"I thought XUL, SVG and QT all did the same years ago."
Nope. They (XUL+SVG+QT) implemented some of the features seperately, but they do not interoperate with each other very well. You can't write a 20 line program that uses all of them. In fact, QT doesn't use SVG very much, and XUL doesn't support QT at all. XUL and SVG integration is still very much an experimental thing, and I haven't seen working SVG in a Mozilla without the Adobe plugin.
XAML combines the ideas of all these techs in a single file format with solid integration with the underlying OS. I'm not sure what this MS guy wants, though. If Firefox were to switch to XAML, it would be a complete rewrite of the GUI, and it wouldn't be cross-platform. MS would be better off taking a Gecko-Sharp component, adding any necessary features, and using XAML to build a UI around it.
Take your paranoid fantasies somewhere where people don't know enough to refute them.
First, when you compile an EXE file with MS tools, it follows a format called the Portable Executable format[1]. You can verify this by opening up the EXE in a hex editor. There are a few headers, a few sections for code and data, and maybe a debug section. There isn't a section called ".backdoor" or ".spyonuser". By examining it very carefully, it might be possible to determine which version of Windows produced it and what compiler, but you aren't going to find your MAC address, name, street address, and favorite color anywhere.
Second, if you're talking about a network backdoor, that's extremely unlikely also. You can see someone using a backdoor on a Backdoors aresimple packet dump. Set up a packet sniffer between your computer and your internet connection and watch for strange packets. Write a virus or something, and see if someone from MS makes a connection to your computer. If you're so paranoid as to think that MS has trojaned all the routers, switches and hubs in the world so as to make it completely impossible to trace, go see a psychiatrist.
In the movie "Pulp Fiction", The Gimp was the name of a bondage freak who wore a PVC suit and was chained to the ceiling. After I saw that movie, that guy was the first thing I thought of every time I heard "The GIMP". It's not a pretty picture.
1) Java SDK 2) jEdit 3) Mozilla 4) Winamp/XMMS 5) Perl (ActiveState if on Windows) 6) Python (Same as above) 7) PuTTY/ssh 8) Media Player Classic/xine 9) MSN Messenger/amsn 10) Steam for Counterstrike/same with Wine
Perhaps if the kernel guys didn't change the module APIs or actually tried to preserve compatibility between minor kernel versions, the vendors would be able to support Linux without so much work. In my experience, that's where the majority of problems with binary-only drivers come from.
Vendors don't want to have to support and maintain slightly different drivers for 2.4.22, 2.4.23, 2.4.24, 2.6.1, 2.6.0, 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.6.3, and 2.6.4! Stabilize a binary driver API and never make a non-backwards-compatible change.
I tried Rhythmbox, and it couldn't parse my ID3 tags. I had album art attached, and it would try to *play* the album art. Every Windows player I've ever used played them fine, but both Rhythmbox and JuK choked on them. Had to write a perl script to strip the tags and redo them with EasyTag. I should also add that I used iTunes to add a lot of the art, so if Rhythmbox wants to be "iTunes style", it'd help if it would support them;)
Another way to say it is that they have the mindset of a profitable corporation: Take something of value, pay no more than is required, and show the resulting profits at the next shareholders meeting. It really doesn't matter what their mindset is. They're following the rules as layed out, and you're attacking them for not following *your* rules. This doesn't make them a thief.
The bottom line is that you can't say "Look, here's some free software, open for anyone to use" and then, when someone uses it successfully under those terms, say "Well, you have to contribute back now, damnit!". You can't steal something that is free. If you were to change the license to specifically state that users were required to give something back, then Linux would *not be free any more*.
An AGP GPU can send the results back, but the bandwidth from the GPU to the system is *really* slow compared to the bandwidth from the system to the GPU. It's asymmetric. That ends up being the bottleneck, because the GPU can compute frames much faster than it can send them back. PCI-E has equal bandwidth both ways, so it should theoretically be able to keep up.
Users will always have to compile some software until there is a common binary package format that *all* distros agree on, and an associated file system standard. FHS doesn't cut it. I personally don't think this is going to happen in the foreseeable future. There are too many big egos pushing their own "standards" for each distro to agree on one for the benefit of their users.
Maybe it's just my ignorance of film editing/making, but I was under the impression that motion capture was something done by pro animation studios or 3d modelers. Is it really easy enough now to be done with consumer hardware and software?
