I believe that it is possible for Java3D implementations to be (partial) wrappers around hardware-based OpenGL/DirectX functionality.
Well, there are several projects available which make OpenGL available for Java programmers. Lightweight Java Game Library Open GL for Java Don't think the second one is still being developed, but I think Sun is working on something more up to date.
this will severely hamper our efforts to develop ever faster erectile dysfunction medicines, baldness cures in a pill form, medicines for newly created social "disorders", drugs to strip the carbs out of everything (or proteins or whatever the new black is) and have people pay top dollar for them.
Look mods, he is being sarcastic. It deserves "funny", not insightful.
'm sorry, but I run Windows XP on 128MB of ram, and yes, this is the same computer I've run Windows 98, 2000, XP, and 2003 off of. I've also had the misfortune of trying to run Debian, RedHat 9, SuSe (8?), and a couple of others.
No need to be sorry, I'm not offended. However, Redhat 9 and Suse 8 both use kernel 2.4 and therefore do not use the kernel preemption I was talking about. Since you do not provide version numbers I can't comment on the other distributions.
If you want to go around spreading the word that Linux is better than Windows because Windows uses "cheats," or that Linux still has a more superior GUI, even though it's shoddy at best, go ahead.
Please re-read my post. There was a reason I put "cheat" within quotation marks and used the caveat "or clever programming depending on who you ask".:-)
Also, I am very aware that there are lots of things to be desired with regards to quality when it comes to Linux. Personally I use Linux not because I think it is superior to Windows on every account, but because it is good enough for my needs, because it is cheap, because I'm learning stuff when I use it, and mostly because back in the middle nineties, I got furious at all the companies that tried to take control over my computer like I and what I wanted didn't matter. There were lots of guilty parties (Real media for instance which barfed all over my Windows installation), but for some reason Microsoft and their attitude which I felt were (and sometimes still is) "You gave us your money, now shut the fuck up and do what you are told, bitch. You ARE going to use IE. You ARE going to use Outlook/Windows Media Player/Microsoft Messenger" really pissed me off, and I have not forgiven them since (yes, I nurse long grudges).
I also made the sad mistake of trying to use X. [...] Someone *needs* to get rid of the damn X server, or find a way to improve upon it ten fold.
Well then, you should be happy with the news that most distros have dropped XFree86 in favour of the much more quickly developing x.org.
However, most people argue that X is actually plenty fast. What you are experiencing as slow is KDE or Gnome. You could try replacing them with a more lightweight window manager. I know, not everyones idea of fun, but...
I've never understood what Linux people are talking about when they say that Linux 'runs faster' than Windows. I've never experienced that in my life, and i consider myself to be pretty computer literate (enough to know if i've got some crazy circumstance going on that makes that the case, anyway).
For most of its existance, the people working on the Linux kernel has focused on making it a reliable server OS. An old computer running Apache or some other webserver (for instance) under Linux could serve a lot more visitors faster and with less stress than a beefier Windows machine, which is why sysadmins and others who are more used to the server side of computing thought that Linux was faster. However, the kernel was not as well suited for multimedia or interactive programs. Some audio players for instance had a "stuttering" problem on some machines - they were not given enough CPU time to play the sound smoothly. The only way to get around it was to start it the multimedia program as root and set the program to a higher priority, but that was not very good from a security perspective.
With the 2.6 kernel we finally got kernel preemption, I believe this should make interactive programs feel more responsive (incidentally, Windows have gotten much better as a server OS as well in the meantime). Instead of waiting nicely for the kernel to give the program its next slice of processing time so it can serve the user request, the process can preemt other tasks to instantly get its turn when the user clicks a button. (I'm sure there are thousands of Slashdotters who have studied Operating System Concepts who can explain it better than I.)
The kernel preemption not perfect yet, I think I have read on some mailing lists that some people are experiencing a degradation of performance, especially on older hardware, but this should probably be ironed out soon.
