P2's really aren't faster than P1's in fact most P2's use dynamic memory where P1's used significantly faster static EDO memory so your difference wouldn't have suprised me if you were running WinNT on both;) As I said in another post though, microsoft uses similar hacks (with piss poor implementation, unlike the efficient implementation in BeOS).
"Well, once you get a few more CPUs, and you learn to push the vector math to the vector processor, then you begin to feel the difference.
BeOS predicted that eventually, Moore's Law would begin to fade or would periodically dip so that SMP systems would be employed to gain performance. The heavy threading will make it trivial to scale performance approaching linearity with the number of processors.
Think about fiber busses on the system board. Think stackable external CPU modules. Think Beowulf... (sorry, couldn't resist)"
Cheers to that! Woot!
Without a doubt heavily threaded apps was something that Be did right. I just don't think it had much impact on Be's desktop performance on single processor systems. The effect people witnessed has more to do with a clean implementation (something which is not guaranteed to be replicated by the OpenBeOS project but hopefully will be). And Scheduler/interrupt "tuning" aka "hack".
Sorry, your post wasn't argumentative I'm in a bit of an ire because some people want the benefits of those adjustments recognized and the pitfalls ignored.
Without a doubt, with vector offloading and smp systems (and a good scalable implementation to those systems) BeOS wouldn't have needed multimedia hacks anymore:)
This is the real reason I lean toward thinking these guys should have gone with a linux kernel. I view it as kind of the melting pot of technology, it's certainly flexible enough to make the scheduling adjustment's needed for Be and can handle the threading and ALREADY has some pretty good stuff out there for scaling to multiple CPU's. A marriage between the Be desktop and apps and the linux kernel could be a beautiful thing:)
But to each his own I guess, there's nothing stopping parts of this open source project from being ported linux side and Be scheduling options from being added as a compile time option in the linux kernel despite what the OpenBeOS project does.
And what if I told you the same blur effect on Photoshop 7.0 ran through wine typically does not require a visible hesistation at all? Of course this all general on both your and my part, this all varies with the image and size of said image and certain aspects of the image I'm sure those who have written blur filters could tell you better than I could;)
Photo editing really isn't a multimedia effect, it's generally math crunching (although admittedly on newer video cards it's becoming more and more crunching that the video card rather than the cpu do and therefore by Be's type of acceleration would become a bit snappier).
My point really wasn't in that specific example, BeOS accelerates multimedia and as a side effect gains a snappy desktop might be a better way to put it. It gives more interrupts to audio and video hardware and a scheduler to match. This could be done with most any open kernel however.
The price of course is that it's really just a hack, it's not more efficient and therefore faster. Instead it robs resources and cpu time from other tasks and the system to provide this speedup and therein lies the inherent problem. For the desktop of quite a few users this would be just fine (I'd GUESS about 70%ish) for the other 30% BeOS would feel pretty sluggish when it came time to get anything done.
Microsoft actually did something pretty similar with win95/98/ME and to a lesser extent win2k & XP, granted their implementation was piss poor but it's a large part of why 98 is so much more responsive than XP or 2K. They kept giving services these "performance boosts" until finally they end up "boosting" most everything and came pretty close to a balanced system.
BeOS is good in the ways it was intended to be, if you were going to implement said hack, BeOS' implementation would be the one to study. In any case, perhaps I misspoke, or perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying.
"What would you say if I told you that I tried Linux 2.6.0 on the same computere where BeOS is installed, and BeOS still felt much snappier?"
How can you feel snappier than instant response? Unless your test system is under 1ghz or doesn't have much ram (the ram being far more important on a linux system, which won't give a noticably different desktop respone between 500mhz and 1ghz but will dramatically change performance with memory since it doesn't swap if it has enough). I don't have anything beyond 5yrs old to test with.
"And what would you say if I told you that a one-OS-fit-all approach is flawed, and that 1000+ node SGI "cluster" (you got that wrong, SGI isn't into clusters but large NUMA monsters) will not do for a destkop OS any good?"
I really wouldn't pay much attention since your post lacks either basis or relevance on every point.
Your statement (or hypothetical statement the way your phrased it) that a one-OS-fit-all approach is flawed lacks any sort of basis. It's nice to throw pointless generalities out with no basis, would you like to PROVIDE A REASON this is flawed? It's not as if this has some inherent truth when analyzed.
At a glance that sounds reasonable, a multi function printer certainly doesn't work as well as a good external fax modem/printer/scanner individually.
But we aren't talking about that are we? We are talking about the lowest level common api that applications speak to and abracts them from hardware. To make linux a useful Be kernel for instance we can adjust the scheduler to give higher priority to audio and video and or increased hardware interrupts. And still have linux.
Linux is entirely modular, any piece that works contrary to your end can be removed and replaced with a new piece that is custom tuned for the application at hand or simply removed if not needed.
