The reason games are written without multithreading is because most games are written with consoles in mind. While the PS 2 has a type of parallel processing, neither XBox nor Nintendo support any kind of SMP.
The next generation of consoles from Sony and MS are supposedly going to be fully SMP capable, so game developers will start taking advantage. That will make multithreaded ports to PC a no-brainer.
There's nothing about gaming that makes multithreading less usefull - in fact the need to run a real time physics engine as well as an AI make most games excellent candidates for multithreading. The only reason it hasn't been done is because most hardware (console and PC) doesn't support it and it doesn't make sense (financially) to write a second version of the game that can, just for the 30 or so people who could actually use it. As dual core cpu's, along with the PS 3 and XBox 2, become more common, the software will begin taking advantage.
Not yet, but there will be. The Playstation 3 and the XBox 2 are both designed to rely heavily on parallel processing. Even the PS 2 did somewhat. The result of this will be that game developers will start thinking in terms of multithreading when writing for the platforms, which of course means multithreaded ports for PC.
This was all mentioned in TFA, perhaps you should have read it before asking silly questions?
Corporations have one purpose and one purpose only. Profit. They exist only to enrich the shareholders.
Since the shareholders are safely insulated from the day to day actions of the corporation they feel no guilt when the corporation does something immoral. They don't go to jail when the corporation does something illegal. Only recently, and only in certain circumstances, have corporate officers been held legally and financially responsible for the actions of their corporation.
A corporation gives it's leaders a huge amount of power, and at the same time removes accountability. This is a situation that will almost always lead to corruption. While a few corporations manage to maintain good morals (like Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream) this never lasts beyond the founder's directorship. Once the original founder, who had the vision and faith in the concept, retires or is voted out by the shareholders, corporations inevitably begin loosing their moral compass.
While there isn't anything in the corporation's rulebook that says a corporation must be evil, it's an almost certain outcome of the relentless demand (by the shareholders) for growth and dividends, even when the market is saturated, or the economy lags.
In short, greed is the core of any corporation. It is the reason they exist. It is expected of the corporate officers. It is also one of the seven deadly sins - which certainly implies that corporations are evil by nature. Only the rare corporation is led by a truely moral leader, and then only for a while.
I used windows for 9 years, and don't remember ever seeing anything even remotely resembling Enlightenment desktop, with multiple and virtual desktops. Not only is it sweeter eye candy than anything windows put out, it also revolutionized my workflow and made me much more productive.
I've noticed that the same people who are complaining about Linux's "lack of originality" are the same people who complain that "Linux can't even do [insert MS Windows gimmick here]".
In the end of the day, Microsoft has no obligation to make it easy for you to switch to another office suite.
Had they not illegally squashed competion that would be true. However, MS should be penalized for illegally establishing a monoply by being forced to release the standards by which their software saves files. Courts in several countries agree.
Had MS competed fairly all along none of this would be an issue, and they wouldn't be forced to "give up" their standards.
IE and Office would have pwned WP and Netscape even without these practices, just because they were clearly superior.
Funny, most secretaries and authors preferred Word Perfect. And Netscape was clearly a more popular browser.
Do you think MS would have had to give away, or heavily discount, their software if was truly better than the competition? Are you even old enough to know what you are talking about? It's easy to compare a 9 year old version of WP against the MS Word you use now and prefer Word. But in the mid 90's those of us who had to use word processing professionally found Word Perfect and Lotus 123 far superior to MS's Office line.
Face it, MS broke the law and competed unfairly because they coudn't win fairly because they offered an inferior product.
DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't Run used to be an internal motto at MS. They even had posters on the walls. It was discovered that MS had deliberately introduced bugs into MSDOS 2 that prevented Lotus from running correctly. This was illegal, and not the only time MS broke the law to establish their monopoly. Windows 3.2 would check which version of DOS you had, and refuse to run under any other than MSDOS. Microsoft claimed other versions of DOS, like DRDOS (a superior product) weren't capable of running windows, when actually they were. By the time anyone was able to prove that MS had deliberately prevented other DOS's from running windows (love that hidden source) it was too late for most of the other DOS's to compete.
Why do you think MS lost the anti-trust case? Do you think they would have lost if they hadn't broken the laws and illegally forced other companies out of buisiness? Which part of the word Guilty didn't you understand?