Note also that Windows uses a lot of "cheats" (or clever programming, depending on who you ask) to make the system appear fast, for instance showing the login screen for Windows 2000 and its successors BEFORE the system has finished loading and all daemons have started running. If you are fast you can log in, but you can't really start any programs or do anything, because the hard drive and the processor are working furiously. However, you get the perception that Windows loads much faster than Linux, which shows the prompt only when it is ready to serve the user. And also we have the thing with IE and lots of other MS software being loaded in the background wether you ask or not, and only hiding the icons instead of unloading them when the user tries to "close" them thereby sacrificing memory to gain percieved speed for the user.
[Gotland] is an island off the east coast of Sweden where the (historic) Goths lived.
This was claimed for a long time, not only by nationalists, but also by reputable historical researchers. However, most of them today believe that the theory that the eastern Goths and the Visigoths came from Gotland is wrong. The best link I could find on the subject: NationMaster.com
Is that from the Bender-werecar episode? It was loaded with geek jokes. On the wall with the paintings of Bender's ancestors there is a robot in a naval uniform named Commodore LXVI.
When the hauntings start, there is an eerie version of the Windows 95 startup sound, and bender is chased by a flying toaster and a flying Windows logo.
The gypsy fortune-teller machine reads a manual - "How to exorcise were-cars: for Windows 98"
And this dialog:
Robot villager: "Bah, with all your science, are you any closer to unravelling the mystery of how a robot walks, or talks!?" Prof. Farnsworth: "Of course you idiot, your diagram is printed on your chest plate!" [opens robot's chest, and sure enough, a circuit diagram on the inside] Robot villager [closes chest angrily]: "I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!"
Oh, and on the Fear of a Bot Planet episode, Bender is reading robot porn, and you see a split second of circuit diagrams on a center foldout. Anyone who is good at electronics who paused and could tell us if it is anything meaningful you can build using the diagram?
Agreed. Once you are getting a bit better it is great fun. For me, it has ceased to be a chore, and feels more like a time to relax, be a bit creative.
Also, this topic is a great opportunity to copy and paste some fun links.
The worst breakfast ever: "Swanson, producers of some of the world's fattiest TV dinners, is seeking to take over the breakfast market with a new line of microwaveable morning meals. It's called the 'Hungry Man All Day Breakfast,' and it's threatening to turn people into manatees."
Hi, I've read 1984 many times. I find it fascinating that you chose ACLU to illustrate the BB concept - a case where a minor organisation openly fought against something they dislike (for right or wrong) when you have a government with the aide of a lapdog media that tries to rewrite and erase history basically on a daily basis, EXACTLY as Orwell described it:
Cleansing Time Magazine
As paper libraries and archives give way to electronic data collections, history is becoming ever more frail. A composition instructor at the University of California at Irvine got a disturbing email from a friend who was searching Time magazine's digital archives looking for a certain article written by George Bush Senior and his Defense Secretary, Brent Scowcroft. In that article, the two men purportedly explained why they decided not to occupy Iraq in 1991. Their reason was that such an action would have exceeded the UN's mandate to remove Iraq from Kuwait , and would have destroyed the precedent of an international response to aggression. They went on to argue, in the March 2, 1998 article, had they chosen to occupy Iraq in 1991, the US would probably still be occupying a bitterly hostile land.
The article, in today's light, seems like a clear rebuff to junior's invasion. But the article is gone. It's no longer in Time's digital archives - as if it never existed. The Irvine instructor decided to charge her students with the task of verifying the existence or nonexistence of the article. As it turned out, the article was in fact real, and was still archived by a number of subscription-accessed library research databases - but it was no longer in the Time archives. Interestingly, none of her digital-age students thought to look for the paper copy of the magazine in the library. The instructor did, finding not only the missing article, but also finding that editors changed the titles on many of the articles remaining in the Time archives.
Time's post-facto editing is especially disturbing since it shakes the very foundation of library sciences. An archive is a collection of past works. By definition it must be left intact. Archive managers have no right to edit history. In this case, Time blew their chance to censor this story in 1998.
