You obviously don't understand what slander is then. But anyhow, GNOME and KDE are, just as the author stated in his article, are just getting closer and closer to functioning like Windows. It may very well be that their users are driving this, but so what?
Listening to the public instantly means you're clueless. Since implementation always lags behind research into the better way to do something, if someone is listening to the public they must not be listening to the research, ergo, they don't know what they're talking about.
Current UI research is radically (and I mean radically) different than anything that looks like Windows.
If I went up to the guys that create GNOME and KDE and told them everything they are doing is old-fashioned and they need to scrap the entire project and create something radically different, I would bet that they would buck like wild horses against the idea (mostly because it would be a herculean effort to adapt Linux to the new methods and it would involve hiding every vestige of Linux completely)
Esperandi But admit it, you know how Linux people talk about VB programmers.
I'm completely aware of this. I am also aware that other posters have noticed his statements and, as I predicted when I wrote my original post before even reding the others, that there are a faction of Linux users vehemntly against packaging these things into Linux. I say Delphi is like Visual Basic because they serve the same purpose, to create an easy object-oriented RAD environment (and yes, VB IS object oriented, at least as much as C++ is, go read up about it if you're still arguin against VB 3).
Mark my words, saying you are a Delphi programmer on Linux will make you an outcast in the future. Linux users will laugh at you for using such a "stupid" language, and Windows Delphi programmers will insult you for using such a "stupid" OS.
Esperandi Personaly, I use what works for my purpose and don't pay heed to what other people say, but I'm good at predicting it.
India isn't a third-world country first off. Second off, when the British left, how did India rise? By itself!
I don't see how India is a good argument against my viewpoint... if you find a country full of people who for hundreds of years did nothing but plant crops with futility, inventing only the basic tools, and then has their entire lifestyle subsidized by rich people from other countries, and then gets up and turns their country into a superpower, I'll listen. But, not surprisingly, there are no such countries. Not evne one. Every country that gets such subsidies from the rest of the world gets more and more entrenched in poverty and it has never been any different.
In societies where the government does this, accessing the Internet will merely get the citizens killed. And obviously, i was not talking about people to try to advance themselves and have seen an airplane in their lifetime. I'm talking about the people in Ethiopia and other such impoverished countries who are supported by the UN and poisonous charitable donations. Notice I also never said they were lazy. They are not, necessarily, they are simply apathetic about progress. And people who are apathetic about progress should not be helped to progress. People who are not apathetic about progress would reject your help and do it themselves.
Esperandi Name a significant inventor that created his thing of genius while receiving complete subsidization. There aren't any, and that's not a coincidence.
In the article, the guy mention that Microsoft wouldn't let Borland/Inprise package the Delphi VCLs into Windows itself, but he also says that Linux isn't Windows.
Is this speculation on his part? Does he realize that the Linux community will most likely not simply say "no, thanks" but instead firebomb their headquarters if they even think of integrating something that seems so close to Visual Basic?
Its not that they don't know or don't care, its mostly because they're rampant conformists. If someone came out with a VB development environment for Linux, can you imagine the magnitude of hatred that would be brought agianst him?
In addition to that, if you even consider telling comeone that calling copy cp instead of copy is stupid, their eyes will turn red an they will most likely slay you in cold blood. To denounce the absolutely horrid and disgusting UI of Linux is to spit on their holy ground, the thing where they know the rules and they can stick to them and get Slashdot awards and junk.
It is also the reason Linux isn't an innovator and probably never will be. If it is, it will be incremental and no large revolutions will come of it.
Esperandi There are some sane Linux users out there but sadly, they're just that, users.
You are completely wrong about my level of understanding. I know exactly what journaling is and I know that you simpyl can't conceive of my idas. I'm telling you that referring to a file by its inode, or its filename, or its date, or its permission bits, is a very stupid idea. This is embedded in the filesystem. It needs changed. This is not one of those tried and true ideas that has stood the test of time. All the code to multitask and prevent deadlock, keep that, it works. A lot of the code can be kept, but the filesystem absolutely needs changed. Why? because there won't BE files any more. Like I said in my post, these ideas are *NOT* meant to be an application that runs on the system, it is meant to be THE system. If you implemented something like this on any filesystem that exists today, it would be so messy, hacked, and slow that people wouldn't even begin to conceive of the benefits. And its not just "one guy" that disliked it, its millions and millions of people. You know, the 99% of computer users that aren't using Linux. Those people. They don't want to have to learn a new language where "cp" means copy. In my system, there are no copies. There are no files. There is no hierarchy. How you could even consider keeping any of Linux when doing this (BTW I recommend doing this to Linux because its easy to mess with and much more flexible since there is no megacorp backing it, if Linux doesn't want to even try to explore something new because they love their dear, holy, obtuse and flat out BAD user interface, fine, but don't be surprised when Microsoft scoops you again and you find yourself copying to catch up and never once in your entire existence innovating anything)? (wow, big parenthetical comment;) What're you going to do with md when there are no directories? What are you going to do with fsck when there are no blocks or nodes to order? This is a different system, it is not an iterative change. It is similar to the guy who prosed getting rid of all the command line stuff and going to a graphical interface. No one was smart enough then to do it right so no one won overwhelmingly (Xerox dropped the ball completely, Apple priced it too high, Microsoft had already won with DOS). Want Linux to ever win overwhelingly? Then stop doing the Linux that isn't winning and do something different. If the product that gets developed is no good, so what? its just a hobby, right? Your time is worthless, right? Those are the tenets of Open Source, you try it and a lot of people get to pick it apart. In the end, the user is the one that matters, because the progammers its just his worthless hobby time getting eaten up.