MS doesn't make very much money off Visual Studio, or any of their developer products. Their development apps have always been geared towards getting more people to develop for Windows, so there's more incentive for users to use Windows. Making tools more accessible to the average user helps this goal. My guess is that they're doing this because they're losing those budding developers to Linux.
You've almost always been able to get a complete command line development environment for free if you wanted. Before this, you could download the.NET SDK and Platform SDK and you'd have more than what this offers[1]. Throw in a download of SharpDevelop, and you have a slick.NET kit. All of the MSDN documentation is available online, and that's a pretty damn good help file.
Visual Studio is and always has been an IDE product. The very basic and very powerful users get along fine with the command line versions, but there's a lot of middle-level programmers who want an easy to use and powerful IDE, which is basically what VS.NET delivers. I'm guessing that the idea is that people will try out the command line compilers, say "I kinda like this programming stuff", and buy VS.NET when they need the power. I guess I respectfully disagree with you on who needs the features of full VS.NET.
[1] - Except that the.NET SDK compiler isn't optimizing and this one is.
Rumor (and MSDN) says that Longhorn will ship with a full.NET development environment including compiler, debugger, and build manager. This makes it the first time since QBasic that a kid could learn how to program with only the tools installed with the OS. I don't see them integrating X11 any time soon, since it doesn't have most of the features of the Avalon framework that they're trying to introduce. If they did, it'd probably be a heavily extended version.
GCC does the math shortcuts too, if you use certain level of optimization or specify --ffast-math. It all depends on what optimizations you use. If you don't use any, neither does any optimization that would change functionality.
1) That wasn't a spelling mistake, I didn't mean or say "market advantage". I meant "marked advantage".
2) I *didn't* say that it costs $20. I said that *if* it costed $20, maybe that would give it a fighting chance. By the way, VMware costs $199, not $600.
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"I thought XUL, SVG and QT all did the same years ago."
Nope. They (XUL+SVG+QT) implemented some of the features seperately, but they do not interoperate with each other very well. You can't write a 20 line program that uses all of them. In fact, QT doesn't use SVG very much, and XUL doesn't support QT at all. XUL and SVG integration is still very much an experimental thing, and I haven't seen working SVG in a Mozilla without the Adobe plugin.
XAML combines the ideas of all these techs in a single file format with solid integration with the underlying OS. I'm not sure what this MS guy wants, though. If Firefox were to switch to XAML, it would be a complete rewrite of the GUI, and it wouldn't be cross-platform. MS would be better off taking a Gecko-Sharp component, adding any necessary features, and using XAML to build a UI around it.
Take your paranoid fantasies somewhere where people don't know enough to refute them.
First, when you compile an EXE file with MS tools, it follows a format called the Portable Executable format[1]. You can verify this by opening up the EXE in a hex editor. There are a few headers, a few sections for code and data, and maybe a debug section. There isn't a section called ".backdoor" or ".spyonuser". By examining it very carefully, it might be possible to determine which version of Windows produced it and what compiler, but you aren't going to find your MAC address, name, street address, and favorite color anywhere.
Second, if you're talking about a network backdoor, that's extremely unlikely also. You can see someone using a backdoor on a Backdoors aresimple packet dump. Set up a packet sniffer between your computer and your internet connection and watch for strange packets. Write a virus or something, and see if someone from MS makes a connection to your computer. If you're so paranoid as to think that MS has trojaned all the routers, switches and hubs in the world so as to make it completely impossible to trace, go see a psychiatrist.
[1] - Reference for the PE format: here
Your ideas intrigue me. You have a website or anything?
In the movie "Pulp Fiction", The Gimp was the name of a bondage freak who wore a PVC suit and was chained to the ceiling. After I saw that movie, that guy was the first thing I thought of every time I heard "The GIMP". It's not a pretty picture.
R. It's the GNU version of S, which is a very good statistics tool.
If you're using XP or 2k... How did you get System Shock 2 to work? I've been trying *forever* to get that to run on my roommate's XP box.
Agreed, it's even a particularily slick Java IDE when used with Ant and JUnit and appropriate plugins. It's amazing.
My list, if anyone cares:
/)
1) Java SDK
2) jEdit
3) Mozilla
4) Winamp/XMMS
5) Perl (ActiveState if on Windows)
6) Python (Same as above)
7) PuTTY/ssh
8) Media Player Classic/xine
9) MSN Messenger/amsn
10) Steam for Counterstrike/same with Wine
(Linux versions after
Perhaps if the kernel guys didn't change the module APIs or actually tried to preserve compatibility between minor kernel versions, the vendors would be able to support Linux without so much work. In my experience, that's where the majority of problems with binary-only drivers come from.
