As I mentioned in my post, I am scheduled to have v1.0 on the 25th of March.:) My point was that as long as it is as good as or better than the beta, it will be good enough for me.
I am posting this from OSX beta. As far as I am concerned, what I have here is a fully functional (and beautiful!) operating system. I would use it full time if there were a few more apps available for it, but the OS itself does everything I need it to do. If the 1.0 release that lands on my doorstep on the 25th is as good as this or better, I will be happy. So, I don't see what the problem is...
*sigh* What has this place come to? You give no supporting evidence whatsoever for your assertion, and you get modded up? Clearly, that was an "I agree" mod, not a "you spoke intelligently" mod.
Look, forget whether or not your sig is accurate. I don't really care. Obviously, however, you do. The fact that you have that as your sig shows that you deeply care about Clinton's misdeeds (whether they really happenned or not) to the extent that only a rabid Republican would. Don't you have anything better to say, for crying out loud? Is Clinton really the most important thing in the world to you?
If your are rabid anything (Republican, Democrat, Linux user, Mac user, Christian, Athiest, etc.) to the point where you can't see the other side of the issue, you are what I call a "Zealot".
If a large group of people disagrees with you, and you honestly believe that the only reason why they could disagree is because they are all stupid, then you are a Zealot. (Now what was it you said about the people who oppose the tax cuts?)
How does that make him not one of the most corrupts presidents in American history? When you die, you aren't part of history anymore? Or is it that when a former president dies, he is no longer a former president -- that is, somehow, his entire service gets erased from history? I'm just curious...
They are against repealing of estate taxes, not tax cuts. Two totally different issues.
Oh, I see... When you were talking about millionairs being stupid, you were only refering to millionairs that were opposed to general tax cuts, not just the repeal of the estate tax? Well, then, I guess all your ranting and raving has nothing to do with this article. The article only talks about rich people opposing the repeal of the estate tax.
By the way, if you want to be taken at all seriously by anyone who isn't a rabid Republican (i.e. most of us), you should get rid of that sig.
So hypothetically, if I'm an ignorant user and accidenttly allow smb/nfs/ftp shares of my mp3 collection to anonymous users, I am responsible for those who download?
Yes. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.
just because it is there and you have access to it, doesn't make it my responsibility if you download it.
Sorry, but that's just not true. I am sure that any court would agree that sharing a file on a network constitutes active distribution of that file on said network.
Why are you trying to make excuses? Sharing an mp3 on Napster without the author's permission is illegal. Get over it.
And Sluggy Freelance (long, complex, and interesting story arcs, which are hillarious to boot), Penny Arcade (extreme funny), Player vs Player (more fun(ny) with gaming), Sinfest (offensive and funny), and Adventurers (hillarious -- but only if you play console RPG's)! There are so many awesome web comics!
Yes, that explains why NVidia's GL drivers have always been faster than their D3D drivers.
NVidia implements their OpenGL drivers in hardware too. This is unlike other handware companies (*cough* 3dfx *cough*) whos GL drivers are simply wrappers around some other API (like GLIDE).
You will also notice that NVidia's GL drivers always support the newest features of their cards long before D3D does. For example, NVidia's GL drivers have had the "NV_vertex_program" extension (for programmable vertex shaders) since long before D3D8 was released. Similarily, when the GeForce was released, the GL drivers instantly supported T&L, while D3D users had to wait for Microsoft to released D3D7 for that support.
Might I remind you that NVidia employs several people like Mark J. Kilgard, the author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System (the definative work on the subject), and the GL standard windowing library, GLUT? (If you have ever done any programming with OpenGL at all, you probably used GLUT to do it.) MJK is one of the biggest names in OpenGL on the planet, and I suspect he is part of the reason that NVidia has the best OpenGL implementation in existence.
Please make sure you know what you are talking about before you talk. Thank you.
"Optimized for Direct3D" does not mean that it isn't also "Optimized for OpenGL". And if NVidia is so closely tied to Microsoft, then why are they releasing the GeForce 3 for the Mac first?
If the available open source software in a particular field is lacking in quality, people will always pay money for software that is of better quality. Unless they are zealots. Fortunately, most people aren't zealots.
/me wonders for a moment at why he codes for free.
/me remembers that coding is fun.
/me remembers the e-mails he has received praising his work.
/me goes back to coding. For Free.
But it comes at a high price - unexpandability. You can not add a field to a datastructure, since that makes the struct bigger, and breaks compatibility.