Esperandi But its okay, put your blinders on, keep walking towards the cliff.
No, everyone *COULD* generally benefit from the free availability of information. As i read the comments on this thread one this is abundantly clear. Everyone believes that the people in third world countries just magically appeared there 10 years ago or so and they've been struggling like mad to advance as societies. This isn't true. They've languished in the same ridiculous poverty level for centuries of their own free will and volition. If you sat someone down, told them in their native tongue that they could use this thing to get better crop yields, learn how to irrigate, learn how to heal the sick, and all that, the person would get up, walk away, and go back to banging clothes on a rock. They're not poor because someone is holding them down, they're down because they're apathetic about advancing. Everyone started out in the same place on earth, some people moved here, some moved there. They scattered all over and clumped in tribes and groups. Those groups in the third world are the groups that had no interest in improving their lives, why should anyone break their backs to hold them up? The only thing you could possibly do is breed in them a new kind of dependance (they've already stopped trying to fight nature and grow food, they just wait for care packages from the UN).
short question... Do you believe that if the people tear down land lines to use the copper and sacrifice the mass communication offered by the Internet carried over the lines that they still deserve Internet access?
LOL, do you have ANY concept of what made these people third world countries in the first place?!
If they had the kind of motivation and desire to live that you do, they wouldn't have been/be starving in the streets. They wouldn't have missed the industrial revolution completely. The people wouldn't have went centuries upon centuries without ever discovering simple things like irrigation!
No, if you lived in a third world country you'd be more interested in waiting on a care package from the United States or from the UN. Third World citizens no longer understand the need to fight for life, the need to go out and get a job and get food to feed their families. They just know that food "comes". Where it comes from, how it gets there, how long it will continue, they have no clue. All they know is that the old way of the world when you used to have to exert effort to survive is gone.
So tell me, how would those people get the initiative to really work to get Internet access?
I wish everyone commenting on this thread had read your post... they seem to all believe that unless we bail people out, they'll never survive and get net access on their own. El Salvador is obviously a proof that the bleeding hearts who want to hand everything to people on a silver platter are dead wrong.
Esperandi Don't worry about the tariffs, if the textiles in El Salvador are of quality, I am certain there are other buyers and that the United States is missing out on the textiles as much as El Salvador is missing out on the income.
Instead of a fictional story, I'll give you a thing that actually happened.
There was a big corporation that made stamped metal pieces for another company. They had plants all over the US, Canada, and some in Europe. Well, they put one in South America. For some reason, the factory in South America was only producing half of what the other plants were doing, so they sent a well-meaning young executive down there to investigate. Well, he found that the people simply weren't working as efficiently or as quickly as they were in the other plants. In order to remedy this he came up with the idea of paying them piecemeal, instead of getting paid per hour, they got paid for the amount of metal pieces they stamped. He thought this was a great way to empower the workers and increase productivity. He was very right about empowering the workers, but productivity didn't increase at all. Do you know why? If you knew the mindset of undeveloped people, you would know the answer. Instead of working all week and working hard, they worked hard for 3 days and got paid as much as they used to get paid in a week.
The moral of the story is that you don't help people when they get in trouble. You help them when they need it. There is a paradox in helping other third world countries. We have been sending millions of dollars of aid per year to many third world countries. Have they picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and advanced? No, they require even MORE assistance and if we were to hit an economic catastrophe and not be able to feed them, they would die. They have become completely dependant.
One of the most evil things you can do to a person is make them dependant upon you. So don't give them Internet access, let them earn it. Don't give them factories, let them earn it. These people *CAN* build factories and start ISPs if we give them incentive, but not if we take care of all their needs and tell them they're great just like they are.
We are not lucky. We have provided a system in which the inventors in our society can grow up and invent things, sell them, and gain more resources to invent even greater things. because of this we have wires running all over the globe, we have the Internet, we have computers, we have microwaves and Tang. The reason these other countries do not have such things are not because we're smarter or anything (although we do have more opportunity to experience a wider range of technology simply because it is everywhere), it's because of the systems they're living with. For instance, China. China has 1 billion people and the majority of their country is still egrarian. Why? Beaucse when someone rises up and shows that they are more able than the person next two them they are either reigned by the government and used for the benefit of the empowered group of people or they are told that everyone is equal, no one is better than any other, if he has a burst of energy he should use it to benefit his "fellow man" and all that crap. In America and Canada and other capitalist societies when people see someone doing something great they say "Kick ass man, keep going, I want to buy that when you're done, maybe I'll even invest in you!".
Very different worlds, and it was not luck. Remember your history, America was the first country founded on ideals and not on happenstance of geographic location, religious separatism, etc...
Most of the world that is not yet on the Internet is balkanized. Balkanization is what happens when one country says "stuff that comes from our country is better than stuff that comes from any other" or "We're a better people because we were born here or our grandparents were born over there" and such like that. Like the Balkans, the constantly warrior superpatriot morons.
The countries that are keeping the Internet out right now are countries keeping it out not so much because of the freedom of speech or information issue (though that is a factor) but mostly because they don't want people to use it and say "Wow, they invented this in the USA and the majority of the sites on here are hosted in the USA, the USA must be a really neat place!". Moreover, they don't want people to see that great inventions like the Internet are the result of capitalism. Look at a list of the countries in which accessing the Internet is punishable by death or imprisonment. They're all either communist or socialist. Yes, they preach that everyone should share everything, but behind that sermon is a big country daddy deciding what the kids of the country are big enough to handle, and he guesses it isn't the Internet because of the capitalism issue...
