Depends on who you ask. The Linux fans that want world domination will (or should) tell you that its not "his" loss, its Linux's loss. Now I'm a Linux user and quite happy with it, but I don't really care whether Linux achieves world domination or not, and I have to be brutally honest and say Linux's lack of distribution coherency, useful documentation, user unfriendliness and newbie hostility pretty much dooms any chance it has on the home PC desktop machines. On servers and enterprise workstations, its got a good chance, but its lack of polish will keep it off of most grandmothers' computers out there.
Why? Well, one slim booklet from the distributor just doesn't cut it. There is so much complexity that Linux doesn't hide from the user, that a lot "ordinary folk" won't be able to handle. And the fragmentation and absence of coherency from one app to another as well as within the system itself (multiple desktops, multiple sound systems, multiple printing mechanisms, multiple documentation formats, documentation quality varying from excellent to nonexistent) is going to make it difficult for anyone expecting all apps to behave in much the same way and provide similar features, ie, standardization.
Now before I get flamed, I've already said that I don't care whether Linux "wins" or "loses", which means I don't care about standardization, I don't *want* standardization (in the way many here speak of it) to happen at all, if that means being forced for example to use GNOME instead of KDE (and if KDE ticks me off at some point, then XFCE). If the home desktop is the target, its going to require a significant level of compromise (that I at least am NOT willing to make) on the simplification/standardization issue, and it will require a substantial level of refactoring of existing apps, or replacing all apps in a single coherent mega-package like KDE (except KDE isn't well integrated with the underlying system, since, among other things, its designed to be portable), in order to get the kind of coherency and polish of the system that typical end users will expect/need/demand.
So for people like you and me, losing this guy back to the MS/Apple world doesn't make a difference, but it does to all those who see Linux as their heroic dragon-slayer of myth and legend that will lead them to glorious victory over Microsoft.:) People want to take Linux in different directions, so the result is that to make Linux succeed on the home desktop, you'll have to change it in ways that I (and others) will never accept. Because of this, I think talking about one distro called "Linux" is a waste of time because it'll never happen.
Now I've seen everything, a geek with a standard of beauty set very high for the opposite sex.
You do realize you are talking to guys who would accept anything feminine, with workable hardware roughly in the right places, even long after the warranty has expired? You are suggesting that profoundly sex-starved males should turn down a physically gorgeous woman because her lips are too large?!? Her lips?!?:)
I don't know about the rest of these guys, but my minimum standard of beauty is so low, you can't even trip over it, and if AJ ended up a consolation prize in a game show, I'd still consider myself the luckiest geek alive.
The posts above you show evidence that he didn't lose. Where's your counter-evidence?
A painful wrong is never easily forgotten by its victims, and considering what Bush has done for us in these last 4 years, *nobody* from the center out to the far left is going to soon forget how Gore's victory was stolen from him.
I don't exactly think it's all that important of a feature
I think a large number of folk would disagree with you. Kinda reminds me what the IE apologists said after tabbed browsing came out: "Nah, we don't need it, its not that big a deal". Same problem.
It surely isn't anyting but bloat ..... Somehow when we talk about Mozilla/Firefox features that IE doesn't have it's never unnecessary.
Hmmm, let's turn this on its head: So we have MS boosters who always want to talk about how MS's products have more features and are easier to use, but when an example is shown of a F/OS app with better features and ease of use, suddenly the extra features are "bloat", and the added ease of use is "not all that important a feature". God, I just love Microsoft Logic(TM)!!:)
It, the technology, would be a good thing, its the license for it thats the problem.
MS is not in the business of cooperating with rivals in general, and they've made it abundantly clear they will not cooperate with the Free Software community (you know, the GPL is eeeevvvilll!), so I'm not at all surprised they would encumber this technology with a license that makes it unusable for the Free Software folks. Now maybe some of the Open Source folks can use it (while holding their nose when reading the license), but if Debian can't use it, then I don't care, its dead.
There really is nothing new here folks, please just move along.
Do we all 6.3 billion have to abide to the law of a mere 300 million?
Now wait a sec, aren't you getting a little carried away here? After all, this guy's own government agreed to extradite him, its not like we snuck in and kidnapped the guy. These extradition treaties are 2-way, and agreed to by both sides. Besides, we don't have extradition treaties with the whole world, not even a significant majority of (if you want to go by population).
