Put a protocol adapter in front of it? What you are describing is an X server, friend, even if you are not educated enough in the topic at hand to realize it.
Wayland is attractive to its developers because it explicitly implements a much reduced feature set compared to X11. Quite a few of the X11 features are historic and not of interest to very many modern users, but then again there are some features that are useful and Wayland doesn't offer a replacement for them.
X11 includes a rendering API for 2d graphics, and through extensions, for a variety of compositing and other more "modern" operations. Wayland provides no rendering API at all. Wayland is just a graphics compositing server with input support. It's a small fraction of what X is. It gives you a buffer to write your pixels into and you have to bring a rendering implementation to the party yourself.
This means that applications have even less coherency than they had with X11; X programs have a fundamental set of behaviors that are all the same due to using a single rendering framework. The degree to which this will matter in practice, given how poorly X programs adhere to any kind of common UI paradigm anyway, remains to be seen.
Apparently there's this thing called Mir that Ubuntu is developing that is a competitor to Wayland for the X replacement (where neither is actually a replacement, offering significantly less functionality in both cases). I guess that Ubuntu rejected Wayland and decided to roll their own. I would bet a fair sum that Fedora is pushing Wayland in this way to try to prevent Ubuntu from gathering its own momentum with Mir. I doubt they're pushing it for any reason that benefits end users. It's purely political as a means to prevent a competitor's favored X replacement from gaining support.
I have been an X user for about 26 years now and I have zero problems with it and would rather not see a replacement take over, especially one that is likely to be a step sideways/backwards from an end user perspective ala systemd. But given that Wayland by itself is not nearly as useful as X by itself, I expect that operating systems will use Wayland, at least for a while, as a layer underneath the X server. X will remain, it will just allow Wayland to own its frame buffer instead of owning it itself. And in the end, the functionality I require from X will remain because the X server will remain.
Stick to your guns man. I don't agree with anything he wrote, all of which basically can be reduced to the argument: "no new features should ever be added to any product because they might introduce bugs." Which is ridiculous.
"Invaluable" was the wrong word, oops. I meant, "of such low value".
Also Hey Slashdot, I've been on this site for about 18 years now, still no edit button??? WTF? You guys should just move to the Disqus comments system. It is far superior to anything you've ever done.
The first time I saw this bait-and-switch technique was with Twister in 1996. Advertising showed a scene filmed from a first person point of view across a big empty field with a tornado in the distance. Stuff was flying everywhere and far in the distance a large piece of construction equipment is pulled apart and then a huge tire comes flying at the camera. I thought that scene looked really cool, this was fairly early in the days of wow-factor CG special effects. After watching the movie in the theatre I realized that the scene was not in it.
It always irked me and I always thought it was a bit of bait-and-switch, and I'm glad that someone is trying to hold the studios accountable.
By the way I can't believe that back in 1996 my time was so invaluable to me that I would spend it going to a movie theatre to watch a movie like Twister. In the years since I've been incredibly much more selective. I never watch any of the brain dead CG fest superhero movies, or really any movie whose sole attraction is how much pointless eye candy they can put on the screen in each scene.
Fresnel lens effects cause a variety of artifacts, most notably the appearance of reflective concentric rings in any scene with high contrast, and sometimes a reduced appearance of rings in scenes even with moderate contrast. Additionally, I can see the rings in scenes of flat color or coherent texture, as a subtle difference in pixel density in each successive ring. There is also a reduced contrast when compared to the DK2 lenses. Finally, the Vive lenses have a very small "sweet spot" in my experience; you can't look obliquely outside of a narrow focal range in the middle of the lenses without one or the other (or both) eyes blurring considerably.
The Vive is wonderful but the lenses are crap, full stop. Maybe they are the best that can be achieved with limited budget, time, and concessions to meet a certain feature profile. My DK2 lenses are actually better than the Vive lenses (in my opinion) in every way except field of view.
I would be interested in knowing what kind of lenses this new headset is using, and whether or not anyone with the wherewithal to do so is trying to make better lenses.
