God, you can't even get this right. No, Quartz 2D was never called the window server. Quartz Compositor is a part of the window server, and is sometimes referred to as such, but Quartz 2D is a completely different thing.
"DisplayPDF" was never an official name for anything. Was it used informally by somebody? Hell if I know. But that doesn't mean anything one way or the other, because if it were used as an informal name, it was used incorrectly. Quartz 2D is not, and never has been, analogous to PDF as Display PostScript was to PostScript.
What can I say? That site is just flat-out wrong. It's an ancient description of an equally ancient Quartz demo, and it gets the internals flat-out wrong.
It says, "Quartz does not use Postscript as its internal graphics representation language. Instead, it uses Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) standard which is a superset of Adobe Postscript."
That's just completely incorrect. Quartz 2D graphics are not represented internally as PDF. They just aren't. When a Quartz 2D graphics context is stored in memory, it's stored as a display list, very similar (conceptually) to the way OpenGL scenes are stored in memory. To convert the context to a pixel buffer for display on screen, Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme, depending on hardware) renders and composites the graphics context, which results in a bitmap.
A Quartz 2D display list is very similar to PDF in the way regions are defined and paint applied to them; this makes it easy for PDF files to be converted into Quartz 2D display lists and vice versa. But it's equally true that the Open Inventor file format is similar to an OpenGL display list in the way that vertices and surfaces are defined. You would be wrong to say that OpenGL programs store scenes internally in Open Inventor format; you'd be equally wrong to say that Mac programs store their graphics internally in PDF format. It just ain't so.
Can an Open Inventor model be trivially read from disk and turned into an OpenGL display list? Sure. Can a PDF file be read and trivially turned into a Quartz 2D display list? Yes.
Dude, I hope you got a fucking F on that paper. "Display PDF?" Come on, man. Let's run this down, okay?
Display PostScript worked by embedding a PostScript interpreter right into the operating system. The system would run PostScript programs, rasterizing them to the screen, to produce screen output. The system would do exactly the same thing but route the output to an attached laser printer instead of the screen to produce printed output.
Quartz 2D is not, and has never been, "Display PDF." Quartz 2D is a display-list drawing API that uses a drawing model that's very similar to PDF. Apple included code in the OS that could trivially convert any Quartz 2D display list into a valid PDF file on disk and vice versa. But Quartz 2D is not "Display PDF."
Your section on Quartz Extreme gets a lot of important stuff wrong, too. It doesn't take Quartz Extreme to put a transparent window on top of another window. That's something that the very first builds of Quartz Compositor were capable of doing. Quartz Extreme offers nothing that Quartz Compositor didn't offer; it's just that Quartz Extreme does the same job with the GPU, while Quartz Compositor did it all in the CPU.
Seriously, man, this paper is pretty terrible. Even if your assignment is finished, I hope for your own knowledge you go fill in all the gaping holes.
I find it interesting that everything you listed as either "useful" or "may lead to greater usability" are obviously cherry-picked right out of Mac OS X.
I really don't understand where the need for pretense comes from. Why don't these guys just say, "We want to make our product just like the Mac" and be done with it? I mean, it would make lists like these completely unnecessary, because the cross-reference to the list of planned features could just be a hyperlink to apple.com.
OS X, at least in its current incarnation, does X11 badly. Hopefully Jobs will find it not stylish enough and come up with a clever way to fully integrate it into Quartz.
It would be far easier for everybody who maintains an X11 program to just write a Cocoa front-end for it than it would be for Apple to somehow fold, spindle and mutilate X11 into giving Mac users a decent user experience.
If your program is well written and sufficiently factored, you should be able to put a Cocoa user interface on it in a matter of hours.
The entire OpenGL-composited interface is described using PDF
I sobbed when I read this.
I wrote a really long post correcting this widely and wrongly held opinion some weeks back. I don't feel like finding it, or being that verbose again. So short versions.
No PDF, no OpenGL.
Quartz 2D is a display-list engine, but it is not a PDF interpreter. Rather, Apple wrote some very, very simple shims that quickly translate PDF files into Quartz 2D display lists and back. Nothing in Quartz 2D is represented in PDF format unless it's sitting in a file on the disk.
