This technique compresses 3D vertex information - not 2D video as the headline implies. It will be useful in sending high-res geometry across low-bandwidth connections. Two applications:
Streaming 3D geometry over the Internet - fully buzzword compliant, but how useful is this *really* going to be?
Sending compressed geometry to 3D cards - this is the truly interesting application, IMHO - compressed geometry may be the solution to feeding ultra-fast OpenGL cards, where bus bandwidth may soon become a limiting factor in geometry throughput
"Not to mention that it employees the newest technology like XML, DOM and JS to create an interface that is so flexible, that it is written and interpreted at runtime... Mozilla is versatile enough to write any program within it"
So? I employ proven, stable technologies like Python and Gtk+ to create an interface so flexible, that it is written and intepreted at runtime.
Take your buzzwords and shove them. I don't need another goddam virtual operating system. I need a fast, lightweight, standards-compliant web browser! Mozilla does not deliver.
the more you utilize the tremendous speed of the RAM HD, the farther behind the disk will fall
I definitely see this happening in disk space vs. backup media too. Thanks to Diamond, IBM, et al the capacity of consumer hard drives has left reliable tape backups systems in the dust... Has anyone really worked out how to back up ten or twenty workstations with 60GB of local storage each? A file server with 200GB? Without spending $10,000+ on a tape drive and all day writing to it? With the price of high-end backup devices these days, you could buy all your hard drives over again, maintain them as off-line mirrors, and still have enough $$$ left over for several GB of RAM...
Games completely take over your system, when they run. Linux, being a true multitasking system, does not allow the game to have a completely free reign over system resources, which of course makes it more stable, but also imposes a mild performance hit.
Your observation was completely true in the days of DOS and Win95, but not anymore. A game running on NT is just as isolated from the hardware as a game running on Linux (and Win98 is only slightly looser). e.g. a Win32 application must use the Win32 API to play sounds, same as Linux apps must use the/dev/dsp interface.
3D graphics is exceptional, since direct interaction with the hardware is required for acceptable speed. Both Win32 and the above X drivers provide just such a direct-rendering capability.
(essentially the X drivers let OpenGL functions act like system calls, rather than going through the X IPC mechanism like 2D drawing commands. On Windows *all* drawing is done this way)
It's all X's fault. That said, having a networked client/server GUI beats the shit out of a single-user, single desktop GUI anytime.
Not really - all the tested X drivers use direct-to-hardware rendering, same as Windows. If the apps were run through the X socket, you'd see linux at more like 5% of windows performance instead of 90% =).
That said, X is really showing its age. IMHO network transparency is neat but not necessary at all for 99.9% of users. I'm sick and tired of crappy, jittery 2D on linux - perhaps the solution is pure client-only rendering. Those that need apps over the net can use VNC.
Whew, for a second there I thought IBM was trying to push a non-XML-compliant processor. Could have really hindered its adoption in enterprise computing.
Show nVidia who's the Man...
on
ATI Radeon 256
·
· Score: 1
Assuming ATI keeps up its tradition of supporting open-source drivers, this is *great* news!
Now go and buy one of these newfangled cards - and don't forget to write nVidia a polite letter explaining why binary-only drivers just don't cut it anymore =)
I've got some advice for people like me who are upset at nVidia's proprietary practices... Bite your lips and buy the stock.
Like it or not, nVidia has been doing *much* better than its OSS-friendly competitors. I tripled my money on nVidia's meteoric rise after the X-Box announcement. Can't say the same for Matrox or ATI.
It's very clear that greed still pays... nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft are all performing very strongly, and have been all along.
So if you're pissed off at their greedy business practices, shut up, buy in, and let the profits roll. May your high returns offset the agony of closed-source drivers...
Even an OpenGL developer would be a fool not to take advantage of everything from DirectInput and its ultra-flexible device handling, to DirectSound and its accelerated sound support, and DirectDraw and its accelerated everything support. I forsee Linux oneday having an API just like this, except instead of the hard-to-program closed API that is DirectX, it will be an open (source or not, I don't care) API that will be easily portable to different POSIX (and non POSIX) systems.