Slashdot used to be the place where I asked questions like this to get expert opinions, but admittedly I haven't really been around here much in the past 3 or 4 years so... not sure if this still applies. I've tried asking a bit on reddit but questions get lost in the noise pretty easily there.
No one said anything about focus-to-raise functionality. In fact this is one of the primary benefits of pointer-to-focus instead of click-to-focus... I can type into a partially obscured window if I need to, which often I do. But on the Mac I have to spend time moving my windows around so that the thing I want to look at is not obscured by the thing I'm trying to type into, all the time.
Also, it's super easy to dea with mouse pointers that are "in the way". Move them up an inch, but stay within your program. That is like a non-problem compared to the problems that click-to-focus systems bring.
But whatever... have your preference, and live with it in peace and joy. I just want Apple to give me the same opportunity.
Apparently you don't have kids that like to have black and white printouts that they can color with crayons...
And it's certainly not the case that I print frequently; that's why I bought a laser printer, because even if you only print a document per month, you never have problems.
Anyway, what's the point of stating that someone else's problem isn't a problem for them because it's not a problem for you?
2) control the network interfaces in a sane way that is fully functional on all versions of Mac OS X. Doesn't have to be the same for every version, but there should be something sane for every version.
These are two things that I ran into on the very first complex task I tried to do on the Mac OS X command line (reproduce a chroot based build environment at work).
When the first thing you try has immediate limitations, it's a good indicator that many or most complex tasks would have limitations.
Apple has moved very far away from the Unix philosophy of how systems work. Yes, most of the simple unix commands that interact with little more than basic input/output work fine on Mac OS X (aside from some weird character handling in their terminal program, but every version of Unix has its own weird terminal bugs in my experience), but anything more complex than that generally does not work because Apple doesn't actually buy into the Unix philosophy.
You may be right. It's been a while since I futzed with it. I believe that they changed the color of the dark dock, and it's a color that clashes with my background. So I guess it's not that I can't choose a dark dock, it's that I can't choose an arbitrarily colored dock.
Apple's flavor of Unix is really quite impoverished once you start trying to do anything beyond the most basic things. Sorry, it's true. I like my Mac laptop for stuff that requires a GUI, but Mac OS X cannot hold a candle to Linux when it comes to command line stuff.
Good luck with that. In my experience, Apple's user interface hubris knows no bounds, to the extent that when they decide what the user experience should be like, they are very reticent to provide any customization which would allow it to be changed.
Example: click-to-focus. It's not possible to have focus-follows-pointer in Mac OS X. There is no option that would enable it. Apple decided that everyone should use click-to-focus, and that is the unassailable law in the Mac world.
Another example: dock color. This is such a dumb preference but I cannot imagine why they don't make it user customizable. I like dark colored dock backgrounds, they look better on the desktop backgrounds I choose. But Apple simply will not make them customizable. They have decided what color your dock should be. You must accept it.
There are dozens/hundreds of other examples. Given all of this, I highly doubt that they will make the tab/window behavior customizable if they decide that there is One Right Way that All Users Must Use.
I know it's silly, but the thing I would most like to see improved in MacOS is the print dialog. It's so hard to get a good printout on Mac OS these days; you have no controls for resizing or repositioning the printed material to ensure that it covers the page properly. There appear to be several different print dialogs that appear depending upon the application; so it's possible that I'm experiencing problems related to a particular application, and yet there is no print dialog that any application has ever produced on my Mac laptop that I would consider to be useable. And I don't understand why the print dialog wouldn't always be the same, as an operating system supplied bit of functionality.
It just amazes me that Apple, which gave us the original desktop publishing revolution back in the 80's, can have such terrible print support now.
Is that legal though? Can you really just give your product away for free? Can't that be construed as anti-competitive? It's called "predatory pricing" I believe, isn't it? Sincere question here.
I agree with them on that one. The last thing we need here is additional inflammatory commentary in the news summaries. Leave that stuff for the comments section, where there will be no shortage of it.