Nonsense. The size of a data structure is an implementation issue, and should never be exposed to the user anyway. Access to such data structures should only be granted through opaque pointers and accessor functions. The user should not be allowed to allocate such a structure manually; they should be forced to call a library routine which does the work for them. Any library which exposes the size of any significant structure as part of its interface is poorly designed.
Unfortunately, C does not do much to encourage data insulation. Object oriented programming, and especially abstract classes, would be a great help in alleviating these sorts of problems. Read "Large Scale C++ Software Design" by John Lakos for some extensive discussion of insulation (the process of making an interface binary compatible without hindering implementation extensions).
And - try to search for 100% binary compatibility between say Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Have fuN!
NT and 95 have much better binary compatibility than different Linux distributions. Windows 2000 has almost perfect binary compatibility with NT and 9x. I find that I can write a program once in Windows and have it work on all my friends' computers without trouble. With Linux, on the other hand, I would never even try to distribute a compiled binary. Source code only. Of course, that is not a problem for me, since all of my code is GPL or LGPL.
The thing is, the Windows API passes everything around as handles. Handles are opaque pointers, meaning that the caller has no idea what sort of structure they point to. I suspect that a thread handle in 98 points to a data structure that bears no relation to a thread handle in NT, but does that cause binary compatibility problems? No, because Microsoft correctly used opaque pointers.
Now, most of POSIX and ANSI-C do similar things (FILE*, DIR*, etc.). I am not saying that I particularly like the Windows API (I don't). All I wanted to point out is that it is possible to make a library that can be extended without breaking binary compatibility.
One last point: Binary compatibility is useful for 100% open source systems! What if a critical bug is found in an older version of glibc, forcing you to upgrade? From the sounds of it, you would have to re-compile every program on your system to make it work! I don't want to do that! With a properly written library, a new version could be dropped in without disturbing anything. Hell, you might not even have to reboot.
True, Counter-Strike is not OSS, but it was created by hobbiests, and is completely free (as in beer). Currently, it is *the* most-played game on the net. Yes, it is dependent on Half-Life, but that could easily change if a good open source 3D engine were written.
NVidia does not have a monopoly in any market right now. What they do offer is the best (IMHO) consumer-level graphics card on the market. As well as the second-best. And the third-best. (I'm talking GeForce2 Ultra, GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce 2 here.) That is very different from having a monopoly.
The ATI Radeon is also a reasonably good card, especially if you get the all-in-wonder version. EvilKyro, or whatever it is called, looks interesting, but I don't know all the details about it yet. The point is, NVidia does not have a monopoly.
If you think about it, NVidia is now at the point that 3dfx was at a few years back. A year ahead of the competition. However, unlike 3dfx, NVidia is not encouraging people to use a proprietary API that only works with their own hardware. The best way to access an NVidia card is via OpenGL (even on Windows), which is the most open, cross-platform 3D API starndard out there. NVidia has implemented proprietary extensions to OpenGL, but the extensions are purposely laid out such that it is easy to write software which only uses the extensions if they are available, and uses GL standard calls otherwise. (I know this from experience...)
Furthermore, unlike some well-known monopolistic companies, NVidia is still innovating at an alarming rate. As long as they keep doing so, and their prices stay where they are (GeForce 2 for $130, anyone?), I'm happy.
They do not offer drivers for BeOS. They have allowed Be to write drivers for the TNT2 and below, but there is no GeForce or GeForce 2 driver for BeOS, and NVidia has never written a driver for BeOS themselves. If you click on the "BeOS" link at NVidia's driver page, you'll see that it just re-directs you to Be.
Similarily, NVidia only provides TNT2 and below drivers for OS/2.
For reference, that is 4x more GS-32s than was included in the GScube prototype demonstration at SigGraph 2000, which was capable of rendering scenes from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, with full articulation and near full-quality (shadows, multiple textures, flowing hair, etc.) at 60fps.
Um... no... It rendered Toy Story, IIRC. There is no way in hell that any current graphics chip could render FF: TSW in real time. Think about it. Square owns many, many high-end SGI boxes working in parallel, and they can only render one frame every... oh... few hours? Something like that.
The point is that the dev kit for the Indrema is free for download. Do you know how much a dev kit for the DC, PS2, Game Cube, or X-Box costs? It's one of those "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" things. Hence, open source game writers (like me) are really looking forward to the Indrema.