Esperandi Studies show the rich consistently outearn the poor.
This card that ATI is making is wondrous. I mean, stunning. However, until a few days ago I owned an ATI All In Wonder Pro. I didn't get it for its 3D because I knew it sucked, i got it for the video capture capabilities which it had in abundance. Only a dedicated Videum card I used to have performed better. I soon found out that ATI has absolutely horrid drivers. I mean, this card never worked right even when I got super bleeding edge beta drivers (they were beter than the released ones and more stable I don't know why they weren't public, they gave me a secret URL, forbade me from dispensing it, etc). I would capture a video using their proprietry VCR2 codec (more efficient codec than I had ever seen or have ever yet seen!) and then go to edit it. Playing the video would work, but seeking in any sense would crash the drivers. To this day (and the all in wonder pro is 2 or 3 years old) they have not fixed the problem.
I honestly hope that they support this card well and do a good job with the drivers because even if you've got the best card, its only as good as its drivers.
Another problem I had with this article along the same lines is his view (as is POVRays current view, but this is fixed in Megapov and will hopefully make it into the next release) that bump-mapping is the same as surface-deforming textures. Sure, it might look the same on a screenshot of a bumpy pear sitting on some blistering wood (the screenshot on sharkyextreme), but when you get into a game, you gotta keep the bumps really small. Imagine you've got the wall of a dungeon. You think it'd be easier to make a plasma-fractal generated bump map instead of breaking the triangles on every single section of the wall (which I'm planning on doing in an upcoming game;)... well, when your users get into the game and start walking down this really kickass-looking craggy hallway, they're going to notice something. The crags aren't there. They can walk right through them. Which would be laughed at and viewed as very annoying by gameplayers. (it obscures your view and its ethereal?!) If REAL geometry-deforming maps were able to be applied, collision detection could work, it would keep the polygon count down and the game would be wickedly fast... but POVRay help off for such a long time, I fear if every card supports this fake bump-mapping (it takes the light and just moves the point and texture maps it a little different based on the new virtual position) that game developers will get happy with it and never realize how versatile real surface deforming textures can be... Combine it with a separate collision detection engine and we could have some amazingly realistic games...
This was queitly done recently, but in the most recent geForce256 drivers, Fullscreen AA can be enabled with a little registry twiddling. From what I read there is a "performance hit" but I'm not sure how significant it is...
If collision detection was done on a separate chip on the card and not in the main CPU, it could be very helpful. You send the object you want to test and its potential positon relative to a "reference point" in the object and the card replies with a 1-bit yes or no, maybe more info, but I think that'd be enough. This way the card would never stall. Also, the collision detection wouldn't be one frame behind. The separate chip would do a lookup into the same memory the main CPU is using but wouldn't actually be testing based on that but the coordinates you send. Already matrices are accelerated (ATI is doing it in their new card with their bump mapping) in hardware, and that's all this would be would be a transformation matrix being applied and then a test of collision. I think it could work...
Wile all your suggestions are good, i think a rel photo-realistic engine will be quite different. it will basically be POVRay on a chip or perhaps renderman since I think the most appropriate thing would be to forget bump-mapping and go with a shading language that actually deforms the geometry of the object and then does true ray-tracing.
What comes after that? Well, I have to fight hard to keep my eretion down when thinking of this... Hardware-based realtime radiosity. *uNF*
BTW, the idea of hardware-based collision detection... I hope to GAWD that the hardware manufacturers out there, nVidia in particular (cause I haven't read what they're doing after the geForce256, everyone else has something in the public works) read your post. It would be most gorgeous and possible to have such a thing...
Free PC with built-in hardware ID number (no, that hasn't gone away just because people aren't pissed off about it any more) plus free Internet access. Wow, sounds like the perfect scenario for realworld testing of meterware (pay-per-use software) which was the whole point of the ID number anyways.
Oh, and BTW, meterware is unbeatable. It is the only method that I've ever been able to imagine that is unbreakable (unless you go to court and claim it wasn't you using the system). Picture this: You're going to run Word2k (it would surprise you that an Intel employee was using Windows? Wintel remember) and Word2k needs to call a function SlowDown(). Dynamic linking checks and finds out where SlowDown() is. Oh, it's a COM object on the microsoft.com server. Connect to microsoft.com and send the parameters or whatever and then get the result... if that SlowDown() function is system-critical, this method is foolproof barring someone stealing the DLL or whatever from microsoft.com's server, hacking the program to use it locally, etc.
So, besides getting the net access and PC, they happen to get any up-and-coming software pre-installed?
"Whatever your 'magical' method or algorithm would be, it is *mathematicallly impossible* to have an algorithm that works on arbitrary files of say N bits and compresses each of them to N-1 or less bits. "
I'm going to have to spell this out very carefully being as its the third time I have said it and no one seems to comprehend it. NO DUH! I have never claimed that any technique I may come up with or anyone else might come up with would be such a universal compressor. I didn't even say in my original response that the jumps in compression would be in universal compressors. You are right that no compression algorithm can be guaranteed to, say, reduce a file to exactly half of its original size. I've never thought, stated, or insinuated anything even remotely along those lines.