While you could try to apply one size fits all logic to it, it's like trying to claim rubber is flawed as an attempted one size fits all solution for tires. In a very small instance that may be true (tanks are the only thing that come to mind right now, and that isn't a downfall of rubber, it's really that TIRES don't suit tanks). You logic doesn't apply because rubber can be hardened or softened, shaped and customized into a tire which fits the application perfectly. This is especially ideal since there are already common tools and support for working with rubber to make tires. Someday something may come along which is superior to rubber for use in tires, but thus far both rubber and linux have proven to be flexible enough to make ideal tires and abrastration layers between hardware and software.
"that 1000+ node SGI "cluster" (you got that wrong, SGI isn't into clusters but large NUMA monsters) will not do for a destkop OS any good?""
The first I kindly provided a link to a google search of "sgi linux cluster" which should silence you on it. As for the other, this is the irrelevant part. You see that's great and all, aside from being so painfully obvious it's not worth stating, but it also has nothing to do with me stating that such systems provide better HIGH END audio and video capabilities. As for the low end, I refer you back to the post you replied to in which I already covered the subject.
Honestly, are you trolling, karma whoring or what? You grab a few random statements out of my post, take them out of context ignoring everything else I said (I can only presume because you don't have a logical argument against my statement as a whole but disagree despite logic and felt the need to dispute me?). Then for good measure throw in a few grand claims with NO basis or reasoning whatsoever, and another which is simply false.
The cards you just need a few heavy duty laser printers for. You need to decide if you need colored stock or colored print. If it's colored print your looking at decidedly higher costs. You can also contact a large printing company, the smallest they'll fire up the presses for is going to cost you about $1000-$5000 but that will get quite a few full color cards on good stock cut and ready to go on a palette.
Your next tackle is game pieces, where you go for this is a bit trickey, it depends on your pieces. Decide if they are something you can design and make a physical impression of yourself or if you need an artist to do it for you. Either way contact a few plastics companies FIRST to find out what they will require of you. You can find information about completely doing this yourself on the web, what your wanting is information about molds and injection of plastic in molds, the base equiptment to create hundreds of figures can be has for under $1000 but you have materials on top of that, and still have the problem of likely needing an artist for the design and cast of your pieces.
As for the boards, your not going to be able to run them through printing presses, what you need to do is find the stock for your boards. If you can find a company that will do the boards lock stock and barrel great, you'll likely want to go with that (you will of course need to design or have an artist design your board), otherwise you'll need the stock. If your game can be played on a basic rectangular or square board that doesn't need folded that will make your life easier, otherwise you will have to get someone to play ball or do it yourself. Could get pretty tedious depending on how many of these you intend to produce. Then you'll need to refer back to the presses for stock that will stick the boards, or simply print on cheaper glossy stock and then you can use cold laminate or laquer to adhese them to the physical boards, there are laser printers that are designed for wide stock as well and could be used for when you need it and/or aren't using segmented boards where your image could be chopped up into multiple sheets you could use your regular laser printers for.
As for the packaging, there are numerous companies that do this relatively inexpensively if you are producing these in any quantity.
If you go the route of getting the equiptment yourself then of course the advantage is that it can be reused (although running thick card stock on a regular basis through laser printers will result in a fuser change or a new printer every 3-6months, at that point toner flecks will start to appear on prints).
If you go the route of industrial style companies they front all the equiptment and labor for the task they perform, however they will have minimum runs (it's expensive to fire up a press or make molds). If you go that route remember a couple things, at this level of the game you CAN negotiate, your not walking into a grocery store where there is a price tag on everything and that's how much it costs. Repeat business is great, but sell them on concept of repeat business on other products (later boards), they will generally want to do as much as possible in a single run (since the expense for them is setup to produce your item, and running off a few more later means setting up all over again). It's better to do 5000 now than 1000 each month, and cheaper for them so your talking down will yield more fruit.
ok ok I'll give ya that one. But there is a need for a win32 api implementation on linux.
I'm not one who feels that apps should use wine rather than be converted to a native implementation, but there are alot of apps which neither have source code available nor a company still around and/or supporting them on the platform they were written for, let alone porting them to linux!
I mean after all, what is this survey for if it's not to convince microsoft to open it's protocols so that it's easier to make replacement apps and replace windows in every aspect of computing?
If you've used the 2.6.0 kernel you know another one of those things has been knocked out. Without the hacks that rob the system in other areas. You say BeOS was ahead of it's time. I say BeOS used hacks that robbed the system in other respects to make the gui, graphics and video responsive at the expense of slowing everything else. Linux waited and developed this (gui responsiveness) the RIGHT way and is continuing on that road with reworking the gui itself.
Yes linux isn't as fast in terms of audio and video as BeOS still, but it's lightyears ahead of anything else, and unlike BeOS it scales. Would you care to tell SGI your BeOS system thinks it's faster than their 1000+ node linux cluster?
The truth is that linux will continue to evolve until there simply is no way to get more performance in any respect without compromising another aspect of the system. At that point the efficientcy of linux across the board may or may not have compensated for the speed increases BeOS gained at penalty for everything else, but if it hasn't it shouldn't.
