What is it with Norway? Is it their water or something? First reverse engineering with DeCSS, now hyperlinks with napster.no. Is Norway becoming the new poster boy for Information Unfreedom? I used to think crap like this only happened in liberal Hollywood and conservative Anaheim, but if this keeps up, they'll lose their crown to progressive Norway.
What do you mean by "game"? If you need to write a full screen OpenGL FPS, then your needs are going to be different than if you're writing a civ-style game, and different still if it's a windowed solitaire game.
For some reason, a lot of people think a game needs to be direct rendered full screen. You task will be a lot simpler if you get out of that mold.
Here's an idea that is sure to get me a lot of flamage: look at Qt. First, it's a very well documented library. Second, it comes with lots of examples, including a tetris clone. Third, you get the QCanvas component, which allows you to do sprite work without a lot of hassle. If you want an interesting research project, then think about writing an isomorphic engine based on QCanvas. Find the old XSpriteWorld++ library that was ported to Qt and you're halfway there.
If you need it, it's not legacy. The serial port is still widely useful, for one example. You might not want it, but lots of people need it. I bought a laptop last year and it's now sitting unused on the shelf because the stupid thing didn't come with a serial port.
For a home desktop you probably don't need a serial port. But for embedded devices they're wonderful (and for developing on them they're essential). For maintaining a rack of headless systems they're great. For hardware hobbyist projects they're they next best thing to parallel.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's "legacy crap."
My middle mouse button is most certainly NOT a scroll wheel! I pride myself on the fact that I have NO scroll wheels anywere. Since I use trackballs, that means I pretty much have to do my shopping in eBay. I've to two brand new (original) Logitech Trackman Marble boxes stored away, and I hope I can get through the next sixty years of my life with them.
Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
Security is the inverse of convenience. If you create a 100% convenient system to use, it will end up being 100% insecure.
Locks on our front doors are inconvenient because they make us stand out in rain fumbling for keys. But who among us remove our door locks for the convenience of not getting wet in the rain?
Small followup: While there are certainly software developers who don't test their code ("it compiles, check it in"), and certainly web develeopers who test their pages in multiple browsers, it's the respective communities I'm talking about. The community of software developers expect software to be tested. But the web development community does not expect web pages to be tested before publication.
The problem of crappy webpages will remain until the web development community gets off its fat ass and starts demanding quality from its members.
Re:In defense of...
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Just yesterday I had a run in with the author of an internal site. It was obviously coded for IE only, as download link would not work in anything but IE. The problem appeared to be munged and mutilated URLs, but I wasn't the owner, nor a web developer, so I let him fix it. But he never did.
We would *try* to fix it, but every time he would email me and say "try it now". And of course it never worked. The professional web developer who gets paid to write working web pages couldn't be bothered to test his damned bug fixes in more than one browser! Firefox is free and incredibly easy to install, but he just never bothered.
As a software engineer, I HAVE TO TEST MY CODE. It's expected of me. It's part of my job. It's an industry standard. Our Unix code is tested on more than one variety of Unix. We might not necessarily test Windows code on the Mac, but we will test Windows code on several versions of Windows. But that's because we're software engineers. We can do it, but web "developers" can't. Apparently it's beneath them.
To make a long story short, I found and fixed the problem with that web page. The URLs were malformed and invalid (file:\\path). I sent the fix to the author, but I haven't heard back from him, and the fixes haven't been applied. I think I pissed him off. Good.
Go ahead and make Macs as small as you want. But experience has shown me that the smaller and more integrated a PC, the more likely it is to require Windows-only software and drivers to run. Not being a Windows user, this would not be good for me.
I can sort of imagine how the engineers of this tiny systems think: "Let's integrate all functionality into a single nonstandard chip, then write a cheap ass driver for Windows, and ignore any requests from Open Source troublemakers asking for specs. We'll make millions!"
Nope, I figured out what the problem was. The URLs were all munged. I fixed them and sent the author the corrections. He hasn't responded yet, so I think I pissed him off. Good.
I'm being forced to use Internet Explorer by my company. For years I was able to avoid Windows and use FreeBSD/KDE for all my workstation needs. Then it became apparent that MS Outlook would be required if I didn't want to have urgent emails mysteriously disappear. So I switched to Windows, but put on Firefox to avoid the Microsoft browser. Then they started rolling out webapps that required IExplorer.