Translation: Get your rich friends to fund an ad compaign to spread vicious lies about your opponent. What really worries me about this is the fact that George Junior has done this before, even against fellow Republicans (John McCain), yet not only are thousands buying into the bullshit, no one questions Georgie's character for repeatedly using indirect personal slander as a political weapon.
too bad neither of the candidates the Democrats put forward this season were fit for duty.
They aren't ideal choices, but then again, we've already got an incompetent ego-maniac in the White House, so at this point anybody would be an improvement, IMO.
PS: You've been modded "Interesting", so I don't really buy the idea that/. is liberal, since anyone who would mod lies to be "Interesting" has to have a political agenda, thus we know the right wing nuts are here too.
Essentially/. is just a freakin' web blog for heaven's sake! One of thousands. I don't get why anyone would waste time and mod points on personal vendettas against complete strangers. Heck, the only time I pay attention to who wrote the comment I'm responding to is when the author is Mr. A. C., otherwise, I simply don't care.
How many people are really doing this, and what is/.'s rationale for not allowing under/over rating to be meta-moderated? Anyone?
To clarify: I think Europe raised their gas prices for several reasons, effecting social change was just one of them. Whether they've "failed" or not kinda depends on your definition of failure: they still use much less oil for autos than we do.
Reducing our dependence on foreign oil will only happen when it is more expensive to bring oil from Saudi Arabia than from the Gulf of Mexico
One way to accomplish this is to tax Saudi (or anyone elses) oil. That's the point.
Raising taxes.... (and damage the economy to a greater or lesser extent),
That didn't happen to Europe. Their economies are still decent, but they are less dependent on oil than we are.
but it will not cause us to eliminate oil imports
I never said it would, making fossil fuels artifically more expensive is only one part of a larger strategy to move away from our helpless oil dependence. Indeed, there is a lot of oil available from the rest of the world, so its just a matter of reducing our demand until it can be fully met by sources outside of the Middle East. Only the long term strategy envisions getting away from oil completely, and thats still a work-in-progress.
but it is as likely as not in Texas as in Saudi Arabia.
We already subsidize our own domestic oil resources to make them competitive with foreign sources, at the expense of other energy resources. This is part of the (political) problem: we still favor oil, but we don't, and never will, have the domestic sources to meet our own demand. So as long as we favor oil as much as we do, we are going to be dependent on the Middle East.
PS: I agree that politicians will try to use extra revenue from gas taxes for things other than affecting our oil dependence, I realize that, but thats really a separate (and very old) problem about politics in general.:)
Raising the cost of gas would have wide-ranging effects, and yes, some would be temporarily negative. The primary purpose though is not to raise more money, the real goal is to affect consumer decision making, the more expensive gas is, the more likely consumers will demand higher efficiency in their vehicles. As long as gas is cheap, unfortunately, we'll keep on driving SUVs, and all the other negative consequences of that be damned.
Sorry, about not responding earlier, was in the middle of playing with different browsers and "dropped" this one.
No, what you linked to is another 3D game engine, when I used "engine" I was using it in a more generic way. As I said in my post, I wasn't really referring to 3D FPS games.
A theoretical example of my idea: A turn-based strategy game (using either 3D or 2D), where the multiplayer code (if its a multiplayer game), the game's AI (for single player), all its audio/visual content, and the game's storyline/background/plot is kepy proprietary, but the engine, the core of the game (play mechanics and UI), is open, and the proprietary code interfaces to it thru a clean, flexible API (with the idea to making it easier to make changes in the core without breaking the other stuff - granted, this will always be a tightrope walk).
This wouldn't be a truly F/OS game of course because the company would still hold rights to the game's story-line and graphics, etc, the game's "open core" by itself wouldn't be useful, but it would allow players to modify the game in ways that are currently impossible with conventional closed-source games.
And since I have an AMD chip (which AFAIK do not support all Intel instructions, but have quite a few of their own extra instructions)
FWIW, I've used AMD chips since their 286 clone (starting with MS DOS 3.1), and never found an x86 program that wouldn't work on them because they weren't from Intel, and since I rarely hear stories or claims like this, I believe that the overwhelmingly vast majority of software will work on either just fine.
