Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 1
Conference room R7. Tensions are high. The CEO and VP of Sales are waiting for the presentation that will make or break the careers of two dozen directors, managers and project leads. The presenter plugs the cable from the Epson projector into his Dell/WinXP (with SP2!) laptop. Nothing happens. The presenter presses several different key combinations. Nothing. The secretary squirms in her chair. An engineer leans over and presses a button on the projector. Nothing. The CEO clears his throat. On the wall of the conference room are two glowing red words: "No Signal." Five minutes pass as very people offer helps suggestions, the cables get unplugged and plugged several times, and various buttons are pushed. The Sales VP is starting to get up to leave, when finally an image appears on the screen. Then PowerPoint crashes...
Why has no one written a modified X-lib that detects if you're connecting directly and automatically converts some operations to X-SHM?
Just a wild guess here, but "because no one really needs it?" I have a tiny bit of trust that the guys working on Xorg have already thought of this rather obvious idea, and rejected it for valid reasons that we on the outside can't immediately discern. My initial guess is that the complexity isn't worth the miniscule performance gains, especially since the major GUI libraries already use shared memory where appropriate.
Re:Why isn't this already out?
on
Next Generation X11
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This could be very important in games, I would think.
The graphics engine needed for a game is very different than the graphics engine needed for most other things. The former almost requires a kernel bypass to write directly to the video hardware. But that's overkill for drawing buttons and edit fields and window frames.
You are the classic case of someone not seeing the forest for the trees. "But how can this single oak tree sustain and entire woodland ecology? It can only support a half dozen saprophytes and one squirrel family!"
If you run X in synchronous mode, so that every draw command gets processed one at a time by the server, then yes it will be dog slow and nasty. But that's not the default. Normally your commands get queued up and sent over in batches at certain defined times. In this type of scenario the X11 way is every bit as fast as the win32 way (for example).
Today I was using netscape from Solaris over a slow network to a 100Mhz P1 running FreeBSD/XFree86. No problem. It wouldn't be suitable for running tomorrow's hot new first person shooter, but neither is win32, which is why Windows has DirectX. If you want to argue that X11 needs a DirectX analog, I will fully agree with you. But that's a completely different issue.
My work laptop has over 800Mb in \windows\system32 alone.
Holy crap! I used to dual-boot Win95 and OS/2 4.0 on a 800Mb system! With enough room left over for applications and data. I can see filling up that space with music and images and other data, but required system libraries? Hell no!
You're missing my point. Yes, I do want all that hardware support. But I don't want it all in one package. I don't want to download the sources for 10,000 drivers when I only need 10 of them. The Linux project needs to be partitioned up into subprojects.
I compared it to GNOME and KDE because with those desktops I don't have to download half a gigabyte of capplets and themes just to get Evolution or K3B. This isn't about "most users", this is about bloat. While most users never see GNOME or KDE sources, the hundreds of GNOME and KDE packagers *DO* and they aren't getting them in huge monolithic source code packages. They all aren't independently deciding to separate out kdelibs from kdebase from kdeutils from kdegames, because that has already been done for them as a side effect of sensible project management.
Back when Linux only had a hundred or so drivers, it hasn't a big deal to bundle everything up. But it won't make any sense when Linux has ten thousand drivers in the future. It's impossible to split the kernel up into different platforms, but it's not that difficult to split non-core drivers and modules off into subprojects.
I think people are missing the real issue in their anger over someone criticising the Holy of Holies. In case you missed it, the issue is that Linux is getting fat and bloated.
linux-2.6.11 is forty four megabytes. Gzipped up. I don't want to waste my bandwidth downloading it to see what it is unzipped, but trust me, it's massive. Where does all this bloat come from? Drivers. Drivers are good, but the current kernel paradigm (and Linux isn't alone in this) is that every driver has to be included with the kernel. So we end up with huge packages and huger repositories where everything is required to reside.
Imagine the size of Linux when we finally get to the goal of having every past and current device with a dedicated driver in the source tree. You're talking possibly ten gigabytes uncompressed. Even if you're not using 99.9% of those drivers, they're still there. The day may come when you can actually build the kernel faster than you can make its dependencies.
Could you imagine a KDE or GNOME where every core, addon, auxiliary and experimental component was all part of one single tarball? Even if you only wanted GTK+ and GIMP, you still have to download and configure the entirety of the GNOME repository to get it. That's what it's like with the Linux kernel.
