Yeah, I use an old graphics card. I don't have HL2 or Doom 3. The most advanced game I own right now is Quake II (because the Quake II engine is Free Software now). I also enjoy bzflag sometimes too. I don't do 3d modelling, but I might want a high end graphics card for using Blender perhaps.
There is a still a huge problem: you can no longer purchase hardware which has Free 3D drivers new except for the Radeon 9200. When the Radeon 9200 goes off of the market, what happens? You have to look for the cards on eBay. Eventually there won't be any cards left and if no one is nice enough to give the DRI developers documentation we may very well never have Free support for any new graphics cards. This is a gigantic hit to the ability for a Free Software system to operate, especially if stuff like X on OpenGL ever becomes popular.
How long is it until we no longer have 2D support? We're lucky that the new Radeons and GeForces still do 2D in ways that are very similar to how they were done when documentation was last provided, but we cannot bank on that forever. Eventually they will release a new chip not related to the current series and we may not have anything other than unaccelerated VESA mode. Sure, it'll work, but it will be unusable in practice. And what about when VESA and VGA compatability are no longer needed (you already have this situation on some non-x86 architectures)? Well then, no more graphics for Free Software, we can all go back to using line printers.
If you're going to try to seize the moral high ground, you should at least have the consistency to live there.
clinton@drizzlehell:~/.bobotpp/scripts$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on drizzlehell! rms would be proud.
I do not use any non-Free software on my system. Sure, I can't watch a lot of videos (with codecs that have yet to be reverse engineered by the ffmpeg people) and I haven't been able to watch stuff like homestarrunner (the Free flash player works ok but doesn't support the scripting stuff yet) in years, but it is worth it in the long run.
The ethical issues of free software arise because users obtain programs and install them in computers; they don't really apply to hidden embedded computers, or the BIOS burned in a ROM, or the microcode inside a processor chip, or the firmware that is wired into a processor in an I/O device. In aspects that relate to their design, those things are software; but as regards copying and modification, they may as well be hardware. The BIOS in ROM was, indeed, not a problem.
I think this also helps to make my point clearer; if you can flash the firmware then the firmware should be Free. If you can modify the microcode of the CPU then the microcode should be Free. If the firmware is burned into ROM and can't be modified, then the specs for it should be Free.
Free Software is not Open Source. Do I want an Open Source system? Hell no! I want an entirely Free system from software down to the hardware! I use GNU/Linux because I support the idea of Free Software, not because it doesn't cost me money to use. In fact, it does cost me to not use non-Free software; some of it isn't as usable as the proprietary counterpart and may require me to work on the code itself to make it do what I need.
But I have the freedom to modify the code if I want to. I'd like this with my firmware too. OpenBIOS is promising for the firmware replacement. The Open Graphics Card project is progressing and will finally give me a decent graphics card that is well supported and documented (I have a Radeon 9100; it is the last ATi card I will purchase since they to have gone down the path of not even providing specs to the DRI developers...so no more Matrox, ATi, nVidia,...).
The graphics card thing is a really good example of why we should demand Free Hardware. Unless you give up your Freedom and use proprietary drivers, you no longer can use a modern graphics card and get 3d acceleration under X. Printers are another good example; look at how many printers have no Ghostscript backend because the manufacturers refuse to provide specifications for their proprietary protocols. Specs are nice but open hardware documentation would be nicer since we could then e.g. reprogram the printer's firmware to support PostScript (or if it is too slow for that, something like PPA that we have decent drivers for).
The Neuros has had its firmware and even full hardware specs released! Neuros Audio isn't going out of business; not even close to it. The hardware schematics release may not be immediately useful but the firmware release is; things are progressive with FLAC support and soon MPC, things that never would have happened if the firmware had remain non-free software. Look at Rockbox too. The Rockbox firmware is far superior to the stock firmware.