Perhaps BeOS will have a place in later days as a specialty system for low end audio and video work, but even so it would advantageous to drop the OS part of the name and make it just Be and sit on top of the linux OS. The Be distribution could use a modified linux kernel with a hacked Scheduler and still be able to take advantage of the enourmous driver base of linux.
The truth is that these guys want Be to be it's own OS and not a modified Linux OS. There is no true reason for this, it boils to simply believing that is the way it should be.
Yes it's true, BeOS traded off REAL performance (as in operations actually completing faster) for responsiveness.
So that the system feels faster. Which is when you think about it perfect for a desktop user since they rarely actually need any true performance. The mouse was responsive, things appear on the screen in a blink... to a desktop user that's heaven, even if it takes 4hrs on to apply a basic gaussen blur to an image in photoshop on a 3ghz processor with a gig of ram.
Fuck you both, notepad obviously has more features in a lighter package their either one!!!
Syntax highlighting? Bah, in notepad I have umm word wrap!! Wait you mean both those editors do the word wrap thing? Well can you search for text strings? you can... oh. Well can you press enter and get a blank line??? Well can ya? Oh. Well umm, gee, let's see now.
Erm well, at least notepad is the only piece of Microsoft software that hasn't had a vulnerability in the last year! Bet you can't say that about emacs or vi can ya? hah, proof that notepad is the ultimate uber text editor!
My problem with all the "quiet" keyboards I've seen is that the key's do not spring back to the fingers nearly as fast as a good old $15 piece of junk. I type over 90wpm when I'm not hurrying and this presents a problem for me. It's hard enough even finding a POS keyboard that responds quickly enough that I don't make typo's due to the keys not actuallying being there when my finger is.
Does anyone else have this problem? Has anyone found a silent AND responsive keyboard?
The fedora project itself typically follows suit with redhat in terms of only backporting security patches. However if you install apt for rpm from freshrpms and possibly add a few other repositories you won't be disappointed. All my packages stay up to date.
I may have spoken a bit too quickly about going from 7.3 since I haven't tried to update from that particular version and there are significant binary compatiblity problems going from it on to the other versions. However in the normal way of things you can upgrade using apt.
When you marry apt+3rd party repositories with redhat/fedora you honestly won't miss debian much (after you get used to a few files being named differently and such, which is just typical growing pains).
As I said before, the biggest advantage redhat has over debian is the hardware autodetection which is second to none and sane defaults. The worst boat you'll get into is having to do the same as you would with debian to begin with, configuring things manually. The net result in saved time is worth it's weight in gold.
Added stability in debian from what I've experienced is really just a myth, moreso than it is with BSD. All of the above equate to a rock solid system that never goes down short of hardware failure if properly configured. It's kind of ridiculous to claim additional stability over a system that has no stability issues;)
"What are you talking about? Debian gets updated *daily*, not every six months. My boxes are nearly always running newer software than anyone using a traditional distro. Hopefully Fedora will provide the same capability."
I think he means the honest to god offical iso release. There is an official new fullblown release every 6-12months.
That's great, really it is, but it hardly means that linux no longer needs a consistant system wide clipboard in which ctrl-v ctrl-c and ctrl-x, as well as highlight middle-click ALWAYS work. This includes back and forth between console and X (not just an xterm but a true console). Shift does work and thanks for the tip, but it shouldn't be needed.
This is not as simple as it sounds while maintaining the ability to support multiple users. Because I should be able to login to X as blahuser, ctrl+alt+f1 login as root, ls -l and then highlight some of the output and alt+f7 back to X middle click paste it, this should also work between gui instances. However this should NOT interfere with other users who have logged in via gui terminals and ssh and such, their clipboards should remain consistant to themselves.
Just getting this behavior completely fixed within a single gui instance would be a start however.
You mean ready to configure. That's the part where the installer comes in.
Having an easy way to install and configure software from either the command line or the gui would NOT make linux windows. Being stubborn on these things is not what makes linux linux it's the people who fight simple improvements like these who hold linux back across the board. MOST network admin's don't want to go through more effort than needed. Linux is accepted on the server and workstations because it's rock solid when setup and flexible, NOT because things are as easy to setup to begin with as they should be. There is no reason we can't have both.
Actually having a shortcut made in the gui be a shortcut which is functional in the gui will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having a consistant clipboard behavior will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having simple cli and gui installations and configuration will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having applications intelligently integrate into the gui when their installed (and only if and when their installed) will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Working like windows in some respects will not destroy linux. Adopting the strengths of mac and windows without adopting their problems is what will allow linux to destroy windows.
You want linux systems to replace windows systems on a windows network, then don't make learning how to configure samba a task which requires more than 5mins study for someone who has worked with windows networks for 10yrs.
no, not anymore than you can in debian. you have to update your package lists with those for the new version. Then you have to actually perform the apt-get update. THEN you have to apt-get dist-upgrade. All of which you can do with apt on redhat. In fact that is how I upgraded my own system.
However you missed my real point. Redhat is a bit farther along in the base, but both debian and redhat and individual distribution suck. If they all merged their strengths we would have something, but distro loving zealots like yourself would never let that happen.