It's time non-core drivers got split off from the main Linux project. If you don't need to add anything into the kernel to get driver to work, then put it in the driver subproject and don't bug the big guys with this penny ante crap.
...therefore a perfect free market is just as utopian...
Free marketers and libertarians have a saying: "utopia is not an option." Rejecting the free market because it isn't perfect only makes sense if you have a perfect replacement for it. But there is no perfect replacement, especially not meddling dogoodism.
People don't advocate free markets because they expect utoptia, they advocate free markets because they are *free*. Freedom itself is the goal. Not having some whinyass bureacrat telling me what DRAM chips I can or cannot buy is the goal.
It's my fault you missed my point, because my anger distracted you. But I didn't mean to say I was going to ignore the rights of any copyright holders. Instead I'm seriously thinking about ignoring all the myriad *interpretations* out there regarding the GPL, and rely on my own reading of it and copyright law to guide me. Life is too short to wait for the debian-legal mailing list to tell me how to live it.
To all you GPL advocates out there: go stick your head in a toilet and flush! This may indeed be the last straw. This may the one legal inanity out of hundreds of legal inanities that causes me to wilfully and deliberately violate the GPL with glee.
As far back as I can remember GPL advocates have deliberately incited controversy after controversy in a lame attempt at social engineering. First it was about Apple not being able to write a front end to GCC. Then KDE was illegal because Qt wasn't free. Then Corel LinuxOS was breaking the law because it had a closed beta test. Last month the debian-legal list declared Cervisia to be non-free software despite it's FSF approved license. Now I can't give my friend a PDF if he asks for one without having to go through the hassle of hunting down the raw sources for the fonts I used.
Screw that! A document is not a derivative work of its fonts! Only someone with their head up the GPL's ass could possibly think that these inane controversies promote freedom. They do the opposite because they drive people AWAY from free software. The Free Software community has a reputation, and because of you, it's not a good one.
It doesn't mean any of that at all. This is merely the case of some narrow brained legalistic schmuck pulling controversies out of his ass.
The GPL only applies to the document if the document is a derivative work of the fonts. It is not. I fully understand that most GPL advocates want the word "derivative" to cover every possible use of the work, but the law say otherwise. Using a GPL font in your document doesn't encumber your document!
Not being able to embed fonts is a very draconian restriction. Very few commercial proprietary fonts have this restriction, which will end up making GPL fonts *less* free than most proprietary fonts.
It's censorship if somone on Slashdot objects to it. At least I think that's the current definition. Your library analogy is spot on. It's not censorship if library (even a public elementary school library) doesn't carry Hustler. But that won't stop people from crying foul.
My library doesn't carry Linux Magazine or DaemonNews. But you don't see me funding the ACLU over it...
Please do. Instead of the usual nasty battles over the political pie, just do it without the government. While you may dislike the Christian fundamentalists, they're one one group out of dozens lobbying the government to legislate morality at an ever increasing rate.
Trigdell, who had no BitKeeper license, queried McVoy's server.
Trigdell and Torvalds were both OSDL employees. Now I don't have the exact licensing agreement between BitKeeper, OSDL and Torvalds (and neither do you, btw), but I suspect that BitKeeper was licensed to OSDL and not directly to Torvalds.
Anything else just doesn't explain how the normally rational and reasonable Torvalds can do a one-eighty on this particular issue
What Tridgell did wrong was to get Torvald's BK license taken away. His reverse engineering *demonstrates* that he know about the poison pill. But he did it anyway knowing that Torvald's license was at stake.
Here's an analogy. Bob puts some GPL Linux code into the network router he is designing at work. Some Linux developers find out about, but no settlement can be reached. So the GPL license to Linux is pulled for the entire company. This affects Bill, who wasn't even working on the router. So Bill yells at Bob for being stupid.
Who does Slashdot blame? They blame Bill because Bill got mad instead of supporting Bob's moral right to violate the GPL. Pathetic.
I've been trying to cut through the name calling in an attempt to figure out what's going on. It's hard though, because there's more name calling than coding going on.
Essentially, and correct me if I'm wrong, but Linus had a license to use BK, but his coworker violated the license, so Larry pulled the it. Now Linus is upset because he can't use BK anymore at a time when there aren't any FOSS BK replacements.