I'm surprised you claim that its mathematically impossible to create artificial repetition in order to improve compression considring several things. Number one, I gave an example that proves that it is possible, at least in a simple way. Number two, as per a couple replies to an earlier post of mine in this thread (whihc you must not have read), PNG and bzip2 do exactly this. So apparently they're using a different set of mathematics than you.
While it may be true that the average person sees that text files get real small with zipping and the average person takes about an hour to convince them that they can't recursively zip a file into 1 byte, I would think from my previous discussions mentioning various algorithms that it would become obvious that I'm quite well-versed in data compression (not in theoretical entropy sustaining junk, in real taking X number of bits and figuring a way to reconstruct them from a smaller set of bits).
The advances in data compression will come like MP3 did (already a disproof that there will be no great advances, audio compression before MP3 was either inefficient or extremely lossy), taking advantage of the peculiarities of the data being compressed. Video compression still has a lot of room for improvement, and that improvement will be developed by streaming media companies. 3D point data, texturing files, text, etc... there are thousands of kinds of files. In the future there'll be one compression program that uses hundreds or thousands of algorithms to deal with them. it might even use the same extension for its files to further confuse people...
Esperandi The future is going to be fun. Everything is always getting better. Anyone who tells you the past was better is wrong.
Well, if you want to get good user feedback about how intuitive an interface is whether its Open Source or not, you use the same method. You find someone who has never used any computer of any kind before and you have them use it and listen to their responses.
The problem with this in the Linux realm is that when a grandma sits down and comes back the next day (you can NOT help them in any way shape or form if you're trying to determine how intuitive it is, else it becomes a test of how good they are at listening to you) and tells you she absolutely hates everything about Linux, the testers tend to slay the grandmother in cold blood for speaking out against the holy relic Linux.
This is not a troll, it is a call to reality. if you wish to continue to improve something you need to know when it is time to destroy what you have and start over. Yes, you love your window manager, but to improve it sometimes you have to destroy it and ignore everything you liked about it and just go down a new path. The guy that answered questions on here a week or so ago, the user interface expert, he had some really great ideas. And he hated Linux. So why not take his ideas, destroy everything of Linux that contradicts it, and see if maybe what comes out on the other end is better overall?
Thinking about his ideas, I think it really is a complete tear-down and re-build sort of project. Not even the filesystem can be spared. Journaling? Who gives a flip, in his new concept of using computers (I hate the word paradigm) journaling is stupid. So scrap it. Start over. Quit referring to file by filenames and extensions and a bitfield of permissions. Don't look at those things in a new way, get rid of the old way! Store files based on arbitrary category names, you have a bunch of song files, well, call them song files then. You boot up and you want to look for that song file you have that was made sometime in the 60s by the guy whose name started with B? The machine should not provide this kind of functionality in an application, this should *BE* the system. And no, you can't search by regular expressions, give it up. What about progams and such? Container categories (like song is a category) would cover this, holding the executable stuff. Well, what if someone on the Internet calls their files "music" files instead of "song" files? Easy, when you go to download one of em, it tells you the new file has a "music" flag on it. You can either add "music" as a recognizable trait for files in your system, or create a translation system for your system that will always read "music" as "song". Community standards will emerge, but if they don't it doesn't matter, maps will take care of it. No more systems programming. Everything will be going through this very high level system. You don't open a file, you try to open a class of files or a property within the same container as the program.
Hell, throw in some of Ted Nielsen's ideas which boil down to hyperlinking between portions of a document. Defining document portions shouldn't be that tough and it makes it all possible (I haven't read too deeply into his stuff, but from what I've read this seems as if it would have solved his problems).
For once in your life, I beg of you Open Source world, innovate! Let go of the archaic, obscure Unix past that sucked donkey balls for UI and do something new. You will never (and I mean never) compete for the home desktop unless you do so. If you eventually do, it will only be because you finally became as bloated as Windows. Everyone bitches because Windows ran on top of DOS... hello? X runs on top of Linux, wake up!
Esperandi Seriously and honestly, this is not a troll, and Open Source developers need to read it.
Pretty cool site, and I liked your review (I just learned last night that a burglar alarm would be a good idea and found that my guy being employed as a cop (well a rent-a-cop anyway) really doesn't help)... since I liked it, let me tear the place apart;) It's all constructive criticism, take it in the spirit in which it is given... Anti-alias that logo. Makes your site look amateur and clashes with the more professional aspects of your site. Also, Anti-alias the "GP Reviews" logo (any others on your site where you can see the jaggies on the diagonal lines). I like your index of reviews. Conscise and helpful, don't change a thing. Spruce up your background though. Either go straight black in the background or get a new starfield, the one right now just looks like a dirty black background with dots every once in awhie... If you go all-black I'd recommend replacing your horizontal line (under the "Browse" and "Search" buttons) with a graphic that attaches to the left-hand side menu frame (I hope the meaning of that is clear).
When I like something, I like to try to improve it, just ignore me if you like it better the way it is;)
What does the #1 chipmaker title entail? I noticed the article referred to Intel as such... is it because Intel sells more chips, is more popular in the minds of empty-brained managerial types? Its obviously no longer because they lead the industry in producing the highest performing chips and hasn't been for several months. I'm just wondering what AMD needs to do in order to wrest this title from Intel...
Or is it a totally unofficial definition-less title the author bestows on Intel in an attempt to give some deep loving tongue to their ass?
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously don't understand what slander is then. But anyhow, GNOME and KDE are, just as the author stated in his article, are just getting closer and closer to functioning like Windows. It may very well be that their users are driving this, but so what?