I love copy and paste on linux. The part that needs fixed is that it is not consistant.
I love highlight and middle or right button paste (althougth there we've already bumped into an inconsistantcy) and believe it's worth giving up the ability to highlight and delete and then paste, or simply highlight and paste over.
The part that needs fixed is that between some applications the data isn't carried over, you copy in one app and then can't paste in another. The other hitch is that not all applications support both the mouse based method and Ctrl+c Ctrl+v. The clipboard should be app and window manager independent and should work across all applications.
I don't think the question is really whether or not linux is the superior solution or whether or not it has the potential to swarm this area of computing as it has every other.
I think the issue is really about whether or not it can do it fast enough. Not just because windows is already entrenched and uprooting it is harder than it would be to beat it in even competition. But because When the next release of windows comes out with it's DRM and included bios and the boards stop having them, all the sudden you can't run linux anymore and then linux is dead. on the server and embedded side there will always be reasonable options for this I'm sure. But on the desktop?
Hell I'll do it. Debian has precisely ONE thing going for it. A good package management system, and that package management system has been ported to run on top of RPM, thus eliminating the only good reason to use debian that's left.
Redhat or a redhat based distribution has two good features. It's solid and easy, pretty much any task is at least 90% of the way configured how you want it out of the box and ready to go for most people.
And of course hardware detection, the redhat installer is great and all (despite assuming anyone who is formatting in fat would want something other than fat32 and not even offering said filesystem in the installer) but the real bonus of course is the hardware detection, which surpasses all but MacOS (yes that includes windows, granted windows supports more devices, but not as many out of the box, if you insert a driver disc that's NOT out of the box, the ones windows does detect out of the box do NOT generally configure as smoothly as with anaconda).
When I apt-get install squid on redhat, it installs squid and deps, squid is already in a functional configuration and just works. At that point of course I can change any aspect of the configuration I like. When I install a debian deb, I then have to configure squid, PERIOD.
90% of the prebuilt packages out there that are NOT in apt repositories (things pretty much anyone will run into a time or two) are rpm's with no deb's available. So the redhat system provides a better handle here too.
Now moving past hardware detection and package management. There is the matter of the rest of the installation. A text based installer is great and needed often (due to any distro's apparent lack of ability to make a generic x configuration which actually boots some lowest common denominiator gui on 99.99999% of video+monitor combinations like windows somehow manages to do, this can be done with X I know, because I've done it) and network installs. Redhat however has a text based installer as well that rivals debians (surpasses it if you refer back to hardware detection) AND has a graphical installer for those who don't actually feel they should have to read the screen because they perform numerous installs on varied hardware.
Next you have the gui, redhat and debian have gone to fly a kite on this one. Although redhat is obviously closer with bluecurve. The first thing needed of course is a network neighborhood type thingy that does NOT try to integrate ftp and everything else on god's green earth. A simple samba configurator that DOES NOT reflect the options in the samba conf files and instead simply asks if the system is part of a workgroup or a domain, the computer name and the user name and password to use for windows networking. Then throw in an advanced button. When windows network ing support is chosen in the install then items should be added to the menu's to support sharing printers by right clicking, the same with folders.
The options for user and password security should be available in the sharing window for an object as well as the ability to let anyone use it, phrased that way, not as guest.
When you right click on the desktop there should be an option to create new text documents, folders, and the ability to create shortcuts needs to be more cleanly implemented. Create symlink should be in a seperate submenu under advanced, create shortcut should actually create a clickable shortcut on the desktop and try to create a short shell script and shortcut to cli executables.
Copy and paste needs fixed. An standard co developed effort needs undertaken to develop something equivelent to install shield wizard. The distribution should not accept any software which does not include not only a binary package but an installer which finishes with said application or game in a FUNCTIONING state. In the cases of critical must have applications this could mean writing the installer, but for most should just mean providing libs we suited for this that the project can depen
No nobody has to buy anything. You must give the source upon request to anyone you give a binary to, whether they paid for said binary or not.
Either way, they then have the right distribute the code once they have it on the same terms which is what makes it open source. They don't merely have the ability to view the source. They can modify it and compile their own binaries without waiting for te vendor or without even telling the vendor. Or one person could get the binary (by paying if you will) request the source and distribute it freely to anyone and everyone who has not purchased the binary.
Unless of course you compare our versitility with that of say.. a spider. Throw a sleek set of 8 arms on top of those 8 legs and make it as good at using both as a true spider is. Of course it would have to be as flexible as well.
The size wouldn't be nearly as much an issue, seemingly large spiders can actually manage to squeeze through tiny cracks.
Although somehow I do think you might lose the cute factor...
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P2's really aren't faster than P1's in fact most P2's use dynamic memory where P1's used significantly faster static EDO memory so your difference wouldn't have suprised me if you were running WinNT on both ;) As I said in another post though, microsoft uses similar hacks (with piss poor implementation, unlike the efficient implementation in BeOS).
never done any work for the government have you?