How is that easily available to anyone who is not using Windows?
That self-extracting zip file is of no use to anyone on a Mac, or a sparc based computer, no matter what they do. Do I not deserve to see this open standard because I don't want to spend $300 for a lousy OS?
If MS had wanted this standard to be open they would have offered it in formats that weren't Windows specific.
If I were the guy on stage, I would be very tempted to reply with "Why should we open this up to you anyway?"
Because the governments of several countries said "We will only use software that uses an open format to store OUR data", and Microsoft wants to sell software to those governments?
If I have to sign an agreement to get the standards, then they aren't open. They aren't fully closed, but that's not the same thing. An open standard is one that is accessable to everyone, without restriction. Period.
This is just an attempt by MS to appear to be open (so they can get sales to the governments) when in fact they are not.
While I understand the point you make about your website, it's a very different situation. Your website is free, but governments would have to pay MS hundreds of thousands of dollars for all the copies of Office they would need. That kind of cash buys the right to expect things.
How many times do we have to point out that reverse engineering is NOT the same as "cracking code". You obviously haven't a clue about computer programming and the issues at hand.
As for my citation - as I said before, read my sig it is a lawyer who apparantly works in the field with regards to EULAs.
Apparently? You're quoting this guy and you don't even know for sure? Had you done any research at all, you would have found he was talking about a specific case - Blizzard's EULA prohibits third party selling of in game items and characters. While EULA's may, in some cases, constitute a legal contract, a contract is only valid where it doesn't contradict existing laws. In Don's own words "So, if you call a lawyer right now and say, are EULAs enforceable, he will likely get into the above and his final answer would be "it depends, but in some cases the only way to tell is to go to court." Since the law specifically states that reverse engineering IS legal, any portion of a EULA that denies you that right is unenforcable.
Unfortunately, if you want your product to be 100% (with a grain of salt) compatable with MS you gotta pay them a license fee to get some insight - but that is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is to not buy MS. Use Open Office where it is Open Source.
Um, you do realize that Open Office had to reverse engineer the Microsoft Office formats? You are contradicting yourself here.
reverse engineering Close Source code is NOT fine.
Reverse Engineering is a common, accepted, and fully legal practice used by every industry on earth. Without reverse engineering there would be no General Motors, or Mercedes, or Ferrari. After all, it was Ford that invented mass (assembly line) production, the other companies just reverse engineered the concept. In fact, just about every manufacturing facility in the world uses reverse engineered mass production techniques. The only people who don't think it's fine are the people who own IP they want to get rich from. IP that almost certainly is partially the result of revese enineering itself, since virtually all software today uses techniques that were used before. The next time you add a dialog window with yes and no buttons you are using reverse engineering. In fact the entire concept of "windows" (not the OS, but a box on the screen) on a modern computer is only possible because of reverse engineering.
Just because you do not agree with closed source does not give you a moral or legal right to try and reverse engineer it
Correct. However, patent and copyright laws do give me the legal right to reverse engineer software.
US patent and copyright laws are some of the most over protective in the world. Take, for instance the DMCA, which says it's illegal to bypass copyright protection even if you have no intention of violating any copyright. In other words, it's illegal to be able to commit a crime even if no actual crime will be committed. Yet even here in the US, reverse engineering for the purpose of inter-operability is a protected and legal activity.
Guess what? You can't get rich by writing one program. You'll have to keep working and innovating. You can't retire a multi-millionaire at 25 because you had one good idea. There is no free lunch (well, Google employees excepted). So quit your whining and be prepared to work for a living just like the rest of us. But then, if you weren't so lazy you would have created an actual web page to go with your domain registration. Doh! Or at least not posted it on slashdot until you actually had something to show.
Since EULA's have been and are presently accepted in court - reverse engineering of a product that specifically states in its EULA that you may not do so is not allowed and as such could result in a person being sued.
EULA's have also lost in court several times when they contradict existing law. I could easily put a "you must eat your firstborn child" clause in a EULA, and no court is going to make you do it no matter how many times you clicked the "I agree" button.