The exception is the specialized commands, eg, 3DNOW (AMD) & MMX (Intel), but first, these are only significant for a few specialized applications (and the major specialized applications will provide support for both types, and latest versions of GCC support both), and with the Athlon64 it becomes irrelevent since it supports both MMX, 3DNOW, SSE/SSE2 (supported by both AMD and Intel, and is now preferred over 3DNOW/MMX, and is also supported by GCC), and legacy FP registers, basically everything except the latest additions Intel made to their last version of MMX just before the Athlon64 was released, and those new insns will probably get supported in future Athlon64 processors as well (or maybe not if most everyone moves to SSE2). In other words, AMD has completely caught up with Intel, and its now Intel thats playing catchup to AMD's AMD64 technology.
Anyone still buying Intel because they want to be "safe" is just falling victim to Intel's marketing BS, and will end up paying more, possibly a lot more, for (roughly) the same performance.
If you read the GATOS mailing list it becomes clear after a while they aren't playing it straight
I'm not talking about ATI. The point of my post was trying to understand why you think ATI is worthy of your consideration, while NVIDIA is deserving of nothing but contempt.
The truth here, IMO, is a little more ugly than a lot of us F/OS people would like to hear about. NVIDIA is the clear leader in 3D performance and their driver is more stable and easier to use (they use one unified driver for all their cards). The are the industry leader, which is why there is absolutely no sane reason for them (or anyone trying to compete with them) to open source the code that drives their 3D hardware.
I once wrote a response to this same issue, where I tried to explain why I think the 3D accelerated graphics market is still different (for now) then the other more mature markets for peripheral devices where standards have arisen. There are no standards whatsoever for 3D acceleration, every company is doing things their own proprietary way. I suspect that (the source code of) these 3D drivers would not only tell you a lot about how their internal hardware works, they might also have a lot more of the "intelligence" of the 3D architecture than many of us think. Until these card makers can move most of that intelligence into the silicon of the card, and provide a relatively simple software interface to it, don't anyone hold their breath waiting for these companies to open source what is quite literally their crown jewels.
Perhaps as the industry stabilizes this may happen, but right now 3D acceleration is in a rapid state of flux, the technology changes quickly, and it would simply be more expensive for this companies to put a lot of the intelligence into the silcon, rather than keeping it in software which can easily be updated. I'm guessing that a lot of the code of their drivers would, in a more stable market, be moved onto the silicon and a standardized interface developed.
As for the higher level functionality, that could be copied from existing opensource drivers
The open-source drivers are 2D *only*. There is NO open source code ANYWHERE to control the NVIDIA cards' 3D hardware, it is and has always been proprietary (allegedly for the reasons they give).
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Depends on who you ask. The Linux fans that want world domination will (or should) tell you that its not "his" loss, its Linux's loss. Now I'm a Linux user and quite happy with it, but I don't really care whether Linux achieves world domination or not, and I have to be brutally honest and say Linux's lack of distribution coherency, useful documentation, user unfriendliness and newbie hostility pretty much dooms any chance it has on the home PC desktop machines. On servers and enterprise workstations, its got a good chance, but its lack of polish will keep it off of most grandmothers' computers out there.
Why? Well, one slim booklet from the distributor just doesn't cut it. There is so much complexity that Linux doesn't hide from the user, that a lot "ordinary folk" won't be able to handle. And the fragmentation and absence of coherency from one app to another as well as within the system itself (multiple desktops, multiple sound systems, multiple printing mechanisms, multiple documentation formats, documentation quality varying from excellent to nonexistent) is going to make it difficult for anyone expecting all apps to behave in much the same way and provide similar features, ie, standardization.
Now before I get flamed, I've already said that I don't care whether Linux "wins" or "loses", which means I don't care about standardization, I don't *want* standardization (in the way many here speak of it) to happen at all, if that means being forced for example to use GNOME instead of KDE (and if KDE ticks me off at some point, then XFCE). If the home desktop is the target, its going to require a significant level of compromise (that I at least am NOT willing to make) on the simplification/standardization issue, and it will require a substantial level of refactoring of existing apps, or replacing all apps in a single coherent mega-package like KDE (except KDE isn't well integrated with the underlying system, since, among other things, its designed to be portable), in order to get the kind of coherency and polish of the system that typical end users will expect/need/demand.
So for people like you and me, losing this guy back to the MS/Apple world doesn't make a difference, but it does to all those who see Linux as their heroic dragon-slayer of myth and legend that will lead them to glorious victory over Microsoft.
Now I've seen everything, a geek with a standard of beauty set very high for the opposite sex.
You do realize you are talking to guys who would accept anything feminine, with workable hardware roughly in the right places, even long after the warranty has expired? You are suggesting that profoundly sex-starved males should turn down a physically gorgeous woman because her lips are too large?!? Her lips?!?
