourself.
Yes, it is. Avalon, Indigo, XMAL, and more are all in the PDC build. The key component of Longhorn, the graphics portion of Avalon (based on the next-generation of DirectX), is not in the PDC beta. It won't be released until WinHEC in 2005.
But all the Direct3D-accelerated graphics architecture that's supposed to power it is not yet turned on. Those are the key parts of the whole architecture that correspond to the OSS parts I listed.
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Obviously old people who never saw Power Rangers as a kid modded this down. This might not be funny, but it's hardly off-topic. I mean, c'mon! They might as well rename the Mozilla Suite "Megazord," seeing as how it's what you get when you combine Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird!
It's not really a zealot thing. People were using Google Zeitgeist's 1% number for Linux to compare with actual studies done by research companies that suggested Linux desktop usage was close to 2-3%. A lot of people trust the Google name, and people aren't the brightest cookies in the world, so I think they realized it'd probably be best to remove something that was misleading people.
Go go Power Rangers!
daaa na na na na daaa, na na na na..
Sunbird is less descriptive than Excel? Curious.
Try them on a good pair of headphones. Even on my Sony D66's, 128kbps AACs aren't that great. They sound like I'm listening to them through cloth, with a lot of the sharpness in the music removed. Certainly, they don't sound like the source CDs. For me, LAME's APS setting (~200kbps) is pretty much indistinguishable from the original CD.
You should really try Real 10. It's a whole lot nicer than previous versions, and not "in your face" at all. They even have a pretty good Linux client.
Now the (french?) trolls can bash me and call american's evil war mongers, but how much have other countries spent to help people in poor nations?
More than Americans. In 2003, those French donated $7bn for foreign aid, compared to our $15bn. And this is a country that has 1/5 as many people as we do. That means, per person, the French donated 2.5x as much as we did. In 2000, Japan, a country that has half our population, donated $3bn more than we did. Today, their foreign AID is less than ours, but mostly because of the weakening of the yen and our post-9/11 bribes* (eg: $600m to Pakistan). Of course, you have to take into account that much of our aid is self-serving. 1/3 of our aid budget this year consists of credits allowing foreign militaries to buy US hardware. Additionally, 1/3 (overlapping somewhat with the previous third), of our aid budget goes to propping up Israel and Egypt. Lastly, 70% of our aid budget is tied to the recipients buying services and goods from American companies.
Ironically, Americans tend to think that the federal government spends too much on foreign aid! Polls show that people think that the government spends up to 20% of the budget on aid, and believe that a fairer number would be 5%. Most don't know that the real number is less than 1%, and that 70% of that money comes right back to American companies.
See this very informative site for more information.
Now, don't get me wrong. USAid does lots of good things. They are definitely making a difference in the world. It's just that they do a lot less compared to the size of our economy than the other developed nations of the world.
No, he's not. The newest generation of 3D cards support floating-point precision color, with 16-bits of precision per color channel. For RGB, that means 48 bits of color, with another 16 bits usually used for alpha channel.
The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. The DRI ATI drivers are less than half the speed of their Windows counterparts. The only specifications on those that aren't available is HyperZ, and that could hardly result in a 50% reduction in performance. Also, the DRI drivers aren't good enough to pass any sort of OpenGL conformance suite either. To date, there does not exist an open-source 3D driver that is good as NVIDIA's binary one.
NVIDIA is making money off the Linux drivers. NVIDIA is pretty much the only game in town for Linux graphics workstations, something which quite a few companies are using these days (eg: ILM). Since they have to write Quadro drivers for this market anyway, it's easy for them to support consumer-level NVIDIA cards too.
IBM hasn't announced that it has cut 15,000 jobs in the US. If you're accusing them of fuzzy math, please give some fucking real numbers you god damn pinko.
Too bad you didn't read the article. 1/3 of the 19,000 jobs will be created in North America. That means the US or Canada. So lot's of jobs will be coming our way.
Why don't you try clicking the "Full Size Version" link? That's the scaling you're seeing.
Open GL doesn't support many of the newer features of GPU's. By newer I mean anything in pretty much the past 2-3 years isn't really supported by OpenGL. As an example there isn't yet a HLSL or even a platform independant shader language at all.
That's not true. This *was* true 2-3 years ago, but in that space, the OpenGL ARB has been very quick to keep OpenGL competitive with D3D. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 all came out about a year apart, and 2.0 should be coming wout this year. 1.5, which came out last year, supports pretty much everything out right now, including a full high-level shading language (GLSL).
No it's not. There are different engineering trade-offs that were made. P4 traded IPC for clock-speed. AMD traded clock-speed for IPC. All that matters is what performs the best at the retail clock-speed.
In what illusion are you living?