To paraphrase some other cases:
"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! THE WAR IS OVER!" "Um, actually, the soldiers on the ship printed up that banner and hung it behind us as a total surpise! We knew *nothing* about it."
"Saddam was behind 9/11, that is why we invade!" "We invade because we have evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and threatens the world." "We invade because he has the *capability* to create WMD, also, we never said anything about an imminent threat or him having WMD right now, so shut up!" "We invaded to remove a vicious dictator and bring democracy to Iraq! If you recall something else your memory is defective!"
"The liberal cowards in the CIA who tries to dissuade us from going to war can be safely ignored." "Oh no! The CIA betrayed us, they didn't tell us how dangerous going to war would be! Everyone, look how corrupt and incompetent the CIA is!"
And the good oldies - "Bush has a spotless history!" "Rumsfelt had NOTHING to do with supporting Saddam during the Reagan administration and absolutely did not shake his hand on that picture!" "We did NOT train and financially support the Taliban and Usama bin-Laden to fight the commies during the cold war, and we should ignore weeping liberals who say today that we shouldn't support brutal dictatorships because these dictatorships claim to fight terrorism! God bless America!"
This is one of the things which separates Europeans from Americans.
I spent quite a bit of time in Ireland, for example. The reason why European countries tend to have fewer civil liberties is because their citizens honestly believe they don't need them. Americans were taught from the founding of their country to be suspicious of authority.
Yes, yes, keep stroking that ego. I can't believe you are saying this with a straight face. Look how quickly and easily the PATRIOT act got through. For all your "don't tread on me" bluster, you Americans sure screamed and blubbered for less liberties and more temporary safety once you were exposed to the terrorism that the people of, say, Spain and England had been living under for decades.
You are living in a country that are arresting and detaining people (even juveniles) without charge or trial, without informing relatives, without a right to speak to a lawyer. This is against international law on human rights, not to mention basic human decency. It's fucking Gestapo tactics. Add to this reports by Amnesty that many have probably been treated the same way prisoners in Iraq have been. Your point again?
Another program (written in Java incidentally) which among other things generate music: Grammidity
It works on the "evolve" principle where you "mate" two objects, and then let either the user or some algorithm decide which of the children are most successful and can evolve further.
Actually I belive it was from one of his earliest books, (around Neuromancer time) the short story collection "Burning Crome". It was not a central theme, but it was mentioned in passing in one of the stories (one of the detatched technological/social asides Gibson liked to pepper his stories with). In that story it was not an engineered cure, but an anti-HIV spontaniously mutating in one kid in an American prison who then spread it to many other inmates and so on.
I recall it was somehow depicted as being consensual sex, the kid shocks a naive Japanese reporter by hinting coyly to her how he spread the cure. I don't think Gibson was fully aware of the realities of institutionalised prison rape...:-/
Well, in Swedish, German, French and (I think) Japanese at least, you say it in the order "5 November"...
femte november fumfer November cinqueme Novembre ("fifth day" - forgot what that is) juuichigatsu
Bah. I wish I could boast that I was quadlingual, but even though I have studied these languages I have forgotten almost everything. I had to look up the spelling for most of the words, and I'm still not sure I got it right!
Hey, a great opportunity to tell my favourite Eurotrash joke. Q: "If you call someone who speaks three languages trilingual, someone who speaks two bilingual, can you guess what you call someone who speaks only one language?" A: "American".
[Quake 3] is still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).
Yes, it is incredibly meaningful to see that card X can do 672 frames per second in Quake 3, and card Y can do 784 frames per second, even though your monitor can't show it that quickly or your eyes wouldn't see the difference if it could. When you can boast to your friends about numbers like that, who needs to know how the cards perform in modern games, the ones people actually choose to upgrade their cards for?;-)
He sounds like a clever guy, but "pure Java" for number crunching!?! With "pure C", it'd take half the time with half the number of computers.
...but he would have to spend a lot more time porting it between different architectures and OSes. God, how many times do you have to explain this to people? These days, processing cycles cheap, programmer time expensive.
FP ops in Java are incredibly slow and broken.
