No, no. You got it all wrong. Cedega minus directX support is basically Wine (which does have some DX support). What you don't get is the drivers necessary for copy protection verification, which are proprietary stuff that transgaming has to license.
framerate loss? none, as far as I can tell (though I have plenty of horsepower to throw at games). Accuracy loss? more than desirable. For the most part, it's little things, but those little things add up. Worse than expected multitasking is a problem; some games, like warcraft 3 and starcraft. have problems with font rendering, InstallShield installers have lots of trouble running, most games have trouble activating all the visual candy (one piece of it or another makes cedega crash). Oh, and for your own sake, never look at the slew of debug messages that it spits at your terminal. It's heinous. Still, it allows you to run games quite well, and unless you're a tad fussy, it should do.
The thing is, you see, if Nintendo markets first party so-called "kiddie" games (and I think people consider the GC Mario/Luigi games, Mario party, Mario Kart "kiddie" games on account of their graphics), it (supposedly) must follow that the console isn't good for much more. Instead, if your kiddie games come from reputable kiddie content providers (Disney, Warner Bros, Cartoon Network and other usual culprits) while you come out with yet-another-first person shooter, racing game, EA sports title or beat'em up, that makes it all that much better. I just can't stand how I've only seen 3-4 games for the PSP that are NOT football (soccer for you american types:P) or Racing games
what the heck? should've previewed that post before posting.
Assuming things can't make negative sense, little sense means sense < delta for some delta > 0. If sense == 0, then our condition is verified. QED
No, that would be completely beside the point. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are essentially two distributions by the same people. Being installed as only once CD is part of its purpose. Not having to decide whether you want GNOME or KDE is its purpose. You just get the CD and pop it in. Supposedly, version 6.04 is aiming for a single-CD install/Live version. Making it a 2-CD deal that asks you to change CDs midway through the install is a step backwards.
Just to quickly rebute your reasons to hate Gnome:
Swapped OK/Cancel buttons are a matter of experience. Neither is intuitive (I think, but IANA Ergonomy expert), and time will make you grow used to either.
Big widgets are a Good Thing. They mean big, easy to acquire, targets. I find that in university (where the computers run KDE or fluxbox, no GNOME available) I have to aim MUCH more carefully. That means I'm distracted from what I'm doing, and that it disrupts my workflow. The fact that the default font size is also lower doesn't help in the slightest, either. I'm a big defender of making choices based on actual ergonomic arguments, rather than the cool factor, which seems, at least to me, a big factor in KDE design.
With that stupid menu at the top of the screen, the Mac is destined to stay a one or two monitor system.
Aaawwwwwwww! JUST two screens. Seriously, how large a percentage of users do you expect to use more that one (let alone more than two!) displays? The OSX interface actually follows some pretty solid rules for interface design. It was microsoft that nabbed defeat from the clutches of victory more than once with their designs (Though, to be fair, they've been learning).
Here are a few exercises for you to try out for yourself.
1. Fire up windows.
2. Open as many instances of your favorite program as your machine will allow. Maximize some, shuffle the rest about
3. Now close them. That's right, close them. Use a variety of methods. Namely, file > exit, X button on the corner, move/resize/close menu, application miniature context menu.
4. While doing the former, note a few things: The ease with which you reach the X button when the window is maximized (corner), the time it takes to reach the miniature (edge), the time it takes to reach the move/resize/close menu when the window is maximized (another corner), the time it takes to actually aim for the file menu (not on an edge), the time it takes to reach X and the move/resize/close menu when the window is NOT maximized (NOT on a corner or edge).
You'll probably note that with a teensy little bit of practice, the latter is actually much slower than all the others. However, you should also note how windows doesn't supply visual clues indicating that the corners work. The program borders/buttons don't reach the borders.
Now, MacOS has always used the top border for the menus, and with a little bit of honest effort on your part, you'll have to reach the conclusion that the edges of the screen are a VERY FAST place to reach,while things that are physically closer are not necessarily (or even usually) faster.