The windows are drawn on the screen by a piece of software called Quartz Compositor. A couple of years ago, Apple rewrote Quartz Compositor to take advantage of hardware acceleration. They did use OpenGL for this, but only in a very limited way. Each window is represented as a texture on a surface and fed to the graphics pipeline for compositing.
Quartz is amazing. Nothing else in the world comes anywhere close to it, despite what some very confused people seem to think. But you're really selling it short when you describe it as "PDF and OpenGL." Because it isn't.
I wish I could. I'm sure somewhere in the canon of English-language literature that a more useless hundred pages have been written, but I'm damned if I know what they are.
Did he write a book called "Eon?" I read a book called "Eon" once, and I think he was the author. It was awful. It was all technical mumbo-jumbo, and not a single actual character in sight. It was bad fantasy genre fiction, incredibly disappointing.
I think a similar example is Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series. I recently finished the last book, and while I won't give away anything, the author seems to have basically written himself into a corner out of which he lacked the ability to write himself. So much imagination went into the story's front end that there was nothing left for the climax. I found it profoundly disappointing, and wished I'd stopped reading after book #6. A cliffhanger is a better way to end it than a sort-of-not-really conclusion.
I find that stories with massive premises always end up being anti-climactic. Take "Lord of the Rings" for example. Frodo dunks the ring, war over. I wished it hadn't been that simple. I wished there had been more to it. The setup didn't pay off for me.
You know what truly amuses me about this? After first arguing that Mac OS X is obsolete and being taken all the way to school by yours truly, you sat on it for two solid weeks, and the very best you could come up with is to disinter the ancient "Smalltalk" / "Simula" argument. Son, that argument was all used up back when you were still in diapers. Go find something new to feed your desperate need for a sense of superiority.
Tell you what. Why don't you run along and try to stir up your old "nibs are inferior to XML" argument with somebody who hasn't already grown sick of your unique little blend of ignorance and arrogance.
The basic fact remains: OS X is fundamentally 1980's technology.
To the extent that we're talking about electrons rattling around, yes. There is no other interpretation under which that could possibly be considered sound, however..NET and its development tools are already orders of magnitude better than the junk Apple is shipping for APIs and development tools.
If there were any question in my mind whether you have the foggiest idea what you're talking about, it would be long gone now. Dot net? Surely you must be joking. It's based on Java, for crying out loud. Talk about your technological cul de sacs.
Bull. We've built many perpetual motion machines. The only thing we haven't built yet are commercially viable ones. You can help change that with a small donation... sir? Sir? I say, sir!
Actually, fusion reactors don't use anything, because we have never built one. The closest thing we have ever encountered to a working fusion reactor is the sun, and I'm sure you'd agree that it's a little beyond what's practical for us.
I have worked with users who are doing exactly what you claim people arn't doing e.g working directly with OpenOffice XML files.
The total number of people worldwide who would even know what that sentence means, much less be interested in doing it themselves, is so small as to round down to zero.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format
So?
Finally OpenOffice is hardly an also ran in the Office space it is the second most used product behind MS-Office
LOL. Just making up statistics isn't going to get you anywhere.
That even when a totally non-CO2 emitting, non-radioactive power source is found we still get the "OMG!! It's could cause xxx", uproar.
I think you're missing the "OMG!! It will cost hundreds of billions and we won't see a return on our investment for centuries!!" uproar. That's by far the more significant one, don't you think?
Photovoltaic trumps them all, but to convert even just our current electrical needs to photovoltaic would cost more than we've spent on imported oil since we started importing oil.
Not to mention the fact that we'd basically have to pave over New Mexico. Have you ever been out there? It's a desert, but even a desert is prettier than 40,000 square miles of solar cells.
Slashdot Mirror
God, you can't even get this right. No, Quartz 2D was never called the window server. Quartz Compositor is a part of the window server, and is sometimes referred to as such, but Quartz 2D is a completely different thing.
"DisplayPDF" was never an official name for anything. Was it used informally by somebody? Hell if I know. But that doesn't mean anything one way or the other, because if it were used as an informal name, it was used incorrectly. Quartz 2D is not, and never has been, analogous to PDF as Display PostScript was to PostScript.
What can I say? That site is just flat-out wrong. It's an ancient description of an equally ancient Quartz demo, and it gets the internals flat-out wrong.
