Vista is mostly for servers and corperate boxes, not the consumer. Now if only the other few hundred people actually knew what they where talking about...
This is why they spent ages creating Aero Glass, and it's requirements are far higher than the average corperate PC?
Linux does exactly the same with Direct3D when you use Wine or Cedega, Yeah, and it's slow.
Beside from that I doubt the 50% performance drop,
Well since graphic cards are normally made with the main APIs (OpenGL and D3D) in mind, they are normally made to accelerate the functions provided by them. If D3D and OpenGL do things in different ways (execute buffers), the overhead translating one to the other may actually be very high.
Don't just take gaming into account. OpenGL is used for many professional rendering applications, since it was actually designed for graphics work rather than gaming.
OpenGL will now always be limited by the accuracy, stability, features and speed of DirectX, and considering OpenGL is going to be used on the PS3......
ATI's development cycle is far too slow for linux. They develop for it to work on the current *stable* kernel, rather than the mm kernel or the development kernel. Naturally when it comes out, the development kernel is the stable kernel by that time, and it doesn't work any more. This wouldn't be as bad a problem if they didn't use heavily deprecated kernel features when they're developing (if you can make it build, look at the amount of deprecated errors).
They also use CRAP 2d drivers.. 6x slower in my experience. I think it was based off of really old XFree radeon drivers or something and they haven't changed it.
Their state with windows and linux laptop drivers confused me at first, but their linux drivers work on mobility products, and windows drivers require a hack. My laptop manufacturer doesn't release drivers so I needed to get them to get the updated drivers.
I don't understand why they don't have a nightly driver release.. and they could help by releasing everything that they possibly can opensource and a binary module (see the madwifi drivers for an example), then get a load of OSS developers who know X really well to maintain them. The madwifi drivers work really well for most parts, ATI should learn from them and nvidia.
For the zen you need libnjb and gnomad. Gnomad works for me, sorta buggy though.
Linux needs a decent unified media device access library. Kio, gnome-vfs or the filesystem are "good enough" but they're not fantastic;), and loads of different types of library being hard coded into the apps isn't a good thing. Freedesktop media access would be good.
My biggest problem are Sony media devices (netmd, network walkman).. I think only a very small few of them work.
Lawyers live in an alien world. They make a great fuss about many things `normal' people (as far as they exist) will never even think about, let alone worry about
my point is that there are many, and that each application can choose to behave differently Yeah (misinterpreted what you meant by "no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere.")
It's getting better all the time though
especially under Mac
Mac are very good for consistency.. except for this recent brushed steel vs aqua mix, which has been annoying quite a lot of users I know. I've just recently reccomended an Apple powerbook to someone I know who isn't particularly technical, best tool for the job:D.
windows or MacOS easier to start with. I recently set up my desktop with Gnome for my family to use, it previously had windows. They said it was much easier to use. Admittedly, I did spend about a day setting it up (most of it was making wine work properly), and I did a few things that takes knowledge, but it shows that linux is capable of being simple if the effort is put into it, but current distros just aren't quite there yet.
But on the other hand, I spent 2 days setting up windows... I had a few problems with my graphics card driver and motherboard conflicting and causing it to drop to 640x480 16 colours and telling me that it recovered from a serious error.. and it involved some things that the average user couldn't have done...
"no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere."
"A standard way of doing things are key to appeal to a large audience."
Freedesktop standards Gnome HIG KDE Guidelines
If I use either KDE or Gnome, I very rarely use applications that don't match the environment. My desktop of choice is Gnome, and I've found it much more consistent than the windows GUI.
Office (XP anyway) is really inconsistent. I normally use Microsoft Word, in which every new document opens in a seperate window. However in Excel, the new documents actually open in a new window inside the main excel window, but they create another application button on the taskbar, giving the illusion that it's opened in a seperate window.