It's here now and it's name is SDL. Linux. Windows. Mac. BeOS. 2D and OpenGL graphics. Sound. Input. DirectX on Windows. Fast. Lean. LGPL.
The first developer was Sam Latinga, who currently uses SDL to bring games to Linux with the other folks at Loki Software...
Why would they need bullet proof encryption on a console anyway? This just seems like a real blunder on Sony's part.
Why would they need encryption and region codes on DVD's anyway? This just seems like a real blunder on the DVD-CCA's part. They knew the risks, they had to know DeCSS could/would happen. I don't get it.
On the contrary - I think it's time the old monopoly was closed down, and we were introduced to something we haven't had in a LONG time in the consumer PC processor market - choice.
Yeah, but all the choices suck =). I don't mean to sound harsh, but there is not a compiler hacker on this planet who likes the x86 architecture... Moreover, the choice will be short-lived, as Intel starts flooding the channels with Merc, er, Itaniums. It will take a while for anyone else to implement the IA64 instruction set; until then we're stuck with (admittedly low-cost) x86 clones.
One thing that struck me about the Transmeta announcement was their huge emphasis on x86 binary compatibility. From a consumer's point of view, they're right on target - but as a hacker I'm quite sad to realize the true extent of the damage Intel's years-long monopoly wrought. We won't be free from the Ghost of 8088 for a long while...
Yes, let's have choice... Somebody start working on an Alpha, Sparc, or PowerPC clone!
This is an excellent summary of the technical challenges to digital media preservation.
But the technical issues are insignificant compared to the legal concerns - copyrights, patents, etc.
Sure, most of these forms of copy limitation do expire, but until a large amount of "digital literature" becomes public domain, nobody's even going to *try* developing a preservation system, for fear of lawsuit by irate copyright-holders.
My university's library collection totals nearly seven million books. Yet extracting information from this huge paper collection has been an incredible hassle... I would be willing to pay a significant annual fee if I could access every page in the library via a Web interface. I leave the juicy technical details to the reader's imagination. (I bet a few people with hand-held scanners and rudimentary OCR could digitize the entire library in a reasonable amount of time).
But guess what - this is never going to happen in my lifetime.
These seven million volumes of knowledge are never going to be preserved, because no library director in his/her right mind would risk slipping up and getting sued for violating a long-lasting copyright.
"Although the sample code will be released open source, the MPEG-2 driver will be released in binary format in order to maintain DVD security."
Holy sh*t! This could be the real deal... 100% legit DVD decoding on Linux! But...
The argument that DeCSS is needed to play DVD's on Linux now becomes weaker; the DVDCCA can just say "Look at ATI, they paid for a license blah blah..."
Presumably the drivers will be 99% open source, with a little blank spot where the DVD crypto stuff goes. So we'll have to rely on ATI to compile the driver... Let's hope they don't just support x86! (DVD playback on PowerPC, Alpha, or Sparc, anyone?)
"It is not the case that access control measures 'adversely affect' users in their 'ability to make non-infringing uses.'... Time Warner does not apply technological protections to its digitzed works in order to prevent the distribution of those works to the public."
LOL! Let's just pop a DVD into my Linux machine... Hmm, nope, no technological access protections here!
What about SIM WARS, a Star-Wars-meets-Titanic short created by Meni Tsirbas, Rusty Ippolito, and Andy Lesniak, the digital artists behind the "sinking simulation" for the real Titanic movie...
Is the 2:1 5/3 'mother wavelet' truly lossless for any and all inputs?
Of course not... According to information theory, you can only achieve lossless compression if there is redundancy in the data. RLE compression only works because images (especially computer artwork) tend to have rows of identical pixels. Throw it a "checkerboard" image and you'll get de-compression.
So any scheme which purports to be "lossless" will fail for some inputs...
(I'm curious whether wavelet technology will achieve better compression than say, gzip - what characteristics of full-color images makes them especially susceptible to wavelet compression, versus say, a text file or an executable binary?)
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc are the REAL reasons we're going to need good handwriting and voice recognition. These languages don't map very well into English keyboards, and ones like Chinese simply aren't suited to "typing" at all.