Er, do you have any more recent numbers than a lecture from 2001, originally published in 1998??
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that it is possible for Java3D implementations to be (partial) wrappers around hardware-based OpenGL/DirectX functionality.
Well, there are several projects available which make OpenGL available for Java programmers.
Lightweight Java Game Library
Open GL for Java
Don't think the second one is still being developed, but I think Sun is working on something more up to date.
Who was the kooky mod who gave that insightful?
this will severely hamper our efforts to develop ever faster erectile dysfunction medicines, baldness cures in a pill form, medicines for newly created social "disorders", drugs to strip the carbs out of everything (or proteins or whatever the new black is) and have people pay top dollar for them.
Look mods, he is being sarcastic. It deserves "funny", not insightful.
'm sorry, but I run Windows XP on 128MB of ram, and yes, this is the same computer I've run Windows 98, 2000, XP, and 2003 off of. I've also had the misfortune of trying to run Debian, RedHat 9, SuSe (8?), and a couple of others.
:-)
:-)
No need to be sorry, I'm not offended. However, Redhat 9 and Suse 8 both use kernel 2.4 and therefore do not use the kernel preemption I was talking about. Since you do not provide version numbers I can't comment on the other distributions.
If you want to go around spreading the word that Linux is better than Windows because Windows uses "cheats," or that Linux still has a more superior GUI, even though it's shoddy at best, go ahead.
Please re-read my post. There was a reason I put "cheat" within quotation marks and used the caveat "or clever programming depending on who you ask".
Also, I am very aware that there are lots of things to be desired with regards to quality when it comes to Linux. Personally I use Linux not because I think it is superior to Windows on every account, but because it is good enough for my needs, because it is cheap, because I'm learning stuff when I use it, and mostly because back in the middle nineties, I got furious at all the companies that tried to take control over my computer like I and what I wanted didn't matter. There were lots of guilty parties (Real media for instance which barfed all over my Windows installation), but for some reason Microsoft and their attitude which I felt were (and sometimes still is) "You gave us your money, now shut the fuck up and do what you are told, bitch. You ARE going to use IE. You ARE going to use Outlook/Windows Media Player/Microsoft Messenger" really pissed me off, and I have not forgiven them since (yes, I nurse long grudges).
I also made the sad mistake of trying to use X.
[...]
Someone *needs* to get rid of the damn X server, or find a way to improve upon it ten fold.
Well then, you should be happy with the news that most distros have dropped XFree86 in favour of the much more quickly developing x.org.
However, most people argue that X is actually plenty fast. What you are experiencing as slow is KDE or Gnome. You could try replacing them with a more lightweight window manager. I know, not everyones idea of fun, but...
Anyways, good luck! Let me know how it goes!
Thanks! We will.
I've never understood what Linux people are talking about when they say that Linux 'runs faster' than Windows. I've never experienced that in my life, and i consider myself to be pretty computer literate (enough to know if i've got some crazy circumstance going on that makes that the case, anyway).
For most of its existance, the people working on the Linux kernel has focused on making it a reliable server OS. An old computer running Apache or some other webserver (for instance) under Linux could serve a lot more visitors faster and with less stress than a beefier Windows machine, which is why sysadmins and others who are more used to the server side of computing thought that Linux was faster. However, the kernel was not as well suited for multimedia or interactive programs. Some audio players for instance had a "stuttering" problem on some machines - they were not given enough CPU time to play the sound smoothly. The only way to get around it was to start it the multimedia program as root and set the program to a higher priority, but that was not very good from a security perspective.
With the 2.6 kernel we finally got kernel preemption, I believe this should make interactive programs feel more responsive (incidentally, Windows have gotten much better as a server OS as well in the meantime). Instead of waiting nicely for the kernel to give the program its next slice of processing time so it can serve the user request, the process can preemt other tasks to instantly get its turn when the user clicks a button. (I'm sure there are thousands of Slashdotters who have studied Operating System Concepts who can explain it better than I.)