Sometimes I've had 1 document open that I've not edited, and 1 that I have edited. I'm used to Office bugging me to save documents even when I've not edited them, so when I hit the big "X" button on the window, and it asks to save, I just click "no" because being a human, I don't read messages that I expect to say something, stupid I know. I lose my work.
I'm not the only person this has happened to either...
I know I'll probably get modded troll or something...
Rather than winning or loosing, just make them more interoperable. Lots of people I know like KDE/Qt, lots of people I know like Gnome/GTK+ (or Xfce or something), why should they be forced to use the one they don't like?
It would be better if there was a way to make Qt apps behave like GTK apps, and GTK apps behave like Qt, through themes and swapping default button positions and stuff, then everyone'd be happy. That with the freedesktop specs and we have a nice combination.
I read somewhere about an effort to make other toolkits look like Gtk, so the developer can choose and the user won't be affected.
A "win" probably wont happen anyway. There's no way that one solution will suit all people, and the other people will start on their own solution, then some people will prefer that solution and it will gain momentum.
Trying to consolidate all that would be like trying to make all OSX, BSD, Windows and whatever else users use linux.
And anyway, if there is no competition between different systems, innovation and improvement will slow down...
First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.
They could be harsh with it.
If the student screws up the laptop, they have to fix it or the tech admin will restore from the generic disk image, no files recovered.
Also they could provide the default settings as quite secure (firewall, firefox, secure-services setup, auto update) or just maybe provide a secured linux...
No more books. No more written records. so?;)
Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate.
This isn't different to the way people trust books. They used school books and other education things as a way to control children in Nazi Germany...
And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.
Isn't it time kids started becoming more responsible for their actions?
They should lock their laptops and be careful with them.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase.
Well our school already has a 1:2 computers:students ratio, and if they used laptops they'd probably save quite a lot of money with things like classroom space and other equipment that wouldn't be required as much if everyone had laptops. The student could pay a small amount though, we already pay about £100 at the beginning of the year for our books and equipment here.
Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses. I take my laptop almost every day, and I don't get viruses (maybe why linux should be installed on these laptops).
Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer Realistically, we spend most of the lesson watching and listening to the teacher (whiteboard/electronic smartboard or whatever) and if it's an electronic smartboard, most of the notes can be emailed to the student.
What I've said may be a bit unsuitable for the real world...
I don't really know, not had much experience there yet;) but it could be good for the students in many ways, since teaching responsibility is an important part of education.
I used to love ATI cards.. the only problems I had were some minor settling in issues with my motherboard, 9700 Pro and XP being incompatible, but that was fixed with a simple BIOS settings change. I was satisfied.
Until I installed linux. Now I have a choice * Use old versions of X.org and the kernel that are actually reasonably stable with fglrx and put up with 6x slower (benchmarked) 2d performance, coupled with lots of features not working properly. * Use the opensource drivers and get no 3d accel.
I opted for opensource. They're not the most stable drivers, but they are far more stable than the fglrx ones. If I need 3d, I start another X server with a different config. Thank god I'm not one of the people affected by the fglrx crash when running multiple X servers.
I'd switch to nvidia if it wasn't a laptop. nVidia's drivers aren't the shit, but they're better than ATI's.
This is coming from a previous die-hard ATI fan, but I'm not the only one who feels this way...
Very nice when running under XP though (except for when my ATI control panel fails to load and i have to reinstall the drivers, but that has stopped happening recently).
Recently, some person in the states of Jersey here made a mistake and did something like paying every worker £6 million because they got the decimal point wrong.
They got all the money back (if i got paid that much money i'd have fucked off with it) but several people got fired for it. I was working there at the time, so i tried to gather who got fired for it, but mentioning it gave similar reactions to the ones the people on harry poter gave when someone said "voldemort".
cd/usr/src wget $url tar -xvzf linux-$release cd linux-$release make menuconfig.. enable new stuff.. make make modules_install make install # if your bootloader is configured to boot/boot/vmlinuz cd.. rm linux ln -s linux linux-$release
then reboot.. or kexec (not sure how that's coming along)
There could be a fancy gui for it, and it can be managed in shell scripts, but it's an advanced user's task anyway, like manually replacing dlls on windows or something. Most users would not even know about it as FC or something's upgrade process will probably do it silently.