And BTW, Tridge never clicked an "I Agree" button, and therefore cannot be held by the EULA. He also didn't use Bitkeeper at all while revese engineering the protocols, and clean room reverse engineering is a legally protected activity. And while EULA's have held up in a few jurisdictions that only creates precedents, not laws, and precedents can be (and often have been) overturned by other courts. So far the software companies have been carefull to only sue people in court districts they knew would be supportive. EULA's have yet to be tested in a neutral court, or a Supreme Court.
There is on my Linux Box. You can do a "new login", and get the GDM login screen. When the new user logs out, you're right back to the first user.
Even more usefull is the option for "new login in a nested window". This causes the login screen to appear in a window on the original users desktop. The second user can log in, even using a different desktop (you can run KDE in a window on Gnome, for instance), and actually have both users signed in simultaneously. Although it's not the best idea, you can log in as root in that nested login, and run all your graphic config utilities as root.
I suspect some distros don't enable this feature since it could be (and likely would be) abused and result in security problems. However, nested logins are a feature of the X-Window system (XFree86, don't know if Xorg has it) so any distro with a recent XFree could be configured to allow this.
Well, lets see. When I was looking to see which OS would perform best on my graphics station I used three pieces of software for testing. All three work on both Windows and Linux. They are the GIMP, Blender, and Povray.
These apps performed tasks on average 17 percent faster on Mandrake 10 community edition than they did on Windows. On Gentoo (with only O2 optimizations, not riced out) they performed on average 22 percent faster than Windows XP.
I could probably reduce XP's performance deficit by shutting down the firewall, anti-virus, and other protective wares, but I have an always on connection so it would be pretty stupid to do that. Besides, the Linux distros were tested with the firewall on, as well as some network monitoring daemons, and don't need all the other stuff Windows needs to be reasonably secure.
The tests I used were all based on rendering speeds, which are not dependent on the video card or any drivers, and since I used the same PC (literally, the same box) for all three OS's the speed difference can only be caused by the OS. It was, after all, the only variable.
Therefore, I must call bullshit on your calling bullshit.
Actually, small farmers sell to co-ops, who sell to Walmart.
Small family farms still make up more than 85 percent of the food grown in America.
You are the one that obviously doesn't know how the farm buisiness works. Put your economics textbook away and get a real clue. The world doesn't run on academic theory, it runs on reality.
You obviously don't know any farmers. I know quite a few, here in northern Wisconsin farming is a way of life. Every farmer I know follows crop rotation, not because they get paid to, but because it pays to. They know that depleting their soil is bad for their livelyhood. Most farms have been in the family for generations, and they very much want to leave a productive farm to their offspring. Farmers take a longer term view than most people, maybe because they only get paid once a year. It's the people who get checks every week or two that get locked into the instant gratification "pay me now" short term view.
It would be nice to hear from a farmer about this, but they're too busy working to spend time here on slashdot. It's spring, and they've got another 16 hour workday ahead of them tomorrow.
How about a better idea. Legalize industrial hemp. It doesn't deplete the soil, and you can make diesel fuel from the seeds. We could be paying US farmers to grow oil instead of invading foreign counties for it. We could be making plastic, paper, cloth, and hundreds of other usefull products from it.
The only downside to industrial hemp, from my point of view, is that I can't catch a buzz from it because it doesn't have enough THC to get anyone high.
If your project's success hinges on contribution from your users, it's doomed
Um, doesn't all software's success depend upon contributions from the users? Commercial apps certainly measure their success by how many users "contribute" the sale price. After all, nobody is holding a gun to people's heads saying "Buy this software".
Most software, commercial and free, depends a lot on people contributing marketing (word of mouth). You "contribute" cash for commercial software, Open Source projects would rather you contribute time (but most won't complain if you throw them some cash instead).
Opps, I meant comment # 12268242, not uid. And yes I know what "Anonymous Coward" is. My comments were a slam against all those losers who are afraid to admit who they are.
If you can't log in and let us know who you are - you're not worth listening too.
LOC is one measure of complexity in a piece of software
Complexity, or lack of efficiency? Blender is a pretty complex piece of software, but does it in a remarkably low LOC. This results in a nice tiny (compared to commercial apps with similar functions) fast binary.
Programmers today all think everyone has a 3.0 + Ghz processor, and a gig of ram. Coupled with a Uni system (at least here in the US) that follows the "more is less - sell software by the Mb, but hold the functionality so we can sell plugins and upgrades" corporate mentality, is it any wonder that American commercial software companies are world famous for producing bloatware?
