IMO computer graphics have as much business showing realism as fine arts, photography and movies do - only as a niche artform, not as its main purpose.
They're all visual arts, and as such primarily a medium to depict ideas, not reality.
Also, do you happen to know any more modern day examples of where ATI's and nVidia's cards produce differently looking images?
Uh, that hardware is not ancient compared to Quake 3.
Would be nice to have some comparison with fglrx or the Windows drivers. Also, I haven't kept up with those open source drivers, weren't there two competing ones? One of which always used some kind of hardware abstraction layer, and the other at least started out as a down to the metal driver, if memory serves?
Would be good to know which of those drivers you're using, too.
C'mon, you can't show one work of art, on a medium used for thousands of years as a means of artist expression, and compare it to a medium with ~30 years of history.
That said, Shadow of the Collosus does come close.
About war simulation games not representing any sort of art - well, that's hard to tell, as to much knowledge, there's never been a war simulation game (correct me if I'm wrong), let alone one even trying to achieve some kind of artistic relevance.
This one seemed to go for the documentary value of realistically depicting a war, rather than some artistic interpretation of the events that took place.
It's not just how open source games look. It's their whole production value, the impression that every part of the game is designed to fit some kind of vision.
Most open source games feel like they're build around some code that was produced without any kind of vision, with someone else entirely picking it up and extending it.
Right now, you shouldn't be buying a house anyway.
Letting the bubble burst completely? Great, let's start over! Reboot the world's economy, it was getting stale anyway.
Or could it be you're a wee bit on the selfish side there?
First off, what's currently broken about the bits that nVidia has reimplemented?
I don't know, I don't have any insight into X.org, and the issues it has concerning graphics. I've read somewhere its asynchronous nature is to blame, and that makes sense to me. But it's not something nVidia's drivers fix.
The post you quoted OTOH does mention there are issues that nVidia fixes with their approach.
I'm not pushing the "nVidia is evil" POV. I'm pushing the "Relying on closed-source components is foolish" POV.
Often it really is foolish, and one could be tempted to turn it into a principle. The FSF most likely shares your view.
Sticking to that principle is fine.
I'm just not that much of a black and white person, and somehow don't see a project the size of X.org threatened by its portion of nVidia users in the userbase, just as I don't see the Linux kernel as being threatened by all those binary only drivers people use.
Interesting. That's actually not very different from injecting companies with cash to prevent bankruptcies, and might have a chance to at least slow down the drop in housing prices.
From all those weird things governments try to keep the recession in check, that one actually makes sense.
If nothing else, it's at least equal rights for legal and natural entities.
You feel the future of X.org is threatened by nVidia's policy? In what way?
In the first part of your post you seem to be saying it's the nVidia users who're out of luck whenever new X.org bugfixes/features aren't ported. In which case I don't see how they're holding back the project.
Then you go on saying that nVidia never helps out open source and basically accuse them of being damaging to X.org's health. Which I don't get. As I understand it, it's not X.org which depends on binary-only software, it's nVidia users.
About me not giving a damn about the health of the software I use - I prefer working software, yes. If that's detrimental to the health of some unlying project, I might consider to use something else. Probably not for something as essential as a working graphics system though.
I'm not convinced that using nVidia is bad for X.org anyway.
Yes well, and which approach is the one that actually works?
nVidia's drivers have done their job for me, ATI's.. not so much.
Sure, theoretically, it's better to stick with the given architecture like ATI's drivers do. I get that. But what good does it do for anyone if it hardly works?
I'd rather replace half of X.org with nVidia's code if it means I get to use all my card's features.
Isn't enabling vendors to do that actually one of the things open source advocates keep preaching about?
This doesn't make sense though. You don't have to remove a browser or your Mozilla profile to test another browser.
No, you don't. But during the time it takes to really test that other browser, there will most likely be many updates to FF and its addons - some of which will probably be incompatible to one another.
So, going back to FF, the user will be asked to wait for all those updates to download, install, and to acknowledge which of the many addons stopped working. That takes time, and will annoy.
I'm pretty sure this annoyance will keep people giving any other browser a real chance - going back is just to bothersome.
It's actually forcing them to continue use ff on a regular basis. As soon as people even try to give another browser a chance, coming back to firefox makes them download tons of updates for all those little addons, which stop working as soon as there's a ff update.