And why bother upgrading your kernel on your servers if you don't need a bugfix or a new feature?
Last update i had to do to the windows kernel was 2k to XP... the backwards compatibility can't have been hard for that, considering how little was changed, and anyway, it's very rare that something breaks on my system due to the kernel upgrading.. (except ATI drivers.. but I use the default X.org ones now)
I think the kernel devs are currently in the position where they're relying on the disto to monitor what packages break and stuff.
No matter how much I like OSS, I have to admit, OOo Writer is much slower than word.
My theory is that OOo is cross platform and seems to reimplement quite a lot. It's, therefore, quite a big application to load. Not only that, it's all in one executable (soffice).
Microsoft Office seems to be built on all the features of Windows, which is understandable considering it's a Windows only app (not counting the OSX version because it's completely different). Microsoft Office will therefore already have most stuff loaded by the time you click it. Also you never know where Microsoft might be shoving application specific hacks into the kernel.. Not only that, applications like Excel, Powerpoint and Word all seem to have had stuff completely reimplemented (styles in excel? excel's weird MDI behaviour/window icons in taskbar?), and so, when you click the word icon, it doesn't load all the stuff for excel... which has it's advantages and disadvantages...
But IMO Openoffice Writer is much slower than Word.. although, you should try 1.9, it seems a lot faster. Neither are perfect. Both have a looong way to go yet.
I use OpenOffice and Linux, and so do some of the local companies use OOo, simply due to the price of Microsoft Office, and I'd much rather support and help improve OOo than I would Microsoft Office.
I can almost guarantee that your computer (even just idle) has at least a dozen or so processes going on.
It's the amount of processes running that really counts, when talking about CPUs... I normally have about 117 processes, but my load average is 0.11 at the moment,.. but I'm not doing anything intensive, just surfing the net.
Ideally, the load average should be no more than how many cores you have in total, for optimum performance.
Gnome has the ability to use sftp, ftp, and some other things in gnome-vfs... unfortunately it only works for apps using gnome-vfs, and there are still a few bugs, but it's getting much better all the time.
One of the many things I like about linux is choice.
"Obviously apps look inconsistent." I believe there is a gtk+ qt theme.. maybe you should try that? Unfortunately I can't find something similar to make qt apps look like gtk+ apps, but it's not a massive problem anyway. All the apps I use apart from rosegarden use Gtk+.
"Feel is inconsistent - different file selectors, for example (and one of them crap anyway)" Yeah.. this is unfortunate, but if they both felt the same to use, then they wouldn't really be all that different. Also, gtk's file selector is getting much better than it used to be,;)
"I have to set file associations twice - once for KDE, once for Gnome - this is really annoying." I think that this isn't so much a problem in recent releases because they're following the freedesktop specs for that now.. aren't they?
Choice is good, but it comes with some problems too. I think choice's advantages outweigh the disadvantages too. Especially now that they're trying to make them more interoperable using freedesktop specs.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista is mostly for servers and corperate boxes, not the consumer. Now if only the other few hundred people actually knew what they where talking about...
This is why they spent ages creating Aero Glass, and it's requirements are far higher than the average corperate PC?
Linux does exactly the same with Direct3D when you use Wine or Cedega,
Yeah, and it's slow.
Beside from that I doubt the 50% performance drop,
Well since graphic cards are normally made with the main APIs (OpenGL and D3D) in mind, they are normally made to accelerate the functions provided by them. If D3D and OpenGL do things in different ways (execute buffers), the overhead translating one to the other may actually be very high.
Don't just take gaming into account. OpenGL is used for many professional rendering applications, since it was actually designed for graphics work rather than gaming.