You did not provide criticism. You provided nagging. Criticism is supposed to be constructive.
Oh, so that explains why most of your (Anonymous Coward - uid 12268242) posts are just a string of insults. You need to grow up and get over yourself. You aren't smart and superior as you seem to think, you're petty, insecure, and vile. See, I can insult people I've never met too. That must mean I'm superior and smart also. (Do I need to add the sarcasm tags, or are you smart enough to see it for yourself).
And we need this because??? Seriously, I've been Linux only for websurfing for over a year now, and not once have I had any reason to miss shockwave. I'd just as soon see all proprietary closed standards just fade away on the net. They serve no real purpose other than lining some corporations pockets.
It annoys me that at some time I'll probably have to install Acroread v7 to fill out a form that could have just as easily (or likely more easily) been done in html. I was going to get some SDK or another from Adobe, but couldn't because they made you fill out a PDF form, even for the Linux SDK. At that time Acroread for Linux was still at 5.0.
If I'm trying to download a SDK for linux, doesn't that imply that maybe I'm using Linux? I'm a musician, and was considering PDF to distribute sheet music, since most people use Windows and don't have LaTex support. Not any more, though. If you want sheet music from me you'll need to find something that can print a LaTex file. Sorry for the inconvenience, it's Adobe's fault.
For as bad as you say it is, most of you would give a testicle to have a Linux version of the product, because there really aint nothin better.
No, I wouldn't. In fact, I wouldn't even give the hair off of one.
When Dreamweaver stops creating bloated, non-compliant webpages I would be interested. In the mean time, I'll stick with Screem, Mozilla Composer, or Gedit (or Textpad if I'm stuck on Windows). I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor that makes pages that are fully W3C compliant and properly search engine optimized.
[rant] OSX uses Postscript, and PDF is based on Postscript, that's all. The two are not the same. They are not interchangable. This is about the 13 Millionth time this has been pointed out here on/. It's not even the first time it's been pointed out this thread. Yet still I keep seeing Quartz is based on PDF. There are an awful lot of people here who need serious work on their reading comprehension and retention skills. [/rant]
And don't try telling me Aqua Extreme is different - it's just a theme that uses the underlying engine (aqua on mac, and what ever XP's engine is called on PC).
Sorry about the rant, but stupidity offends me, and it's Monday morning. And I consider it stupidity, not ignorance, when the information has been handed to you repeatedly and you still don't learn.
That's an incredibly obnoxious website. Pop up windows that demand to be closed. Menus that change withour warning causing you to go to pages you didn't intend. Slow load times. Lack of scalability (my real monitor puked, and my "spare" only goes to 800 X 600 - site set for 1024 X 768 so I have to side scroll).
This site is actually almost a textbook example of poor design, all those "cool features" are absolutely pointless, and detract from the viewing experience of any people using alternative surfing tech (web enabled phones, webTV, handheld computers, etc). God help you if you're on a dail up connection like the vast majority of Americans (obviously we./ers are a minority).
If you're impressed with anything about that site (except maybe the cars - Mini's rock), then do me a favor - don't become a web designer.
We've had stories about corporations talking politicians into useing emenent domain to take land
In Rockford IL, a developer named Suni Puril was involved in a land grab. His "friends" in the government used a version of imminent domain called "quick take" to take land owned by a guy named Tom Ditzler, IIRC. They wanted to build a road across his land, it would lead to a new housing development Puri planned to build. Of course, Puri and his "associates" in the government had all bought land along the proposed road before the development was announced.
There were a few minor obstacles to the Puri plan, however:
1. Quick Take had yet to be signed into law (that didn't stop the bulldozers, though)
2. Quick Take was designed to be used when buildings or property posed an immediate public risk, and the absentee owner couldn't be found. Tom lived on the property, and there were no building, fire or health code violations.
3. The land in question was protected wetlands. Since it was built, the road sank and had to be rebuilt (at taxpayer expense).
4. The land is an Indian Burial Ground. The local government hoods got around that by having a 'dozer scrape less than 2 inches deep, and proclaimed that no relics were found. Professors from U of I found numerous relics, including bones, as little as 2 inches deeper.
