I think you're full of shit, but it doesn't matter. Even if you're not, you only need so much memory for that kind of optimization. Having more than you need is useless.
See where it says cached and then a large number after it? That's all cached files. That's my desktop and those numbers are pretty typical, consequently it extremely rarely has to read from the hard drive. Of course that ram is still essentially free if an application actually needs to use it, it doesn't even need to be thrown out to swap, it can just be reused, since the files are still on the hard drive anyways.
You can continue to benefit from this until you've got your entire hard drive cached, and most people have hard drives much larger than 1G (I certainly do at least). Having too much memory is very difficult at the moment, especially since it's difficult to find consumer hardware that really supports more than 2G at the moment (which is likely caused by Windows' outstandingly braindead memory management, coupled with the fact that there's almost no 64-bit Windows support).
Can't even consider vim because of the macro capability in emacs. I have remapped Crtl-z to be equivalent to 'Ctrl-x e' (repeat last macro -- since I don't use 'suspend', the normal Ctrl-z function). Then I can record a macro ('Ctrl-x (' and type *anything* then close with 'Ctrl-x )') and use Ctrl-z to rapid-repeat the last macro. Makes repedetive editing very efficient. Can also do 'Ctrl-u 50 Ctrl-z' to repeat a macro 50 times, etc.
I'd move to vim if it had similar ease with macro creation / execution. Does it? Huh? Well, does it? Come on, preach it, brother! Make me a vim believer!
q<register> to record a macro, q to finish recording. Execute the macro with @<register>, then you can execute it again with @@. Obviously the @ commands can be prefixed with a number to repeat them that many times, 5@@ would repeat the last macro 5 times, for example.
But if you have enough RAM for your applications to function without swapping (and common applications rarely need anything like 512 mb), extra RAM is as useless as high octane gas in a Honda Civic.
Wrong. More RAM is always useful in Linux, it'll be used to cache files if it's not used otherwise.
I was referring to Apple's mandatory startup sound actually, not Microsoft's. I already know how horribly broken Windows and Microsoft products in general are.
If that's any indication of the design of the rest of the system, it sounds awfully braindead to me. Computers are supposed to work *for* you, not against you.
(vim's buffers seem to require that I save the file before switching to another buffer)
You can use multiple windows inside a single vim session, try Ctrl-W n, then:help ^W. If you mean multiple buffers with only one visible at a time, you could use multiple vims in a single screen session, or several open via bash job control, I frequently do at least one of the three.
The big difference, though, is that while there might be more linux users than mac users, I really doubt there are more linux only gamers than mac gamers. Most hardcore gamers that run linux will either dual boot windows, or have a second windows computer around. There are some like you that are linux only but I'd be prepared to bet they're a lot less than mac only gamers.
But there's nothing stopping a Mac user from dual booting with Windows now, and the situation with a second computer is identical to that of a Linux user. Especially considering that older Mac hardware was generally inadequate for gaming, to the point where even Carmack pointed it out as the biggest problem with Doom 3 on the Mac, I don't think your assumptions hold water. Is there even support for NVidia cards on Macs? The NVidia drivers page doesn't list any, despite listing drivers for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and others.
(b) waiting the Linux community grow to a size where potential profits outweight the potential costs
I think you (and most people) are underestimating the number of Linux users, mainly because we're very difficult to count accurately. I don't use Windows, period. But, for example, I bought copies of Doom 3, Doom 3: RoE, and Quake 4 (all of which have native ports), but my sales counted as Windows sales, because there's no Linux specific version to buy.
So how many desktop Linux users are there really? I don't know, but I'd guess at least as many as there are Mac users. More realistically, I'd guess closer to double the number of Mac users, if not more.
Furthermore, I'd venture a guess that even if the number of potential buyers in the Linux games market is 1/10 or 1/20 that of the potential buyers in the Windows games market, those Linux users are exponentially more likely to buy your game than a Windows user, simply because it's easier to rise to the top when there's less competition.
Now Cedega are going backwards because they cannot use the new WINE code.
They can actually, and do still. Only a month or two ago they took several dlls from vanilla Wine (they, of course, are still licensed under the LGPL, not the regular Cedega license).
Furthermore, Cedega is generally full of hacks to make specific games work, which is good in the short run, but bad in the long run. This is especially showing now, as in many ways, vanilla Wine has better D3D support than Cedega. Expect this gap to continue to widen as time passes. There may be a point where Cedega starts using vanilla Wine's D3D implementation too.
Not really, I can't thing of a single thing that makes it any better than X11, and I can think of lots of things that make it worse. It quite obviously was not better than X11 5 years ago when Apple started from scratch.