Listening to the public instantly means you're clueless. Since implementation always lags behind research into the better way to do something, if someone is listening to the public they must not be listening to the research, ergo, they don't know what they're talking about.
Current UI research is radically (and I mean radically) different than anything that looks like Windows.
If I went up to the guys that create GNOME and KDE and told them everything they are doing is old-fashioned and they need to scrap the entire project and create something radically different, I would bet that they would buck like wild horses against the idea (mostly because it would be a herculean effort to adapt Linux to the new methods and it would involve hiding every vestige of Linux completely)
Esperandi
But admit it, you know how Linux people talk about VB programmers.
I'm completely aware of this. I am also aware that other posters have noticed his statements and, as I predicted when I wrote my original post before even reding the others, that there are a faction of Linux users vehemntly against packaging these things into Linux. I say Delphi is like Visual Basic because they serve the same purpose, to create an easy object-oriented RAD environment (and yes, VB IS object oriented, at least as much as C++ is, go read up about it if you're still arguin against VB 3).
Mark my words, saying you are a Delphi programmer on Linux will make you an outcast in the future. Linux users will laugh at you for using such a "stupid" language, and Windows Delphi programmers will insult you for using such a "stupid" OS.
Esperandi
Personaly, I use what works for my purpose and don't pay heed to what other people say, but I'm good at predicting it.
India isn't a third-world country first off. Second off, when the British left, how did India rise? By itself!
I don't see how India is a good argument against my viewpoint... if you find a country full of people who for hundreds of years did nothing but plant crops with futility, inventing only the basic tools, and then has their entire lifestyle subsidized by rich people from other countries, and then gets up and turns their country into a superpower, I'll listen. But, not surprisingly, there are no such countries. Not evne one. Every country that gets such subsidies from the rest of the world gets more and more entrenched in poverty and it has never been any different.
Esperandi
In societies where the government does this, accessing the Internet will merely get the citizens killed. And obviously, i was not talking about people to try to advance themselves and have seen an airplane in their lifetime. I'm talking about the people in Ethiopia and other such impoverished countries who are supported by the UN and poisonous charitable donations. Notice I also never said they were lazy. They are not, necessarily, they are simply apathetic about progress. And people who are apathetic about progress should not be helped to progress. People who are not apathetic about progress would reject your help and do it themselves.
Esperandi
Name a significant inventor that created his thing of genius while receiving complete subsidization. There aren't any, and that's not a coincidence.
In the article, the guy mention that Microsoft wouldn't let Borland/Inprise package the Delphi VCLs into Windows itself, but he also says that Linux isn't Windows.
Is this speculation on his part? Does he realize that the Linux community will most likely not simply say "no, thanks" but instead firebomb their headquarters if they even think of integrating something that seems so close to Visual Basic?
Esperandi
Its not that they don't know or don't care, its mostly because they're rampant conformists. If someone came out with a VB development environment for Linux, can you imagine the magnitude of hatred that would be brought agianst him?
In addition to that, if you even consider telling comeone that calling copy cp instead of copy is stupid, their eyes will turn red an they will most likely slay you in cold blood. To denounce the absolutely horrid and disgusting UI of Linux is to spit on their holy ground, the thing where they know the rules and they can stick to them and get Slashdot awards and junk.
It is also the reason Linux isn't an innovator and probably never will be. If it is, it will be incremental and no large revolutions will come of it.
Esperandi
There are some sane Linux users out there but sadly, they're just that, users.
You are completely wrong about my level of understanding. I know exactly what journaling is and I know that you simpyl can't conceive of my idas. I'm telling you that referring to a file by its inode, or its filename, or its date, or its permission bits, is a very stupid idea. This is embedded in the filesystem. It needs changed. This is not one of those tried and true ideas that has stood the test of time. All the code to multitask and prevent deadlock, keep that, it works. A lot of the code can be kept, but the filesystem absolutely needs changed. Why? because there won't BE files any more. Like I said in my post, these ideas are *NOT* meant to be an application that runs on the system, it is meant to be THE system. If you implemented something like this on any filesystem that exists today, it would be so messy, hacked, and slow that people wouldn't even begin to conceive of the benefits. And its not just "one guy" that disliked it, its millions and millions of people. You know, the 99% of computer users that aren't using Linux. Those people. They don't want to have to learn a new language where "cp" means copy. In my system, there are no copies. There are no files. There is no hierarchy. How you could even consider keeping any of Linux when doing this (BTW I recommend doing this to Linux because its easy to mess with and much more flexible since there is no megacorp backing it, if Linux doesn't want to even try to explore something new because they love their dear, holy, obtuse and flat out BAD user interface, fine, but don't be surprised when Microsoft scoops you again and you find yourself copying to catch up and never once in your entire existence innovating anything)? (wow, big parenthetical comment ;) What're you going to do with md when there are no directories? What are you going to do with fsck when there are no blocks or nodes to order? This is a different system, it is not an iterative change. It is similar to the guy who prosed getting rid of all the command line stuff and going to a graphical interface. No one was smart enough then to do it right so no one won overwhelmingly (Xerox dropped the ball completely, Apple priced it too high, Microsoft had already won with DOS). Want Linux to ever win overwhelingly? Then stop doing the Linux that isn't winning and do something different. If the product that gets developed is no good, so what? its just a hobby, right? Your time is worthless, right? Those are the tenets of Open Source, you try it and a lot of people get to pick it apart. In the end, the user is the one that matters, because the progammers its just his worthless hobby time getting eaten up.