Free Software needs to run on a system that is Free down to its lowest level. We live in a world now where everyone is trying to kill us with things like hardware-based Digital Restrictions Management. We must demand at the very least Free firmware for the hardware and good enough hardware interface specs to actually do something with the firmware (stuff like e.g. the Verilog for the ASIC doesn't matter so much when you have that, but it would be nice to have).
A basketball player can improve, have a good streak of games, and then have his performance deteriorate if he does not keep up his training (perhaps to even lower than the baseline, never to improve again).
In April of 2004, the random playlist code in XMMS was updated to use random instead of rand where available. random samples from/dev/urandom which should give you much nicer numbers than the 16-bit ones that rand returns.
XMMS will repeat songs if you turn loop all on (in random mode this is not guaranteed to be after all the other songs have played). The only way to force it not to repeat a song in the same session is to turn looping off.
When someone tries to connect to your phone you have to enter a passcode and tell them the passcode and then authorize them to connect after they get the passcode correct. Bluetooth is encrypted on the transport layer so I don't see the issue.
The range is limited to a few meters anyway. I walked 3 meters away from my cell phone with a bluetooth headset on and it lost the connection. If you are at a large table with friends only they should be in range. Plus you only have to turn bluetooth on for a few minutes while you are exchanging info and then you can turn it back off. No one can pull info from your phone either; you have to send it.
Why not use bluetooth? You can send your contact info to everyone else fairly easy (I have my contact info in my phonebook on my Series60 phone and just have to select it and then option->send->via bluetooth).
Heh, no one has ever commented on my.sig before. It's actually a reference to Dilbert the cartoon (I've had that sig since when it was on the air, I think it comes from the first episode even).
Dilbert was asking Dogbert what he should name some product (a treadmill or something). It was POS and Dogbert suggested giving it the catchphrase 'The Whatever 7000: Fewer features than the 9000 but just as fun' (or something like that).
I'm tired from having to code PHP for three weeks straight (with MySQL too...ugh, this sucks when I'm using to Scheme + PostgreSQL) and probably not making any sense. Time for sleep.
And, if you do run QEMU or BOCHS, you can run the tool-chain for x86 there as well (QEMU would be preferred, because the tools will simply integrate into the command-line and `make' correctly).
You could share the disk image between QEMU and bochs too; build and test with QEMU and then restart the image with Bochs if you need the debugging features that Bochs offers.
I was going to mention something about how WM should scale dockapps automatically but... then I realized that it would be basically impossible under X unless everything drew to an offscreen buffer handled by wmaker and then scaled that. Or used a dockapp lib that provided widgets and stuff that auto-scaled...
The Power of Lisp lies in that messy syntax is the problem. Without it the macro system wouldn't be possible.
The syntax is actually really easy to use, even without a text editor to balance parenthesis for you. The problem is that it isn't easy to use at first, especially if you have prior programming knowledge with one of the many Algol-like languages. It also takes a bit of knowledge of functional programming because it is often easier to do things functionally than imperatively (especially when you have a compiler that ensures tail call optimization).
Of course, there is room for many different programming languages and there are enough users of Lisp to keep it alive and that's all that really matters. The rest of the world can suffer with C and C++:)
SML is cool, I know a guy who did some work on the SML/NJ compiler (I think it was SML/NJ, it might have been another one but it was at CMU that he did it). I prefer Lisp even though I probably should prefer SML:)
Proper software strikes a balance between disciplines. Imperative, object oriented, functional, they all have their uses. It is a mistake to go all the way in one direction.
Which is naturally why we should all be using Common Lisp because it can do all of that with ease.
I run Window Maker. It uses 800kB of RAM (this is why a pixmap-only theme, the default config uses 300kB). I used to have a 166Mhz Pentium box with 48M of RAM (96M swap) and it was Window Maker + Konqueror (2.something) + Gaim + xchat + emacs fine. Mozilla wasn't touchable (then again, there was no Firefox at the time and M17 was sloooowwww). Compile times were slow but reasonable for a system of its speed. Things sped up a bit when I made the background a solid color instead of a pixmap (and used a non-pixmap theme in Window Maker).