In OSX, with exposé, the corners of the screen have potential use as really good multi-tasking accelerators. Even though I don't own a Mac (yet), the scant minutes of use I've accumulated from some of my friends' Macs indicate that you get used to the "throw to the corner" motion of exposé remarkably quickly. KDE also places the menus on the top of the screen if you want, though unfortunately that only works with Qt applications (so no firefox, amongst other).
Gnome, while not putting the menus on the top edge, allows for large amounts of costumization regarding the panels. I have a set of launchers on one edge, the taskbar on another (as usual), the start menu equivalent on the top right (encompassing the corner), show desktop on the bottom right corner, trash bin on the bottom left, and a list of currently open applications on the top right. A desktop pager/switcher is placed on the bottom, next to show desktop. Almost all the edge space is used with useful things (except for the left edge, that I find a bit more cumbersome to reach).
Windows, however, does all it can to prevent you from using the easiest places to reach on your screen. Why is that?
the rootkit in question (possibly all rootkits? nit my area of expertise) is installed at the driver layer. LOTS of software installs parts of itself at the driver layer, including some parts of some raytracing/computer generated imagery programs, and do so legitimately. Neither counts as self contained. As always, the question is: do you want to catch all villains and some innocents in between, or do you want to make sure no innocents are caught, and let some villains slip?
Well, we're talking about Charles Petzold, who's been a serious MS writer for ages. He was talking at a.NET conference, or somesuch (at least, definitely towards mostly.NET people). He wants to make a point, which works much better when you use a concrete example rather than speaking about generics, and he uses the example that's most familiar to him and his audience. By speaking ill of many of the features that are considered the holy grail of VS, he invites their users to think twice about them. In short, he targetted the speech at the crowd at hand. And slashdot posted it for all to see, minus context.
Ubuntu is 1 CD, slackware is 2. Debian is 1 or 20+ (take your pick), and I can't recall any more right now. However, you'll find something like 4 slack CDs -- #3 & #4 are source code. I haven't used any other distros thus far, so I can't comment on any others. But I agree that the "freedom of choice" is stretched a bit thin at times (I want the freedom. I just don't want to use all of it at the same time!
When it comes to openoffice, I have to say that it is less feature rich than ms office, does indeed run slower, but on the other hand is free and came preinstalled with ubuntu when I installed it. And performance is still, by and wide, enough for me not to care (just not snappy).
well, the ergonomics argument says that your field of vision is wider than it is tall. Hence, the screen proportions should accompany that tendency.
the l33t argument says that a widescreen 19" LCD lets you put 2 terminals side by side without shrinking them. Possibly it has enough height for a full four xterms. What more could you possibly need?
dying? really? you might want to warn microsoft, sony and nintendo, then. Seriously now, even though I'm not a Mac user (yet!), my feeling on the matter is that of the VHS/Beta situation rehashed. That, plus the PPC apparently just going towards a direction that doesn't really benefit computer makers.
By which I mean crappy laptop support. Apple would die without their laptop lines (no, the iPod alone wouldn't keep them alive for that long. And no, it's not like 70% of their revenue). That means those lines are quite clearly the ones that should define policy.
Much in the same way I prefer AMD's desktop processors to Intel's, I think the (desktop) PPC is quite a nice thing. Intel's Pentium Ms have quite decent performance, and really good energy consumption. IBM didn't give the latter to Apple (I'll refrain from discussing the former). The G4 has shown remarkable strength in lasting this much, and Apple's engineers deserve credit for pushing the chip to its limits. But the PPC's turf lies elsewhere.
Well, while the CPU people are finally doing dual core processors (essentially, two instruction pipelines in one die, plus cache et al), the GPU people have something like 24 pipelines in a single graphics chip. Why is it that the CPU people have such lame parallelism?