They won't want to go through that procedure again, so they'll just have to either stop using ff alltogether, or give up on using anything else as their main browser.
It's a very effective kind of vendor lock in.
I get what you're saying, I think.
Computer systems, the way they're being sold to people, are not solutions. But that's my problem with them - they're not useful, unless there's some problem they at least help solving. They're not even being advertised as solutions anymore, there's no need to. They're totally selfserving.
My point was that the overuse of computer technology without clearly defined purpose leads to computers becoming self serving, leading to more overuse through habituation.
How would that work?
You set up a consortium, come up with all the features you'd need in your software. Then you hire someone who's willing to acquire all the specialized knowledge needed to make specialized software, and begin making it. Lots of the features your consortium came up with won't be possible, leading to lots of meetings and debates in order to find a working compromise.
That will take a while, and in the meantime members of this consortium will change their minds on some of the features, some will want to leave and others will want to join.
In the end, after a few years, you'll have a piece of software designed by a comitee, few members of which are actually qualified to design software.
Then you release it as free software - to what end? Successful free software sticks around because it has a large userbase, something not given in this case. Nobody is going to pick up that code and start working with it, unless they happen to have an industry to run. In which case, they're most likely not going to start tinkering with the code very much.
(Is it just me, or is making a "solution" a negative thing as it suggests you had a *problem* in the first place, rather than, say, a need, or a requirement?)
So you're admitting software, and by extension computers, tend not to be solutions for some real problem, but rather something to fill some vague need, or a requirement for something that's yet to be defined?
Great, the more people admit that, the sooner we can concentrate on using computers on problems they really are a solution to, and ban them from everywhere else.
Moreover, if McDonalds in China is similar to McDonalds in Mexico, then a BigMac is an "expensive" luxury item. That is, it is not something that people will eat every day.
Exactly, consuming American fast food is a luxury almost everywhere. Which is why the BigMac factor doesn't work all that well.
Chinese, or Mexican, or pretty much all but maybe American, factory workers will most likely not spend their hard earned cash on a BigMac. For those people from the article, those 12.5RMB would almost be half their daily wage, and for someone who's paid the Mexican minimum salary you mentioned, it's almost two third.
I agree 0.41USD/hour is something a family can get by with in China, but don't think the BigMac factor is very helpful in figuring that out.
According to http://www.xe.com/ucc/, 0.41USD about 2.80RMB, which bought you about two baozi (the only low-end food source I can remember the price of right now) in Shanghai a few years ago. Outside Shanghai they're sure to be a lot cheaper.
I'd say you'd need six of those to feed you, your wife, and the one child you're allowed.
As those people work 12 hours a day, they'd still have 24.60RMB left. Actually enough for some variance in the diet, provided their rent doesn't exceed, say, 500RMB per month.
I'm pretty sure those worker's families have a, in a material sense, much better life than they could have by relying on subsistence farming, but of course they're giving up one family member for it, and there is no job security whatsoever. These factories often rely on a few customers, and are even more susceptible to market changes than those in developed countries, where no week goes by without one shutting down.
The Human Rights are well defined, and don't cover a person's wage, but their living conditions.
They have nothing to do with giving everyone some arbitrary sum of money.
I agree with your assessment of the pictures on the linked page, but I wouldn't, in any way, blame the tech. Maybe it encourages people to take some rather bland pictures because it's cheap to do so, as you don't have to care about film and development cost at all, but there's always been postcard photography.
While shooting analog on old, high quality cameras can produce superior pictures compare to what digital can do (at least it could last time I checked), that's only achievable when you also develop and enlarge those pictures yourself. If you can, good for you. If not, I feel pretty much everyone is better off with a digital camera and a good raster graphics editor.
Also, but I'm not sure if it's because of my browser's ineptitude, posting something to undo moderation doesn't give you the modpoints back.
I'd also like a way to just undo moderation without posting something.
And a pony of course.
200 times the performance of this beast? I don't think you'd have much fun trying to browse today's web this way..
Modern software can be seen as bloated, sure. But OTOH PCs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, making the bloat not seem as bad, IMO. Hardware is cheaper than programmer's time, by a long shot.
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IMO computer graphics have as much business showing realism as fine arts, photography and movies do - only as a niche artform, not as its main purpose.
They're all visual arts, and as such primarily a medium to depict ideas, not reality.