"Well, once you get a few more CPUs, and you learn to push the vector math to the vector processor, then you begin to feel the difference.
:)
:)
BeOS predicted that eventually, Moore's Law would begin to fade or would periodically dip so that SMP systems would be employed to gain performance. The heavy threading will make it trivial to scale performance approaching linearity with the number of processors.
Think about fiber busses on the system board. Think stackable external CPU modules. Think Beowulf... (sorry, couldn't resist)"
Cheers to that! Woot!
Without a doubt heavily threaded apps was something that Be did right. I just don't think it had much impact on Be's desktop performance on single processor systems. The effect people witnessed has more to do with a clean implementation (something which is not guaranteed to be replicated by the OpenBeOS project but hopefully will be). And Scheduler/interrupt "tuning" aka "hack".
Sorry, your post wasn't argumentative I'm in a bit of an ire because some people want the benefits of those adjustments recognized and the pitfalls ignored.
Without a doubt, with vector offloading and smp systems (and a good scalable implementation to those systems) BeOS wouldn't have needed multimedia hacks anymore
This is the real reason I lean toward thinking these guys should have gone with a linux kernel. I view it as kind of the melting pot of technology, it's certainly flexible enough to make the scheduling adjustment's needed for Be and can handle the threading and ALREADY has some pretty good stuff out there for scaling to multiple CPU's. A marriage between the Be desktop and apps and the linux kernel could be a beautiful thing
But to each his own I guess, there's nothing stopping parts of this open source project from being ported linux side and Be scheduling options from being added as a compile time option in the linux kernel despite what the OpenBeOS project does.
And what if I told you the same blur effect on Photoshop 7.0 ran through wine typically does not require a visible hesistation at all? Of course this all general on both your and my part, this all varies with the image and size of said image and certain aspects of the image I'm sure those who have written blur filters could tell you better than I could ;)
Photo editing really isn't a multimedia effect, it's generally math crunching (although admittedly on newer video cards it's becoming more and more crunching that the video card rather than the cpu do and therefore by Be's type of acceleration would become a bit snappier).
My point really wasn't in that specific example, BeOS accelerates multimedia and as a side effect gains a snappy desktop might be a better way to put it. It gives more interrupts to audio and video hardware and a scheduler to match. This could be done with most any open kernel however.
The price of course is that it's really just a hack, it's not more efficient and therefore faster. Instead it robs resources and cpu time from other tasks and the system to provide this speedup and therein lies the inherent problem. For the desktop of quite a few users this would be just fine (I'd GUESS about 70%ish) for the other 30% BeOS would feel pretty sluggish when it came time to get anything done.
Microsoft actually did something pretty similar with win95/98/ME and to a lesser extent win2k & XP, granted their implementation was piss poor but it's a large part of why 98 is so much more responsive than XP or 2K. They kept giving services these "performance boosts" until finally they end up "boosting" most everything and came pretty close to a balanced system.
BeOS is good in the ways it was intended to be, if you were going to implement said hack, BeOS' implementation would be the one to study. In any case, perhaps I misspoke, or perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying.
"You got that wrong, SGI isn't into clusters but large NUMA monsters."
- 8&oe=UTF -8&q=SGI+linux+cluster&btnG=Google+Search
Try again:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF
"What would you say if I told you that I tried Linux 2.6.0 on the same computere where BeOS is installed, and BeOS still felt much snappier?"
How can you feel snappier than instant response? Unless your test system is under 1ghz or doesn't have much ram (the ram being far more important on a linux system, which won't give a noticably different desktop respone between 500mhz and 1ghz but will dramatically change performance with memory since it doesn't swap if it has enough). I don't have anything beyond 5yrs old to test with.
"And what would you say if I told you that a one-OS-fit-all approach is flawed, and that 1000+ node SGI "cluster" (you got that wrong, SGI isn't into clusters but large NUMA monsters) will not do for a destkop OS any good?"
I really wouldn't pay much attention since your post lacks either basis or relevance on every point.
Your statement (or hypothetical statement the way your phrased it) that a one-OS-fit-all approach is flawed lacks any sort of basis. It's nice to throw pointless generalities out with no basis, would you like to PROVIDE A REASON this is flawed? It's not as if this has some inherent truth when analyzed.
At a glance that sounds reasonable, a multi function printer certainly doesn't work as well as a good external fax modem/printer/scanner individually.
But we aren't talking about that are we? We are talking about the lowest level common api that applications speak to and abracts them from hardware. To make linux a useful Be kernel for instance we can adjust the scheduler to give higher priority to audio and video and or increased hardware interrupts. And still have linux.
Linux is entirely modular, any piece that works contrary to your end can be removed and replaced with a new piece that is custom tuned for the application at hand or simply removed if not needed.
While you could try to apply one size fits all logic to it, it's like trying to claim rubber is flawed as an attempted one size fits all solution for tires. In a very small instance that may be true (tanks are the only thing that come to mind right now, and that isn't a downfall of rubber, it's really that TIRES don't suit tanks). You logic doesn't apply because rubber can be hardened or softened, shaped and customized into a tire which fits the application perfectly. This is especially ideal since there are already common tools and support for working with rubber to make tires. Someday something may come along which is superior to rubber for use in tires, but thus far both rubber and linux have proven to be flexible enough to make ideal tires and abrastration layers between hardware and software.