But just one half hour ago I experienced something that may make me lose my gruntleness. Internet Explorer is now required to DOWNLOAD FILES. Using Firefox I can navigate to the software process page, and with Firefox I can see the link to the software design specification template, but when using Firefox to retrieve that file I get a 404 error. When using Internet Explorer the file downloads fine.
Something this stupid cannot have been coded accidentally.
In the past you would have been right, but the 5.x branch is now stable with the release of 5.3. There's no more effort with it than there is with 4.11.
Of course, this doesn't mean that there's no reason for not using the 4.x branch. Heck, I know people running the 3.x branch...
I've not used OpenBSD, but from everything I hear it's very similar to NetBSD. NetBSD is very much a lean system, with no fat. That doesn't mean it's stripped down to the barely usable essentials though.
I'm still a FreeBSD fan though. Mostly this is because it's the BSD I fell in love with first. But a little bit of the reason is because it has a larger community. This results in more available ports, more forums and mailing lists to find answers, more developers to speed up development, etc. FreeBSD has DRI, which I don't think Net/Open have quite yet (correct me if I'm wrong).
All of the BSDs borrow liberally from each other. When OpenBSD audits some code, Net and Free get the fixes. When NetBSD revamped and modernized the BSD init, FreeBSD adopted it with blinking.
I hate to make gross generalizations, but here's one anyway. NetBSD is more "vanilla" than the other BSDs, while FreeBSD is more "mainstream" than the others.
Do what I do and do both! I'm on the subscription, so I get every release in a nice Walnut Creek style jewelcase, and I also download the ISOs (or upgrade from cvsup) so I can install immediately without having to wait for the mailman.
When you give a copy to a friend to try out, they'll be much more impressed if they see a professional jewelcase instead of something you burned and wrote on with an old sharpie. They won't think you're trying to shove off some cheapass warez on them.
if you want to contribute to an open-source project, you shouldn't have to fork it because the current maintainers are dicks.
If the current maintainers are dicks, forking may be the only option you have if you want to contribute. Unless of course you want to start from scatch and be five years behind.
Of course not! He's too busy telling other people what to do to have any time doing it himself. Remember the old saying, "If you can, code. If you cannot, write a book."
To clarify, you use 3D to do 2D stuff. For example, transparency and compositing, or rotation and scaling. You could of course do this in 2D, but by doing it in 3D you get both the 2D and the 3D.
There are completely documented 2D cards. But they're not on the market anymore. And they won't do this advanced 2D rendering.
Don't actually remove the pin, but simply don't have it connect anywhere on the PCB. I only used the 486 as an example, not a model. You're going to have different PCBs anyway, because they will be labelled differently. So that one cent cost evaporates.
Besides, any company that seeks to save one cent on a fifty dollar cost board deserves the flak they receive when someone hacks the driver.
As the article said, if you bothered to read it, "2D is a special case of 3D". The 2D specific work that will be done is only optimization for the 2D case.
Mac's Aqua desktop requires a 3D accelerated card, even though there's nothing on that desktop that is 3D.
Linux is a real OS and BSD's end up having to use a Linux "Emulator" to run half the software anyways
The only thing you need the Linux "emulator" for is Linux *binaries*. If the code is Free Software and isn't kernel specific, just port it instead of emulating it. In reality it's only there for proprietary software like Oracle and Acrobat.
This card isn't being created for gamers. It's been created for desktop users. KDE, GNOME, Qt and GTK+ will want hardware 3D acceleration to do all sorts of fast rendering. But they won't need in-hardware geometry and vertex processing.
Yeah, it will suck playing Doom III on this, but that's not the target market.
Actually, the OSS drivers for ATI aren't that bad. Unfortunately you need an older card and you're not going to get any sort of optimization. As the article stated, a lot of people are still going to go the route of a $20 Rage 128 off of eBay. But some of us are excited about the possiblity of a non-cripple video card that is less than two years old.
Slashdot Mirror
What is it with Norway? Is it their water or something? First reverse engineering with DeCSS, now hyperlinks with napster.no. Is Norway becoming the new poster boy for Information Unfreedom? I used to think crap like this only happened in liberal Hollywood and conservative Anaheim, but if this keeps up, they'll lose their crown to progressive Norway.
