No, full-blown search engine competition is not a good thing. I, for one, DON'T want even more search bots sucking up my website's bandwidth in a completely retarded way, ignoring robots.txt (yes, Googlebot does that, it just doesn't identify itself as Googlebot and operates from a slightly different IP range - but this range belongs to Google and the bot's behaviour is roughly the same) and so on.
And that would actually cause more accidents. Accelerating is very often a better way to escape a crash (except maybe a head-on, for obvious reasons) than braking - of course, people are braking because they feel it's the proper thing to do, but the keyword here is "escape". More often than not, reducing the speed before the crash won't do, it will be too much anyway - but by accelerating in, it is possible to not crash at all, especially in a side crash. Imagine you are entering an intersection on a green light, at 60km/h and suddenly, you see a car on a crash course on your right, entering the intersection despite the red light for him. If the crash seems absolutely imminent, usually the best thing to do is to smash the gas into the floor and hope your car isn't speed-locked. If it is, well, your safety feature just killed you.
The official, state-funded (and well-funded) Second Program of Polish Radio is broadcasting in very high quality (analog stereo, not some fancy-schmancy HD, but it can be high quality just as well if you use a proper transmitter), mostly classical and early music, some jazz, blues and good ol' rock, and at certain times even various kinds of interesting, alternative music. In addition, they interview various artists and scientists, do a lot of discussion on the music they air and so on. Even the ads they have are mostly relevant and they don't increase the volume fo them like in the television.
See, a radio program can be made so it is interesting. Several millions of people in Poland listen to it (it's actually the second most popular radio program here) and I have yet to see a podcast of really comparable quality (cultural, not accoustic).
Lawsuits, court orders, bazillions of dollars in damages, ruined lifes, bizarre legal actions, etc, etc.
Sounds like it was about something damn important.
Well, it's about DAMN ENTERTAINMENT. And it's getting more and more, er, entertaining every day. Or maybe not. What the hell is going on and why no one is able to see the biggest absurdity in there?
And yet I'm using KDE3 with the OS X-style menus enabled and the window buttons moved to the left side of the title bar. No, I don't like OS X as a whole at all (especially the widget style) - but I like those two ideas, so I've copied them to my desktop. Believe it or not, on a 12" screen and a tracpoint, the "infinite-height" menus are extremely handy. You see, it's all a matter of preference.
It's unlikely but not impossible - don't forget that the Pentium M and, subsequently, Core line of processors was based on Pentium III Coppermine, whereas the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture developed in the meantime was abandoned completely. Going back to Pentium I would be a bit on the extreme, but it's possible that they meant some basic design principles of Pentium I, not the whole core as it was. Maybe they will make something from scratch, but keep it similar to the original Pentium's inner RISC core, or maybe redo it as a vector processor or hell knows what. It was a citation from a translated interview with some press monkey, so you can expect anything.
Goddamned sales-speak, full of lies and deception, as always. There was no "issue" to "addres and rectify" after being "brought to attention". Of course they knew it would work like that, they desgined it to. They just thought they would get away with it. The world would be a better place if it were to be criminal to tell such cattledung as an official statement.
But it's not only about conterfeit goods (that should actually be banned, I'm OK with that) - it's about reselling genuine, original and legally acquired goods. Read the summary again, this time more carefully.
OK, my wording was at fault. They're worse off, because they could face x lawsuits from a single source backed by a shedload of money and a band of the most fierce hellho^W^W^W^W lawyers ever employed by a corporation (read: IBM legal team), instead of several, but less significant companies, maybe some of them even at a similar level in the foodchain.
...is now shit out of luck, because there are 6+ companies that will smash them into the ground for trying to use every single practical approach to whatever they're trying to do, instead of a single one?
Big bitmaps are one thing - extreme speeds are the other. AFAIK there is a Quake 3 renderer that uses raytracing. It would be interesting to try it out on such a cluster...