"that 1000+ node SGI "cluster" (you got that wrong, SGI isn't into clusters but large NUMA monsters) will not do for a destkop OS any good?""
The first I kindly provided a link to a google search of "sgi linux cluster" which should silence you on it. As for the other, this is the irrelevant part. You see that's great and all, aside from being so painfully obvious it's not worth stating, but it also has nothing to do with me stating that such systems provide better HIGH END audio and video capabilities. As for the low end, I refer you back to the post you replied to in which I already covered the subject.
Honestly, are you trolling, karma whoring or what? You grab a few random statements out of my post, take them out of context ignoring everything else I said (I can only presume because you don't have a logical argument against my statement as a whole but disagree despite logic and felt the need to dispute me?). Then for good measure throw in a few grand claims with NO basis or reasoning whatsoever, and another which is simply false.
Better yet use your old AD&D world and make the different color pieces correspond to races that are relevant.
The cards you just need a few heavy duty laser printers for. You need to decide if you need colored stock or colored print. If it's colored print your looking at decidedly higher costs. You can also contact a large printing company, the smallest they'll fire up the presses for is going to cost you about $1000-$5000 but that will get quite a few full color cards on good stock cut and ready to go on a palette.
Your next tackle is game pieces, where you go for this is a bit trickey, it depends on your pieces. Decide if they are something you can design and make a physical impression of yourself or if you need an artist to do it for you. Either way contact a few plastics companies FIRST to find out what they will require of you. You can find information about completely doing this yourself on the web, what your wanting is information about molds and injection of plastic in molds, the base equiptment to create hundreds of figures can be has for under $1000 but you have materials on top of that, and still have the problem of likely needing an artist for the design and cast of your pieces.
As for the boards, your not going to be able to run them through printing presses, what you need to do is find the stock for your boards. If you can find a company that will do the boards lock stock and barrel great, you'll likely want to go with that (you will of course need to design or have an artist design your board), otherwise you'll need the stock. If your game can be played on a basic rectangular or square board that doesn't need folded that will make your life easier, otherwise you will have to get someone to play ball or do it yourself. Could get pretty tedious depending on how many of these you intend to produce. Then you'll need to refer back to the presses for stock that will stick the boards, or simply print on cheaper glossy stock and then you can use cold laminate or laquer to adhese them to the physical boards, there are laser printers that are designed for wide stock as well and could be used for when you need it and/or aren't using segmented boards where your image could be chopped up into multiple sheets you could use your regular laser printers for.
As for the packaging, there are numerous companies that do this relatively inexpensively if you are producing these in any quantity.
If you go the route of getting the equiptment yourself then of course the advantage is that it can be reused (although running thick card stock on a regular basis through laser printers will result in a fuser change or a new printer every 3-6months, at that point toner flecks will start to appear on prints).
If you go the route of industrial style companies they front all the equiptment and labor for the task they perform, however they will have minimum runs (it's expensive to fire up a press or make molds). If you go that route remember a couple things, at this level of the game you CAN negotiate, your not walking into a grocery store where there is a price tag on everything and that's how much it costs. Repeat business is great, but sell them on concept of repeat business on other products (later boards), they will generally want to do as much as possible in a single run (since the expense for them is setup to produce your item, and running off a few more later means setting up all over again). It's better to do 5000 now than 1000 each month, and cheaper for them so your talking down will yield more fruit.
ok ok I'll give ya that one. But there is a need for a win32 api implementation on linux.
I'm not one who feels that apps should use wine rather than be converted to a native implementation, but there are alot of apps which neither have source code available nor a company still around and/or supporting them on the platform they were written for, let alone porting them to linux!
I mean after all, what is this survey for if it's not to convince microsoft to open it's protocols so that it's easier to make replacement apps and replace windows in every aspect of computing?
If you've used the 2.6.0 kernel you know another one of those things has been knocked out. Without the hacks that rob the system in other areas. You say BeOS was ahead of it's time. I say BeOS used hacks that robbed the system in other respects to make the gui, graphics and video responsive at the expense of slowing everything else. Linux waited and developed this (gui responsiveness) the RIGHT way and is continuing on that road with reworking the gui itself.
Yes linux isn't as fast in terms of audio and video as BeOS still, but it's lightyears ahead of anything else, and unlike BeOS it scales. Would you care to tell SGI your BeOS system thinks it's faster than their 1000+ node linux cluster?
The truth is that linux will continue to evolve until there simply is no way to get more performance in any respect without compromising another aspect of the system. At that point the efficientcy of linux across the board may or may not have compensated for the speed increases BeOS gained at penalty for everything else, but if it hasn't it shouldn't.
Perhaps BeOS will have a place in later days as a specialty system for low end audio and video work, but even so it would advantageous to drop the OS part of the name and make it just Be and sit on top of the linux OS. The Be distribution could use a modified linux kernel with a hacked Scheduler and still be able to take advantage of the enourmous driver base of linux.