To answer both questions. Graphics are trivial to parallelize. You know to start with that you'll be doing essentially the same code for all pixels, and each pixel is essentially independent from its neighbours. So doing one or twenty at the same time is mostly the same, and since all you need is to make sure the whole screen is rendered, each pipeline just needs to grab the next unhandled pixel. No syncronization difficulties, no nothing. Since pixel pipelines don't stop each other doing syncing, you effectively have a 24 GHz processor in this beast.
On the other hand, you have an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (damn, that's a needlessly big, numbery name). It has two cores, each running at 2.4 GHz (2.4 * 2 = 4.8, hence the name, I believe). However, for safe use of two processors for general computing purposes, lots of timing trouble has to be handled. Even if you do have those two processors, a lot of time has to be spent making sure they're coherent, and the effective performance is well below twice that of a single processor at twice the clock speed.
So, if raising the speed is easier than adding another core, and gives enough performance benefits to justify it, without the added programming complexity and errors (there was at least one privilege elevation exploit in linux that involved race conditions in kernel calls, IIRC), why go multiple processor earlier than needed? Of course, for some easily parallelized problems, people have been using multiprocessing for quite a while, and actually doing two things at the same time is also a possibility, but not quite as directly useful as in the graphics card scenario.
Ok, since you seem to hace a serious case of clue deficit disorder, I'll feed it to you in small bite-sized chunks.
The Pentium M is actually a pretty decent chip.
Centrino is a pretty decent platform.
IBM hasn't done much regarding laptop processors in a while, intel has a vested interest in keeping that area going.
Laptops are now the majority of computer sales, unlike laptops
AMD does NOT have a decent platform to fight Centrino/Pentium M with. Their desktop CPUs are great (typing from an Athlon 64 3500+), but their Turion line sucks too much power.
So yeah, you have the big, studly, 4-core PowerMac. It's essentially a workstation machine. that, truth be told, doesn't add up to that big a part of Mac sales. iBooks and Powerbooks, however, are a different matter. Those, despite the increasingly apparent weakness of the G4, still sell like hot cakes. Simple logics would indicate that a stronger processor under the hood would sell even better. So yeah, the intel roadmap might actually look pretty decent for apple.
or, more accurately, a one button mouse that can tell where you pressed and react like a two button mouse. So the OP WAS correct. It is indeed a one button mouse. Only not quite. Erm. I'll go to bed now.
well, even if it is "one day later", it's not the UT2004, binaries in the DVD, sort of quality for a linux release. So I think the GP has a point there.
I mean, one says "Linux and Windows users are equals in our eyes", while the other one goes "We're all for Windows, and Linux comes as an afterthought." As a Linux user, guess which one I like better?
Obviously flamebait, but I'll bite, if only for informational purposes.
the mac mini definitely has the "try-me" price you speak of. A tight little computer that has everything (if in small amounts).
the iBook is probably the best bang-for-buck I've seen for 12" laptops. I've only seen one or two cheaper models elsewhere, and those were celerons (urgh). The fact that it has a dedicated video memory also means that you don't have to deal with a "super w00t graphics up to 128 MB (shared) videocard". Shared my arse, the things monopolize whatever amount of RAM you'll let them, effectively eating away at your baseline RAM.
they do sell old products at a discount: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/71902/wo/hZGIfXyuIrAp3pW3gtU1NkYqMj5 /5.0.15.1.0.8.63.0.0.0.0.0.0.3.1.1.0?35,72
granted, the discount isn't all that big, but it serves its purpose.
What say you of a G5 iMac 17" (2GHz, DVD+/-RW) for $949?
Slashdot Mirror
No, no. You got it all wrong. Cedega minus directX support is basically Wine (which does have some DX support). What you don't get is the drivers necessary for copy protection verification, which are proprietary stuff that transgaming has to license.
framerate loss? none, as far as I can tell (though I have plenty of horsepower to throw at games). Accuracy loss? more than desirable. For the most part, it's little things, but those little things add up. Worse than expected multitasking is a problem; some games, like warcraft 3 and starcraft. have problems with font rendering, InstallShield installers have lots of trouble running, most games have trouble activating all the visual candy (one piece of it or another makes cedega crash). Oh, and for your own sake, never look at the slew of debug messages that it spits at your terminal. It's heinous. Still, it allows you to run games quite well, and unless you're a tad fussy, it should do.