I would be upset too. I personally despise anti-reverse-engineering clauses, but you don't practice civil disobedience when it hurts anyone beside yourself. Tridgell should never have reverse engineered the line while an employee of OSDL.
I'm not going to see the movie. They replaced Tom Bombadil with some stupid robot, and I hear Trillian is going to be fighting at Helm's Deep. Isn't anything sacred anymore?
What the heck does "small" government have to do with privatizing the sidewalks? Small government is not the same thing as no government. Are you implying that since it's impractical to privatize sidewalks, that we must take the opposite direction and nationalize everything including the neighbor kid's lemonade stand?
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people working for Union Carbide poisoning entire neighborhoods in India and not being held responsible for it. I'm talking about a drunk skipper spilling tons of crude along Alaska's coast and merely getting fired.
When the corporation enters into a debt with you, you agree to waive personal liability.
This is bullshit. I've been in this situation and I can personally tell you that the contract *I* wrote didn't waive any responsibility for the corporation who signed it. The problem was that I didn't know that the individual signing the sales contract had incorporated themselves. So when I went to collect on the $5000 debt I was told that John Smith the individual didn't actually sign, but that I would have to collect from John Smith Inc. Trying to collect from John Smith Inc. was futile they claimed John Smith the individual signed. I got a court judgement against John Smith the individual, but he proceeded to file bankruptcy listing John Smith Inc. as the major creditor. I then got a court judgement against John Smith Inc. but in the meantime it had "reorganized" into a different corporation. Yada yada yada. This was ONE man! Imagine what a big corporation can do.
If a private business sends an employee to my home and they cause damages, the owners of the private business are liable. But if it's a corporation whose employee caused the damages, the corporation owners aren't liable. As a stockholder in Union Carbide, why should I care if the company I own one share in dumps toxic chemicals on a neighborhood in India? I'm not liable for it! To me it's just an investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Conference room R7. Tensions are high. The CEO and VP of Sales are waiting for the presentation that will make or break the careers of two dozen directors, managers and project leads. The presenter plugs the cable from the Epson projector into his Dell/WinXP (with SP2!) laptop. Nothing happens. The presenter presses several different key combinations. Nothing. The secretary squirms in her chair. An engineer leans over and presses a button on the projector. Nothing. The CEO clears his throat. On the wall of the conference room are two glowing red words: "No Signal." Five minutes pass as very people offer helps suggestions, the cables get unplugged and plugged several times, and various buttons are pushed. The Sales VP is starting to get up to leave, when finally an image appears on the screen. Then PowerPoint crashes...
Why has no one written a modified X-lib that detects if you're connecting directly and automatically converts some operations to X-SHM?
Just a wild guess here, but "because no one really needs it?" I have a tiny bit of trust that the guys working on Xorg have already thought of this rather obvious idea, and rejected it for valid reasons that we on the outside can't immediately discern. My initial guess is that the complexity isn't worth the miniscule performance gains, especially since the major GUI libraries already use shared memory where appropriate.
This could be very important in games, I would think.
The graphics engine needed for a game is very different than the graphics engine needed for most other things. The former almost requires a kernel bypass to write directly to the video hardware. But that's overkill for drawing buttons and edit fields and window frames.
You are the classic case of someone not seeing the forest for the trees. "But how can this single oak tree sustain and entire woodland ecology? It can only support a half dozen saprophytes and one squirrel family!"
If you run X in synchronous mode, so that every draw command gets processed one at a time by the server, then yes it will be dog slow and nasty. But that's not the default. Normally your commands get queued up and sent over in batches at certain defined times. In this type of scenario the X11 way is every bit as fast as the win32 way (for example).
Today I was using netscape from Solaris over a slow network to a 100Mhz P1 running FreeBSD/XFree86. No problem. It wouldn't be suitable for running tomorrow's hot new first person shooter, but neither is win32, which is why Windows has DirectX. If you want to argue that X11 needs a DirectX analog, I will fully agree with you. But that's a completely different issue.
My work laptop has over 800Mb in \windows\system32 alone.
Holy crap! I used to dual-boot Win95 and OS/2 4.0 on a 800Mb system! With enough room left over for applications and data. I can see filling up that space with music and images and other data, but required system libraries? Hell no!