The kernel preemption not perfect yet, I think I have read on some mailing lists that some people are experiencing a degradation of performance, especially on older hardware, but this should probably be ironed out soon.
Note also that Windows uses a lot of "cheats" (or clever programming, depending on who you ask) to make the system appear fast, for instance showing the login screen for Windows 2000 and its successors BEFORE the system has finished loading and all daemons have started running. If you are fast you can log in, but you can't really start any programs or do anything, because the hard drive and the processor are working furiously. However, you get the perception that Windows loads much faster than Linux, which shows the prompt only when it is ready to serve the user. And also we have the thing with IE and lots of other MS software being loaded in the background wether you ask or not, and only hiding the icons instead of unloading them when the user tries to "close" them thereby sacrificing memory to gain percieved speed for the user.
[Gotland] is an island off the east coast of Sweden where the (historic) Goths lived.
This was claimed for a long time, not only by nationalists, but also by reputable historical researchers. However, most of them today believe that the theory that the eastern Goths and the Visigoths came from Gotland is wrong. The best link I could find on the subject:
NationMaster.com
X.org is pronounced ``ZORG!'' and XFree86 is pronounced ``dead''.
All in favor say ``ZORG!''. If we all say it often enough, it'll stick.
Bump! I mean, ZORG!
Haha, good one! Thanks for posting that. It's not me though. I live in Sweden. :-)
I'm envious. How come when *I* boot up Linux it feels nothing like ho's paddling my ass? The only time I get close is when I try to configure XFree.
Bah, I meant "Commodore LXIV" of course. Sorry!
Is that from the Bender-werecar episode? It was loaded with geek jokes. On the wall with the paintings of Bender's ancestors there is a robot in a naval uniform named Commodore LXVI.
When the hauntings start, there is an eerie version of the Windows 95 startup sound, and bender is chased by a flying toaster and a flying Windows logo.
The gypsy fortune-teller machine reads a manual - "How to exorcise were-cars: for Windows 98"
And this dialog:
Robot villager: "Bah, with all your science, are you any closer to unravelling the mystery of how a robot walks, or talks!?"
Prof. Farnsworth: "Of course you idiot, your diagram is printed on your chest plate!" [opens robot's chest, and sure enough, a circuit diagram on the inside]
Robot villager [closes chest angrily]: "I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe!"
Oh, and on the Fear of a Bot Planet episode, Bender is reading robot porn, and you see a split second of circuit diagrams on a center foldout. Anyone who is good at electronics who paused and could tell us if it is anything meaningful you can build using the diagram?
Agreed. Once you are getting a bit better it is great fun. For me, it has ceased to be a chore, and feels more like a time to relax, be a bit creative.
Also, this topic is a great opportunity to copy and paste some fun links.
The worst breakfast ever: "Swanson, producers of some of the world's fattiest TV dinners, is seeking to take over the breakfast market with a new line of microwaveable morning meals. It's called the 'Hungry Man All Day Breakfast,' and it's threatening to turn people into manatees."
For those who like Mystery Science Theatre 3000, here is a similar take on edibles; The Gallery of Regrettable Food
To paraphrase some other cases:
"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! THE WAR IS OVER!" "Um, actually, the soldiers on the ship printed up that banner and hung it behind us as a total surpise! We knew *nothing* about it."
"Saddam was behind 9/11, that is why we invade!"
"We invade because we have evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and threatens the world."
"We invade because he has the *capability* to create WMD, also, we never said anything about an imminent threat or him having WMD right now, so shut up!"
"We invaded to remove a vicious dictator and bring democracy to Iraq! If you recall something else your memory is defective!"
"The liberal cowards in the CIA who tries to dissuade us from going to war can be safely ignored."
"Oh no! The CIA betrayed us, they didn't tell us how dangerous going to war would be! Everyone, look how corrupt and incompetent the CIA is!"
And the good oldies -
"Bush has a spotless history!"
"Rumsfelt had NOTHING to do with supporting Saddam during the Reagan administration and absolutely did not shake his hand on that picture!"