MIT and BSD licenses are "free" for the developer wanting to use the code. The GPL license is "free" for the user using the code and wanting to look at it to learn something or become a developer. With GPL code, some developers are a bit, pardon my language, fucked when it comes to using the code for anything they wanted. Still, they can, e.g. contact the developers of the GPL code for LGPL dual-licensing for them or something like that. It happens. On the other hand, with BSD and MIT code taken by $BAD_BIG_CORPORATION and distributed in a binary-only form, it's the users who are quite fucked. And guess what? They could stand on their teeth and clap their ears and still wouldn't be able to do anything about that.
On the other hand, for EVERY record in the record book there was the first time. So we either allow new records to be "invented" to be later beaten, which makes sense, or we stick to the current set indefinitely, which would get a bit boring sooner or later.
Wine is actually an example of something extremely rare - a project that looked like it was doomed from the beginning, took millenia to get to the current state, but achieved usefulness anyway. Most of the time it works and when it doesn't, most of the time it's just common bugs, not incompleteness.
But every time Nvidia releases "THE new, big thing" the prices of the previos and, especially, the second-previous generation cards drop by a significant amount, making them worth the buck for an occasional gamer who doesn't want to spend a fortune to play games and is happy with his games running on the low to medium details settings.
From my experience, I can tell that Intel USB controllers have protection against overcurrent, voltage spikes and erratic interference on all lines, power and data alike. The device needs to be plugged out for the port to "reboot" after being disconnected by the controller. I witnessed that while designing a few USB-driven devices with high-power motors that didn't separate the USB supply and the external supply rails properly and there was quite a significant amount of interference crosstalk when the motors revved up (checked with a 'scope). Then, the port just turned off completely and the driver printed a message to dmesg that said something about emergency cutoff due to interference, which was exactly what was happening. Quite impressive, if you ask me.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough - of course, there are constraints in the real world, but in research and industrial design those constraints are usually practical and reasonable and, in the case of designing a product, the requirements will boild down to "make something solid and useful". That's still good. It's the consumer product design that calls for "make something crippled that breaks just after the warranty expires, restricts the user and is awkward to operate - millions of idiots will buy it anyway". That's what I don't want to be doing.
Actually I'm aiming for robotics, which is IMO one of the few electrical engineering-related fields where almost no typical consumer products exist, while there's plenty of research aimed at building cool stuff and, if one really needs more profits, quite a bit of industrial desgin, which actually isn't all that bad because most of the time the "customers" are engineers, too.
When I learned electronics, engineers built products by soldering together resistors and transistors. But today, the job of engineers is to build derivative works by combining units of intellectual property owned by third parties. That's not what they're trained for, and it's a mine-field of potential litigation for every company that puts software in its products This is exactly why, while being fascinated with electronics and embedded systems, I don't want to work in the consumer product industry when I graduate. Even if the pure research work in the field pays less than product development. I feel that the "engineering" constrained by sales requirements and legal gibblerish is not really engineering anymore and, being able to see its outcomes - dozens of devices that show unspeakable amounts of absolute blockheadedness and lack of ANY thought in their design - I don't want to have anything to do with it.
As far as I know, this only concerns toolkit authors, making the point a bit irrelevant for a typical GUI programmer. Sure, I can name a few applications that, for some reason, use the X libraries directly and are actual GUI applications, not some maintenance or configuration utilities - but, on the other hand, none of them requires any kind of performance. And if you really have to use pure X without all the hassle, there's this new xcb interface.
As for the X vs. Windows performance, I didn't ever do any measurements, but Compiz and all runs quite well on my hardware (Intel GMA 950), so I'm not complaining.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Geez, people bash on the network transaprency all the time, while it's actually the least of the problems. And it's completely irrelevant when an application connects locally because it happens over a shared-memory IPC (which unix sockets actually is, despite having "sockets" in the name).