I've been on Slashdot for many years now and I'm just starting to finally get tired of the general level of complete idiocy of most posters here. Am I getting old or is the internet population at large just getting dumber? Not sure.
Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?
I agree there was some trickery there. Since they did not address this at all, I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed. Having to point that out in the video would take away from the apparent magic which is probably why they didn't mention it (and that's somewhat disingenous if you ask me). It's possible that they provide some tool that attempts to automatically fill in the background, and if so it would appear that it was used in some of the examples (such as when the apple or whatever it was was moved in the painting, the area that was revealed looked more like the cloudy background than it did like the table that the apple was on), but there's no way that they automatically compute the background for anything that is not on top of a pattern or more or less flatly shaded surface. I also noticed that in some examples, they were merely adding new objects to the scene (such as the NYC taxi cab example), and although they started with a scene that looked like the cab was already there is moved it to reveal painted chevrons underneath, it's likely that those chevrons were already in the photo and didn't need to be recreated.
In short: they glossed over that detail and used examples that didn't require explaining it, but it'c certainly an issue that a real user would have to address and doesn't happen as "magically" as it would appear from the video.
BTW, CMU alum here. Went back to campus for the first time in nearly 20 years earlier this year. My how things have changed. I suppose every college is the same way now, but holy crap it's so much more cushy than it used to be! Guess all that cush keeps the computer science juices flowing...
Slashdot Mirror
Designing a system easy enough to be catastrophically broken by a single seemingly harmless substitution is a big problem too.
I have no problem with nuclear power but fragile processes are not good for anyone.
You sir, are correct. I wouldn't have been quite as harsh as you, but I was about to respond and say more or less the same thing.
Put a protocol adapter in front of it? What you are describing is an X server, friend, even if you are not educated enough in the topic at hand to realize it.
Wayland is attractive to its developers because it explicitly implements a much reduced feature set compared to X11. Quite a few of the X11 features are historic and not of interest to very many modern users, but then again there are some features that are useful and Wayland doesn't offer a replacement for them.
X11 includes a rendering API for 2d graphics, and through extensions, for a variety of compositing and other more "modern" operations. Wayland provides no rendering API at all. Wayland is just a graphics compositing server with input support. It's a small fraction of what X is. It gives you a buffer to write your pixels into and you have to bring a rendering implementation to the party yourself.
This means that applications have even less coherency than they had with X11; X programs have a fundamental set of behaviors that are all the same due to using a single rendering framework. The degree to which this will matter in practice, given how poorly X programs adhere to any kind of common UI paradigm anyway, remains to be seen.
Apparently there's this thing called Mir that Ubuntu is developing that is a competitor to Wayland for the X replacement (where neither is actually a replacement, offering significantly less functionality in both cases). I guess that Ubuntu rejected Wayland and decided to roll their own. I would bet a fair sum that Fedora is pushing Wayland in this way to try to prevent Ubuntu from gathering its own momentum with Mir. I doubt they're pushing it for any reason that benefits end users. It's purely political as a means to prevent a competitor's favored X replacement from gaining support.
I have been an X user for about 26 years now and I have zero problems with it and would rather not see a replacement take over, especially one that is likely to be a step sideways/backwards from an end user perspective ala systemd. But given that Wayland by itself is not nearly as useful as X by itself, I expect that operating systems will use Wayland, at least for a while, as a layer underneath the X server. X will remain, it will just allow Wayland to own its frame buffer instead of owning it itself. And in the end, the functionality I require from X will remain because the X server will remain.
Go ahead and "shitlist" them. Nobody but you will care.
Stick to your guns man. I don't agree with anything he wrote, all of which basically can be reduced to the argument: "no new features should ever be added to any product because they might introduce bugs." Which is ridiculous.
"Invaluable" was the wrong word, oops. I meant, "of such low value".
Also Hey Slashdot, I've been on this site for about 18 years now, still no edit button??? WTF? You guys should just move to the Disqus comments system. It is far superior to anything you've ever done.