"We did NOT train and financially support the Taliban and Usama bin-Laden to fight the commies during the cold war, and we should ignore weeping liberals who say today that we shouldn't support brutal dictatorships because these dictatorships claim to fight terrorism! God bless America!"
The list is basically endless....:
http://mediastudy.com/articles/av12-11-03.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0206-02.htm
http://www.dunedinmethodist.org.nz/just/orwl.html
Because this site is left leaning, and anti Bush. It dosen't make news here when Rush Limbaugh wins a big award.
If "anal-cysts" Limbaugh ever wins an award and it gets posted on Slashdot, it should be under the topic "It's funny. Weep."
This is one of the things which separates Europeans from Americans.
I spent quite a bit of time in Ireland, for example. The reason why European countries tend to have fewer civil liberties is because their citizens honestly believe they don't need them. Americans were taught from the founding of their country to be suspicious of authority.
Yes, yes, keep stroking that ego. I can't believe you are saying this with a straight face. Look how quickly and easily the PATRIOT act got through. For all your "don't tread on me" bluster, you Americans sure screamed and blubbered for less liberties and more temporary safety once you were exposed to the terrorism that the people of, say, Spain and England had been living under for decades.
You are living in a country that are arresting and detaining people (even juveniles) without charge or trial, without informing relatives, without a right to speak to a lawyer. This is against international law on human rights, not to mention basic human decency. It's fucking Gestapo tactics. Add to this reports by Amnesty that many have probably been treated the same way prisoners in Iraq have been. Your point again?
Thank you, excellent post! Most entertaining and informative thing I have read on Slashdot in a long time.
Another program (written in Java incidentally) which among other things generate music: Grammidity
It works on the "evolve" principle where you "mate" two objects, and then let either the user or some algorithm decide which of the children are most successful and can evolve further.
Arigato gozaimashita. I remembered the name of the month, and that dates were very complicated, but not much else. :-)
7: Did I mention we don't give a shit?
So why did you bother to post then?
Actually I belive it was from one of his earliest books, (around Neuromancer time) the short story collection "Burning Crome". It was not a central theme, but it was mentioned in passing in one of the stories (one of the detatched technological/social asides Gibson liked to pepper his stories with). In that story it was not an engineered cure, but an anti-HIV spontaniously mutating in one kid in an American prison who then spread it to many other inmates and so on.
:-/
I recall it was somehow depicted as being consensual sex, the kid shocks a naive Japanese reporter by hinting coyly to her how he spread the cure. I don't think Gibson was fully aware of the realities of institutionalised prison rape...
Well, in Swedish, German, French and (I think) Japanese at least, you say it in the order "5 November"...
;-)
femte november
fumfer November
cinqueme Novembre
("fifth day" - forgot what that is) juuichigatsu
Bah. I wish I could boast that I was quadlingual, but even though I have studied these languages I have forgotten almost everything. I had to look up the spelling for most of the words, and I'm still not sure I got it right!
Hey, a great opportunity to tell my favourite Eurotrash joke.
Q: "If you call someone who speaks three languages trilingual, someone who speaks two bilingual, can you guess what you call someone who speaks only one language?"
A: "American".
No offence.
Netterfield, Barth - I think that's an anagram for a really bad book by Scientology founder Hubbard, or the bad film by John Travolta.
There are alternatives to rebooting if you want to play.Javagaming
LWJGL
[Quake 3] is still the only game that can push the hardware to its limits reliably. All those other games tend to have bottlenecks that are algorithm/code related rather than hardware related (like the scripting engine in UT).
;-)
Yes, it is incredibly meaningful to see that card X can do 672 frames per second in Quake 3, and card Y can do 784 frames per second, even though your monitor can't show it that quickly or your eyes wouldn't see the difference if it could. When you can boast to your friends about numbers like that, who needs to know how the cards perform in modern games, the ones people actually choose to upgrade their cards for?
FP ops in Java are incredibly slow and broken.
Er, do you have any more recent numbers than a lecture from 2001, originally published in 1998??