If you run a smallish window manager and have at least 48M of RAM (one of the 16M SIMMs went bad so I had to swap memory around and ended up at only 32M after convincing my friend that his Indy didn't need RAM and then it wasn't usable) everything will run fine. OO.o will be basically unusable (at least 641b was, it's certainly better now since 641b is ancient) but KOffice and Applixware Office (yeah, remember that? It was $30 and kind of worth it...SHELF is neat little programming language at least) run great. Eventually I was able to snatch some PC66 for free and got up to 64M with a blazingly fast (note that this was 2001ish so you should laugh) K6/233Mhz and the system was very usable.
I actually ran Quake 3 at around 25fps @ 640x480x16 after I replaced the TrioV64+ with a Voodoo3. Team Arena and Solider of Fortune weren't really playable though. Heretic II got above 40fps and I wasted way too much time on that (This was when Loki games were going for $10 a pop at EBGames). Sim City 3k didn't run well at all, even with 64M (funny how the one 2D game needed more RAM than the 3d ones...).
The point is, 128M of RAM is a lot. Not when you are running KDE 3 or GNOME 2 on it, but if you stick to running Window Maker (or Fluxbox, IceWM, XFCE, etc.) and using Konqueror or Mozilla (or Galeon or Firefox) it will work fine. OO.o might not be too happy but KOffice works fine unless you need to do super heavy duty word processing. You might be surprised at how well KDE/GNOME apps run when you aren't running the entire desktop environment.
If it weren't Walmart (which I refuse to shop at for ethical reasons, they are an evil evil company) I'd be tempted to buy one of these and throw Debian onto it.
Note that I still run Window Maker even though I have a dual AthlonMP 2800+ system with a gig of RAM:-)
Free Software is not Open Source. The OSI has no relation to the FSF.
The Free Software Movement cares about freeing all users of software, not just some users. Software patents are a Bad Thing and should be eliminated and not tolerated at all.
ffmpeg/libavcodec takes advantage of SMP now so I can encode videos almost twice as fast as before. Quake III kind of uses it, not very much to be noticeable.
I also run more than one program at a time so the entire system is faster.
Two dual core processors would rock hard (when my AthlonMP 2800+ system stop being usable I'm going to get dual dua-core Opterons, or PPC64s if they exist).
Why break backwards compatibility? And there is XSL if you need XML. I suppose one day it will replace CSS but things move slowly in the name of backwards compatibility).
We need to go back to S-Exps;)
Re:Here's a handful of good CSS resources
on
The CSS Anthology
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You wouldn't happen to know of a decent Mac-browser emulator would you?
Konqueror
If it works in Konqueror it should be fine in Safari. OmniWeb uses Safari renderer now and I don't think that anyone really uses IE for Mac anymore since it sucks hard (when I was still in High School the school got a brand new 766Mhz top of the line G4 and installed OS X Beta on it and I used that through X.2 on a daily basis before I graduated...oh how I shall miss thee, backroom OS X box that no one else got to use).
Mozilla on the Mac is the same as Mozilla everywhere so that covers Firefox, Mozilla, and Camino. I dunno about iCab, I haven't used that since I have 7100/66 back in 98 (running good old OS 8 with 24M of RAM and it was usable dammit).
Jordan Rudess is amazing. Does he have two identical racks so that if one fails for some reason he can just hit a switch and keep going?
I remember reading in DTIFC (sucks that the next issue is the last) that he is able to use the one keyboard by programming all the settings changes before the show and tapping a foot controller to go through them. That's just... wow.
I wish I had that much money to spend on a keyboard:)
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Yeah, I use an old graphics card. I don't have HL2 or Doom 3. The most advanced game I own right now is Quake II (because the Quake II engine is Free Software now). I also enjoy bzflag sometimes too. I don't do 3d modelling, but I might want a high end graphics card for using Blender perhaps.