For English-speakers, voice recognition and OCR might seem like neat gimmicks, but they're going to be *vital* to bring information technology into places like rural China, where people are lucky to be literate in their own language, nevermind learning a foreign phonetic alphabet and awkward keyboard input methods.
I agree wholeheartedly... I just installed Windows 2000 Pro last night. Now, don't get me wrong - I despise MS as much as the next Slashdot reader and I've got 3 linux boxes at home - but DAMN this is a slick product. Let's compare how I installed my email client on the two different platforms...
Win2k - Downloaded self-extracting exe. Double-clicked. Hit enter a few times. Done.
Linux - Heard that Balsa and Eucalyptus finally got IMAP support! OK, downloading Balsa tarball. Untarred it to/tmp, typed 'configure --prefix=/usr/local.' Typed 'make' -- damn, the build is broken! Undefined symbol deep in a mass of C++. Not gonna touch that... OK, Eucalyptus... Untarred, configured. So far so good. Make. Looks like it's compiling... Doh! Can't find/usr/include/libgnomeui/gnomeui-druid.h. Jeez, I thought my GNOME RPM's were up to date. Okaay, downloading latest gnome-libs.tar.gz. Untar, configure, make, make install. Good. Back to Eucalyptus. Make. Doh! Another missing header. It's 2AM. Giving up for now. Invoking the classic IMAP client - pine. Boy, that one-dimensional text interface is just as fast as Outlook Express' multi-folder multi-account tree view. NOT.
I agree with a post I saw a week or so ago - Linux will take over the server, but it's got a long way to go to reach the desktop. And I'm talking about the power-user desktop; forget AOL-type newbies!
I think the configurable security levels are a wonderful idea for bringing newbies into Linux... One more thing - how about re-rooting the standard file manager at the user's home directory? That would get rid of a lot of confusion... ("What's this?/etcetera? Hmm, must be some extra junk. Here, I'll just get rid of it..."
I wonder what 'added functionality' will be in the professional edition on top of the entertainment edition.
According to Xi's website, the "entertainment" server can only render into a single OpenGL window, while the "pro" version allows multiple windows at once.
The "pro" server also does "hardware antialiasing" (which will soon be utilized in games, no?)
I am sick and tired of this "only for Redhat" junk. It's just a $#%# kernel module. There is NO reason to single out a single distribution for compatibility.
It's great that more hardware vendors are opening up their drivers, but I do NOT want to be locked into Redhat's distribution in order to use them...
If you read the article, you'd know that this console _will_ be running a Microsoft OS. A modified version of Windows CE.
And will be using all the DirectX APIs (Direct3D instead of OpenGL - shudder). The huge overhead all this creates is going to keep MS behind in the performance department. I'll take a pedal-to-the-metal Playstation 2 anyday...
Slashdot Mirror
So? I employ proven, stable technologies like Python and Gtk+ to create an interface so flexible, that it is written and intepreted at runtime.
Take your buzzwords and shove them. I don't need another goddam virtual operating system. I need a fast, lightweight, standards-compliant web browser! Mozilla does not deliver.
Thank you.
That's because Carmack never got around to enabling SMP on the Linux version -- r_smp doesn't do anything =)
I definitely see this happening in disk space vs. backup media too. Thanks to Diamond, IBM, et al the capacity of consumer hard drives has left reliable tape backups systems in the dust... Has anyone really worked out how to back up ten or twenty workstations with 60GB of local storage each? A file server with 200GB? Without spending $10,000+ on a tape drive and all day writing to it? With the price of high-end backup devices these days, you could buy all your hard drives over again, maintain them as off-line mirrors, and still have enough $$$ left over for several GB of RAM...
Your observation was completely true in the days of DOS and Win95, but not anymore. A game running on NT is just as isolated from the hardware as a game running on Linux (and Win98 is only slightly looser). e.g. a Win32 application must use the Win32 API to play sounds, same as Linux apps must use the
3D graphics is exceptional, since direct interaction with the hardware is required for acceptable speed. Both Win32 and the above X drivers provide just such a direct-rendering capability.