Also, do you happen to know any more modern day examples of where ATI's and nVidia's cards produce differently looking images?
Stop making people feel old, you insensitive clod!
Uh, that hardware is not ancient compared to Quake 3.
Would be nice to have some comparison with fglrx or the Windows drivers. Also, I haven't kept up with those open source drivers, weren't there two competing ones? One of which always used some kind of hardware abstraction layer, and the other at least started out as a down to the metal driver, if memory serves?
Would be good to know which of those drivers you're using, too.
C'mon, you can't show one work of art, on a medium used for thousands of years as a means of artist expression, and compare it to a medium with ~30 years of history.
That said, Shadow of the Collosus does come close.
About war simulation games not representing any sort of art - well, that's hard to tell, as to much knowledge, there's never been a war simulation game (correct me if I'm wrong), let alone one even trying to achieve some kind of artistic relevance.
This one seemed to go for the documentary value of realistically depicting a war, rather than some artistic interpretation of the events that took place.
It's not just how open source games look. It's their whole production value, the impression that every part of the game is designed to fit some kind of vision.
Most open source games feel like they're build around some code that was produced without any kind of vision, with someone else entirely picking it up and extending it.
Applies to you too.
Right now, you shouldn't be buying a house anyway.
Letting the bubble burst completely? Great, let's start over! Reboot the world's economy, it was getting stale anyway.
Or could it be you're a wee bit on the selfish side there?
First off, what's currently broken about the bits that nVidia has reimplemented?
I don't know, I don't have any insight into X.org, and the issues it has concerning graphics. I've read somewhere its asynchronous nature is to blame, and that makes sense to me. But it's not something nVidia's drivers fix.
The post you quoted OTOH does mention there are issues that nVidia fixes with their approach.
I'm not pushing the "nVidia is evil" POV. I'm pushing the "Relying on closed-source components is foolish" POV.
Often it really is foolish, and one could be tempted to turn it into a principle. The FSF most likely shares your view.
Sticking to that principle is fine.
I'm just not that much of a black and white person, and somehow don't see a project the size of X.org threatened by its portion of nVidia users in the userbase, just as I don't see the Linux kernel as being threatened by all those binary only drivers people use.
They're planing to try to fix mortgages?
Interesting. That's actually not very different from injecting companies with cash to prevent bankruptcies, and might have a chance to at least slow down the drop in housing prices.
From all those weird things governments try to keep the recession in check, that one actually makes sense.
If nothing else, it's at least equal rights for legal and natural entities.
You feel the future of X.org is threatened by nVidia's policy? In what way?
In the first part of your post you seem to be saying it's the nVidia users who're out of luck whenever new X.org bugfixes/features aren't ported. In which case I don't see how they're holding back the project.
Then you go on saying that nVidia never helps out open source and basically accuse them of being damaging to X.org's health. Which I don't get. As I understand it, it's not X.org which depends on binary-only software, it's nVidia users.
About me not giving a damn about the health of the software I use - I prefer working software, yes. If that's detrimental to the health of some unlying project, I might consider to use something else. Probably not for something as essential as a working graphics system though.
I'm not convinced that using nVidia is bad for X.org anyway.
Yes well, and which approach is the one that actually works?
nVidia's drivers have done their job for me, ATI's.. not so much.
Sure, theoretically, it's better to stick with the given architecture like ATI's drivers do. I get that. But what good does it do for anyone if it hardly works?
I'd rather replace half of X.org with nVidia's code if it means I get to use all my card's features.
Isn't enabling vendors to do that actually one of the things open source advocates keep preaching about?
Isn't that kind of the point of clipart?
That, and being so ugly that people who actually use it deserve getting sued.
This doesn't make sense though. You don't have to remove a browser or your Mozilla profile to test another browser.
No, you don't. But during the time it takes to really test that other browser, there will most likely be many updates to FF and its addons - some of which will probably be incompatible to one another.
So, going back to FF, the user will be asked to wait for all those updates to download, install, and to acknowledge which of the many addons stopped working. That takes time, and will annoy.
I'm pretty sure this annoyance will keep people giving any other browser a real chance - going back is just to bothersome.
It's actually forcing them to continue use ff on a regular basis. As soon as people even try to give another browser a chance, coming back to firefox makes them download tons of updates for all those little addons, which stop working as soon as there's a ff update.