Slashdot Mirror
the future (i.e. now) the money wouldn't be in selling software, it would be in selling support (like Red Hat) and documentation (like O'Reilly)
It's been said before, but... if you make your money off of support, what is your insentive to write interfaces so good that users rarely need help?
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Have you ever tried to debug your brain? It can be fairly difficult.
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As I mentioned in my post, I am scheduled to have v1.0 on the 25th of March. :) My point was that as long as it is as good as or better than the beta, it will be good enough for me.
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BTW, my current main OS is Debian Linux w/KDE2.1.
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*sigh* What has this place come to? You give no supporting evidence whatsoever for your assertion, and you get modded up? Clearly, that was an "I agree" mod, not a "you spoke intelligently" mod.
Look, forget whether or not your sig is accurate. I don't really care. Obviously, however, you do. The fact that you have that as your sig shows that you deeply care about Clinton's misdeeds (whether they really happenned or not) to the extent that only a rabid Republican would. Don't you have anything better to say, for crying out loud? Is Clinton really the most important thing in the world to you?
If your are rabid anything (Republican, Democrat, Linux user, Mac user, Christian, Athiest, etc.) to the point where you can't see the other side of the issue, you are what I call a "Zealot".
If a large group of people disagrees with you, and you honestly believe that the only reason why they could disagree is because they are all stupid, then you are a Zealot. (Now what was it you said about the people who oppose the tax cuts?)
See the sig.
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How does that make him not one of the most corrupts presidents in American history? When you die, you aren't part of history anymore? Or is it that when a former president dies, he is no longer a former president -- that is, somehow, his entire service gets erased from history? I'm just curious...
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Why? It's true. Name me a more corrupt politician of any party.
Nixon
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They are against repealing of estate taxes, not tax cuts. Two totally different issues.
Oh, I see... When you were talking about millionairs being stupid, you were only refering to millionairs that were opposed to general tax cuts, not just the repeal of the estate tax? Well, then, I guess all your ranting and raving has nothing to do with this article. The article only talks about rich people opposing the repeal of the estate tax.
By the way, if you want to be taken at all seriously by anyone who isn't a rabid Republican (i.e. most of us), you should get rid of that sig.
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So hypothetically, if I'm an ignorant user and accidenttly allow smb/nfs/ftp shares of my mp3 collection to anonymous users, I am responsible for those who download?
Yes. Ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law.
just because it is there and you have access to it, doesn't make it my responsibility if you download it.
Sorry, but that's just not true. I am sure that any court would agree that sharing a file on a network constitutes active distribution of that file on said network.
Why are you trying to make excuses? Sharing an mp3 on Napster without the author's permission is illegal. Get over it.
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And Sluggy Freelance (long, complex, and interesting story arcs, which are hillarious to boot), Penny Arcade (extreme funny), Player vs Player (more fun(ny) with gaming), Sinfest (offensive and funny), and Adventurers (hillarious -- but only if you play console RPG's)! There are so many awesome web comics!
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Isn't Windows already free for non-commercial use? I mean... effectively, not legally.
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Yes, that explains why NVidia's GL drivers have always been faster than their D3D drivers.
NVidia implements their OpenGL drivers in hardware too. This is unlike other handware companies (*cough* 3dfx *cough*) whos GL drivers are simply wrappers around some other API (like GLIDE).
You will also notice that NVidia's GL drivers always support the newest features of their cards long before D3D does. For example, NVidia's GL drivers have had the "NV_vertex_program" extension (for programmable vertex shaders) since long before D3D8 was released. Similarily, when the GeForce was released, the GL drivers instantly supported T&L, while D3D users had to wait for Microsoft to released D3D7 for that support.
Might I remind you that NVidia employs several people like Mark J. Kilgard, the author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System (the definative work on the subject), and the GL standard windowing library, GLUT? (If you have ever done any programming with OpenGL at all, you probably used GLUT to do it.) MJK is one of the biggest names in OpenGL on the planet, and I suspect he is part of the reason that NVidia has the best OpenGL implementation in existence.
Please make sure you know what you are talking about before you talk. Thank you.
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"Optimized for Direct3D" does not mean that it isn't also "Optimized for OpenGL". And if NVidia is so closely tied to Microsoft, then why are they releasing the GeForce 3 for the Mac first?
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If the available open source software in a particular field is lacking in quality, people will always pay money for software that is of better quality. Unless they are zealots. Fortunately, most people aren't zealots.