The thing is, you see, if Nintendo markets first party so-called "kiddie" games (and I think people consider the GC Mario/Luigi games, Mario party, Mario Kart "kiddie" games on account of their graphics), it (supposedly) must follow that the console isn't good for much more. Instead, if your kiddie games come from reputable kiddie content providers (Disney, Warner Bros, Cartoon Network and other usual culprits) while you come out with yet-another-first person shooter, racing game, EA sports title or beat'em up, that makes it all that much better. I just can't stand how I've only seen 3-4 games for the PSP that are NOT football (soccer for you american types :P) or Racing games
what the heck? should've previewed that post before posting.
Assuming things can't make negative sense, little sense means sense < delta for some delta > 0. If sense == 0, then our condition is verified. QED
little sense means sense 0. Hence, sense = 0 fulfills that condition. There you go!
No, that would be completely beside the point. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are essentially two distributions by the same people. Being installed as only once CD is part of its purpose. Not having to decide whether you want GNOME or KDE is its purpose. You just get the CD and pop it in. Supposedly, version 6.04 is aiming for a single-CD install/Live version. Making it a 2-CD deal that asks you to change CDs midway through the install is a step backwards.
Just to quickly rebute your reasons to hate Gnome: Swapped OK/Cancel buttons are a matter of experience. Neither is intuitive (I think, but IANA Ergonomy expert), and time will make you grow used to either. Big widgets are a Good Thing. They mean big, easy to acquire, targets. I find that in university (where the computers run KDE or fluxbox, no GNOME available) I have to aim MUCH more carefully. That means I'm distracted from what I'm doing, and that it disrupts my workflow. The fact that the default font size is also lower doesn't help in the slightest, either. I'm a big defender of making choices based on actual ergonomic arguments, rather than the cool factor, which seems, at least to me, a big factor in KDE design.
In nautilus, go to edit > preferences > behaviour, then tick the "always open in browser windows" checkbox. That's all it takes
Apparently Kubuntu is also a good project from the fine people that gives us Ubuntu. Two sub-distros, essentially
Aaawwwwwwww! JUST two screens. Seriously, how large a percentage of users do you expect to use more that one (let alone more than two!) displays? The OSX interface actually follows some pretty solid rules for interface design. It was microsoft that nabbed defeat from the clutches of victory more than once with their designs (Though, to be fair, they've been learning).
Here are a few exercises for you to try out for yourself.
1. Fire up windows.
2. Open as many instances of your favorite program as your machine will allow. Maximize some, shuffle the rest about
3. Now close them. That's right, close them. Use a variety of methods. Namely, file > exit, X button on the corner, move/resize/close menu, application miniature context menu.
4. While doing the former, note a few things: The ease with which you reach the X button when the window is maximized (corner), the time it takes to reach the miniature (edge), the time it takes to reach the move/resize/close menu when the window is maximized (another corner), the time it takes to actually aim for the file menu (not on an edge), the time it takes to reach X and the move/resize/close menu when the window is NOT maximized (NOT on a corner or edge).
You'll probably note that with a teensy little bit of practice, the latter is actually much slower than all the others. However, you should also note how windows doesn't supply visual clues indicating that the corners work. The program borders/buttons don't reach the borders.
Now, MacOS has always used the top border for the menus, and with a little bit of honest effort on your part, you'll have to reach the conclusion that the edges of the screen are a VERY FAST place to reach,while things that are physically closer are not necessarily (or even usually) faster.