The truth is that these guys want Be to be it's own OS and not a modified Linux OS. There is no true reason for this, it boils to simply believing that is the way it should be.
Yes it's true, BeOS traded off REAL performance (as in operations actually completing faster) for responsiveness.
So that the system feels faster. Which is when you think about it perfect for a desktop user since they rarely actually need any true performance. The mouse was responsive, things appear on the screen in a blink... to a desktop user that's heaven, even if it takes 4hrs on to apply a basic gaussen blur to an image in photoshop on a 3ghz processor with a gig of ram.
How about the win32 api, which is neither fully documented nor correctly documented.
still two commands. You could actually edit the sources.list and still keep it in a single commandline but it would be several commands.
./update-distro
It'd be better to slap it in a shell script, update-distro. Then you can compact it into one.
Fuck you both, notepad obviously has more features in a lighter package their either one!!!
Syntax highlighting? Bah, in notepad I have umm word wrap!! Wait you mean both those editors do the word wrap thing? Well can you search for text strings? you can... oh. Well can you press enter and get a blank line??? Well can ya? Oh. Well umm, gee, let's see now.
Erm well, at least notepad is the only piece of Microsoft software that hasn't had a vulnerability in the last year! Bet you can't say that about emacs or vi can ya? hah, proof that notepad is the ultimate uber text editor!
My problem with all the "quiet" keyboards I've seen is that the key's do not spring back to the fingers nearly as fast as a good old $15 piece of junk. I type over 90wpm when I'm not hurrying and this presents a problem for me. It's hard enough even finding a POS keyboard that responds quickly enough that I don't make typo's due to the keys not actuallying being there when my finger is.
Does anyone else have this problem? Has anyone found a silent AND responsive keyboard?
The fedora project itself typically follows suit with redhat in terms of only backporting security patches. However if you install apt for rpm from freshrpms and possibly add a few other repositories you won't be disappointed. All my packages stay up to date.
;)
I may have spoken a bit too quickly about going from 7.3 since I haven't tried to update from that particular version and there are significant binary compatiblity problems going from it on to the other versions. However in the normal way of things you can upgrade using apt.
When you marry apt+3rd party repositories with redhat/fedora you honestly won't miss debian much (after you get used to a few files being named differently and such, which is just typical growing pains).
As I said before, the biggest advantage redhat has over debian is the hardware autodetection which is second to none and sane defaults. The worst boat you'll get into is having to do the same as you would with debian to begin with, configuring things manually. The net result in saved time is worth it's weight in gold.
Added stability in debian from what I've experienced is really just a myth, moreso than it is with BSD. All of the above equate to a rock solid system that never goes down short of hardware failure if properly configured. It's kind of ridiculous to claim additional stability over a system that has no stability issues
"What are you talking about? Debian gets updated *daily*, not every six months. My boxes are nearly always running newer software than anyone using a traditional distro. Hopefully Fedora will provide the same capability."
I think he means the honest to god offical iso release. There is an official new fullblown release every 6-12months.
That's great, really it is, but it hardly means that linux no longer needs a consistant system wide clipboard in which ctrl-v ctrl-c and ctrl-x, as well as highlight middle-click ALWAYS work. This includes back and forth between console and X (not just an xterm but a true console). Shift does work and thanks for the tip, but it shouldn't be needed.
This is not as simple as it sounds while maintaining the ability to support multiple users. Because I should be able to login to X as blahuser, ctrl+alt+f1 login as root, ls -l and then highlight some of the output and alt+f7 back to X middle click paste it, this should also work between gui instances. However this should NOT interfere with other users who have logged in via gui terminals and ssh and such, their clipboards should remain consistant to themselves.
Just getting this behavior completely fixed within a single gui instance would be a start however.
You mean ready to configure. That's the part where the installer comes in.
Having an easy way to install and configure software from either the command line or the gui would NOT make linux windows. Being stubborn on these things is not what makes linux linux it's the people who fight simple improvements like these who hold linux back across the board. MOST network admin's don't want to go through more effort than needed. Linux is accepted on the server and workstations because it's rock solid when setup and flexible, NOT because things are as easy to setup to begin with as they should be. There is no reason we can't have both.
Actually having a shortcut made in the gui be a shortcut which is functional in the gui will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having a consistant clipboard behavior will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having simple cli and gui installations and configuration will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Having applications intelligently integrate into the gui when their installed (and only if and when their installed) will NOT corrupt the integrity of linux.
Working like windows in some respects will not destroy linux. Adopting the strengths of mac and windows without adopting their problems is what will allow linux to destroy windows.
You want linux systems to replace windows systems on a windows network, then don't make learning how to configure samba a task which requires more than 5mins study for someone who has worked with windows networks for 10yrs.
no, not anymore than you can in debian. you have to update your package lists with those for the new version. Then you have to actually perform the apt-get update. THEN you have to apt-get dist-upgrade. All of which you can do with apt on redhat. In fact that is how I upgraded my own system.