I'd say all the old, device-dependent xfree86 code is to blame for most of the needless complexity and while it is being rewritten, it's a slow process that requires more developers than are involved with the project. Working with the new X.org code, while still demanding, wasn't really bad, just required thinking and getting "the bigger picture" well.
Actually, the new code is perfectly capable of dropping network transparency, integration of needless extensions and so on *when it's appropriate*, just take a look at Kdrive. But still too many important things remain in the xfree86 part.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's a HUGE, and I mean, REALLY HUGE codebase that deals with hell lots of different concepts (graphics, input, networking,...) that requires a good deal of understanding to modify it properly. Yet, there are less than 30 (!) active developers. That's probably one of the most under-manned Open Source project out there, proportionally to its size. And it's, again, because it's complicated as hell and nothing can be done about this - it's just the way a windowing server has to be.
I've tried to help the project two years ago, I did dome work on input hotplugging and while not much of the code I wrote finally made it to the upstream (Daniel Stone, the man behind the input subsystem, finally decided for a different solution than what I was thinking about - maybe that was a good decision, I'm not the one to judge), I could experience myself how difficult developing X is. Besides skills and experience, you need to be able to keep track of such a big structure mentally, all the time. Not every programmer can do that, even skilled and experienced.
And, no, you can't always abstract everything out and make a nice, clean structure for the code to adhere to. Maybe the X code could be a bit easier to modify, but just a bit. Trying to force that, you would end up with an Xserver counterpart of GNU Hurd, if you know what I mean...
Oh, and there's something else that caught my attention.
From the court decision (actually, the license agreement between LG and Intel):
"[the license] is granted by either party hereto . . . to any third party for the combination by a third party of Licensed Products of either party with items, components, or the like acquired . . . from sources other than a partyhereto, or for the use, import, offer for sale or sale of such combination." Brief for Petitioners 8 (quoting App. 164).
A literal (as requred for the licensish newspeak) interpretation quickly reveals that is's FRICKIN' IMPOSSIBLE to not infringe on the LG patents. Intel doesn't make capacitors, resistors, connectors, laminate sheets, transistors, voltage regulators, fasteners and LOADS of other crap that make up a single mainboard, no matter how "all-Intel" it is.
In short, the relevant part of the agreement is plain idiotic.
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No, full-blown search engine competition is not a good thing. I, for one, DON'T want even more search bots sucking up my website's bandwidth in a completely retarded way, ignoring robots.txt (yes, Googlebot does that, it just doesn't identify itself as Googlebot and operates from a slightly different IP range - but this range belongs to Google and the bot's behaviour is roughly the same) and so on.
And that would actually cause more accidents. Accelerating is very often a better way to escape a crash (except maybe a head-on, for obvious reasons) than braking - of course, people are braking because they feel it's the proper thing to do, but the keyword here is "escape". More often than not, reducing the speed before the crash won't do, it will be too much anyway - but by accelerating in, it is possible to not crash at all, especially in a side crash. Imagine you are entering an intersection on a green light, at 60km/h and suddenly, you see a car on a crash course on your right, entering the intersection despite the red light for him. If the crash seems absolutely imminent, usually the best thing to do is to smash the gas into the floor and hope your car isn't speed-locked. If it is, well, your safety feature just killed you.
Is it?
The official, state-funded (and well-funded) Second Program of Polish Radio is broadcasting in very high quality (analog stereo, not some fancy-schmancy HD, but it can be high quality just as well if you use a proper transmitter), mostly classical and early music, some jazz, blues and good ol' rock, and at certain times even various kinds of interesting, alternative music. In addition, they interview various artists and scientists, do a lot of discussion on the music they air and so on. Even the ads they have are mostly relevant and they don't increase the volume fo them like in the television.
See, a radio program can be made so it is interesting. Several millions of people in Poland listen to it (it's actually the second most popular radio program here) and I have yet to see a podcast of really comparable quality (cultural, not accoustic).