In Norway, information wants to be imprisoned...
What do you mean by "game"? If you need to write a full screen OpenGL FPS, then your needs are going to be different than if you're writing a civ-style game, and different still if it's a windowed solitaire game.
For some reason, a lot of people think a game needs to be direct rendered full screen. You task will be a lot simpler if you get out of that mold.
Here's an idea that is sure to get me a lot of flamage: look at Qt. First, it's a very well documented library. Second, it comes with lots of examples, including a tetris clone. Third, you get the QCanvas component, which allows you to do sprite work without a lot of hassle. If you want an interesting research project, then think about writing an isomorphic engine based on QCanvas. Find the old XSpriteWorld++ library that was ported to Qt and you're halfway there.
If you need it, it's not legacy. The serial port is still widely useful, for one example. You might not want it, but lots of people need it. I bought a laptop last year and it's now sitting unused on the shelf because the stupid thing didn't come with a serial port.
For a home desktop you probably don't need a serial port. But for embedded devices they're wonderful (and for developing on them they're essential). For maintaining a rack of headless systems they're great. For hardware hobbyist projects they're they next best thing to parallel.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's "legacy crap."
My middle mouse button is most certainly NOT a scroll wheel! I pride myself on the fact that I have NO scroll wheels anywere. Since I use trackballs, that means I pretty much have to do my shopping in eBay. I've to two brand new (original) Logitech Trackman Marble boxes stored away, and I hope I can get through the next sixty years of my life with them.
Security is the inverse of convenience. If you create a 100% convenient system to use, it will end up being 100% insecure.
Locks on our front doors are inconvenient because they make us stand out in rain fumbling for keys. But who among us remove our door locks for the convenience of not getting wet in the rain?
Small followup: While there are certainly software developers who don't test their code ("it compiles, check it in"), and certainly web develeopers who test their pages in multiple browsers, it's the respective communities I'm talking about. The community of software developers expect software to be tested. But the web development community does not expect web pages to be tested before publication.
The problem of crappy webpages will remain until the web development community gets off its fat ass and starts demanding quality from its members.
Just yesterday I had a run in with the author of an internal site. It was obviously coded for IE only, as download link would not work in anything but IE. The problem appeared to be munged and mutilated URLs, but I wasn't the owner, nor a web developer, so I let him fix it. But he never did.
We would *try* to fix it, but every time he would email me and say "try it now". And of course it never worked. The professional web developer who gets paid to write working web pages couldn't be bothered to test his damned bug fixes in more than one browser! Firefox is free and incredibly easy to install, but he just never bothered.
As a software engineer, I HAVE TO TEST MY CODE. It's expected of me. It's part of my job. It's an industry standard. Our Unix code is tested on more than one variety of Unix. We might not necessarily test Windows code on the Mac, but we will test Windows code on several versions of Windows. But that's because we're software engineers. We can do it, but web "developers" can't. Apparently it's beneath them.
To make a long story short, I found and fixed the problem with that web page. The URLs were malformed and invalid (file:\\path). I sent the fix to the author, but I haven't heard back from him, and the fixes haven't been applied. I think I pissed him off. Good.
Go ahead and make Macs as small as you want. But experience has shown me that the smaller and more integrated a PC, the more likely it is to require Windows-only software and drivers to run. Not being a Windows user, this would not be good for me.
I can sort of imagine how the engineers of this tiny systems think: "Let's integrate all functionality into a single nonstandard chip, then write a cheap ass driver for Windows, and ignore any requests from Open Source troublemakers asking for specs. We'll make millions!"
Nope, I figured out what the problem was. The URLs were all munged. I fixed them and sent the author the corrections. He hasn't responded yet, so I think I pissed him off. Good.
Sigh. I finally got a reply back from the IT department. I quote the entire response: "Is there some reason you can't use Internet Explorer?"
I've thought of a dozen cleverly sarcastic replies, but I want to keep my job... at least until I get my resume cleaned up.
I'm being forced to use Internet Explorer by my company. For years I was able to avoid Windows and use FreeBSD/KDE for all my workstation needs. Then it became apparent that MS Outlook would be required if I didn't want to have urgent emails mysteriously disappear. So I switched to Windows, but put on Firefox to avoid the Microsoft browser. Then they started rolling out webapps that required IExplorer.