There is a still a huge problem: you can no longer purchase hardware which has Free 3D drivers new except for the Radeon 9200. When the Radeon 9200 goes off of the market, what happens? You have to look for the cards on eBay. Eventually there won't be any cards left and if no one is nice enough to give the DRI developers documentation we may very well never have Free support for any new graphics cards. This is a gigantic hit to the ability for a Free Software system to operate, especially if stuff like X on OpenGL ever becomes popular.
How long is it until we no longer have 2D support? We're lucky that the new Radeons and GeForces still do 2D in ways that are very similar to how they were done when documentation was last provided, but we cannot bank on that forever. Eventually they will release a new chip not related to the current series and we may not have anything other than unaccelerated VESA mode. Sure, it'll work, but it will be unusable in practice. And what about when VESA and VGA compatability are no longer needed (you already have this situation on some non-x86 architectures)? Well then, no more graphics for Free Software, we can all go back to using line printers.
If you're going to try to seize the moral high ground, you should at least have the consistency to live there.
clinton@drizzlehell:~/.bobotpp/scripts$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on drizzlehell! rms would be proud.
I do not use any non-Free software on my system. Sure, I can't watch a lot of videos (with codecs that have yet to be reverse engineered by the ffmpeg people) and I haven't been able to watch stuff like homestarrunner (the Free flash player works ok but doesn't support the scripting stuff yet) in years, but it is worth it in the long run.
...And to quote the article:
I think this also helps to make my point clearer; if you can flash the firmware then the firmware should be Free. If you can modify the microcode of the CPU then the microcode should be Free. If the firmware is burned into ROM and can't be modified, then the specs for it should be Free.
Free Software is not Open Source. Do I want an Open Source system? Hell no! I want an entirely Free system from software down to the hardware! I use GNU/Linux because I support the idea of Free Software, not because it doesn't cost me money to use. In fact, it does cost me to not use non-Free software; some of it isn't as usable as the proprietary counterpart and may require me to work on the code itself to make it do what I need.
But I have the freedom to modify the code if I want to. I'd like this with my firmware too. OpenBIOS is promising for the firmware replacement. The Open Graphics Card project is progressing and will finally give me a decent graphics card that is well supported and documented (I have a Radeon 9100; it is the last ATi card I will purchase since they to have gone down the path of not even providing specs to the DRI developers...so no more Matrox, ATi, nVidia, ...).
The graphics card thing is a really good example of why we should demand Free Hardware. Unless you give up your Freedom and use proprietary drivers, you no longer can use a modern graphics card and get 3d acceleration under X. Printers are another good example; look at how many printers have no Ghostscript backend because the manufacturers refuse to provide specifications for their proprietary protocols. Specs are nice but open hardware documentation would be nicer since we could then e.g. reprogram the printer's firmware to support PostScript (or if it is too slow for that, something like PPA that we have decent drivers for).
The Neuros has had its firmware and even full hardware specs released! Neuros Audio isn't going out of business; not even close to it. The hardware schematics release may not be immediately useful but the firmware release is; things are progressive with FLAC support and soon MPC, things that never would have happened if the firmware had remain non-free software. Look at Rockbox too. The Rockbox firmware is far superior to the stock firmware.
Free Software needs to run on a system that is Free down to its lowest level. We live in a world now where everyone is trying to kill us with things like hardware-based Digital Restrictions Management. We must demand at the very least Free firmware for the hardware and good enough hardware interface specs to actually do something with the firmware (stuff like e.g. the Verilog for the ASIC doesn't matter so much when you have that, but it would be nice to have).
Ok, I agree with you for the most part then. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
A basketball player can improve, have a good streak of games, and then have his performance deteriorate if he does not keep up his training (perhaps to even lower than the baseline, never to improve again).