(essentially the X drivers let OpenGL functions act like system calls, rather than going through the X IPC mechanism like 2D drawing commands. On Windows *all* drawing is done this way)
Not really - all the tested X drivers use direct-to-hardware rendering, same as Windows. If the apps were run through the X socket, you'd see linux at more like 5% of windows performance instead of 90% =).
That said, X is really showing its age. IMHO network transparency is neat but not necessary at all for 99.9% of users. I'm sick and tired of crappy, jittery 2D on linux - perhaps the solution is pure client-only rendering. Those that need apps over the net can use VNC.
Whew, for a second there I thought IBM was trying to push a non-XML-compliant processor. Could have really hindered its adoption in enterprise computing.
Assuming ATI keeps up its tradition of supporting open-source drivers, this is *great* news!
Now go and buy one of these newfangled cards - and don't forget to write nVidia a polite letter explaining why binary-only drivers just don't cut it anymore =)
insmod napsterfs.o /dev/napsterfs /nap
/nap/MP3/By_Group/Korn/*.mp3 ~/mp3s /nap/hollywood/1999/The_Matrix.mpg.gz ~/vids /nap/SURPRESSED/DeCSS.tar.gz...
mount
cp
cp
tar zxvf
OK who's gonna write napsterfs.o?
I've got some advice for people like me who are upset at nVidia's proprietary practices... Bite your lips and buy the stock.
Like it or not, nVidia has been doing *much* better than its OSS-friendly competitors. I tripled my money on nVidia's meteoric rise after the X-Box announcement. Can't say the same for Matrox or ATI.
It's very clear that greed still pays... nVidia, Intel, and Microsoft are all performing very strongly, and have been all along.
So if you're pissed off at their greedy business practices, shut up, buy in, and let the profits roll. May your high returns offset the agony of closed-source drivers...
It's here now and it's name is SDL. Linux. Windows. Mac. BeOS. 2D and OpenGL graphics. Sound. Input. DirectX on Windows. Fast. Lean. LGPL.
The first developer was Sam Latinga, who currently uses SDL to bring games to Linux with the other folks at Loki Software...
Why would they need encryption and region codes on DVD's anyway? This just seems like a real blunder on the DVD-CCA's part. They knew the risks, they had to know DeCSS could/would happen. I don't get it.
Thanks 348...=)
Yeah, but all the choices suck =). I don't mean to sound harsh, but there is not a compiler hacker on this planet who likes the x86 architecture... Moreover, the choice will be short-lived, as Intel starts flooding the channels with Merc, er, Itaniums. It will take a while for anyone else to implement the IA64 instruction set; until then we're stuck with (admittedly low-cost) x86 clones.
One thing that struck me about the Transmeta announcement was their huge emphasis on x86 binary compatibility. From a consumer's point of view, they're right on target - but as a hacker I'm quite sad to realize the true extent of the damage Intel's years-long monopoly wrought. We won't be free from the Ghost of 8088 for a long while...
Yes, let's have choice... Somebody start working on an Alpha, Sparc, or PowerPC clone!
This is an excellent summary of the technical challenges to digital media preservation.
But the technical issues are insignificant compared to the legal concerns - copyrights, patents, etc.
Sure, most of these forms of copy limitation do expire, but until a large amount of "digital literature" becomes public domain, nobody's even going to *try* developing a preservation system, for fear of lawsuit by irate copyright-holders.
My university's library collection totals nearly seven million books. Yet extracting information from this huge paper collection has been an incredible hassle... I would be willing to pay a significant annual fee if I could access every page in the library via a Web interface. I leave the juicy technical details to the reader's imagination. (I bet a few people with hand-held scanners and rudimentary OCR could digitize the entire library in a reasonable amount of time).
But guess what - this is never going to happen in my lifetime.
These seven million volumes of knowledge are never going to be preserved, because no library director in his/her right mind would risk slipping up and getting sued for violating a long-lasting copyright.
Holy sh*t! This could be the real deal... 100% legit DVD decoding on Linux! But...