They won't want to go through that procedure again, so they'll just have to either stop using ff alltogether, or give up on using anything else as their main browser.
It's a very effective kind of vendor lock in.
I get what you're saying, I think.
Computer systems, the way they're being sold to people, are not solutions. But that's my problem with them - they're not useful, unless there's some problem they at least help solving. They're not even being advertised as solutions anymore, there's no need to. They're totally selfserving.
My point was that the overuse of computer technology without clearly defined purpose leads to computers becoming self serving, leading to more overuse through habituation.
How would that work?
You set up a consortium, come up with all the features you'd need in your software. Then you hire someone who's willing to acquire all the specialized knowledge needed to make specialized software, and begin making it. Lots of the features your consortium came up with won't be possible, leading to lots of meetings and debates in order to find a working compromise.
That will take a while, and in the meantime members of this consortium will change their minds on some of the features, some will want to leave and others will want to join.
In the end, after a few years, you'll have a piece of software designed by a comitee, few members of which are actually qualified to design software.
Then you release it as free software - to what end? Successful free software sticks around because it has a large userbase, something not given in this case. Nobody is going to pick up that code and start working with it, unless they happen to have an industry to run. In which case, they're most likely not going to start tinkering with the code very much.
(Is it just me, or is making a "solution" a negative thing as it suggests you had a *problem* in the first place, rather than, say, a need, or a requirement?)
So you're admitting software, and by extension computers, tend not to be solutions for some real problem, but rather something to fill some vague need, or a requirement for something that's yet to be defined?
Great, the more people admit that, the sooner we can concentrate on using computers on problems they really are a solution to, and ban them from everywhere else.
Moreover, if McDonalds in China is similar to McDonalds in Mexico, then a BigMac is an "expensive" luxury item. That is, it is not something that people will eat every day.
Exactly, consuming American fast food is a luxury almost everywhere. Which is why the BigMac factor doesn't work all that well.
Chinese, or Mexican, or pretty much all but maybe American, factory workers will most likely not spend their hard earned cash on a BigMac. For those people from the article, those 12.5RMB would almost be half their daily wage, and for someone who's paid the Mexican minimum salary you mentioned, it's almost two third.
I agree 0.41USD/hour is something a family can get by with in China, but don't think the BigMac factor is very helpful in figuring that out.
According to http://www.xe.com/ucc/, 0.41USD about 2.80RMB, which bought you about two baozi (the only low-end food source I can remember the price of right now) in Shanghai a few years ago. Outside Shanghai they're sure to be a lot cheaper.
I'd say you'd need six of those to feed you, your wife, and the one child you're allowed.
As those people work 12 hours a day, they'd still have 24.60RMB left. Actually enough for some variance in the diet, provided their rent doesn't exceed, say, 500RMB per month.
I'm pretty sure those worker's families have a, in a material sense, much better life than they could have by relying on subsistence farming, but of course they're giving up one family member for it, and there is no job security whatsoever. These factories often rely on a few customers, and are even more susceptible to market changes than those in developed countries, where no week goes by without one shutting down.
The Human Rights are well defined, and don't cover a person's wage, but their living conditions.
They have nothing to do with giving everyone some arbitrary sum of money.
I agree with your assessment of the pictures on the linked page, but I wouldn't, in any way, blame the tech. Maybe it encourages people to take some rather bland pictures because it's cheap to do so, as you don't have to care about film and development cost at all, but there's always been postcard photography.
While shooting analog on old, high quality cameras can produce superior pictures compare to what digital can do (at least it could last time I checked), that's only achievable when you also develop and enlarge those pictures yourself. If you can, good for you. If not, I feel pretty much everyone is better off with a digital camera and a good raster graphics editor.
They've got a Journalist class in WoW now? What's next, a Tourist class?
Indeed it has.
Also, but I'm not sure if it's because of my browser's ineptitude, posting something to undo moderation doesn't give you the modpoints back.
I'd also like a way to just undo moderation without posting something.
And a pony of course.
200 times the performance of this beast? I don't think you'd have much fun trying to browse today's web this way..
Modern software can be seen as bloated, sure. But OTOH PCs are a lot cheaper than they used to be, making the bloat not seem as bad, IMO. Hardware is cheaper than programmer's time, by a long shot.