Esperandi
But its okay, put your blinders on, keep walking towards the cliff.
No, everyone *COULD* generally benefit from the free availability of information. As i read the comments on this thread one this is abundantly clear. Everyone believes that the people in third world countries just magically appeared there 10 years ago or so and they've been struggling like mad to advance as societies. This isn't true. They've languished in the same ridiculous poverty level for centuries of their own free will and volition. If you sat someone down, told them in their native tongue that they could use this thing to get better crop yields, learn how to irrigate, learn how to heal the sick, and all that, the person would get up, walk away, and go back to banging clothes on a rock. They're not poor because someone is holding them down, they're down because they're apathetic about advancing. Everyone started out in the same place on earth, some people moved here, some moved there. They scattered all over and clumped in tribes and groups. Those groups in the third world are the groups that had no interest in improving their lives, why should anyone break their backs to hold them up? The only thing you could possibly do is breed in them a new kind of dependance (they've already stopped trying to fight nature and grow food, they just wait for care packages from the UN).
Esperandi
short question...
Do you believe that if the people tear down land lines to use the copper and sacrifice the mass communication offered by the Internet carried over the lines that they still deserve Internet access?
Esperandi
LOL, do you have ANY concept of what made these people third world countries in the first place?!
If they had the kind of motivation and desire to live that you do, they wouldn't have been/be starving in the streets. They wouldn't have missed the industrial revolution completely. The people wouldn't have went centuries upon centuries without ever discovering simple things like irrigation!
Esperandi
No, if you lived in a third world country you'd be more interested in waiting on a care package from the United States or from the UN. Third World citizens no longer understand the need to fight for life, the need to go out and get a job and get food to feed their families. They just know that food "comes". Where it comes from, how it gets there, how long it will continue, they have no clue. All they know is that the old way of the world when you used to have to exert effort to survive is gone.
So tell me, how would those people get the initiative to really work to get Internet access?
Esperandi
I wish everyone commenting on this thread had read your post... they seem to all believe that unless we bail people out, they'll never survive and get net access on their own. El Salvador is obviously a proof that the bleeding hearts who want to hand everything to people on a silver platter are dead wrong.
Esperandi
Don't worry about the tariffs, if the textiles in El Salvador are of quality, I am certain there are other buyers and that the United States is missing out on the textiles as much as El Salvador is missing out on the income.
Instead of a fictional story, I'll give you a thing that actually happened.
There was a big corporation that made stamped metal pieces for another company. They had plants all over the US, Canada, and some in Europe. Well, they put one in South America. For some reason, the factory in South America was only producing half of what the other plants were doing, so they sent a well-meaning young executive down there to investigate. Well, he found that the people simply weren't working as efficiently or as quickly as they were in the other plants. In order to remedy this he came up with the idea of paying them piecemeal, instead of getting paid per hour, they got paid for the amount of metal pieces they stamped. He thought this was a great way to empower the workers and increase productivity. He was very right about empowering the workers, but productivity didn't increase at all. Do you know why? If you knew the mindset of undeveloped people, you would know the answer. Instead of working all week and working hard, they worked hard for 3 days and got paid as much as they used to get paid in a week.
The moral of the story is that you don't help people when they get in trouble. You help them when they need it. There is a paradox in helping other third world countries. We have been sending millions of dollars of aid per year to many third world countries. Have they picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and advanced? No, they require even MORE assistance and if we were to hit an economic catastrophe and not be able to feed them, they would die. They have become completely dependant.
One of the most evil things you can do to a person is make them dependant upon you. So don't give them Internet access, let them earn it. Don't give them factories, let them earn it. These people *CAN* build factories and start ISPs if we give them incentive, but not if we take care of all their needs and tell them they're great just like they are.
Esperandi
We are not lucky. We have provided a system in which the inventors in our society can grow up and invent things, sell them, and gain more resources to invent even greater things. because of this we have wires running all over the globe, we have the Internet, we have computers, we have microwaves and Tang. The reason these other countries do not have such things are not because we're smarter or anything (although we do have more opportunity to experience a wider range of technology simply because it is everywhere), it's because of the systems they're living with. For instance, China. China has 1 billion people and the majority of their country is still egrarian. Why? Beaucse when someone rises up and shows that they are more able than the person next two them they are either reigned by the government and used for the benefit of the empowered group of people or they are told that everyone is equal, no one is better than any other, if he has a burst of energy he should use it to benefit his "fellow man" and all that crap. In America and Canada and other capitalist societies when people see someone doing something great they say "Kick ass man, keep going, I want to buy that when you're done, maybe I'll even invest in you!".
Very different worlds, and it was not luck. Remember your history, America was the first country founded on ideals and not on happenstance of geographic location, religious separatism, etc...
Esperandi
Most of the world that is not yet on the Internet is balkanized. Balkanization is what happens when one country says "stuff that comes from our country is better than stuff that comes from any other" or "We're a better people because we were born here or our grandparents were born over there" and such like that. Like the Balkans, the constantly warrior superpatriot morons.
The countries that are keeping the Internet out right now are countries keeping it out not so much because of the freedom of speech or information issue (though that is a factor) but mostly because they don't want people to use it and say "Wow, they invented this in the USA and the majority of the sites on here are hosted in the USA, the USA must be a really neat place!". Moreover, they don't want people to see that great inventions like the Internet are the result of capitalism. Look at a list of the countries in which accessing the Internet is punishable by death or imprisonment. They're all either communist or socialist. Yes, they preach that everyone should share everything, but behind that sermon is a big country daddy deciding what the kids of the country are big enough to handle, and he guesses it isn't the Internet because of the capitalism issue...