5. When Governor Edgar did sign Quicktake, he deliberately excluded the Ditzler land, identified by it's street address and plat coordinates. The locals had one of their tame local judges say the property qualified anyway.
It's been 4 or 5 years now. Tom has yet to see a dime, or even be told how much he'll be paid for the land. The road still isn't usable (it keeps sinking).
Yes, Virginia, the Government IS pwned by big buisiness. And everyone else doesn't care because "it didn't/couldn't happen to them".
Slashdot Mirror
The reason games are written without multithreading is because most games are written with consoles in mind. While the PS 2 has a type of parallel processing, neither XBox nor Nintendo support any kind of SMP.
The next generation of consoles from Sony and MS are supposedly going to be fully SMP capable, so game developers will start taking advantage. That will make multithreaded ports to PC a no-brainer.
There's nothing about gaming that makes multithreading less usefull - in fact the need to run a real time physics engine as well as an AI make most games excellent candidates for multithreading. The only reason it hasn't been done is because most hardware (console and PC) doesn't support it and it doesn't make sense (financially) to write a second version of the game that can, just for the 30 or so people who could actually use it. As dual core cpu's, along with the PS 3 and XBox 2, become more common, the software will begin taking advantage.
Not yet, but there will be. The Playstation 3 and the XBox 2 are both designed to rely heavily on parallel processing. Even the PS 2 did somewhat. The result of this will be that game developers will start thinking in terms of multithreading when writing for the platforms, which of course means multithreaded ports for PC.
This was all mentioned in TFA, perhaps you should have read it before asking silly questions?
TommyCorporations have one purpose and one purpose only. Profit. They exist only to enrich the shareholders.
Since the shareholders are safely insulated from the day to day actions of the corporation they feel no guilt when the corporation does something immoral. They don't go to jail when the corporation does something illegal. Only recently, and only in certain circumstances, have corporate officers been held legally and financially responsible for the actions of their corporation.
A corporation gives it's leaders a huge amount of power, and at the same time removes accountability. This is a situation that will almost always lead to corruption. While a few corporations manage to maintain good morals (like Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream) this never lasts beyond the founder's directorship. Once the original founder, who had the vision and faith in the concept, retires or is voted out by the shareholders, corporations inevitably begin loosing their moral compass.
While there isn't anything in the corporation's rulebook that says a corporation must be evil, it's an almost certain outcome of the relentless demand (by the shareholders) for growth and dividends, even when the market is saturated, or the economy lags.
In short, greed is the core of any corporation. It is the reason they exist. It is expected of the corporate officers. It is also one of the seven deadly sins - which certainly implies that corporations are evil by nature. Only the rare corporation is led by a truely moral leader, and then only for a while.
TommyI used windows for 9 years, and don't remember ever seeing anything even remotely resembling Enlightenment desktop, with multiple and virtual desktops. Not only is it sweeter eye candy than anything windows put out, it also revolutionized my workflow and made me much more productive.
I've noticed that the same people who are complaining about Linux's "lack of originality" are the same people who complain that "Linux can't even do [insert MS Windows gimmick here]".
TommyHad they not illegally squashed competion that would be true. However, MS should be penalized for illegally establishing a monoply by being forced to release the standards by which their software saves files. Courts in several countries agree.
Had MS competed fairly all along none of this would be an issue, and they wouldn't be forced to "give up" their standards.
Funny, most secretaries and authors preferred Word Perfect. And Netscape was clearly a more popular browser.
Do you think MS would have had to give away, or heavily discount, their software if was truly better than the competition? Are you even old enough to know what you are talking about? It's easy to compare a 9 year old version of WP against the MS Word you use now and prefer Word. But in the mid 90's those of us who had to use word processing professionally found Word Perfect and Lotus 123 far superior to MS's Office line.
Face it, MS broke the law and competed unfairly because they coudn't win fairly because they offered an inferior product.
TommyDOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't Run used to be an internal motto at MS. They even had posters on the walls. It was discovered that MS had deliberately introduced bugs into MSDOS 2 that prevented Lotus from running correctly. This was illegal, and not the only time MS broke the law to establish their monopoly. Windows 3.2 would check which version of DOS you had, and refuse to run under any other than MSDOS. Microsoft claimed other versions of DOS, like DRDOS (a superior product) weren't capable of running windows, when actually they were. By the time anyone was able to prove that MS had deliberately prevented other DOS's from running windows (love that hidden source) it was too late for most of the other DOS's to compete.