But just one half hour ago I experienced something that may make me lose my gruntleness. Internet Explorer is now required to DOWNLOAD FILES. Using Firefox I can navigate to the software process page, and with Firefox I can see the link to the software design specification template, but when using Firefox to retrieve that file I get a 404 error. When using Internet Explorer the file downloads fine.
Something this stupid cannot have been coded accidentally.
In the past you would have been right, but the 5.x branch is now stable with the release of 5.3. There's no more effort with it than there is with 4.11.
Of course, this doesn't mean that there's no reason for not using the 4.x branch. Heck, I know people running the 3.x branch...
I've not used OpenBSD, but from everything I hear it's very similar to NetBSD. NetBSD is very much a lean system, with no fat. That doesn't mean it's stripped down to the barely usable essentials though.
I'm still a FreeBSD fan though. Mostly this is because it's the BSD I fell in love with first. But a little bit of the reason is because it has a larger community. This results in more available ports, more forums and mailing lists to find answers, more developers to speed up development, etc. FreeBSD has DRI, which I don't think Net/Open have quite yet (correct me if I'm wrong).
All of the BSDs borrow liberally from each other. When OpenBSD audits some code, Net and Free get the fixes. When NetBSD revamped and modernized the BSD init, FreeBSD adopted it with blinking.
I hate to make gross generalizations, but here's one anyway. NetBSD is more "vanilla" than the other BSDs, while FreeBSD is more "mainstream" than the others.
Do what I do and do both! I'm on the subscription, so I get every release in a nice Walnut Creek style jewelcase, and I also download the ISOs (or upgrade from cvsup) so I can install immediately without having to wait for the mailman.
When you give a copy to a friend to try out, they'll be much more impressed if they see a professional jewelcase instead of something you burned and wrote on with an old sharpie. They won't think you're trying to shove off some cheapass warez on them.
How about an 802.11g card that doesn't require loading proprietary microcode from the driver?
:-)
That's the next project
if you want to contribute to an open-source project, you shouldn't have to fork it because the current maintainers are dicks.
If the current maintainers are dicks, forking may be the only option you have if you want to contribute. Unless of course you want to start from scatch and be five years behind.
You CAN therefore read qt on linux.
Yes you can. But it is NOT SUPPORTED. In fact, it might even be in violation of patents, and certainly is in violation of copyrights.
Of course not! He's too busy telling other people what to do to have any time doing it himself. Remember the old saying, "If you can, code. If you cannot, write a book."
To clarify, you use 3D to do 2D stuff. For example, transparency and compositing, or rotation and scaling. You could of course do this in 2D, but by doing it in 3D you get both the 2D and the 3D.
There are completely documented 2D cards. But they're not on the market anymore. And they won't do this advanced 2D rendering.
Don't actually remove the pin, but simply don't have it connect anywhere on the PCB. I only used the 486 as an example, not a model. You're going to have different PCBs anyway, because they will be labelled differently. So that one cent cost evaporates.
Besides, any company that seeks to save one cent on a fifty dollar cost board deserves the flak they receive when someone hacks the driver.
OpenGL != games
As the article said, if you bothered to read it, "2D is a special case of 3D". The 2D specific work that will be done is only optimization for the 2D case.
Mac's Aqua desktop requires a 3D accelerated card, even though there's nothing on that desktop that is 3D.
Linux is a real OS and BSD's end up having to use a Linux "Emulator" to run half the software anyways
The only thing you need the Linux "emulator" for is Linux *binaries*. If the code is Free Software and isn't kernel specific, just port it instead of emulating it. In reality it's only there for proprietary software like Oracle and Acrobat.
This card isn't being created for gamers. It's been created for desktop users. KDE, GNOME, Qt and GTK+ will want hardware 3D acceleration to do all sorts of fast rendering. But they won't need in-hardware geometry and vertex processing.
Yeah, it will suck playing Doom III on this, but that's not the target market.
Actually, the OSS drivers for ATI aren't that bad. Unfortunately you need an older card and you're not going to get any sort of optimization. As the article stated, a lot of people are still going to go the route of a $20 Rage 128 off of eBay. But some of us are excited about the possiblity of a non-cripple video card that is less than two years old.
But that's still no reason to disable them in the software. Simply don't connect up pin and you're done. Just like with the 486SX.