Lawsuits, court orders, bazillions of dollars in damages, ruined lifes, bizarre legal actions, etc, etc.
Sounds like it was about something damn important.
Well, it's about DAMN ENTERTAINMENT. And it's getting more and more, er, entertaining every day. Or maybe not. What the hell is going on and why no one is able to see the biggest absurdity in there?
And yet I'm using KDE3 with the OS X-style menus enabled and the window buttons moved to the left side of the title bar. No, I don't like OS X as a whole at all (especially the widget style) - but I like those two ideas, so I've copied them to my desktop. Believe it or not, on a 12" screen and a tracpoint, the "infinite-height" menus are extremely handy. You see, it's all a matter of preference.
It's unlikely but not impossible - don't forget that the Pentium M and, subsequently, Core line of processors was based on Pentium III Coppermine, whereas the Pentium 4 Netburst architecture developed in the meantime was abandoned completely. Going back to Pentium I would be a bit on the extreme, but it's possible that they meant some basic design principles of Pentium I, not the whole core as it was. Maybe they will make something from scratch, but keep it similar to the original Pentium's inner RISC core, or maybe redo it as a vector processor or hell knows what. It was a citation from a translated interview with some press monkey, so you can expect anything.
Goddamned sales-speak, full of lies and deception, as always. There was no "issue" to "addres and rectify" after being "brought to attention". Of course they knew it would work like that, they desgined it to. They just thought they would get away with it. The world would be a better place if it were to be criminal to tell such cattledung as an official statement.
But it's not only about conterfeit goods (that should actually be banned, I'm OK with that) - it's about reselling genuine, original and legally acquired goods. Read the summary again, this time more carefully.
OK, my wording was at fault. They're worse off, because they could face x lawsuits from a single source backed by a shedload of money and a band of the most fierce hellho^W^W^W^W lawyers ever employed by a corporation (read: IBM legal team), instead of several, but less significant companies, maybe some of them even at a similar level in the foodchain.
...is now shit out of luck, because there are 6+ companies that will smash them into the ground for trying to use every single practical approach to whatever they're trying to do, instead of a single one?
Hey, you forgot about the parrots!
Big bitmaps are one thing - extreme speeds are the other. AFAIK there is a Quake 3 renderer that uses raytracing. It would be interesting to try it out on such a cluster...
MIT and BSD licenses are "free" for the developer wanting to use the code. The GPL license is "free" for the user using the code and wanting to look at it to learn something or become a developer. With GPL code, some developers are a bit, pardon my language, fucked when it comes to using the code for anything they wanted. Still, they can, e.g. contact the developers of the GPL code for LGPL dual-licensing for them or something like that. It happens. On the other hand, with BSD and MIT code taken by $BAD_BIG_CORPORATION and distributed in a binary-only form, it's the users who are quite fucked. And guess what? They could stand on their teeth and clap their ears and still wouldn't be able to do anything about that.
It is.
On the other hand, for EVERY record in the record book there was the first time. So we either allow new records to be "invented" to be later beaten, which makes sense, or we stick to the current set indefinitely, which would get a bit boring sooner or later.
I don't see a similarity, really.
Wine is actually an example of something extremely rare - a project that looked like it was doomed from the beginning, took millenia to get to the current state, but achieved usefulness anyway. Most of the time it works and when it doesn't, most of the time it's just common bugs, not incompleteness.
But every time Nvidia releases "THE new, big thing" the prices of the previos and, especially, the second-previous generation cards drop by a significant amount, making them worth the buck for an occasional gamer who doesn't want to spend a fortune to play games and is happy with his games running on the low to medium details settings.