However you missed my real point. Redhat is a bit farther along in the base, but both debian and redhat and individual distribution suck. If they all merged their strengths we would have something, but distro loving zealots like yourself would never let that happen.
I love copy and paste on linux. The part that needs fixed is that it is not consistant.
I love highlight and middle or right button paste (althougth there we've already bumped into an inconsistantcy) and believe it's worth giving up the ability to highlight and delete and then paste, or simply highlight and paste over.
The part that needs fixed is that between some applications the data isn't carried over, you copy in one app and then can't paste in another. The other hitch is that not all applications support both the mouse based method and Ctrl+c Ctrl+v. The clipboard should be app and window manager independent and should work across all applications.
I don't think the question is really whether or not linux is the superior solution or whether or not it has the potential to swarm this area of computing as it has every other.
I think the issue is really about whether or not it can do it fast enough. Not just because windows is already entrenched and uprooting it is harder than it would be to beat it in even competition. But because When the next release of windows comes out with it's DRM and included bios and the boards stop having them, all the sudden you can't run linux anymore and then linux is dead. on the server and embedded side there will always be reasonable options for this I'm sure. But on the desktop?
Hell I'll do it. Debian has precisely ONE thing going for it. A good package management system, and that package management system has been ported to run on top of RPM, thus eliminating the only good reason to use debian that's left.
Redhat or a redhat based distribution has two good features. It's solid and easy, pretty much any task is at least 90% of the way configured how you want it out of the box and ready to go for most people.
And of course hardware detection, the redhat installer is great and all (despite assuming anyone who is formatting in fat would want something other than fat32 and not even offering said filesystem in the installer) but the real bonus of course is the hardware detection, which surpasses all but MacOS (yes that includes windows, granted windows supports more devices, but not as many out of the box, if you insert a driver disc that's NOT out of the box, the ones windows does detect out of the box do NOT generally configure as smoothly as with anaconda).
When I apt-get install squid on redhat, it installs squid and deps, squid is already in a functional configuration and just works. At that point of course I can change any aspect of the configuration I like. When I install a debian deb, I then have to configure squid, PERIOD.
90% of the prebuilt packages out there that are NOT in apt repositories (things pretty much anyone will run into a time or two) are rpm's with no deb's available. So the redhat system provides a better handle here too.
Now moving past hardware detection and package management. There is the matter of the rest of the installation. A text based installer is great and needed often (due to any distro's apparent lack of ability to make a generic x configuration which actually boots some lowest common denominiator gui on 99.99999% of video+monitor combinations like windows somehow manages to do, this can be done with X I know, because I've done it) and network installs. Redhat however has a text based installer as well that rivals debians (surpasses it if you refer back to hardware detection) AND has a graphical installer for those who don't actually feel they should have to read the screen because they perform numerous installs on varied hardware.
Next you have the gui, redhat and debian have gone to fly a kite on this one. Although redhat is obviously closer with bluecurve. The first thing needed of course is a network neighborhood type thingy that does NOT try to integrate ftp and everything else on god's green earth. A simple samba configurator that DOES NOT reflect the options in the samba conf files and instead simply asks if the system is part of a workgroup or a domain, the computer name and the user name and password to use for windows networking. Then throw in an advanced button. When windows network ing support is chosen in the install then items should be added to the menu's to support sharing printers by right clicking, the same with folders.
The options for user and password security should be available in the sharing window for an object as well as the ability to let anyone use it, phrased that way, not as guest.
When you right click on the desktop there should be an option to create new text documents, folders, and the ability to create shortcuts needs to be more cleanly implemented. Create symlink should be in a seperate submenu under advanced, create shortcut should actually create a clickable shortcut on the desktop and try to create a short shell script and shortcut to cli executables.
Copy and paste needs fixed. An standard co developed effort needs undertaken to develop something equivelent to install shield wizard. The distribution should not accept any software which does not include not only a binary package but an installer which finishes with said application or game in a FUNCTIONING state. In the cases of critical must have applications this could mean writing the installer, but for most should just mean providing libs we suited for this that the project can depen
"usable business desktop"
stability is not the only qualification.
Don't forget strike down the DMCA, the RIAA is nothing compared with the DMCA itself which must be destroyed.
No nobody has to buy anything. You must give the source upon request to anyone you give a binary to, whether they paid for said binary or not.
Either way, they then have the right distribute the code once they have it on the same terms which is what makes it open source. They don't merely have the ability to view the source. They can modify it and compile their own binaries without waiting for te vendor or without even telling the vendor. Or one person could get the binary (by paying if you will) request the source and distribute it freely to anyone and everyone who has not purchased the binary.
Unless of course you compare our versitility with that of say.. a spider. Throw a sleek set of 8 arms on top of those 8 legs and make it as good at using both as a true spider is. Of course it would have to be as flexible as well.
The size wouldn't be nearly as much an issue, seemingly large spiders can actually manage to squeeze through tiny cracks.
Although somehow I do think you might lose the cute factor...