LOL! Let's just pop a DVD into my Linux machine... Hmm, nope, no technological access protections here!
What about SIM WARS , a Star-Wars-meets-Titanic short created by Meni Tsirbas, Rusty Ippolito, and Andy Lesniak, the digital artists behind the "sinking simulation" for the real Titanic movie...
Of course not... According to information theory, you can only achieve lossless compression if there is redundancy in the data. RLE compression only works because images (especially computer artwork) tend to have rows of identical pixels. Throw it a "checkerboard" image and you'll get de-compression.
So any scheme which purports to be "lossless" will fail for some inputs...
(I'm curious whether wavelet technology will achieve better compression than say, gzip - what characteristics of full-color images makes them especially susceptible to wavelet compression, versus say, a text file or an executable binary?)
For English-speakers, voice recognition and OCR might seem like neat gimmicks, but they're going to be *vital* to bring information technology into places like rural China, where people are lucky to be literate in their own language, nevermind learning a foreign phonetic alphabet and awkward keyboard input methods.
Check out China's up-and-coming domestic computer maker Legend at http://www.legend-holdings.co m/eng/press_centre6.html... Their basic model includes a keyboard, but more centrally - a writing tablet.
I'm glad to see Linux-based voice and writing recognition efforts. Imagine this - Linux bringing the Internet to 1+ billion more people...
I agree wholeheartedly... I just installed Windows 2000 Pro last night. Now, don't get me wrong - I despise MS as much as the next Slashdot reader and I've got 3 linux boxes at home - but DAMN this is a slick product. Let's compare how I installed my email client on the two different platforms...
/tmp, typed 'configure --prefix=/usr/local.' Typed 'make' -- damn, the build is broken! Undefined symbol deep in a mass of C++. Not gonna touch that... OK, Eucalyptus... Untarred, configured. So far so good. Make. Looks like it's compiling... Doh! Can't find /usr/include/libgnomeui/gnomeui-druid.h. Jeez, I thought my GNOME RPM's were up to date. Okaay, downloading latest gnome-libs.tar.gz. Untar, configure, make, make install. Good. Back to Eucalyptus. Make. Doh! Another missing header. It's 2AM. Giving up for now. Invoking the classic IMAP client - pine. Boy, that one-dimensional text interface is just as fast as Outlook Express' multi-folder multi-account tree view. NOT.
Win2k - Downloaded self-extracting exe. Double-clicked. Hit enter a few times. Done.
Linux - Heard that Balsa and Eucalyptus finally got IMAP support! OK, downloading Balsa tarball. Untarred it to
I agree with a post I saw a week or so ago - Linux will take over the server, but it's got a long way to go to reach the desktop. And I'm talking about the power-user desktop; forget AOL-type newbies!
I think the configurable security levels are a wonderful idea for bringing newbies into Linux... One more thing - how about re-rooting the standard file manager at the user's home directory? That would get rid of a lot of confusion... ("What's this? /etcetera? Hmm, must be some extra junk. Here, I'll just get rid of it..."
ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/sou rce/q1source.zip ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgam es/idstuff/source/q1source.zip ftp.3 dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsuppor ted/q1source.zip ftp2 .3dgamers.com/pub/3daction/00archives/quake/unsupp orted/q1source.zip
I wonder what 'added functionality' will be in the professional edition on top of the entertainment edition.
According to Xi's website, the "entertainment" server can only render into a single OpenGL window, while the "pro" version allows multiple windows at once.
The "pro" server also does "hardware antialiasing" (which will soon be utilized in games, no?)
I am sick and tired of this "only for Redhat" junk. It's just a $#%# kernel module. There is NO reason to single out a single distribution for compatibility.
It's great that more hardware vendors are opening up their drivers, but I do NOT want to be locked into Redhat's distribution in order to use them...
If you read the article, you'd know that this console _will_ be running a Microsoft OS. A modified version of Windows CE.
And will be using all the DirectX APIs (Direct3D instead of OpenGL - shudder). The huge overhead all this creates is going to keep MS behind in the performance department. I'll take a pedal-to-the-metal Playstation 2 anyday...