Esperandi
Studies show the rich consistently outearn the poor.
This card that ATI is making is wondrous. I mean, stunning. However, until a few days ago I owned an ATI All In Wonder Pro. I didn't get it for its 3D because I knew it sucked, i got it for the video capture capabilities which it had in abundance. Only a dedicated Videum card I used to have performed better. I soon found out that ATI has absolutely horrid drivers. I mean, this card never worked right even when I got super bleeding edge beta drivers (they were beter than the released ones and more stable I don't know why they weren't public, they gave me a secret URL, forbade me from dispensing it, etc). I would capture a video using their proprietry VCR2 codec (more efficient codec than I had ever seen or have ever yet seen!) and then go to edit it. Playing the video would work, but seeking in any sense would crash the drivers. To this day (and the all in wonder pro is 2 or 3 years old) they have not fixed the problem.
I honestly hope that they support this card well and do a good job with the drivers because even if you've got the best card, its only as good as its drivers.
Esperandi
Another problem I had with this article along the same lines is his view (as is POVRays current view, but this is fixed in Megapov and will hopefully make it into the next release) that bump-mapping is the same as surface-deforming textures. Sure, it might look the same on a screenshot of a bumpy pear sitting on some blistering wood (the screenshot on sharkyextreme), but when you get into a game, you gotta keep the bumps really small. Imagine you've got the wall of a dungeon. You think it'd be easier to make a plasma-fractal generated bump map instead of breaking the triangles on every single section of the wall (which I'm planning on doing in an upcoming game ;)... well, when your users get into the game and start walking down this really kickass-looking craggy hallway, they're going to notice something. The crags aren't there. They can walk right through them. Which would be laughed at and viewed as very annoying by gameplayers. (it obscures your view and its ethereal?!) If REAL geometry-deforming maps were able to be applied, collision detection could work, it would keep the polygon count down and the game would be wickedly fast... but POVRay help off for such a long time, I fear if every card supports this fake bump-mapping (it takes the light and just moves the point and texture maps it a little different based on the new virtual position) that game developers will get happy with it and never realize how versatile real surface deforming textures can be... Combine it with a separate collision detection engine and we could have some amazingly realistic games...
Esperandi
This was queitly done recently, but in the most recent geForce256 drivers, Fullscreen AA can be enabled with a little registry twiddling. From what I read there is a "performance hit" but I'm not sure how significant it is...
Esperandi
If collision detection was done on a separate chip on the card and not in the main CPU, it could be very helpful. You send the object you want to test and its potential positon relative to a "reference point" in the object and the card replies with a 1-bit yes or no, maybe more info, but I think that'd be enough. This way the card would never stall. Also, the collision detection wouldn't be one frame behind. The separate chip would do a lookup into the same memory the main CPU is using but wouldn't actually be testing based on that but the coordinates you send. Already matrices are accelerated (ATI is doing it in their new card with their bump mapping) in hardware, and that's all this would be would be a transformation matrix being applied and then a test of collision. I think it could work...
Esperandi
Wile all your suggestions are good, i think a rel photo-realistic engine will be quite different. it will basically be POVRay on a chip or perhaps renderman since I think the most appropriate thing would be to forget bump-mapping and go with a shading language that actually deforms the geometry of the object and then does true ray-tracing.
What comes after that? Well, I have to fight hard to keep my eretion down when thinking of this... Hardware-based realtime radiosity. *uNF*
BTW, the idea of hardware-based collision detection... I hope to GAWD that the hardware manufacturers out there, nVidia in particular (cause I haven't read what they're doing after the geForce256, everyone else has something in the public works) read your post. It would be most gorgeous and possible to have such a thing...
Esperandi
Free PC with built-in hardware ID number (no, that hasn't gone away just because people aren't pissed off about it any more) plus free Internet access. Wow, sounds like the perfect scenario for realworld testing of meterware (pay-per-use software) which was the whole point of the ID number anyways.
Oh, and BTW, meterware is unbeatable. It is the only method that I've ever been able to imagine that is unbreakable (unless you go to court and claim it wasn't you using the system). Picture this: You're going to run Word2k (it would surprise you that an Intel employee was using Windows? Wintel remember) and Word2k needs to call a function SlowDown(). Dynamic linking checks and finds out where SlowDown() is. Oh, it's a COM object on the microsoft.com server. Connect to microsoft.com and send the parameters or whatever and then get the result... if that SlowDown() function is system-critical, this method is foolproof barring someone stealing the DLL or whatever from microsoft.com's server, hacking the program to use it locally, etc.
So, besides getting the net access and PC, they happen to get any up-and-coming software pre-installed?
Esperandi
"Whatever your 'magical' method or algorithm would be, it is *mathematicallly impossible* to have an algorithm that works on arbitrary files of say N bits and compresses each of them to N-1 or less bits. "
I'm going to have to spell this out very carefully being as its the third time I have said it and no one seems to comprehend it. NO DUH! I have never claimed that any technique I may come up with or anyone else might come up with would be such a universal compressor. I didn't even say in my original response that the jumps in compression would be in universal compressors. You are right that no compression algorithm can be guaranteed to, say, reduce a file to exactly half of its original size. I've never thought, stated, or insinuated anything even remotely along those lines.