OpenGL will now always be limited by the accuracy, stability, features and speed of DirectX, and considering OpenGL is going to be used on the PS3......
Why? Helix/Real Player is just fine.
From release notes
These release notes provide information on the latest posting of ATI's Proprietary Linux driver version 8.14.13 (IIRC)
IIRC? Um... wonder if that's for "If I Remember Correctly"
ATI's development cycle is far too slow for linux. They develop for it to work on the current *stable* kernel, rather than the mm kernel or the development kernel. Naturally when it comes out, the development kernel is the stable kernel by that time, and it doesn't work any more. This wouldn't be as bad a problem if they didn't use heavily deprecated kernel features when they're developing (if you can make it build, look at the amount of deprecated errors).
.. 6x slower in my experience. I think it was based off of really old XFree radeon drivers or something and they haven't changed it.
They also use CRAP 2d drivers
Their state with windows and linux laptop drivers confused me at first, but their linux drivers work on mobility products, and windows drivers require a hack. My laptop manufacturer doesn't release drivers so I needed to get them to get the updated drivers.
I don't understand why they don't have a nightly driver release.. and they could help by releasing everything that they possibly can opensource and a binary module (see the madwifi drivers for an example), then get a load of OSS developers who know X really well to maintain them. The madwifi drivers work really well for most parts, ATI should learn from them and nvidia.
For the zen you need libnjb and gnomad. Gnomad works for me, sorta buggy though.
;), and loads of different types of library being hard coded into the apps isn't a good thing. Freedesktop media access would be good.
Linux needs a decent unified media device access library. Kio, gnome-vfs or the filesystem are "good enough" but they're not fantastic
My biggest problem are Sony media devices (netmd, network walkman).. I think only a very small few of them work.
Lawyers live in an alien world. They make a great fuss about many things `normal' people (as far as they exist) will never even think about, let alone worry about
;)
So do geeks
It's probably for security. Admins of very secure stuff wouldn't want thier site servicing requests if they're not being logged anywhere.
my point is that there are many, and that each application can choose to behave differently
:D.
Yeah (misinterpreted what you meant by "no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere.")
It's getting better all the time though
especially under Mac
Mac are very good for consistency.. except for this recent brushed steel vs aqua mix, which has been annoying quite a lot of users I know.
I've just recently reccomended an Apple powerbook to someone I know who isn't particularly technical, best tool for the job
windows or MacOS easier to start with.
I recently set up my desktop with Gnome for my family to use, it previously had windows. They said it was much easier to use. Admittedly, I did spend about a day setting it up (most of it was making wine work properly), and I did a few things that takes knowledge, but it shows that linux is capable of being simple if the effort is put into it, but current distros just aren't quite there yet.
But on the other hand, I spent 2 days setting up windows... I had a few problems with my graphics card driver and motherboard conflicting and causing it to drop to 640x480 16 colours and telling me that it recovered from a serious error.. and it involved some things that the average user couldn't have done...
"no one has a real true standard to enforce anywhere."
"A standard way of doing things are key to appeal to a large audience."
Freedesktop standards
Gnome HIG
KDE Guidelines
If I use either KDE or Gnome, I very rarely use applications that don't match the environment. My desktop of choice is Gnome, and I've found it much more consistent than the windows GUI.
Windows User Experience
Office (XP anyway) is really inconsistent. I normally use Microsoft Word, in which every new document opens in a seperate window. However in Excel, the new documents actually open in a new window inside the main excel window, but they create another application button on the taskbar, giving the illusion that it's opened in a seperate window.
Sometimes I've had 1 document open that I've not edited, and 1 that I have edited. I'm used to Office bugging me to save documents even when I've not edited them, so when I hit the big "X" button on the window, and it asks to save, I just click "no" because being a human, I don't read messages that I expect to say something, stupid I know. I lose my work.
I'm not the only person this has happened to either...