In April of 2004, the random playlist code in XMMS was updated to use random instead of rand where available. random samples from /dev/urandom which should give you much nicer numbers than the 16-bit ones that rand returns.
XMMS will repeat songs if you turn loop all on (in random mode this is not guaranteed to be after all the other songs have played). The only way to force it not to repeat a song in the same session is to turn looping off.
In basketball, a player can train and improve his performance over time.
When someone tries to connect to your phone you have to enter a passcode and tell them the passcode and then authorize them to connect after they get the passcode correct. Bluetooth is encrypted on the transport layer so I don't see the issue.
The range is limited to a few meters anyway. I walked 3 meters away from my cell phone with a bluetooth headset on and it lost the connection. If you are at a large table with friends only they should be in range. Plus you only have to turn bluetooth on for a few minutes while you are exchanging info and then you can turn it back off. No one can pull info from your phone either; you have to send it.
Why not use bluetooth? You can send your contact info to everyone else fairly easy (I have my contact info in my phonebook on my Series60 phone and just have to select it and then option->send->via bluetooth).
Heh, no one has ever commented on my .sig before. It's actually a reference to Dilbert the cartoon (I've had that sig since when it was on the air, I think it comes from the first episode even).
Dilbert was asking Dogbert what he should name some product (a treadmill or something). It was POS and Dogbert suggested giving it the catchphrase 'The Whatever 7000: Fewer features than the 9000 but just as fun' (or something like that).
I'm tired from having to code PHP for three weeks straight (with MySQL too...ugh, this sucks when I'm using to Scheme + PostgreSQL) and probably not making any sense. Time for sleep.
And, if you do run QEMU or BOCHS, you can run the tool-chain for x86 there as well (QEMU would be preferred, because the tools will simply integrate into the command-line and `make' correctly).
You could share the disk image between QEMU and bochs too; build and test with QEMU and then restart the image with Bochs if you need the debugging features that Bochs offers.
I was going to mention something about how WM should scale dockapps automatically but ... then I realized that it would be basically impossible under X unless everything drew to an offscreen buffer handled by wmaker and then scaled that. Or used a dockapp lib that provided widgets and stuff that auto-scaled ...
One day, far away :)
The Power of Lisp lies in that messy syntax is the problem. Without it the macro system wouldn't be possible.
The syntax is actually really easy to use, even without a text editor to balance parenthesis for you. The problem is that it isn't easy to use at first, especially if you have prior programming knowledge with one of the many Algol-like languages. It also takes a bit of knowledge of functional programming because it is often easier to do things functionally than imperatively (especially when you have a compiler that ensures tail call optimization).
Of course, there is room for many different programming languages and there are enough users of Lisp to keep it alive and that's all that really matters. The rest of the world can suffer with C and C++ :)
SML is cool, I know a guy who did some work on the SML/NJ compiler (I think it was SML/NJ, it might have been another one but it was at CMU that he did it). I prefer Lisp even though I probably should prefer SML :)
Proper software strikes a balance between disciplines. Imperative, object oriented, functional, they all have their uses. It is a mistake to go all the way in one direction.
Which is naturally why we should all be using Common Lisp because it can do all of that with ease.
/me ducks
You can set the size of icons in WPrefs in the Icon Preferences panel, in the lower right hand corner in the box "Icon Size."
You can go from 24x24 to 96x96 but anything other than 64x64 makes dockapps look weird.
I run Window Maker. It uses 800kB of RAM (this is why a pixmap-only theme, the default config uses 300kB). I used to have a 166Mhz Pentium box with 48M of RAM (96M swap) and it was Window Maker + Konqueror (2.something) + Gaim + xchat + emacs fine. Mozilla wasn't touchable (then again, there was no Firefox at the time and M17 was sloooowwww). Compile times were slow but reasonable for a system of its speed. Things sped up a bit when I made the background a solid color instead of a pixmap (and used a non-pixmap theme in Window Maker).