In OSX, with exposé, the corners of the screen have potential use as really good multi-tasking accelerators. Even though I don't own a Mac (yet), the scant minutes of use I've accumulated from some of my friends' Macs indicate that you get used to the "throw to the corner" motion of exposé remarkably quickly. KDE also places the menus on the top of the screen if you want, though unfortunately that only works with Qt applications (so no firefox, amongst other).
Gnome, while not putting the menus on the top edge, allows for large amounts of costumization regarding the panels. I have a set of launchers on one edge, the taskbar on another (as usual), the start menu equivalent on the top right (encompassing the corner), show desktop on the bottom right corner, trash bin on the bottom left, and a list of currently open applications on the top right. A desktop pager/switcher is placed on the bottom, next to show desktop. Almost all the edge space is used with useful things (except for the left edge, that I find a bit more cumbersome to reach).
Windows, however, does all it can to prevent you from using the easiest places to reach on your screen. Why is that?the rootkit in question (possibly all rootkits? nit my area of expertise) is installed at the driver layer. LOTS of software installs parts of itself at the driver layer, including some parts of some raytracing/computer generated imagery programs, and do so legitimately. Neither counts as self contained. As always, the question is: do you want to catch all villains and some innocents in between, or do you want to make sure no innocents are caught, and let some villains slip?
had you RTFA, you'd have known that it is (sony's DRM)'s rootkit. (wow, pointer algebra in ENGLISH!)
Well, we're talking about Charles Petzold, who's been a serious MS writer for ages. He was talking at a .NET conference, or somesuch (at least, definitely towards mostly .NET people). He wants to make a point, which works much better when you use a concrete example rather than speaking about generics, and he uses the example that's most familiar to him and his audience. By speaking ill of many of the features that are considered the holy grail of VS, he invites their users to think twice about them. In short, he targetted the speech at the crowd at hand. And slashdot posted it for all to see, minus context.
I'll just mod you down if you don't come up with an Open Source keyboard! :-)
Ubuntu is 1 CD, slackware is 2. Debian is 1 or 20+ (take your pick), and I can't recall any more right now. However, you'll find something like 4 slack CDs -- #3 & #4 are source code. I haven't used any other distros thus far, so I can't comment on any others. But I agree that the "freedom of choice" is stretched a bit thin at times (I want the freedom. I just don't want to use all of it at the same time!
When it comes to openoffice, I have to say that it is less feature rich than ms office, does indeed run slower, but on the other hand is free and came preinstalled with ubuntu when I installed it. And performance is still, by and wide, enough for me not to care (just not snappy).
I'm under the impression that it's a "buy an expensive 19" screen, get a detachable laptopish computer free" deal
well, the ergonomics argument says that your field of vision is wider than it is tall. Hence, the screen proportions should accompany that tendency. the l33t argument says that a widescreen 19" LCD lets you put 2 terminals side by side without shrinking them. Possibly it has enough height for a full four xterms. What more could you possibly need?
dying? really? you might want to warn microsoft, sony and nintendo, then. Seriously now, even though I'm not a Mac user (yet!), my feeling on the matter is that of the VHS/Beta situation rehashed. That, plus the PPC apparently just going towards a direction that doesn't really benefit computer makers.
By which I mean crappy laptop support. Apple would die without their laptop lines (no, the iPod alone wouldn't keep them alive for that long. And no, it's not like 70% of their revenue). That means those lines are quite clearly the ones that should define policy.
Much in the same way I prefer AMD's desktop processors to Intel's, I think the (desktop) PPC is quite a nice thing. Intel's Pentium Ms have quite decent performance, and really good energy consumption. IBM didn't give the latter to Apple (I'll refrain from discussing the former). The G4 has shown remarkable strength in lasting this much, and Apple's engineers deserve credit for pushing the chip to its limits. But the PPC's turf lies elsewhere.
Well, while the CPU people are finally doing dual core processors (essentially, two instruction pipelines in one die, plus cache et al), the GPU people have something like 24 pipelines in a single graphics chip. Why is it that the CPU people have such lame parallelism?