You're missing my point. Yes, I do want all that hardware support. But I don't want it all in one package. I don't want to download the sources for 10,000 drivers when I only need 10 of them. The Linux project needs to be partitioned up into subprojects.
I compared it to GNOME and KDE because with those desktops I don't have to download half a gigabyte of capplets and themes just to get Evolution or K3B. This isn't about "most users", this is about bloat. While most users never see GNOME or KDE sources, the hundreds of GNOME and KDE packagers *DO* and they aren't getting them in huge monolithic source code packages. They all aren't independently deciding to separate out kdelibs from kdebase from kdeutils from kdegames, because that has already been done for them as a side effect of sensible project management.
Back when Linux only had a hundred or so drivers, it hasn't a big deal to bundle everything up. But it won't make any sense when Linux has ten thousand drivers in the future. It's impossible to split the kernel up into different platforms, but it's not that difficult to split non-core drivers and modules off into subprojects.
I think people are missing the real issue in their anger over someone criticising the Holy of Holies. In case you missed it, the issue is that Linux is getting fat and bloated.
linux-2.6.11 is forty four megabytes. Gzipped up. I don't want to waste my bandwidth downloading it to see what it is unzipped, but trust me, it's massive. Where does all this bloat come from? Drivers. Drivers are good, but the current kernel paradigm (and Linux isn't alone in this) is that every driver has to be included with the kernel. So we end up with huge packages and huger repositories where everything is required to reside.
Imagine the size of Linux when we finally get to the goal of having every past and current device with a dedicated driver in the source tree. You're talking possibly ten gigabytes uncompressed. Even if you're not using 99.9% of those drivers, they're still there. The day may come when you can actually build the kernel faster than you can make its dependencies.
Could you imagine a KDE or GNOME where every core, addon, auxiliary and experimental component was all part of one single tarball? Even if you only wanted GTK+ and GIMP, you still have to download and configure the entirety of the GNOME repository to get it. That's what it's like with the Linux kernel.
It's time non-core drivers got split off from the main Linux project. If you don't need to add anything into the kernel to get driver to work, then put it in the driver subproject and don't bug the big guys with this penny ante crap.
...therefore a perfect free market is just as utopian...
Free marketers and libertarians have a saying: "utopia is not an option." Rejecting the free market because it isn't perfect only makes sense if you have a perfect replacement for it. But there is no perfect replacement, especially not meddling dogoodism.
People don't advocate free markets because they expect utoptia, they advocate free markets because they are *free*. Freedom itself is the goal. Not having some whinyass bureacrat telling me what DRAM chips I can or cannot buy is the goal.
Why isn't it free? What does it fail to meet in the FSF's Free Software definition?
I take it you work for Mandriva...
The X Window System test suite tests... the X Window System!
p.s. I hope you're not one of those that thinks just because it compiles it must be correct...
Not all of us who are GPL advocates are also zealots
Then you non-zealot advocates need to speak up, because you're getting drowned out in the cacaphony of violation accusations.
It's my fault you missed my point, because my anger distracted you. But I didn't mean to say I was going to ignore the rights of any copyright holders. Instead I'm seriously thinking about ignoring all the myriad *interpretations* out there regarding the GPL, and rely on my own reading of it and copyright law to guide me. Life is too short to wait for the debian-legal mailing list to tell me how to live it.
To all you GPL advocates out there: go stick your head in a toilet and flush! This may indeed be the last straw. This may the one legal inanity out of hundreds of legal inanities that causes me to wilfully and deliberately violate the GPL with glee.
As far back as I can remember GPL advocates have deliberately incited controversy after controversy in a lame attempt at social engineering. First it was about Apple not being able to write a front end to GCC. Then KDE was illegal because Qt wasn't free. Then Corel LinuxOS was breaking the law because it had a closed beta test. Last month the debian-legal list declared Cervisia to be non-free software despite it's FSF approved license. Now I can't give my friend a PDF if he asks for one without having to go through the hassle of hunting down the raw sources for the fonts I used.
Screw that! A document is not a derivative work of its fonts! Only someone with their head up the GPL's ass could possibly think that these inane controversies promote freedom. They do the opposite because they drive people AWAY from free software. The Free Software community has a reputation, and because of you, it's not a good one.
It doesn't mean any of that at all. This is merely the case of some narrow brained legalistic schmuck pulling controversies out of his ass.