If you run a smallish window manager and have at least 48M of RAM (one of the 16M SIMMs went bad so I had to swap memory around and ended up at only 32M after convincing my friend that his Indy didn't need RAM and then it wasn't usable) everything will run fine. OO.o will be basically unusable (at least 641b was, it's certainly better now since 641b is ancient) but KOffice and Applixware Office (yeah, remember that? It was $30 and kind of worth it...SHELF is neat little programming language at least) run great. Eventually I was able to snatch some PC66 for free and got up to 64M with a blazingly fast (note that this was 2001ish so you should laugh) K6/233Mhz and the system was very usable.
I actually ran Quake 3 at around 25fps @ 640x480x16 after I replaced the TrioV64+ with a Voodoo3. Team Arena and Solider of Fortune weren't really playable though. Heretic II got above 40fps and I wasted way too much time on that (This was when Loki games were going for $10 a pop at EBGames). Sim City 3k didn't run well at all, even with 64M (funny how the one 2D game needed more RAM than the 3d ones...).
The point is, 128M of RAM is a lot. Not when you are running KDE 3 or GNOME 2 on it, but if you stick to running Window Maker (or Fluxbox, IceWM, XFCE, etc.) and using Konqueror or Mozilla (or Galeon or Firefox) it will work fine. OO.o might not be too happy but KOffice works fine unless you need to do super heavy duty word processing. You might be surprised at how well KDE/GNOME apps run when you aren't running the entire desktop environment.
If it weren't Walmart (which I refuse to shop at for ethical reasons, they are an evil evil company) I'd be tempted to buy one of these and throw Debian onto it.
Note that I still run Window Maker even though I have a dual AthlonMP 2800+ system with a gig of RAM :-)
Actually the machine never died, just the pfinet server.
Free Software is not Open Source. The OSI has no relation to the FSF.
The Free Software Movement cares about freeing all users of software, not just some users. Software patents are a Bad Thing and should be eliminated and not tolerated at all.
Remember, folks: if the data and the code don't go together, it's not OO!
Never used CLOS before, have you?
I want dual dual-core PPC64s. I know that single core ones are available now and have been available for a while.
And I'm broke right now so this is a few years out so they should exist at a more reasonable price.
ffmpeg/libavcodec takes advantage of SMP now so I can encode videos almost twice as fast as before. Quake III kind of uses it, not very much to be noticeable.
I also run more than one program at a time so the entire system is faster.
Two dual core processors would rock hard (when my AthlonMP 2800+ system stop being usable I'm going to get dual dua-core Opterons, or PPC64s if they exist).
CSS predates XML (IIRC).
Why break backwards compatibility? And there is XSL if you need XML. I suppose one day it will replace CSS but things move slowly in the name of backwards compatibility).
We need to go back to S-Exps ;)
You wouldn't happen to know of a decent Mac-browser emulator would you?
Konqueror
If it works in Konqueror it should be fine in Safari. OmniWeb uses Safari renderer now and I don't think that anyone really uses IE for Mac anymore since it sucks hard (when I was still in High School the school got a brand new 766Mhz top of the line G4 and installed OS X Beta on it and I used that through X.2 on a daily basis before I graduated...oh how I shall miss thee, backroom OS X box that no one else got to use).
Mozilla on the Mac is the same as Mozilla everywhere so that covers Firefox, Mozilla, and Camino. I dunno about iCab, I haven't used that since I have 7100/66 back in 98 (running good old OS 8 with 24M of RAM and it was usable dammit).
Jordan Rudess is amazing. Does he have two identical racks so that if one fails for some reason he can just hit a switch and keep going?
I remember reading in DTIFC (sucks that the next issue is the last) that he is able to use the one keyboard by programming all the settings changes before the show and tapping a foot controller to go through them. That's just ... wow.
I wish I had that much money to spend on a keyboard :)