To answer both questions. Graphics are trivial to parallelize. You know to start with that you'll be doing essentially the same code for all pixels, and each pixel is essentially independent from its neighbours. So doing one or twenty at the same time is mostly the same, and since all you need is to make sure the whole screen is rendered, each pipeline just needs to grab the next unhandled pixel. No syncronization difficulties, no nothing. Since pixel pipelines don't stop each other doing syncing, you effectively have a 24 GHz processor in this beast.
On the other hand, you have an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (damn, that's a needlessly big, numbery name). It has two cores, each running at 2.4 GHz (2.4 * 2 = 4.8, hence the name, I believe). However, for safe use of two processors for general computing purposes, lots of timing trouble has to be handled. Even if you do have those two processors, a lot of time has to be spent making sure they're coherent, and the effective performance is well below twice that of a single processor at twice the clock speed.
So, if raising the speed is easier than adding another core, and gives enough performance benefits to justify it, without the added programming complexity and errors (there was at least one privilege elevation exploit in linux that involved race conditions in kernel calls, IIRC), why go multiple processor earlier than needed? Of course, for some easily parallelized problems, people have been using multiprocessing for quite a while, and actually doing two things at the same time is also a possibility, but not quite as directly useful as in the graphics card scenario.
brain fart, for which I ask forgiveness. That should be "Laptops are now the majority of computer sales, to the expense of desktops".
Ok, since you seem to hace a serious case of clue deficit disorder, I'll feed it to you in small bite-sized chunks.
The Pentium M is actually a pretty decent chip.
Centrino is a pretty decent platform.
IBM hasn't done much regarding laptop processors in a while, intel has a vested interest in keeping that area going.
Laptops are now the majority of computer sales, unlike laptops
AMD does NOT have a decent platform to fight Centrino/Pentium M with. Their desktop CPUs are great (typing from an Athlon 64 3500+), but their Turion line sucks too much power.
So yeah, you have the big, studly, 4-core PowerMac. It's essentially a workstation machine. that, truth be told, doesn't add up to that big a part of Mac sales. iBooks and Powerbooks, however, are a different matter. Those, despite the increasingly apparent weakness of the G4, still sell like hot cakes. Simple logics would indicate that a stronger processor under the hood would sell even better. So yeah, the intel roadmap might actually look pretty decent for apple.
or, more accurately, a one button mouse that can tell where you pressed and react like a two button mouse. So the OP WAS correct. It is indeed a one button mouse. Only not quite. Erm. I'll go to bed now.
add to that the iBooks and PowerBook models 15" and 17", and the Mac mini. Actually, it boils down to mostly ATi, except for the PowerMac!
well, even if it is "one day later", it's not the UT2004, binaries in the DVD, sort of quality for a linux release. So I think the GP has a point there.
I mean, one says "Linux and Windows users are equals in our eyes", while the other one goes "We're all for Windows, and Linux comes as an afterthought." As a Linux user, guess which one I like better?
Obviously flamebait, but I'll bite, if only for informational purposes. the mac mini definitely has the "try-me" price you speak of. A tight little computer that has everything (if in small amounts). the iBook is probably the best bang-for-buck I've seen for 12" laptops. I've only seen one or two cheaper models elsewhere, and those were celerons (urgh). The fact that it has a dedicated video memory also means that you don't have to deal with a "super w00t graphics up to 128 MB (shared) videocard". Shared my arse, the things monopolize whatever amount of RAM you'll let them, effectively eating away at your baseline RAM. they do sell old products at a discount: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/A ppleStore.woa/71902/wo/hZGIfXyuIrAp3pW3gtU1NkYqMj5 /5.0.15.1.0.8.63.0.0.0.0.0.0.3.1.1.0?35,72
granted, the discount isn't all that big, but it serves its purpose.
What say you of a G5 iMac 17" (2GHz, DVD+/-RW) for $949?