I know I'll probably get modded troll or something...
Rather than winning or loosing, just make them more interoperable. Lots of people I know like KDE/Qt, lots of people I know like Gnome/GTK+ (or Xfce or something), why should they be forced to use the one they don't like?
It would be better if there was a way to make Qt apps behave like GTK apps, and GTK apps behave like Qt, through themes and swapping default button positions and stuff, then everyone'd be happy. That with the freedesktop specs and we have a nice combination.
I read somewhere about an effort to make other toolkits look like Gtk, so the developer can choose and the user won't be affected.
A "win" probably wont happen anyway. There's no way that one solution will suit all people, and the other people will start on their own solution, then some people will prefer that solution and it will gain momentum.
Trying to consolidate all that would be like trying to make all OSX, BSD, Windows and whatever else users use linux.
And anyway, if there is no competition between different systems, innovation and improvement will slow down...
First, if the laptops are $850, don't also forget to add the tech support that will be required for each laptop. Will students be able to take the laptops home? What if one gets a virus, and infects the others. What if a few students decide to destroy all the laptops. In a wireless community, that can be done. Yet, it would be impossible to burn all the books.
;)
;) but it could be good for the students in many ways, since teaching responsibility is an important part of education.
They could be harsh with it. If the student screws up the laptop, they have to fix it or the tech admin will restore from the generic disk image, no files recovered.
Also they could provide the default settings as quite secure (firewall, firefox, secure-services setup, auto update) or just maybe provide a secured linux...
No more books. No more written records.
so?
Students will start using only computers, and trust the content as accurate.
This isn't different to the way people trust books. They used school books and other education things as a way to control children in Nazi Germany...
And what about lost laptops? What is a more attractive target to steal? Laptops or books? I know on college campuses, people try and steal books, to sell them back to the bookstore for $20. Now imagine something worth 10 times as much.
Isn't it time kids started becoming more responsible for their actions?
They should lock their laptops and be careful with them.
This is a bad idea for so many reasons. It will raise costs per student for the school to operate. Either students will have to pay, or the property tax will increase.
Well our school already has a 1:2 computers:students ratio, and if they used laptops they'd probably save quite a lot of money with things like classroom space and other equipment that wouldn't be required as much if everyone had laptops. The student could pay a small amount though, we already pay about £100 at the beginning of the year for our books and equipment here.
Laptops are more vulnerable to 14-17 year olds for thieft and malicious viruses.
I take my laptop almost every day, and I don't get viruses (maybe why linux should be installed on these laptops).
Most of my friends who spend 6+ hours in front of a computer
Realistically, we spend most of the lesson watching and listening to the teacher (whiteboard/electronic smartboard or whatever) and if it's an electronic smartboard, most of the notes can be emailed to the student. What I've said may be a bit unsuitable for the real world...
I don't really know, not had much experience there yet
I used to love ATI cards.. the only problems I had were some minor settling in issues with my motherboard, 9700 Pro and XP being incompatible, but that was fixed with a simple BIOS settings change.
l
I was satisfied.
Until I installed linux. Now I have a choice
* Use old versions of X.org and the kernel that are actually reasonably stable with fglrx and put up with 6x slower (benchmarked) 2d performance, coupled with lots of features not working properly.
* Use the opensource drivers and get no 3d accel.
I opted for opensource. They're not the most stable drivers, but they are far more stable than the fglrx ones. If I need 3d, I start another X server with a different config. Thank god I'm not one of the people affected by the fglrx crash when running multiple X servers.
I'd switch to nvidia if it wasn't a laptop.
nVidia's drivers aren't the shit, but they're better than ATI's.
This is coming from a previous die-hard ATI fan, but I'm not the only one who feels this way...
http://www.petitiononline.com/atipet/petition.htm
Very nice when running under XP though (except for when my ATI control panel fails to load and i have to reinstall the drivers, but that has stopped happening recently).