Why do you think MS lost the anti-trust case? Do you think they would have lost if they hadn't broken the laws and illegally forced other companies out of buisiness? Which part of the word Guilty didn't you understand?
TommyHow is that easily available to anyone who is not using Windows?
That self-extracting zip file is of no use to anyone on a Mac, or a sparc based computer, no matter what they do. Do I not deserve to see this open standard because I don't want to spend $300 for a lousy OS?
If MS had wanted this standard to be open they would have offered it in formats that weren't Windows specific.
You mean like Open Office already does?
Because the governments of several countries said "We will only use software that uses an open format to store OUR data", and Microsoft wants to sell software to those governments?
If I have to sign an agreement to get the standards, then they aren't open. They aren't fully closed, but that's not the same thing. An open standard is one that is accessable to everyone, without restriction. Period.
This is just an attempt by MS to appear to be open (so they can get sales to the governments) when in fact they are not.
While I understand the point you make about your website, it's a very different situation. Your website is free, but governments would have to pay MS hundreds of thousands of dollars for all the copies of Office they would need. That kind of cash buys the right to expect things.
TommyHow many times do we have to point out that reverse engineering is NOT the same as "cracking code". You obviously haven't a clue about computer programming and the issues at hand.
As for my citation - as I said before, read my sig it is a lawyer who apparantly works in the field with regards to EULAs.Apparently? You're quoting this guy and you don't even know for sure? Had you done any research at all, you would have found he was talking about a specific case - Blizzard's EULA prohibits third party selling of in game items and characters. While EULA's may, in some cases, constitute a legal contract, a contract is only valid where it doesn't contradict existing laws. In Don's own words "So, if you call a lawyer right now and say, are EULAs enforceable, he will likely get into the above and his final answer would be "it depends, but in some cases the only way to tell is to go to court." Since the law specifically states that reverse engineering IS legal, any portion of a EULA that denies you that right is unenforcable.
Unfortunately, if you want your product to be 100% (with a grain of salt) compatable with MS you gotta pay them a license fee to get some insight - but that is their choice. Your choice as a consumer is to not buy MS. Use Open Office where it is Open Source.
Um, you do realize that Open Office had to reverse engineer the Microsoft Office formats? You are contradicting yourself here.
Reverse Engineering is a common, accepted, and fully legal practice used by every industry on earth. Without reverse engineering there would be no General Motors, or Mercedes, or Ferrari. After all, it was Ford that invented mass (assembly line) production, the other companies just reverse engineered the concept. In fact, just about every manufacturing facility in the world uses reverse engineered mass production techniques. The only people who don't think it's fine are the people who own IP they want to get rich from. IP that almost certainly is partially the result of revese enineering itself, since virtually all software today uses techniques that were used before. The next time you add a dialog window with yes and no buttons you are using reverse engineering. In fact the entire concept of "windows" (not the OS, but a box on the screen) on a modern computer is only possible because of reverse engineering.
Just because you do not agree with closed source does not give you a moral or legal right to try and reverse engineer itCorrect. However, patent and copyright laws do give me the legal right to reverse engineer software.
US patent and copyright laws are some of the most over protective in the world. Take, for instance the DMCA, which says it's illegal to bypass copyright protection even if you have no intention of violating any copyright. In other words, it's illegal to be able to commit a crime even if no actual crime will be committed. Yet even here in the US, reverse engineering for the purpose of inter-operability is a protected and legal activity.
Guess what? You can't get rich by writing one program. You'll have to keep working and innovating. You can't retire a multi-millionaire at 25 because you had one good idea. There is no free lunch (well, Google employees excepted). So quit your whining and be prepared to work for a living just like the rest of us. But then, if you weren't so lazy you would have created an actual web page to go with your domain registration. Doh! Or at least not posted it on slashdot until you actually had something to show.
Since EULA's have been and are presently accepted in court - reverse engineering of a product that specifically states in its EULA that you may not do so is not allowed and as such could result in a person being sued.EULA's have also lost in court several times when they contradict existing law. I could easily put a "you must eat your firstborn child" clause in a EULA, and no court is going to make you do it no matter how many times you clicked the "I agree" button.