The GPL only applies to the document if the document is a derivative work of the fonts. It is not. I fully understand that most GPL advocates want the word "derivative" to cover every possible use of the work, but the law say otherwise. Using a GPL font in your document doesn't encumber your document!
Not being able to embed fonts is a very draconian restriction. Very few commercial proprietary fonts have this restriction, which will end up making GPL fonts *less* free than most proprietary fonts.
It's censorship if somone on Slashdot objects to it. At least I think that's the current definition. Your library analogy is spot on. It's not censorship if library (even a public elementary school library) doesn't carry Hustler. But that won't stop people from crying foul.
My library doesn't carry Linux Magazine or DaemonNews. But you don't see me funding the ACLU over it...
lets show 'em and and do it better ourselves!
Please do. Instead of the usual nasty battles over the political pie, just do it without the government. While you may dislike the Christian fundamentalists, they're one one group out of dozens lobbying the government to legislate morality at an ever increasing rate.
Trigdell, who had no BitKeeper license, queried McVoy's server.
Trigdell and Torvalds were both OSDL employees. Now I don't have the exact licensing agreement between BitKeeper, OSDL and Torvalds (and neither do you, btw), but I suspect that BitKeeper was licensed to OSDL and not directly to Torvalds.
Anything else just doesn't explain how the normally rational and reasonable Torvalds can do a one-eighty on this particular issue
What Tridgell did wrong was to get Torvald's BK license taken away. His reverse engineering *demonstrates* that he know about the poison pill. But he did it anyway knowing that Torvald's license was at stake.
Here's an analogy. Bob puts some GPL Linux code into the network router he is designing at work. Some Linux developers find out about, but no settlement can be reached. So the GPL license to Linux is pulled for the entire company. This affects Bill, who wasn't even working on the router. So Bill yells at Bob for being stupid.
Who does Slashdot blame? They blame Bill because Bill got mad instead of supporting Bob's moral right to violate the GPL. Pathetic.
Ah yes. Fighting slavery with slavery. It makes my old heart go "pitter pat pitter pat." Sniff. I love you guys!
I've been trying to cut through the name calling in an attempt to figure out what's going on. It's hard though, because there's more name calling than coding going on.
Essentially, and correct me if I'm wrong, but Linus had a license to use BK, but his coworker violated the license, so Larry pulled the it. Now Linus is upset because he can't use BK anymore at a time when there aren't any FOSS BK replacements.
I would be upset too. I personally despise anti-reverse-engineering clauses, but you don't practice civil disobedience when it hurts anyone beside yourself. Tridgell should never have reverse engineered the line while an employee of OSDL.
I'm not going to see the movie. They replaced Tom Bombadil with some stupid robot, and I hear Trillian is going to be fighting at Helm's Deep. Isn't anything sacred anymore?
What the heck does "small" government have to do with privatizing the sidewalks? Small government is not the same thing as no government. Are you implying that since it's impractical to privatize sidewalks, that we must take the opposite direction and nationalize everything including the neighbor kid's lemonade stand?
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people working for Union Carbide poisoning entire neighborhoods in India and not being held responsible for it. I'm talking about a drunk skipper spilling tons of crude along Alaska's coast and merely getting fired.
When the corporation enters into a debt with you, you agree to waive personal liability.
This is bullshit. I've been in this situation and I can personally tell you that the contract *I* wrote didn't waive any responsibility for the corporation who signed it. The problem was that I didn't know that the individual signing the sales contract had incorporated themselves. So when I went to collect on the $5000 debt I was told that John Smith the individual didn't actually sign, but that I would have to collect from John Smith Inc. Trying to collect from John Smith Inc. was futile they claimed John Smith the individual signed. I got a court judgement against John Smith the individual, but he proceeded to file bankruptcy listing John Smith Inc. as the major creditor. I then got a court judgement against John Smith Inc. but in the meantime it had "reorganized" into a different corporation. Yada yada yada. This was ONE man! Imagine what a big corporation can do.
If a private business sends an employee to my home and they cause damages, the owners of the private business are liable. But if it's a corporation whose employee caused the damages, the corporation owners aren't liable. As a stockholder in Union Carbide, why should I care if the company I own one share in dumps toxic chemicals on a neighborhood in India? I'm not liable for it! To me it's just an investment.