It says, "Quartz does not use Postscript as its internal graphics representation language. Instead, it uses Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) standard which is a superset of Adobe Postscript."
That's just completely incorrect. Quartz 2D graphics are not represented internally as PDF. They just aren't. When a Quartz 2D graphics context is stored in memory, it's stored as a display list, very similar (conceptually) to the way OpenGL scenes are stored in memory. To convert the context to a pixel buffer for display on screen, Quartz Compositor (or Quartz Extreme, depending on hardware) renders and composites the graphics context, which results in a bitmap.
A Quartz 2D display list is very similar to PDF in the way regions are defined and paint applied to them; this makes it easy for PDF files to be converted into Quartz 2D display lists and vice versa. But it's equally true that the Open Inventor file format is similar to an OpenGL display list in the way that vertices and surfaces are defined. You would be wrong to say that OpenGL programs store scenes internally in Open Inventor format; you'd be equally wrong to say that Mac programs store their graphics internally in PDF format. It just ain't so.
Can an Open Inventor model be trivially read from disk and turned into an OpenGL display list? Sure. Can a PDF file be read and trivially turned into a Quartz 2D display list? Yes.
That's it. Okay?
What possessed you to post a link to an ass-ugly screen shot? Does this have something to do with my post?
Dude, I hope you got a fucking F on that paper. "Display PDF?" Come on, man. Let's run this down, okay?
Display PostScript worked by embedding a PostScript interpreter right into the operating system. The system would run PostScript programs, rasterizing them to the screen, to produce screen output. The system would do exactly the same thing but route the output to an attached laser printer instead of the screen to produce printed output.
Quartz 2D is not, and has never been, "Display PDF." Quartz 2D is a display-list drawing API that uses a drawing model that's very similar to PDF. Apple included code in the OS that could trivially convert any Quartz 2D display list into a valid PDF file on disk and vice versa. But Quartz 2D is not "Display PDF."
Your section on Quartz Extreme gets a lot of important stuff wrong, too. It doesn't take Quartz Extreme to put a transparent window on top of another window. That's something that the very first builds of Quartz Compositor were capable of doing. Quartz Extreme offers nothing that Quartz Compositor didn't offer; it's just that Quartz Extreme does the same job with the GPU, while Quartz Compositor did it all in the CPU.
Seriously, man, this paper is pretty terrible. Even if your assignment is finished, I hope for your own knowledge you go fill in all the gaping holes.
I find it interesting that everything you listed as either "useful" or "may lead to greater usability" are obviously cherry-picked right out of Mac OS X.
I really don't understand where the need for pretense comes from. Why don't these guys just say, "We want to make our product just like the Mac" and be done with it? I mean, it would make lists like these completely unnecessary, because the cross-reference to the list of planned features could just be a hyperlink to apple.com.
It would be wise if you take that "screenshots" link and bury it in a deep, deep hole where it can never be found.
The screen shots are fugly.
Give us a call when you're willing to pay for quality products. Until then, you can continue to suck at the hind teat.
Life's harsh. That which is free will always, always suck.
OS X, at least in its current incarnation, does X11 badly. Hopefully Jobs will find it not stylish enough and come up with a clever way to fully integrate it into Quartz.
It would be far easier for everybody who maintains an X11 program to just write a Cocoa front-end for it than it would be for Apple to somehow fold, spindle and mutilate X11 into giving Mac users a decent user experience.
If your program is well written and sufficiently factored, you should be able to put a Cocoa user interface on it in a matter of hours.
The entire OpenGL-composited interface is described using PDF
I sobbed when I read this.
I wrote a really long post correcting this widely and wrongly held opinion some weeks back. I don't feel like finding it, or being that verbose again. So short versions.
No PDF, no OpenGL.
Quartz 2D is a display-list engine, but it is not a PDF interpreter. Rather, Apple wrote some very, very simple shims that quickly translate PDF files into Quartz 2D display lists and back. Nothing in Quartz 2D is represented in PDF format unless it's sitting in a file on the disk.
The windows are drawn on the screen by a piece of software called Quartz Compositor. A couple of years ago, Apple rewrote Quartz Compositor to take advantage of hardware acceleration. They did use OpenGL for this, but only in a very limited way. Each window is represented as a texture on a surface and fed to the graphics pipeline for compositing.