And BTW, Tridge never clicked an "I Agree" button, and therefore cannot be held by the EULA. He also didn't use Bitkeeper at all while revese engineering the protocols, and clean room reverse engineering is a legally protected activity. And while EULA's have held up in a few jurisdictions that only creates precedents, not laws, and precedents can be (and often have been) overturned by other courts. So far the software companies have been carefull to only sue people in court districts they knew would be supportive. EULA's have yet to be tested in a neutral court, or a Supreme Court.
TommyThere is on my Linux Box. You can do a "new login", and get the GDM login screen. When the new user logs out, you're right back to the first user.
Even more usefull is the option for "new login in a nested window". This causes the login screen to appear in a window on the original users desktop. The second user can log in, even using a different desktop (you can run KDE in a window on Gnome, for instance), and actually have both users signed in simultaneously. Although it's not the best idea, you can log in as root in that nested login, and run all your graphic config utilities as root.
I suspect some distros don't enable this feature since it could be (and likely would be) abused and result in security problems. However, nested logins are a feature of the X-Window system (XFree86, don't know if Xorg has it) so any distro with a recent XFree could be configured to allow this.
TommyWell, lets see. When I was looking to see which OS would perform best on my graphics station I used three pieces of software for testing. All three work on both Windows and Linux. They are the GIMP, Blender, and Povray.
These apps performed tasks on average 17 percent faster on Mandrake 10 community edition than they did on Windows. On Gentoo (with only O2 optimizations, not riced out) they performed on average 22 percent faster than Windows XP.
I could probably reduce XP's performance deficit by shutting down the firewall, anti-virus, and other protective wares, but I have an always on connection so it would be pretty stupid to do that. Besides, the Linux distros were tested with the firewall on, as well as some network monitoring daemons, and don't need all the other stuff Windows needs to be reasonably secure.
The tests I used were all based on rendering speeds, which are not dependent on the video card or any drivers, and since I used the same PC (literally, the same box) for all three OS's the speed difference can only be caused by the OS. It was, after all, the only variable.
Therefore, I must call bullshit on your calling bullshit.
TommyActually, small farmers sell to co-ops, who sell to Walmart.
Small family farms still make up more than 85 percent of the food grown in America.
You are the one that obviously doesn't know how the farm buisiness works. Put your economics textbook away and get a real clue. The world doesn't run on academic theory, it runs on reality.
TommyIt would be nice to hear from a farmer about this, but they're too busy working to spend time here on slashdot. It's spring, and they've got another 16 hour workday ahead of them tomorrow.
TommyHow about a better idea. Legalize industrial hemp. It doesn't deplete the soil, and you can make diesel fuel from the seeds. We could be paying US farmers to grow oil instead of invading foreign counties for it. We could be making plastic, paper, cloth, and hundreds of other usefull products from it.
The only downside to industrial hemp, from my point of view, is that I can't catch a buzz from it because it doesn't have enough THC to get anyone high.
TommyUm, doesn't all software's success depend upon contributions from the users? Commercial apps certainly measure their success by how many users "contribute" the sale price. After all, nobody is holding a gun to people's heads saying "Buy this software".
Most software, commercial and free, depends a lot on people contributing marketing (word of mouth). You "contribute" cash for commercial software, Open Source projects would rather you contribute time (but most won't complain if you throw them some cash instead).
TommyOpps, I meant comment # 12268242, not uid. And yes I know what "Anonymous Coward" is. My comments were a slam against all those losers who are afraid to admit who they are.
If you can't log in and let us know who you are - you're not worth listening too.
Tommy
Complexity, or lack of efficiency? Blender is a pretty complex piece of software, but does it in a remarkably low LOC. This results in a nice tiny (compared to commercial apps with similar functions) fast binary.
Programmers today all think everyone has a 3.0 + Ghz processor, and a gig of ram. Coupled with a Uni system (at least here in the US) that follows the "more is less - sell software by the Mb, but hold the functionality so we can sell plugins and upgrades" corporate mentality, is it any wonder that American commercial software companies are world famous for producing bloatware?
You did not provide criticism. You provided nagging. Criticism is supposed to be constructive.Oh, so that explains why most of your (Anonymous Coward - uid 12268242) posts are just a string of insults. You need to grow up and get over yourself. You aren't smart and superior as you seem to think, you're petty, insecure, and vile. See, I can insult people I've never met too. That must mean I'm superior and smart also. (Do I need to add the sarcasm tags, or are you smart enough to see it for yourself).