Recently, some person in the states of Jersey here made a mistake and did something like paying every worker £6 million because they got the decimal point wrong. They got all the money back (if i got paid that much money i'd have fucked off with it) but several people got fired for it. I was working there at the time, so i tried to gather who got fired for it, but mentioning it gave similar reactions to the ones the people on harry poter gave when someone said "voldemort".
Well, it's quite simple as it is...
/usr/src .. enable new stuff .. /boot/vmlinuz ..
cd
wget $url
tar -xvzf linux-$release
cd linux-$release
make menuconfig
make
make modules_install
make install # if your bootloader is configured to boot
cd
rm linux
ln -s linux linux-$release
then reboot.. or kexec (not sure how that's coming along)
There could be a fancy gui for it, and it can be managed in shell scripts, but it's an advanced user's task anyway, like manually replacing dlls on windows or something. Most users would not even know about it as FC or something's upgrade process will probably do it silently.
And why bother upgrading your kernel on your servers if you don't need a bugfix or a new feature?
Last update i had to do to the windows kernel was 2k to XP... the backwards compatibility can't have been hard for that, considering how little was changed, and anyway, it's very rare that something breaks on my system due to the kernel upgrading.. (except ATI drivers.. but I use the default X.org ones now)
I think the kernel devs are currently in the position where they're relying on the disto to monitor what packages break and stuff.
No matter how much I like OSS, I have to admit, OOo Writer is much slower than word.
My theory is that OOo is cross platform and seems to reimplement quite a lot. It's, therefore, quite a big application to load. Not only that, it's all in one executable (soffice).
Microsoft Office seems to be built on all the features of Windows, which is understandable considering it's a Windows only app (not counting the OSX version because it's completely different). Microsoft Office will therefore already have most stuff loaded by the time you click it.
Also you never know where Microsoft might be shoving application specific hacks into the kernel..
Not only that, applications like Excel, Powerpoint and Word all seem to have had stuff completely reimplemented (styles in excel? excel's weird MDI behaviour/window icons in taskbar?), and so, when you click the word icon, it doesn't load all the stuff for excel... which has it's advantages and disadvantages...
But IMO Openoffice Writer is much slower than Word.. although, you should try 1.9, it seems a lot faster. Neither are perfect. Both have a looong way to go yet.
I use OpenOffice and Linux, and so do some of the local companies use OOo, simply due to the price of Microsoft Office, and I'd much rather support and help improve OOo than I would Microsoft Office.
I can almost guarantee that your computer (even just idle) has at least a dozen or so processes going on.
It's the amount of processes running that really counts, when talking about CPUs... I normally have about 117 processes, but my load average is 0.11 at the moment,.. but I'm not doing anything intensive, just surfing the net.
Ideally, the load average should be no more than how many cores you have in total, for optimum performance.
Well if there is more than one thread running on the OS, it should be able to distribute execution between processors...
Gnome has the ability to use sftp, ftp, and some other things in gnome-vfs... unfortunately it only works for apps using gnome-vfs, and there are still a few bugs, but it's getting much better all the time.
;)
One of the many things I like about linux is choice.
"Obviously apps look inconsistent."
I believe there is a gtk+ qt theme.. maybe you should try that? Unfortunately I can't find something similar to make qt apps look like gtk+ apps, but it's not a massive problem anyway. All the apps I use apart from rosegarden use Gtk+.
"Feel is inconsistent - different file selectors, for example (and one of them crap anyway)"
Yeah.. this is unfortunate, but if they both felt the same to use, then they wouldn't really be all that different.
Also, gtk's file selector is getting much better than it used to be,
"I have to set file associations twice - once for KDE, once for Gnome - this is really annoying."
I think that this isn't so much a problem in recent releases because they're following the freedesktop specs for that now.. aren't they?
Choice is good, but it comes with some problems too. I think choice's advantages outweigh the disadvantages too. Especially now that they're trying to make them more interoperable using freedesktop specs.