Quartz is amazing. Nothing else in the world comes anywhere close to it, despite what some very confused people seem to think. But you're really selling it short when you describe it as "PDF and OpenGL." Because it isn't.
It's so unusual that you find somebody so willing to openly admit that he's just a stinkin' troll.
By definition, one party always has something to gain from not cooperating.
Please don't call it "failure to cooperate." There's no need to become a spinmeister.
I wish I could. I'm sure somewhere in the canon of English-language literature that a more useless hundred pages have been written, but I'm damned if I know what they are.
Heh. "Cooperating rationally" is a contradiction in terms.
Did he write a book called "Eon?" I read a book called "Eon" once, and I think he was the author. It was awful. It was all technical mumbo-jumbo, and not a single actual character in sight. It was bad fantasy genre fiction, incredibly disappointing.
Sure it does. Is your vision of utopia an anarchic society where nobody is responsible for anything and stuff just kinda happens?
I think a similar example is Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series. I recently finished the last book, and while I won't give away anything, the author seems to have basically written himself into a corner out of which he lacked the ability to write himself. So much imagination went into the story's front end that there was nothing left for the climax. I found it profoundly disappointing, and wished I'd stopped reading after book #6. A cliffhanger is a better way to end it than a sort-of-not-really conclusion.
I find that stories with massive premises always end up being anti-climactic. Take "Lord of the Rings" for example. Frodo dunks the ring, war over. I wished it hadn't been that simple. I wished there had been more to it. The setup didn't pay off for me.
You know what truly amuses me about this? After first arguing that Mac OS X is obsolete and being taken all the way to school by yours truly, you sat on it for two solid weeks, and the very best you could come up with is to disinter the ancient "Smalltalk" / "Simula" argument. Son, that argument was all used up back when you were still in diapers. Go find something new to feed your desperate need for a sense of superiority.
Tell you what. Why don't you run along and try to stir up your old "nibs are inferior to XML" argument with somebody who hasn't already grown sick of your unique little blend of ignorance and arrogance.
Shoo.
The basic fact remains: OS X is fundamentally 1980's technology.
.NET and its development tools are already orders of magnitude better than the junk Apple is shipping for APIs and development tools.
To the extent that we're talking about electrons rattling around, yes. There is no other interpretation under which that could possibly be considered sound, however.
If there were any question in my mind whether you have the foggiest idea what you're talking about, it would be long gone now. Dot net? Surely you must be joking. It's based on Java, for crying out loud. Talk about your technological cul de sacs.
Bull. We've built many perpetual motion machines. The only thing we haven't built yet are commercially viable ones. You can help change that with a small donation ... sir? Sir? I say, sir!
Think of what happens when nuclear technology is exported to rouge nations?
They get makeup all over it?
Actually, fusion reactors don't use anything, because we have never built one. The closest thing we have ever encountered to a working fusion reactor is the sun, and I'm sure you'd agree that it's a little beyond what's practical for us.
I have worked with users who are doing exactly what you claim people arn't doing e.g working directly with OpenOffice XML files.
The total number of people worldwide who would even know what that sentence means, much less be interested in doing it themselves, is so small as to round down to zero.
OpenOffice XML file formats are the basis of the OASIS XML Office document format
So?
Finally OpenOffice is hardly an also ran in the Office space it is the second most used product behind MS-Office
LOL. Just making up statistics isn't going to get you anywhere.
That even when a totally non-CO2 emitting, non-radioactive power source is found we still get the "OMG!! It's could cause xxx", uproar.
I think you're missing the "OMG!! It will cost hundreds of billions and we won't see a return on our investment for centuries!!" uproar. That's by far the more significant one, don't you think?
Photovoltaic trumps them all, but to convert even just our current electrical needs to photovoltaic would cost more than we've spent on imported oil since we started importing oil.
Not to mention the fact that we'd basically have to pave over New Mexico. Have you ever been out there? It's a desert, but even a desert is prettier than 40,000 square miles of solar cells.
Do people know of any serious downsides to wave energy ?
You mean apart from the fact that it's been the basis of more confidence scams than the whole Nigerian royal family?