From my experience, I can tell that Intel USB controllers have protection against overcurrent, voltage spikes and erratic interference on all lines, power and data alike. The device needs to be plugged out for the port to "reboot" after being disconnected by the controller. I witnessed that while designing a few USB-driven devices with high-power motors that didn't separate the USB supply and the external supply rails properly and there was quite a significant amount of interference crosstalk when the motors revved up (checked with a 'scope). Then, the port just turned off completely and the driver printed a message to dmesg that said something about emergency cutoff due to interference, which was exactly what was happening. Quite impressive, if you ask me.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough - of course, there are constraints in the real world, but in research and industrial design those constraints are usually practical and reasonable and, in the case of designing a product, the requirements will boild down to "make something solid and useful". That's still good. It's the consumer product design that calls for "make something crippled that breaks just after the warranty expires, restricts the user and is awkward to operate - millions of idiots will buy it anyway". That's what I don't want to be doing.
Actually I'm aiming for robotics, which is IMO one of the few electrical engineering-related fields where almost no typical consumer products exist, while there's plenty of research aimed at building cool stuff and, if one really needs more profits, quite a bit of industrial desgin, which actually isn't all that bad because most of the time the "customers" are engineers, too.
So... It Will Blend, right?
As far as I know, this only concerns toolkit authors, making the point a bit irrelevant for a typical GUI programmer. Sure, I can name a few applications that, for some reason, use the X libraries directly and are actual GUI applications, not some maintenance or configuration utilities - but, on the other hand, none of them requires any kind of performance. And if you really have to use pure X without all the hassle, there's this new xcb interface.
As for the X vs. Windows performance, I didn't ever do any measurements, but Compiz and all runs quite well on my hardware (Intel GMA 950), so I'm not complaining.
Geez, people bash on the network transaprency all the time, while it's actually the least of the problems. And it's completely irrelevant when an application connects locally because it happens over a shared-memory IPC (which unix sockets actually is, despite having "sockets" in the name).
I'd say all the old, device-dependent xfree86 code is to blame for most of the needless complexity and while it is being rewritten, it's a slow process that requires more developers than are involved with the project. Working with the new X.org code, while still demanding, wasn't really bad, just required thinking and getting "the bigger picture" well.
Actually, the new code is perfectly capable of dropping network transparency, integration of needless extensions and so on *when it's appropriate*, just take a look at Kdrive. But still too many important things remain in the xfree86 part.
It's a HUGE, and I mean, REALLY HUGE codebase that deals with hell lots of different concepts (graphics, input, networking, ...) that requires a good deal of understanding to modify it properly. Yet, there are less than 30 (!) active developers. That's probably one of the most under-manned Open Source project out there, proportionally to its size. And it's, again, because it's complicated as hell and nothing can be done about this - it's just the way a windowing server has to be.
I've tried to help the project two years ago, I did dome work on input hotplugging and while not much of the code I wrote finally made it to the upstream (Daniel Stone, the man behind the input subsystem, finally decided for a different solution than what I was thinking about - maybe that was a good decision, I'm not the one to judge), I could experience myself how difficult developing X is. Besides skills and experience, you need to be able to keep track of such a big structure mentally, all the time. Not every programmer can do that, even skilled and experienced.
And, no, you can't always abstract everything out and make a nice, clean structure for the code to adhere to. Maybe the X code could be a bit easier to modify, but just a bit. Trying to force that, you would end up with an Xserver counterpart of GNU Hurd, if you know what I mean...
Oh, and there's something else that caught my attention.
From the court decision (actually, the license agreement between LG and Intel):
"[the license] is granted by either party hereto . . . to any third party for the combination by a third party of Licensed Products of either party with items, components, or the like acquired . . . from sources other than a partyhereto, or for the use, import, offer for sale or sale of such combination." Brief for Petitioners 8 (quoting App. 164).
A literal (as requred for the licensish newspeak) interpretation quickly reveals that is's FRICKIN' IMPOSSIBLE to not infringe on the LG patents. Intel doesn't make capacitors, resistors, connectors, laminate sheets, transistors, voltage regulators, fasteners and LOADS of other crap that make up a single mainboard, no matter how "all-Intel" it is.
In short, the relevant part of the agreement is plain idiotic.