The first time I saw this bait-and-switch technique was with Twister in 1996. Advertising showed a scene filmed from a first person point of view across a big empty field with a tornado in the distance. Stuff was flying everywhere and far in the distance a large piece of construction equipment is pulled apart and then a huge tire comes flying at the camera. I thought that scene looked really cool, this was fairly early in the days of wow-factor CG special effects. After watching the movie in the theatre I realized that the scene was not in it.
It always irked me and I always thought it was a bit of bait-and-switch, and I'm glad that someone is trying to hold the studios accountable.
By the way I can't believe that back in 1996 my time was so invaluable to me that I would spend it going to a movie theatre to watch a movie like Twister. In the years since I've been incredibly much more selective. I never watch any of the brain dead CG fest superhero movies, or really any movie whose sole attraction is how much pointless eye candy they can put on the screen in each scene.
My enthusiasm for the Star Wars universe almost died when my hopes for a good Star Wars movie were crushed by The Force Awakens!
Why don't people with useful things to say get Slashdot accounts anymore? It's hard to tell the wheat from the chaff when it's all Anonymous Coward.
I used to think having a Slashdot Id was cool, and it was in the 90's/00's. Times have changed I guess.
Fresnel lens effects cause a variety of artifacts, most notably the appearance of reflective concentric rings in any scene with high contrast, and sometimes a reduced appearance of rings in scenes even with moderate contrast. Additionally, I can see the rings in scenes of flat color or coherent texture, as a subtle difference in pixel density in each successive ring. There is also a reduced contrast when compared to the DK2 lenses. Finally, the Vive lenses have a very small "sweet spot" in my experience; you can't look obliquely outside of a narrow focal range in the middle of the lenses without one or the other (or both) eyes blurring considerably.
The Vive is wonderful but the lenses are crap, full stop. Maybe they are the best that can be achieved with limited budget, time, and concessions to meet a certain feature profile. My DK2 lenses are actually better than the Vive lenses (in my opinion) in every way except field of view.
I would be interested in knowing what kind of lenses this new headset is using, and whether or not anyone with the wherewithal to do so is trying to make better lenses.
Slashdot used to be the place where I asked questions like this to get expert opinions, but admittedly I haven't really been around here much in the past 3 or 4 years so ... not sure if this still applies. I've tried asking a bit on reddit but questions get lost in the noise pretty easily there.
No one said anything about focus-to-raise functionality. In fact this is one of the primary benefits of pointer-to-focus instead of click-to-focus ... I can type into a partially obscured window if I need to, which often I do. But on the Mac I have to spend time moving my windows around so that the thing I want to look at is not obscured by the thing I'm trying to type into, all the time.
Also, it's super easy to dea with mouse pointers that are "in the way". Move them up an inch, but stay within your program. That is like a non-problem compared to the problems that click-to-focus systems bring.
But whatever ... have your preference, and live with it in peace and joy. I just want Apple to give me the same opportunity.
Apparently you don't have kids that like to have black and white printouts that they can color with crayons ...
And it's certainly not the case that I print frequently; that's why I bought a laser printer, because even if you only print a document per month, you never have problems.
Anyway, what's the point of stating that someone else's problem isn't a problem for them because it's not a problem for you?
It's more complicated than the time or space I have to explain it here. Also, nice "no true scotsman" line of reasoning there.
1) chroot that works in any sane fashion
2) control the network interfaces in a sane way that is fully functional on all versions of Mac OS X. Doesn't have to be the same for every version, but there should be something sane for every version.
These are two things that I ran into on the very first complex task I tried to do on the Mac OS X command line (reproduce a chroot based build environment at work).
When the first thing you try has immediate limitations, it's a good indicator that many or most complex tasks would have limitations.
Apple has moved very far away from the Unix philosophy of how systems work. Yes, most of the simple unix commands that interact with little more than basic input/output work fine on Mac OS X (aside from some weird character handling in their terminal program, but every version of Unix has its own weird terminal bugs in my experience), but anything more complex than that generally does not work because Apple doesn't actually buy into the Unix philosophy.