I don't know about the rest of these guys, but my minimum standard of beauty is so low, you can't even trip over it, and if AJ ended up a consolation prize in a game show, I'd still consider myself the luckiest geek alive.
The posts above you show evidence that he didn't lose. Where's your counter-evidence?
A painful wrong is never easily forgotten by its victims, and considering what Bush has done for us in these last 4 years, *nobody* from the center out to the far left is going to soon forget how Gore's victory was stolen from him.
I think a large number of folk would disagree with you. Kinda reminds me what the IE apologists said after tabbed browsing came out: "Nah, we don't need it, its not that big a deal". Same problem.
Hmmm, let's turn this on its head: So we have MS boosters who always want to talk about how MS's products have more features and are easier to use, but when an example is shown of a F/OS app with better features and ease of use, suddenly the extra features are "bloat", and the added ease of use is "not all that important a feature". God, I just love Microsoft Logic(TM)!!
Its too bad we can't mod by the paragraph, the first 2 get "Insightful" and the remainder get "Tinfoil Hat Funny".
I CAN EMPATHISE< AND I FEEL YOUR PAIN< BUT DON"T WORRY< YOU"LL GET USED TO IT AFTER AWHILE>
Ahh, now both posts are "Insightful", so the harmony of the universe is now restored.
Darnit, I've actually *got* mod points right now, but I've already posted in this thread! Aarrrrrgghhh!
Oh for cryin' out loud you mods, why "Funny"? This is "Insightful" if I've ever seen it!
Ahh, a fellow spelunker. Well met, sir. Could you please point your flashlight somewhere else, its hurting my eyes, thanks.
It, the technology, would be a good thing, its the license for it thats the problem.
MS is not in the business of cooperating with rivals in general, and they've made it abundantly clear they will not cooperate with the Free Software community (you know, the GPL is eeeevvvilll!), so I'm not at all surprised they would encumber this technology with a license that makes it unusable for the Free Software folks. Now maybe some of the Open Source folks can use it (while holding their nose when reading the license), but if Debian can't use it, then I don't care, its dead.
There really is nothing new here folks, please just move along.
Be very, very, careful here. Using "IP" by itself could get you in real hot water with RMS. :)
Now wait a sec, aren't you getting a little carried away here? After all, this guy's own government agreed to extradite him, its not like we snuck in and kidnapped the guy. These extradition treaties are 2-way, and agreed to by both sides. Besides, we don't have extradition treaties with the whole world, not even a significant majority of (if you want to go by population).
Translation: Get your rich friends to fund an ad compaign to spread vicious lies about your opponent. What really worries me about this is the fact that George Junior has done this before, even against fellow Republicans (John McCain), yet not only are thousands buying into the bullshit, no one questions Georgie's character for repeatedly using indirect personal slander as a political weapon.
They aren't ideal choices, but then again, we've already got an incompetent ego-maniac in the White House, so at this point anybody would be an improvement, IMO.
PS: You've been modded "Interesting", so I don't really buy the idea that
Are you serious?
/. is just a freakin' web blog for heaven's sake! One of thousands. I don't get why anyone would waste time and mod points on personal vendettas against complete strangers. Heck, the only time I pay attention to who wrote the comment I'm responding to is when the author is Mr. A. C., otherwise, I simply don't care.
/.'s rationale for not allowing under/over rating to be meta-moderated? Anyone?
Essentially
How many people are really doing this, and what is
Did you ever bother to read my ID page?
You're an even bigger idiot now, Mr. AC.
contributors != the public
95% of the public doesn't code. If you meant to say "contributors" (ie, other developers) instead of "the public", then I'll agree with that.
One way to accomplish this is to tax Saudi (or anyone elses) oil. That's the point.
That didn't happen to Europe. Their economies are still decent, but they are less dependent on oil than we are.
I never said it would, making fossil fuels artifically more expensive is only one part of a larger strategy to move away from our helpless oil dependence. Indeed, there is a lot of oil available from the rest of the world, so its just a matter of reducing our demand until it can be fully met by sources outside of the Middle East. Only the long term strategy envisions getting away from oil completely, and thats still a work-in-progress.
We already subsidize our own domestic oil resources to make them competitive with foreign sources, at the expense of other energy resources. This is part of the (political) problem: we still favor oil, but we don't, and never will, have the domestic sources to meet our own demand. So as long as we favor oil as much as we do, we are going to be dependent on the Middle East.