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/me wonders for a moment at why he codes for free.
/me remembers that coding is fun.
/me remembers the e-mails he has received praising his work.
/me goes back to coding. For Free.
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Nonsense. The size of a data structure is an implementation issue, and should never be exposed to the user anyway. Access to such data structures should only be granted through opaque pointers and accessor functions. The user should not be allowed to allocate such a structure manually; they should be forced to call a library routine which does the work for them. Any library which exposes the size of any significant structure as part of its interface is poorly designed.
Unfortunately, C does not do much to encourage data insulation. Object oriented programming, and especially abstract classes, would be a great help in alleviating these sorts of problems. Read "Large Scale C++ Software Design" by John Lakos for some extensive discussion of insulation (the process of making an interface binary compatible without hindering implementation extensions).
NT and 95 have much better binary compatibility than different Linux distributions. Windows 2000 has almost perfect binary compatibility with NT and 9x. I find that I can write a program once in Windows and have it work on all my friends' computers without trouble. With Linux, on the other hand, I would never even try to distribute a compiled binary. Source code only. Of course, that is not a problem for me, since all of my code is GPL or LGPL.
The thing is, the Windows API passes everything around as handles. Handles are opaque pointers, meaning that the caller has no idea what sort of structure they point to. I suspect that a thread handle in 98 points to a data structure that bears no relation to a thread handle in NT, but does that cause binary compatibility problems? No, because Microsoft correctly used opaque pointers.
Now, most of POSIX and ANSI-C do similar things (FILE*, DIR*, etc.). I am not saying that I particularly like the Windows API (I don't). All I wanted to point out is that it is possible to make a library that can be extended without breaking binary compatibility.
One last point: Binary compatibility is useful for 100% open source systems! What if a critical bug is found in an older version of glibc, forcing you to upgrade? From the sounds of it, you would have to re-compile every program on your system to make it work! I don't want to do that! With a properly written library, a new version could be dropped in without disturbing anything. Hell, you might not even have to reboot.
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Because if there were no cap, Siggy could troll at +1 for years... oh wait, he's already doing that...
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True, Counter-Strike is not OSS, but it was created by hobbiests, and is completely free (as in beer). Currently, it is *the* most-played game on the net. Yes, it is dependent on Half-Life, but that could easily change if a good open source 3D engine were written.
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Really? Does it support full 3D accelleration? If not, I don't cound that as a "driver". A GeForce without 3D is just a generic 2D graphics card.
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NVidia does not have a monopoly in any market right now. What they do offer is the best (IMHO) consumer-level graphics card on the market. As well as the second-best. And the third-best. (I'm talking GeForce2 Ultra, GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce 2 here.) That is very different from having a monopoly.
The ATI Radeon is also a reasonably good card, especially if you get the all-in-wonder version. EvilKyro, or whatever it is called, looks interesting, but I don't know all the details about it yet. The point is, NVidia does not have a monopoly.
If you think about it, NVidia is now at the point that 3dfx was at a few years back. A year ahead of the competition. However, unlike 3dfx, NVidia is not encouraging people to use a proprietary API that only works with their own hardware. The best way to access an NVidia card is via OpenGL (even on Windows), which is the most open, cross-platform 3D API starndard out there. NVidia has implemented proprietary extensions to OpenGL, but the extensions are purposely laid out such that it is easy to write software which only uses the extensions if they are available, and uses GL standard calls otherwise. (I know this from experience...)
Furthermore, unlike some well-known monopolistic companies, NVidia is still innovating at an alarming rate. As long as they keep doing so, and their prices stay where they are (GeForce 2 for $130, anyone?), I'm happy.
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Similarily, NVidia only provides TNT2 and below drivers for OS/2.
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Um... no... It rendered Toy Story, IIRC. There is no way in hell that any current graphics chip could render FF: TSW in real time. Think about it. Square owns many, many high-end SGI boxes working in parallel, and they can only render one frame every... oh... few hours? Something like that.
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Umm... Who are you arguing with? We all agree that OS9 sucks. We aren't talking about it anymore. We are talking about OSX. OSX is much better.
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The point is that the dev kit for the Indrema is free for download. Do you know how much a dev kit for the DC, PS2, Game Cube, or X-Box costs? It's one of those "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" things. Hence, open source game writers (like me) are really looking forward to the Indrema.
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We're not going to get anywhere as long as people hold that attitude. Don't forget the Indrema! Specs of the X-Box, runs on Linux.
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