DirectX has long surpassed OpenGL in usability and usage. Its just easier to code for, it just works.
Are you high? I've coded for both, and OpenGL is by *far* superior. DirectX forces you to deal with this pseudo object-oriented interfaces crap,a nd has the classic Windows API flaws: giant structures with lot's of deprecated fields passed as parameters, terrible naming conventions, and API calls that don't carry their weight. In contrast, OpenGL is a fairly elegant API, with nice minimal interfaces, a higher level of abstraction, and API calls that do one thing and do it well.
I just love coding for windows,
You're definitely high. Tell me: have you ever used MFC? How can anybody still conscience coding for Windows after dealing with that steaming pile of shit?
Arcane makefiles my ass
Yes, "arcane makefiles" are so much worse than project files that are totally opaque, easy to break, and only work in one fricking IDE!
I had to write a C++ device driver over the weekend, and string operations are just so tedious compared to C# - not even talking about memory managment etc.
Did you use std::string and friends?
Correction: D3D is the de facto standard for "video game" graphics. Sheer volume isn't evrything --- $17,000 buys you a whole lot of copies of Quake! When Maya and XSI choose D3D as their primary API, then we can declare it the de facto standard.
Correction: Direct3D is the de facto standard for *video game* graphics. DirectX has the sheer numbers, but OpenGL competes very nicely in the "$'s being made" category. $18,000 (the price-tag of the OpenGL-based Houdini 3D suite), buys you a whole lot of copies of Quake! When XSI or Maya replace OpenGL with D3D as their primary API, then it can be called the de facto standard for graphics.
OpenGL is doing just fine. I had lot's of worries about it, back in the DirectX 7 era, when Microsoft was rushing ahead, and the ARB was dragging it's ass with the standard, but those fears have since faded. OpenGL 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 came out in quick succession, with each release maintaining feature-parity with DirectX. Vendor support, from NVIDIA anyway, has been excellent, with new driver releases supporting new features being released within months of each updated standard.
OpenGL is about to get a big overhaul for 2.0 (due out this year at SIGGRAPH, I think), and should compete well with the DirectX updates in Longhorn.
Heh. "Unified windows OS" is a very funny concept. Let's review, shall we?
.NET toolkit, used by Visual Studio. Visio appears to have it's own toolkit (it's butt-ugly and looks totally different than the above three applications). I don't know if Encarta still has it's own toolkit, but it used to. There are a couple of Qt-based apps (Adobe Picture Album), as well as miscellaneous ones like Swing, etc. When Longhorn comes out, you'll just get to add WinFX on top of all that.
.NET 1.1, OWL (Borland), among others, all of which are in common use.
1) How many installers are there on Windows? MSI installers have only been standard since Win2k, there are still tons of InstallShield and Wise installers out there, not to mention custom nut-jobs like Sierra's. How many Windows apps have you seen that don't uninstall properly? (*cough* Sierra *cough*).
2) How many toolkits are there on Windows? You've got the XP common controls, used by IE. You've got the MS Office toolkit, used by Office. You've got the
3) How many APIs are there on Windows? You've got straight Win32, MFC, WTL,
So the whole concept of a "unified Windows OS" is positively silly!
Wow. You actually tried to argue something this complex, entirely by analogy??!
And it's spelled infinite.
Actually, the reason that having the menu-bar at the top rocks is that it's much faster to access the menu (Fitt's law). Measurements show that Mac users can get to the menu 5 times faster on average than Windows users.
When Adobe ports Photoshop to Linux how are they going to distribute it to anyone that wants to download it from their site? :) If there isn't already one, it would be pretty easy to create a program that would open "repository files" and automatically add them to your sources.list.
Set up an APT repository for it
There is no simple, standard way to distribute an application for each version of Linux that will install. Windows DOES IT. Linux DOES NOT.
Linux isn't an OS. Debian is an OS. There is a simple, standard way to distribute an application for Debian, just as in Windows.
Furthermore, it shouldn't be necessary to use a CLI, ever.
It's really not necessary to use the CLI to do package installation. It's just easier to describe on the web. A GUI like Synaptic let's you do everything from finding packages to installing them, all from one interface. Much easier than doing the same thing under Windows.
vaporware is something that is promised but never relased. Longhorn has had several beta releases, including a major PDC build.
The projects I'm talking about already have releases. Go to freedesktop.org and download them yourself.
Yes, it is. Avalon, Indigo, XMAL, and more are all in the PDC build.
The key component of Longhorn, the graphics portion of Avalon (based on the next-generation of DirectX), is not in the PDC beta. It won't be released until WinHEC in 2005.
But all the Direct3D-accelerated graphics architecture that's supposed to power it is not yet turned on. Those are the key parts of the whole architecture that correspond to the OSS parts I listed.