Apple needs an advantage.
Sure, but reinventing the wheel is far from the most efficient way to get there.
Making a native port of an open source program for Windows is a lot of work too. What is the difference?
The difference is in users. Most Windows users aren't very picky about the software they use, and this is why they're still using Windows. They already have a hodgepodge of different apps that all work and look differently, and it really doesn't matter to them. Most Mac users pretend that there must be some sort of unifying force behind all of their applications that make them all look and behave exactly the same. Not to debate the merits of either approach, but OSS is most definitely not the latter.
OSX has quite a bit of open source software for it. Aside from obvious things like bash, tcsh, vim, xorg, apache httpd, php, perl, there are also things that don't come with it!
Is it a coincidence that you almost (less Xorg) exclusively named applications that aren't graphical in nature? How many Mac users actually use (or have even heard of!) any of those? Less than 5%? The supposed target Apple market ("creative" people) doesn't care about any of those applications.
Apple can never win. Its either criticism for using open source or now they don't have enough.
It's not about Apple losing or winning. It's a matter of OSS not being used very much on Macs, regardless of how that affects them.
If they had used x11 for everything it would be "why not use linux instead of the copy".
Not from me. I would have said "Smart move, now we can share software both ways with essentially zero effort!".
Nothing is stopping you from using "Mac OS" with x11... its called gnustep + windowmaker. Try it sometime. Its only about a decade out of date.. but its there. (pronounced: nextstep)
Except that I have no interest in using Mac OS. The reason I don't use it is not because it doesn't use X11.
Linux users, do me a favor. Only speak of positives of your OS of choice. Don't sit there and trash every other OS out there.
You don't have to ask, I already do. For example, I love the way that Linux and OSS...
give me complete freedom both as a developer and a user.
provide me with the best platform with the best tools to get just about any job done.
have developers that I can actually talk to without a support contract.
are focused on making the best software, rather than the most marketable software.
almost always have a dollar cost of zero.
I can keep going if you want me to.
Does linux have lots of game ports? No. (work on that)
We are. Are you?
My personal vision is that someday operating systems will be free that work for everyone.
Me too. Except I don't ever see it coming from Apple or Microsoft.
You don't think it integrates nicely? In its default configuration, I hardly notice a difference between X apps and Aqua apps. The only thing that I notice is that X apps take just a little longer to load, because X takes a couple seconds to load. I am not saying that you are wrong -- the integration is not perfect, and some improvement wouldn't hurt, but, in my own opinion, X seems fairly well integrated. Could you explain to me what is terribly wrong with it?
I never said I didn't think it integrates nicely, I said that's the most common complaint I've heard of OSS on OS X. Frequently in talking with Mac users I'll suggest they try a particular piece of OSS that I know works on OS X, and the majority of the time, they'll respond with something like "Oh I tried that already, it's gross because it's not Aqua!". I have used OS X only briefly, it isn't something that interests me, but otherwise I don't have any particularly strong feelings about it.
I know there's plenty of OSS going on for OSX and it's even got the bash kernel so you can compile pre-existing OSS apps that were written for it but man these Windows OSS programs are slick and super easy to install.
The bash *kernel*!? It's a shell, not a kernel. There is a world of difference.
I don't see OSS as a big thing on OS X, despite the fact many things can simply be recompiled for it, Mac zealots demand "native" (read: not using X11) ports of software, which is significantly more work than simply recompiling. If Apple was smart, they would either 1) have used X11 for everything in the first place or 2) figured out how to actually make X11 integrate nicely with it's proprietary GUI.
I can't see this being good for customers. As we all know, ATI's products tend to be miserably supported, though this hasn't been the case for AMD thus far. How will this affect the nForce line of chipsets? Given ATI's past I'd much rather have an nForce than whatever ATI kicks out.
On the other hand, perhaps AMD will drag ATI out of it's rut, but I think it's just as probable that ATI will drag AMD down, and that's good for nobody.
One of my favourite things about KDE (or, more specifically, kwin) is the way it handles focus. In particular, it doesn't enforce that the window in focus must be the window on top. Using the default (at least they were default the last time I did a fresh install) KDE settings, scrolling the mousewheel can be used to change the the focus to the window you're scrolling in, but without changing it's z positioning. Furthermore, once you've given a window this state in this manner, you can interact with it normally without fear of it popping on top again, until you a) left click on the titlebar, or b) it loses focus (and then gains it again).
While a similar effect is possible by using focus-follows-mouse, it also requires you to keep the mouse cursor inside the window you want to have focus, whereas with this method, the mouse cursor can be anywhere.