I'm surprised you claim that its mathematically impossible to create artificial repetition in order to improve compression considring several things. Number one, I gave an example that proves that it is possible, at least in a simple way. Number two, as per a couple replies to an earlier post of mine in this thread (whihc you must not have read), PNG and bzip2 do exactly this. So apparently they're using a different set of mathematics than you.
While it may be true that the average person sees that text files get real small with zipping and the average person takes about an hour to convince them that they can't recursively zip a file into 1 byte, I would think from my previous discussions mentioning various algorithms that it would become obvious that I'm quite well-versed in data compression (not in theoretical entropy sustaining junk, in real taking X number of bits and figuring a way to reconstruct them from a smaller set of bits).
The advances in data compression will come like MP3 did (already a disproof that there will be no great advances, audio compression before MP3 was either inefficient or extremely lossy), taking advantage of the peculiarities of the data being compressed. Video compression still has a lot of room for improvement, and that improvement will be developed by streaming media companies. 3D point data, texturing files, text, etc... there are thousands of kinds of files. In the future there'll be one compression program that uses hundreds or thousands of algorithms to deal with them. it might even use the same extension for its files to further confuse people...
Esperandi
The future is going to be fun. Everything is always getting better. Anyone who tells you the past was better is wrong.
Well, if you want to get good user feedback about how intuitive an interface is whether its Open Source or not, you use the same method. You find someone who has never used any computer of any kind before and you have them use it and listen to their responses.
The problem with this in the Linux realm is that when a grandma sits down and comes back the next day (you can NOT help them in any way shape or form if you're trying to determine how intuitive it is, else it becomes a test of how good they are at listening to you) and tells you she absolutely hates everything about Linux, the testers tend to slay the grandmother in cold blood for speaking out against the holy relic Linux.
This is not a troll, it is a call to reality. if you wish to continue to improve something you need to know when it is time to destroy what you have and start over. Yes, you love your window manager, but to improve it sometimes you have to destroy it and ignore everything you liked about it and just go down a new path. The guy that answered questions on here a week or so ago, the user interface expert, he had some really great ideas. And he hated Linux. So why not take his ideas, destroy everything of Linux that contradicts it, and see if maybe what comes out on the other end is better overall?
Thinking about his ideas, I think it really is a complete tear-down and re-build sort of project. Not even the filesystem can be spared. Journaling? Who gives a flip, in his new concept of using computers (I hate the word paradigm) journaling is stupid. So scrap it. Start over. Quit referring to file by filenames and extensions and a bitfield of permissions. Don't look at those things in a new way, get rid of the old way! Store files based on arbitrary category names, you have a bunch of song files, well, call them song files then. You boot up and you want to look for that song file you have that was made sometime in the 60s by the guy whose name started with B? The machine should not provide this kind of functionality in an application, this should *BE* the system. And no, you can't search by regular expressions, give it up. What about progams and such? Container categories (like song is a category) would cover this, holding the executable stuff. Well, what if someone on the Internet calls their files "music" files instead of "song" files? Easy, when you go to download one of em, it tells you the new file has a "music" flag on it. You can either add "music" as a recognizable trait for files in your system, or create a translation system for your system that will always read "music" as "song". Community standards will emerge, but if they don't it doesn't matter, maps will take care of it. No more systems programming. Everything will be going through this very high level system. You don't open a file, you try to open a class of files or a property within the same container as the program.
Hell, throw in some of Ted Nielsen's ideas which boil down to hyperlinking between portions of a document. Defining document portions shouldn't be that tough and it makes it all possible (I haven't read too deeply into his stuff, but from what I've read this seems as if it would have solved his problems).
For once in your life, I beg of you Open Source world, innovate! Let go of the archaic, obscure Unix past that sucked donkey balls for UI and do something new. You will never (and I mean never) compete for the home desktop unless you do so. If you eventually do, it will only be because you finally became as bloated as Windows. Everyone bitches because Windows ran on top of DOS... hello? X runs on top of Linux, wake up!
Esperandi
Seriously and honestly, this is not a troll, and Open Source developers need to read it.
Pretty cool site, and I liked your review (I just learned last night that a burglar alarm would be a good idea and found that my guy being employed as a cop (well a rent-a-cop anyway) really doesn't help)... since I liked it, let me tear the place apart ;) It's all constructive criticism, take it in the spirit in which it is given...
;)
Anti-alias that logo. Makes your site look amateur and clashes with the more professional aspects of your site. Also, Anti-alias the "GP Reviews" logo (any others on your site where you can see the jaggies on the diagonal lines). I like your index of reviews. Conscise and helpful, don't change a thing. Spruce up your background though. Either go straight black in the background or get a new starfield, the one right now just looks like a dirty black background with dots every once in awhie... If you go all-black I'd recommend replacing your horizontal line (under the "Browse" and "Search" buttons) with a graphic that attaches to the left-hand side menu frame (I hope the meaning of that is clear).
When I like something, I like to try to improve it, just ignore me if you like it better the way it is
Esperandi
What does the #1 chipmaker title entail? I noticed the article referred to Intel as such... is it because Intel sells more chips, is more popular in the minds of empty-brained managerial types? Its obviously no longer because they lead the industry in producing the highest performing chips and hasn't been for several months. I'm just wondering what AMD needs to do in order to wrest this title from Intel...
Or is it a totally unofficial definition-less title the author bestows on Intel in an attempt to give some deep loving tongue to their ass?
Esperandi