TommyAnd we need this because??? Seriously, I've been Linux only for websurfing for over a year now, and not once have I had any reason to miss shockwave. I'd just as soon see all proprietary closed standards just fade away on the net. They serve no real purpose other than lining some corporations pockets.
It annoys me that at some time I'll probably have to install Acroread v7 to fill out a form that could have just as easily (or likely more easily) been done in html. I was going to get some SDK or another from Adobe, but couldn't because they made you fill out a PDF form, even for the Linux SDK. At that time Acroread for Linux was still at 5.0.
If I'm trying to download a SDK for linux, doesn't that imply that maybe I'm using Linux? I'm a musician, and was considering PDF to distribute sheet music, since most people use Windows and don't have LaTex support. Not any more, though. If you want sheet music from me you'll need to find something that can print a LaTex file. Sorry for the inconvenience, it's Adobe's fault.
TommyNo, I wouldn't. In fact, I wouldn't even give the hair off of one.
When Dreamweaver stops creating bloated, non-compliant webpages I would be interested. In the mean time, I'll stick with Screem, Mozilla Composer, or Gedit (or Textpad if I'm stuck on Windows). I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor that makes pages that are fully W3C compliant and properly search engine optimized.
TommyOSX does NOT use PDF.
[rant] OSX uses Postscript, and PDF is based on Postscript, that's all. The two are not the same. They are not interchangable. This is about the 13 Millionth time this has been pointed out here on /. It's not even the first time it's been pointed out this thread. Yet still I keep seeing Quartz is based on PDF. There are an awful lot of people here who need serious work on their reading comprehension and retention skills. [/rant]
And don't try telling me Aqua Extreme is different - it's just a theme that uses the underlying engine (aqua on mac, and what ever XP's engine is called on PC).
Sorry about the rant, but stupidity offends me, and it's Monday morning. And I consider it stupidity, not ignorance, when the information has been handed to you repeatedly and you still don't learn.
TommyThat's an incredibly obnoxious website. Pop up windows that demand to be closed. Menus that change withour warning causing you to go to pages you didn't intend. Slow load times. Lack of scalability (my real monitor puked, and my "spare" only goes to 800 X 600 - site set for 1024 X 768 so I have to side scroll).
This site is actually almost a textbook example of poor design, all those "cool features" are absolutely pointless, and detract from the viewing experience of any people using alternative surfing tech (web enabled phones, webTV, handheld computers, etc). God help you if you're on a dail up connection like the vast majority of Americans (obviously we ./ers are a minority).
If you're impressed with anything about that site (except maybe the cars - Mini's rock), then do me a favor - don't become a web designer.
TommyIn Rockford IL, a developer named Suni Puril was involved in a land grab. His "friends" in the government used a version of imminent domain called "quick take" to take land owned by a guy named Tom Ditzler, IIRC. They wanted to build a road across his land, it would lead to a new housing development Puri planned to build. Of course, Puri and his "associates" in the government had all bought land along the proposed road before the development was announced.
There were a few minor obstacles to the Puri plan, however:
It's been 4 or 5 years now. Tom has yet to see a dime, or even be told how much he'll be paid for the land. The road still isn't usable (it keeps sinking).1. Quick Take had yet to be signed into law (that didn't stop the bulldozers, though)
2. Quick Take was designed to be used when buildings or property posed an immediate public risk, and the absentee owner couldn't be found. Tom lived on the property, and there were no building, fire or health code violations.
3. The land in question was protected wetlands. Since it was built, the road sank and had to be rebuilt (at taxpayer expense).
4. The land is an Indian Burial Ground. The local government hoods got around that by having a 'dozer scrape less than 2 inches deep, and proclaimed that no relics were found. Professors from U of I found numerous relics, including bones, as little as 2 inches deeper.
5. When Governor Edgar did sign Quicktake, he deliberately excluded the Ditzler land, identified by it's street address and plat coordinates. The locals had one of their tame local judges say the property qualified anyway.
Yes, Virginia, the Government IS pwned by big buisiness. And everyone else doesn't care because "it didn't/couldn't happen to them".
Tommy