In the same vein, the alt+(left|right) mouse button combos, which by default are mapped to moving and resizing a window, don't give a window focus either. Thus, you can move and resize any window without fear of it a) coming into focus or b) changing z order.
Experimental 3D acceleration support for ATI cards >9200 is already in Xorg, see the old page (from before it was merged with Xorg) here: http://r300.sourceforge.net/.
But by switching they neglect great deals like a free porche bundled with purchase of a million licenses.
As long as OSS can't give out free porches as bonus to government-funded purchases, we're on a lost position.
So... take the money you didn't spend on a million software licenses, and buy a couple thousand Porches? I fail to see how buying proprietary software works out for the better here.
Maybe if I sell you a copy of RHEL 4 for $200,000 and throw in a free Porche, would that make it better?
And since I primarily use Ruby on Rails or PHP for my coding, the most annoying part is the god damned SQL code!
You have problems with SQL? SQL is, by far, the simplest part of any application. Pushing work into the database tends to eliminate the vast majority of the work. If you don't find that, then you're not using them correctly.
The real problem is the horrible horrible font (Verdana, IIRC) that Slashdot asks for specifically now. I haven't been able to fix this through stylesheet overrides yet...
Slashdot Mirror
Run top:
See where it says cached and then a large number after it? That's all cached files. That's my desktop and those numbers are pretty typical, consequently it extremely rarely has to read from the hard drive. Of course that ram is still essentially free if an application actually needs to use it, it doesn't even need to be thrown out to swap, it can just be reused, since the files are still on the hard drive anyways.
You can continue to benefit from this until you've got your entire hard drive cached, and most people have hard drives much larger than 1G (I certainly do at least). Having too much memory is very difficult at the moment, especially since it's difficult to find consumer hardware that really supports more than 2G at the moment (which is likely caused by Windows' outstandingly braindead memory management, coupled with the fact that there's almost no 64-bit Windows support).
q<register> to record a macro, q to finish recording. Execute the macro with @<register>, then you can execute it again with @@. Obviously the @ commands can be prefixed with a number to repeat them that many times, 5@@ would repeat the last macro 5 times, for example.
Wrong. More RAM is always useful in Linux, it'll be used to cache files if it's not used otherwise.
A turd is still a turd, even if you "only" have to step in it once a week (, month, year...).
I was referring to Apple's mandatory startup sound actually, not Microsoft's. I already know how horribly broken Windows and Microsoft products in general are.
If that's any indication of the design of the rest of the system, it sounds awfully braindead to me. Computers are supposed to work *for* you, not against you.
I suspect you'll find that the overwhelming majority use their distro's packages, which don't use the Mozilla installer.
Dual boot? Why would you install Windows to run Konqueror?
You can use multiple windows inside a single vim session, try Ctrl-W n, then :help ^W. If you mean multiple buffers with only one visible at a time, you could use multiple vims in a single screen session, or several open via bash job control, I frequently do at least one of the three.
I'm not sure if you're thinking that the release of Vista will be good or bad for consumers, if it ever happens.
Except that pretty much by definition, a computer running Windows is in an unusable state.
They're worth buying even just to vote for Linux with your dollars.
I was planning on sticking with my current Thinkpad for awhile longer, but this is almost reason enough to get a new one.
So, where can we buy one?
But there's nothing stopping a Mac user from dual booting with Windows now, and the situation with a second computer is identical to that of a Linux user. Especially considering that older Mac hardware was generally inadequate for gaming, to the point where even Carmack pointed it out as the biggest problem with Doom 3 on the Mac, I don't think your assumptions hold water. Is there even support for NVidia cards on Macs? The NVidia drivers page doesn't list any, despite listing drivers for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and others.
I think you (and most people) are underestimating the number of Linux users, mainly because we're very difficult to count accurately. I don't use Windows, period. But, for example, I bought copies of Doom 3, Doom 3: RoE, and Quake 4 (all of which have native ports), but my sales counted as Windows sales, because there's no Linux specific version to buy.
So how many desktop Linux users are there really? I don't know, but I'd guess at least as many as there are Mac users. More realistically, I'd guess closer to double the number of Mac users, if not more.
Furthermore, I'd venture a guess that even if the number of potential buyers in the Linux games market is 1/10 or 1/20 that of the potential buyers in the Windows games market, those Linux users are exponentially more likely to buy your game than a Windows user, simply because it's easier to rise to the top when there's less competition.