PS: I agree that politicians will try to use extra revenue from gas taxes for things other than affecting our oil dependence, I realize that, but thats really a separate (and very old) problem about politics in general.
Raising the cost of gas would have wide-ranging effects, and yes, some would be temporarily negative. The primary purpose though is not to raise more money, the real goal is to affect consumer decision making, the more expensive gas is, the more likely consumers will demand higher efficiency in their vehicles. As long as gas is cheap, unfortunately, we'll keep on driving SUVs, and all the other negative consequences of that be damned.
Sorry, about not responding earlier, was in the middle of playing with different browsers and "dropped" this one.
No, what you linked to is another 3D game engine, when I used "engine" I was using it in a more generic way. As I said in my post, I wasn't really referring to 3D FPS games.
A theoretical example of my idea: A turn-based strategy game (using either 3D or 2D), where the multiplayer code (if its a multiplayer game), the game's AI (for single player), all its audio/visual content, and the game's storyline/background/plot is kepy proprietary, but the engine, the core of the game (play mechanics and UI), is open, and the proprietary code interfaces to it thru a clean, flexible API (with the idea to making it easier to make changes in the core without breaking the other stuff - granted, this will always be a tightrope walk).
This wouldn't be a truly F/OS game of course because the company would still hold rights to the game's story-line and graphics, etc, the game's "open core" by itself wouldn't be useful, but it would allow players to modify the game in ways that are currently impossible with conventional closed-source games.
FWIW, I've used AMD chips since their 286 clone (starting with MS DOS 3.1), and never found an x86 program that wouldn't work on them because they weren't from Intel, and since I rarely hear stories or claims like this, I believe that the overwhelmingly vast majority of software will work on either just fine.
The exception is the specialized commands, eg, 3DNOW (AMD) & MMX (Intel), but first, these are only significant for a few specialized applications (and the major specialized applications will provide support for both types, and latest versions of GCC support both), and with the Athlon64 it becomes irrelevent since it supports both MMX, 3DNOW, SSE/SSE2 (supported by both AMD and Intel, and is now preferred over 3DNOW/MMX, and is also supported by GCC), and legacy FP registers, basically everything except the latest additions Intel made to their last version of MMX just before the Athlon64 was released, and those new insns will probably get supported in future Athlon64 processors as well (or maybe not if most everyone moves to SSE2). In other words, AMD has completely caught up with Intel, and its now Intel thats playing catchup to AMD's AMD64 technology.
Anyone still buying Intel because they want to be "safe" is just falling victim to Intel's marketing BS, and will end up paying more, possibly a lot more, for (roughly) the same performance.
Spoken like a true AC.
Idiot.
Hi, Bill.
I'm not talking about ATI. The point of my post was trying to understand why you think ATI is worthy of your consideration, while NVIDIA is deserving of nothing but contempt.
The truth here, IMO, is a little more ugly than a lot of us F/OS people would like to hear about. NVIDIA is the clear leader in 3D performance and their driver is more stable and easier to use (they use one unified driver for all their cards). The are the industry leader, which is why there is absolutely no sane reason for them (or anyone trying to compete with them) to open source the code that drives their 3D hardware.
I once wrote a response to this same issue, where I tried to explain why I think the 3D accelerated graphics market is still different (for now) then the other more mature markets for peripheral devices where standards have arisen. There are no standards whatsoever for 3D acceleration, every company is doing things their own proprietary way. I suspect that (the source code of) these 3D drivers would not only tell you a lot about how their internal hardware works, they might also have a lot more of the "intelligence" of the 3D architecture than many of us think. Until these card makers can move most of that intelligence into the silicon of the card, and provide a relatively simple software interface to it, don't anyone hold their breath waiting for these companies to open source what is quite literally their crown jewels.
Perhaps as the industry stabilizes this may happen, but right now 3D acceleration is in a rapid state of flux, the technology changes quickly, and it would simply be more expensive for this companies to put a lot of the intelligence into the silcon, rather than keeping it in software which can easily be updated. I'm guessing that a lot of the code of their drivers would, in a more stable market, be moved onto the silicon and a standardized interface developed.
The open-source drivers are 2D *only*. There is NO open source code ANYWHERE to control the NVIDIA cards' 3D hardware, it is and has always been proprietary (allegedly for the reasons they give).
Therein lies the power of a monopoly...