You may be right. It's been a while since I futzed with it. I believe that they changed the color of the dark dock, and it's a color that clashes with my background. So I guess it's not that I can't choose a dark dock, it's that I can't choose an arbitrarily colored dock.
Apple's flavor of Unix is really quite impoverished once you start trying to do anything beyond the most basic things. Sorry, it's true. I like my Mac laptop for stuff that requires a GUI, but Mac OS X cannot hold a candle to Linux when it comes to command line stuff.
Good luck with that. In my experience, Apple's user interface hubris knows no bounds, to the extent that when they decide what the user experience should be like, they are very reticent to provide any customization which would allow it to be changed.
Example: click-to-focus. It's not possible to have focus-follows-pointer in Mac OS X. There is no option that would enable it. Apple decided that everyone should use click-to-focus, and that is the unassailable law in the Mac world.
Another example: dock color. This is such a dumb preference but I cannot imagine why they don't make it user customizable. I like dark colored dock backgrounds, they look better on the desktop backgrounds I choose. But Apple simply will not make them customizable. They have decided what color your dock should be. You must accept it.
There are dozens/hundreds of other examples. Given all of this, I highly doubt that they will make the tab/window behavior customizable if they decide that there is One Right Way that All Users Must Use.
I know it's silly, but the thing I would most like to see improved in MacOS is the print dialog. It's so hard to get a good printout on Mac OS these days; you have no controls for resizing or repositioning the printed material to ensure that it covers the page properly. There appear to be several different print dialogs that appear depending upon the application; so it's possible that I'm experiencing problems related to a particular application, and yet there is no print dialog that any application has ever produced on my Mac laptop that I would consider to be useable. And I don't understand why the print dialog wouldn't always be the same, as an operating system supplied bit of functionality.
It just amazes me that Apple, which gave us the original desktop publishing revolution back in the 80's, can have such terrible print support now.
Is that legal though? Can you really just give your product away for free? Can't that be construed as anti-competitive? It's called "predatory pricing" I believe, isn't it? Sincere question here.
I agree with them on that one. The last thing we need here is additional inflammatory commentary in the news summaries. Leave that stuff for the comments section, where there will be no shortage of it.
I've been on Slashdot for many years now and I'm just starting to finally get tired of the general level of complete idiocy of most posters here. Am I getting old or is the internet population at large just getting dumber? Not sure.
Well enlighten us, Big Sexy Joe, what's so awesome about wherever it is that you live that you can so easily look down on the clueless 8 million or so that can't possibly have a good reason for living in the SF bay area?
I agree there was some trickery there. Since they did not address this at all, I am assuming that the answer is simply that they had to manually paint in the parts of the photos that were revealed when other parts were removed. Having to point that out in the video would take away from the apparent magic which is probably why they didn't mention it (and that's somewhat disingenous if you ask me). It's possible that they provide some tool that attempts to automatically fill in the background, and if so it would appear that it was used in some of the examples (such as when the apple or whatever it was was moved in the painting, the area that was revealed looked more like the cloudy background than it did like the table that the apple was on), but there's no way that they automatically compute the background for anything that is not on top of a pattern or more or less flatly shaded surface. I also noticed that in some examples, they were merely adding new objects to the scene (such as the NYC taxi cab example), and although they started with a scene that looked like the cab was already there is moved it to reveal painted chevrons underneath, it's likely that those chevrons were already in the photo and didn't need to be recreated.
In short: they glossed over that detail and used examples that didn't require explaining it, but it'c certainly an issue that a real user would have to address and doesn't happen as "magically" as it would appear from the video.
BTW, CMU alum here. Went back to campus for the first time in nearly 20 years earlier this year. My how things have changed. I suppose every college is the same way now, but holy crap it's so much more cushy than it used to be! Guess all that cush keeps the computer science juices flowing ...