They can actually, and do still. Only a month or two ago they took several dlls from vanilla Wine (they, of course, are still licensed under the LGPL, not the regular Cedega license).
Furthermore, Cedega is generally full of hacks to make specific games work, which is good in the short run, but bad in the long run. This is especially showing now, as in many ways, vanilla Wine has better D3D support than Cedega. Expect this gap to continue to widen as time passes. There may be a point where Cedega starts using vanilla Wine's D3D implementation too.
Not really, I can't thing of a single thing that makes it any better than X11, and I can think of lots of things that make it worse. It quite obviously was not better than X11 5 years ago when Apple started from scratch.
Sure, but reinventing the wheel is far from the most efficient way to get there.
The difference is in users. Most Windows users aren't very picky about the software they use, and this is why they're still using Windows. They already have a hodgepodge of different apps that all work and look differently, and it really doesn't matter to them. Most Mac users pretend that there must be some sort of unifying force behind all of their applications that make them all look and behave exactly the same. Not to debate the merits of either approach, but OSS is most definitely not the latter.
Is it a coincidence that you almost (less Xorg) exclusively named applications that aren't graphical in nature? How many Mac users actually use (or have even heard of!) any of those? Less than 5%? The supposed target Apple market ("creative" people) doesn't care about any of those applications.
It's not about Apple losing or winning. It's a matter of OSS not being used very much on Macs, regardless of how that affects them.
Not from me. I would have said "Smart move, now we can share software both ways with essentially zero effort!".
Except that I have no interest in using Mac OS. The reason I don't use it is not because it doesn't use X11.
You don't have to ask, I already do. For example, I love the way that Linux and OSS...
I can keep going if you want me to.
We are. Are you?
Me too. Except I don't ever see it coming from Apple or Microsoft.
I never said I didn't think it integrates nicely, I said that's the most common complaint I've heard of OSS on OS X. Frequently in talking with Mac users I'll suggest they try a particular piece of OSS that I know works on OS X, and the majority of the time, they'll respond with something like "Oh I tried that already, it's gross because it's not Aqua!". I have used OS X only briefly, it isn't something that interests me, but otherwise I don't have any particularly strong feelings about it.
The bash *kernel*!? It's a shell, not a kernel. There is a world of difference.
I don't see OSS as a big thing on OS X, despite the fact many things can simply be recompiled for it, Mac zealots demand "native" (read: not using X11) ports of software, which is significantly more work than simply recompiling. If Apple was smart, they would either 1) have used X11 for everything in the first place or 2) figured out how to actually make X11 integrate nicely with it's proprietary GUI.
I can't see this being good for customers. As we all know, ATI's products tend to be miserably supported, though this hasn't been the case for AMD thus far. How will this affect the nForce line of chipsets? Given ATI's past I'd much rather have an nForce than whatever ATI kicks out.
On the other hand, perhaps AMD will drag ATI out of it's rut, but I think it's just as probable that ATI will drag AMD down, and that's good for nobody.
One of my favourite things about KDE (or, more specifically, kwin) is the way it handles focus. In particular, it doesn't enforce that the window in focus must be the window on top. Using the default (at least they were default the last time I did a fresh install) KDE settings, scrolling the mousewheel can be used to change the the focus to the window you're scrolling in, but without changing it's z positioning. Furthermore, once you've given a window this state in this manner, you can interact with it normally without fear of it popping on top again, until you a) left click on the titlebar, or b) it loses focus (and then gains it again).
While a similar effect is possible by using focus-follows-mouse, it also requires you to keep the mouse cursor inside the window you want to have focus, whereas with this method, the mouse cursor can be anywhere.
In the same vein, the alt+(left|right) mouse button combos, which by default are mapped to moving and resizing a window, don't give a window focus either. Thus, you can move and resize any window without fear of it a) coming into focus or b) changing z order.
Experimental 3D acceleration support for ATI cards >9200 is already in Xorg, see the old page (from before it was merged with Xorg) here: http://r300.sourceforge.net/.
So... take the money you didn't spend on a million software licenses, and buy a couple thousand Porches? I fail to see how buying proprietary software works out for the better here.
Maybe if I sell you a copy of RHEL 4 for $200,000 and throw in a free Porche, would that make it better?
Who would have thought the massive payoffs from Microsoft to drop Linux support would make them more profitable?
You have problems with SQL? SQL is, by far, the simplest part of any application. Pushing work into the database tends to eliminate the vast majority of the work. If you don't find that, then you're not using them correctly.
The real problem is the horrible horrible font (Verdana, IIRC) that Slashdot asks for specifically now. I haven't been able to fix this through stylesheet overrides yet...