Chambers wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Orchid XP v8 [mailto:voi### [at] devnull]
>> Besides, I was under the distinct impression that it's *illegal* to
>> reverse-engineer Windows. And that its implementation is covered by
>> several billion patents precisely to prevent anybody ever making
>> something compatible with it, for that matter.
> 
> WINE Is Not an Emulator.  They don't really reverse engineer anything
> (that is, they don't reimplement the Windows core DLLs or anything),
> rather they allow Windows .exe's to run on Linux, and allow dynamic
> linking of Windows DLLs under Linux.

That's not correct. DirectX DLLs have no chance in hell of running in Linux,
for example, since they probably talk to some Windows-specific thing to
talk to the graphics cards. WINE has a full implementation of DirectX that
calls OpenGL functions instead of... whatever Windows DLLs do.

 "If a library tries to access features of the rest of the system that are
not fully implemented in Wine, the native DLL might work much worse than
the corresponding built-in one, if at all. For example, the native Windows
GDI library must be paired with a Windows display driver, which of course
is not present under Intel Unix and Wine. 

 Finally, occasionally built-in Wine DLLs implement more features than the
corresponding native Windows DLLs. Probably the most important example of
such behavior is the integration of Wine with X provided by Wine's built-in
USER DLL. Should the native Windows USER library take load-order
precedence, such features as the ability to use the clipboard or
drag-and-drop between Wine windows and X windows will be lost."

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> The thing that I like about it is that everything is a texture - it's an
> interesting way of looking at a standard display, because you can do
> things like enhanced zoom or the rotating cube with very little CPU
> overhead, so it seems.

The idea is that zooming in doesn't use any more CPU/GPU than not doing it.
When looking at the normal screen, it's already applying the identity
transformation matrix to everything anyway :) Changing the matrix to do
some scaling costs nothing.

(of course, interpolation during scaling does cost some GPU)

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> Yeah.  I really like running Rockbox on my iPod mini, but it doesn't work
> on the touch yet.  I have thought about running iPodLinux, but Rockbox
> does a good enough job for me with the one patch I've applied (speed up/
> slow down the playback without a pitch shift).

I'm not really interested in running a custom OS (Rockbox or Linux) on my
iPod touch, as long as I can put my own userland software on the standard
OS. (and I can)

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On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:58:19 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> The thing that I like about it is that everything is a texture - it's
>> an interesting way of looking at a standard display, because you can do
>> things like enhanced zoom or the rotating cube with very little CPU
>> overhead, so it seems.
> 
> The idea is that zooming in doesn't use any more CPU/GPU than not doing
> it. When looking at the normal screen, it's already applying the
> identity transformation matrix to everything anyway :) Changing the
> matrix to do some scaling costs nothing.
> 
> (of course, interpolation during scaling does cost some GPU)

Yes, and I think that's an outstanding way to do it.  It' s nice to see 
my CPU not being used for things like that. :-)

The interesting thing is that if I start playing a video in mplayer and 
switch to fullscreen, then increase the playback speed (all this with 
audio turned off), the playback speed maxes out sooner than if I leave it 
in a window and zoom in on it.  It's probably the mplayer scaling that 
causes that, but it's interesting that I get better performance letting 
xgl handle the zooming to full screen.

Of course it makes sense, mplayer uses its own scaling and not xgl's.

Jim

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On Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:46:10 -0800, Chambers wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Jim Henderson [mailto:nos### [at] nospamcom] What's the most recent
>> you tried?
> 
> Fedora, sometime in the last year.
> 
> ...Ben Chambers
> www.pacificwebguy.com

I don't believe Fedora integrates the repos the way openSUSE does.

Jim

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On Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:07:45 -0200, Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> Yeah.  I really like running Rockbox on my iPod mini, but it doesn't
>> work on the touch yet.  I have thought about running iPodLinux, but
>> Rockbox does a good enough job for me with the one patch I've applied
>> (speed up/ slow down the playback without a pitch shift).
> 
> I'm not really interested in running a custom OS (Rockbox or Linux) on
> my iPod touch, as long as I can put my own userland software on the
> standard OS. (and I can)

The thing that's nice about rockbox is things like the experimental patch 
for speed adjustment without pitch adjustment.  And of course my 
favourite for my mini, gapless track switching.  It amazes me that Apple 
never implemented that in the stock firmware.

Jim

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: nemesis [mailto:nam### [at] gmailcom]
> They have to increase programmer productivity because otherwise it'd be
> impossible to deal with the difficult to understand Windows code. ;)

...or any large project.  See, this is the attitude I mentioned before. 
Windows is not the only large, complex project out there, yet you choose 
to pick on them.

Would you prefer Notepad and CLI compiler?

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

The plural of anecdote is not data  --Elbows

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"Chambers" <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Would you prefer Notepad and CLI compiler?

Of course not.  Vim and GCC to me. ;)

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>> Sure, there are about 25,000 Mahjong clones for Linux. But how many
>> large-scale games are there?
> 
> I personally *don't want one*. Large scale games are for people who have
> time to spend exclusively on playing a game. I want games to play quickly
> with no day-long storylines, and that use little enough CPU so I can play
> them while waiting for a render to finish :)

...which is also a valid viewpoint. But my personal preference is for 
large, impressive games.

I'm still sad that Valve has decided to stop making those and go with 
this whole "episodic" format. It basically means you have to wait 6 
months, pay quite a large amount of money, and then get to play a little 
bit of a small game that is so tiny it's hardly worth ever playing 
again. It's a bit like having a TV series where each 20 minute episode 
comes out 6 months after the last one...

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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Invisible [mailto:voi### [at] devnull]
> I'm still sad that Valve has decided to stop making those and go with
> this whole "episodic" format. It basically means you have to wait 6
> months, pay quite a large amount of money, and then get to play a
> little
> bit of a small game that is so tiny it's hardly worth ever playing
> again. It's a bit like having a TV series where each 20 minute episode
> comes out 6 months after the last one...

The industry as a whole has been moving to shorter games.  Most action
games can now be completed in 10-15 hours (some as little as 6).  I
finished my speed run of GTA IV in 14 hours, and the main quest in
Fallout 3 can be done in ~10.

Things were just getting ridiculous with main storylines taking 40+
hours in every single game, and developers started noticing when 90% of
the people who bought their game never finished it.

Now, things are shorter, games have more branching and are more fun to
replay, and more people finish the games they start.

...Ben Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com

I said "share," not "scare!"

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