Vendors don't want to have to support and maintain slightly different drivers for 2.4.22, 2.4.23, 2.4.24, 2.6.1, 2.6.0, 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.6.3, and 2.6.4! Stabilize a binary driver API and never make a non-backwards-compatible change.
"major component of both cough syrup and paintballs" That's why paintballs taste so bad!
My friend who goes to school there says that Ohio was *always* uninhabitable.
I tried Rhythmbox, and it couldn't parse my ID3 tags. I had album art attached, and it would try to *play* the album art. Every Windows player I've ever used played them fine, but both Rhythmbox and JuK choked on them. Had to write a perl script to strip the tags and redo them with EasyTag. I should also add that I used iTunes to add a lot of the art, so if Rhythmbox wants to be "iTunes style", it'd help if it would support them ;)
Another way to say it is that they have the mindset of a profitable corporation: Take something of value, pay no more than is required, and show the resulting profits at the next shareholders meeting. It really doesn't matter what their mindset is. They're following the rules as layed out, and you're attacking them for not following *your* rules. This doesn't make them a thief.
The bottom line is that you can't say "Look, here's some free software, open for anyone to use" and then, when someone uses it successfully under those terms, say "Well, you have to contribute back now, damnit!". You can't steal something that is free. If you were to change the license to specifically state that users were required to give something back, then Linux would *not be free any more*.
Just to be pedantic...
You don't render video, you render frames and assemble them into video, then display the video. The title is indeed correct.
An AGP GPU can send the results back, but the bandwidth from the GPU to the system is *really* slow compared to the bandwidth from the system to the GPU. It's asymmetric. That ends up being the bottleneck, because the GPU can compute frames much faster than it can send them back. PCI-E has equal bandwidth both ways, so it should theoretically be able to keep up.
Yes, the AGP bus has unidirectionality built in. PCI-Express has the possibility to change this, since (IIRC) it has equal bandwidth both ways.
Users will always have to compile some software until there is a common binary package format that *all* distros agree on, and an associated file system standard. FHS doesn't cut it. I personally don't think this is going to happen in the foreseeable future. There are too many big egos pushing their own "standards" for each distro to agree on one for the benefit of their users.
Maybe it's just my ignorance of film editing/making, but I was under the impression that motion capture was something done by pro animation studios or 3d modelers. Is it really easy enough now to be done with consumer hardware and software?
MS doesn't make very much money off Visual Studio, or any of their developer products. Their development apps have always been geared towards getting more people to develop for Windows, so there's more incentive for users to use Windows. Making tools more accessible to the average user helps this goal. My guess is that they're doing this because they're losing those budding developers to Linux.
.NET SDK and Platform SDK and you'd have more than what this offers[1]. Throw in a download of SharpDevelop, and you have a slick .NET kit. All of the MSDN documentation is available online, and that's a pretty damn good help file.
.NET SDK compiler isn't optimizing and this one is.
You've almost always been able to get a complete command line development environment for free if you wanted. Before this, you could download the
Visual Studio is and always has been an IDE product. The very basic and very powerful users get along fine with the command line versions, but there's a lot of middle-level programmers who want an easy to use and powerful IDE, which is basically what VS.NET delivers. I'm guessing that the idea is that people will try out the command line compilers, say "I kinda like this programming stuff", and buy VS.NET when they need the power. I guess I respectfully disagree with you on who needs the features of full VS.NET.
[1] - Except that the
I was talking about Microsoft OS software specifically. The fact that I mentioned QBasic as a "programming tool" is a hint ;)
Rumor (and MSDN) says that Longhorn will ship with a full .NET development environment including compiler, debugger, and build manager. This makes it the first time since QBasic that a kid could learn how to program with only the tools installed with the OS. I don't see them integrating X11 any time soon, since it doesn't have most of the features of the Avalon framework that they're trying to introduce. If they did, it'd probably be a heavily extended version.
When VC++6 was released, that ISO standard was only a draft. It's fixed in VC++ 7, as are most ISO-compliance issues.
GCC does the math shortcuts too, if you use certain level of optimization or specify --ffast-math. It all depends on what optimizations you use. If you don't use any, neither does any optimization that would change functionality.
Dogpile has to be the worst name for anything.
1) That wasn't a spelling mistake, I didn't mean or say "market advantage". I meant "marked advantage".
2) I *didn't* say that it costs $20. I said that *if* it costed $20, maybe that would give it a fighting chance. By the way, VMware costs $199, not $600.